Marketing consistency

When you’re out promoting your product, think about the message you want to convey to your customers.  Ensure that every part of your campaign is consistent around that central message. Sounds obvious, but it doesn’t happen every time. Case in point:

While watching the Giants-Bears Sunday Night Football game, the latest Nissan Maxima commercials were being broadcast. If you haven’t seen them yet, there are two flavors:

• The first touts a smooth ride highlighting “zero gear-shift shock”. That’s just a fancy term for minimal jerks when the automatic transmission moves through the gears.
• The second touts the car as an exhilarating ride, and to prove their point they show the driver changing the gears on an automatic transmission. Lets leave aside the point that in automatic transmissions you hardly have to change gears while in motion. Most car commercials do that.

If you look at both these ads together, what is the message that Nissan wants us to take away after viewing them? Is the Maxima a smooth, semi-luxury car or a sports car? You tell me…

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20 rules for delivering software products

During my time as a software developer, I’ve observed that many of the problems affecting product development in the software world can be resolved if you follow the following rules. Product and project managers: please take note.

• Make sure you know what you are building. Many project delays are because the “customer”- the manager, corporate head, (you?) doesn’t actually know what they want.

[Update] Recognize that what you need to build will change all the time. Make sure your process supports this and that you reconcile the change with the point above.

• Make sure you only work on things that you need to ship with version 1.0.
• Make sure you always keep the prototype running.
• Show demos every few days to make sure no one is confused about what is going on.
• Don’t make any project your time to show how clever, cute, or interesting you can be.
• Small is good. Keep Teams/Egos/Methods/Files/Modules/Projects/build times small.
• If someone is not clicking with the rest of the team:
  1. talk to them privately,
  2. reassign them,
  3. if this person is you, read #9, and consider if you want to build this project, or do something else. Follow your heart.
• Do the riskiest part of the project first.
• Make sure you’re in total control of your toolset and improve it systematically
• Do not take the clients’ deadlines literally – first accept the project, then renegotiate the deadline.

[Update] I do not mean to imply that the clients’ constraints are not important. I’ve seen too many examples of team heroics to meet deadlines, when it would have been OK from the client’s perspective to slip by a reasonable amount of time. Keep the lines of communication open and balance the needs of both parties.

• Design your software around interfaces so you can make massive changes cheaply.
• Document the interfaces perfectly, but don’t document code (see next point).
• Be fanatical about the readability of code.
• Remember that the enemy of the better is the best.
• Push all QC, packaging, and issue management through a single team.
• Build regression testing into the build process.
• When debugging a problem, never ask, “how come it works on my box?”
• If some code is too complex to understand on a Monday morning before coffee, redesign it.
• Never add new code while there are still major bugs in the existing code.
• Don’t worry about it. If you are working hard, and follow 1-19, you are doing your part.

eBay maps

eBay has just launched a small test – the eBay Map It Prototype. This expands their search – when you use MapIt to search for listings within a specific radius, you’ll see a map indicating exactly where these items are located, and can drill down to get the items closest to you. They get the maps and geographical data from MapQuest. This is also in direct competition with existing services like AuctionMapper, and seems more user-friendly at first glance.

Lets get this thing started

I am a product manager at one of the major internet companies in Silicon Valley. Prior to that, I was a software engineer with a computer science background.

Why product management?

Ken Norton, Director of Product Management, JotSpot (recently acquired by Google) describes it best in his blog:

Product management is a weird discipline full of oddballs and rejects that never quite fit in anywhere else. For my part, I loved the technical challenges of solving problems, but I hated having other people tell me what to do. I wanted to be a part of the strategic decisions, I wanted to own the product. Marketing appealed to my creativity, but I knew I’d dislike being too far away from the technology. Engineers respected me, but knew my heart was elsewhere and generally thought I was too “marketing-ish.” People like me naturally gravitate to product management.

My favorite line is “Remember buddy, nobody asked you to show up.” This is how one colleague greeted me on my first day in the new role – “Oh hey and by the way, this is going to be fuzzy and vague and you are going to constantly question the purpose of your position. That is part of the job. Congratulations on your new position.“

Why do I need product managers?

Because. No, really. In the long run great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it, which can get pretty tricky.

Why this blog?

Product management combines elements of lots of other specialties – engineering, design, marketing, sales, business development. There is no official course or training that one can take. No one graduates with a BS in Product Management. You learn the tricks of the trade either

• on the job, or
• talking to those who have travelled this road before you, or
• reading books and blogs.

I find that I learn something better if I write it down. Hence this blog, where I hope to note down my experiences, thoughts and pointers to the wisdom of others.

Hopefully it will help other folks too.