I’m starting to notice this meme popping up all over the place now.
I think why: Anyone who works with clients daily can understand they think you have this button you can press to make things happen immediately.
Kudos to Staples on an effective campaign.
Drugstore.com Earnings Call | InternetStockBlog.com
You can learn a lot about online trends by reading earnings transcripts of online retailers. Checkout this shift towards search identified here:
In addition to looking at each order, and each partnership, we have been carefully scrutinizing our marketing expenses. In 2005, we tested a number of marketing vehicles to accelerate our growth and gain valuable insight into which program drive customer behavior. As part of our 2006 budgeting process, we did a very careful analysis of each and every marketing program examining the effectiveness, return, and relative performance of each. Our goal was to identify programs that provide the greatest growth at the lowest cost, to identify which programs help us drive to profitability, and which will be deferred until we have the cash to self-fund.
Our analysis confirmed that search both free and paid is a cornerstone of our new customer acquisition and continues to show very high ROI. In addition, the changes we’re making to our site and shopping experience has driven significant changes to customer conversion and our personalization effort both on the site and in e-mail shows very strong returns.
By comparison, catalog, direct mail, and in-box inserts have proven to be more expensive.
Hadn’t seen this one before. (I seem to say this almost daily, which I suppose is a good thing).
Here’s a blog dedicated to frustrated Salesforce.com users: Gripeforce
And here I thought this force thing you can tag on to anything was a marketing unifier. It turns out it can be used against you as well 
Roadmaps are dangerous | (Signal vs Noise)
The author here creates a nice juicy (can straw be juicy?) straw man and then proceeds to tear it down. Roadmaps force you to follow yesterday today. Huh? This makes no sense. Since when did creating a roadmap make its implementors irrational?
My personal rule for roadmaps is to recreate them every month. Does #$#! happen to roadmaps? Sure. If you didn’t have a roadmap, would #$!$@ happen? Sure. So what’s the difference? A roadmap is just your product’s best guess at the needs of the market — and here’s the key term — right now. It gives your customers something to chew on - something to react to - something to comment about. Customers often want to see you have a vision for the space, the article even admits as much. Well, write that down and you have yourself a $2 roadmap.
Another straw man I’ve seen recently? All these webinar detractors in favor of pod/vidcasts. I don’t know about you guys, but we don’t do any webinars unless we provide them in downloadable format after the event. Give that a fancy name like Web 2.0 permissions marketing, and now you’re really cooking with gas. We must be doing something new and different. Please!
“Every time I read Jakob Nielsen,” I wrote in 2000, “I get this feeling that he really doesn’t appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone’s number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you’d never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other.”
ack/nak: rule: write the MRD first
quick quiz: How many of you Product Managers out there are doing this? What, we need more than a functional spec?
Heh.
A few interesting ones:
I find articles like this interesting because as a small company you’re always looking for ways to improve. It’s sometimes useful to get a sense what other companies measure. A great book which delves into this topic a lot is Less is More, which I think is a really interesting book.
Another thing I found interesting about this article is that they were asked about “measurements” and only a many of the answers did not focused on something that could be measured, but things that were more soft.
Steven Sinofsky’s Microsoft TechTalk : PM at Microsoft
Interesting discussion about the role of PM. I almost like the comments more than the article. Some of it devolved into “who is overhead” and who isn’t.
I refer to PM as Product Management, not Program Manager. I would almost consider Program Manager something like an architect or business analyst. Product Management is supposed to be the voice of the customer. Everything else is context. Things like requirements are important, especially when you have many groups to communicate with, but requirements aren’t important if you aren’t sure you are working on the wrong things.
Based on some of the comments, it’s fun to think of devs making changes all the time like the Wild West… but if you are responsible for someone’s business/livelihood, that just ain’t the way it works.
Ask any hosted platform (eBay, Google Adwords, Salesforce, even CA) what downtime is like and I can assure you it’s no fun. Things need to be planned, tested and shipped. This can be done incrementally to be sure, but these mini-cycles exist nonetheless.
My Greatest Lesson: Fast Company Article
Way cool. I love to read the thoughts of successful people and what they feel is most important to their world view. You almost hope that some of that sticks in your head, although it never seems to
Some neat people featured in the article
I like looking at the presentation strategies of others. Presentation Zen focuses a lot on this topic.
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