Products are Conversations
Cartoon by Gapingvoid Products are Conversations We’ve lost our way in Product Management. When the biggest problem Product Managers face is setting roadmap priorities based on market feedback, it’s symptomatic of the underlying practices and tools. Simply put, Products are Conversations. How you orchestrate conversations with customers and cross-functionally in your organization is what makes […]
The Product Manager Problem
Ever since the Product Manager role was created to bring decision making as close to customers as possible, it has been an art and science of collaborating with stakeholders. The problem today is how to scale collaboration with your stakeholders, when the signal-to noise ratio is out of control: Customers overwhelmed with choice and information […]
Don’t Let Product Management Turn Into “The Roadmap Guys”
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. “The VP of PM is in Boston and Providence this week, can […]
A New Chapter In My Life; Google
When I decided to leave SAP to take a short sabbatical I didn’t really know what to expect. Six months later I am happy to report that it was one of the best decisions I ever made. These were some of the best weeks and months of my life. After this short period of disconnecting […]
Selling Up in #SaaS. Not what it’s cracked up to be
The single most common pitfall I see in 90% of earlier stage product plans is a lethal misconception that aspiring to sell software to the highest levels of the organization, is better. This is blatantly obvious to many product leaders but foreign to equally as many. Trust me. It isn’t necessarily all that. It’s expensive: the […]
Your Product Roadmap *is* your Product
After building, marketing and selling lots of software, I’m convinced that the single most underutilized component to driving growth is your roadmap. In SaaS or consumer products monetized via an enterprise budget, you make your numbers because of your current feature set. But you blow out your quarter because your product and sales teams present […]
Welcome to community-powered Commerce
The need for customer engagement is clear. They buy more: “Fully engaged customers represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue and relationship growth.” (Gallup) They expect it: “70-90% of the buyers journey is complete prior to engaging a vendor.” (Forrester Research) And they need it: “45% of buyers require person-to-person contact […]
Jobs has nothing on Musk
There were legitimate complaints about the Model X launch event. There usually are about most launches. Venture Beat took Elon Musk to the cleaners, calling his performance during the Model X launch “…a marketing and PR disaster, concluding: “I know it’s an unfair comparison for anyone, really, but given Musk’s incredible entrepreneurial achievements, I can’t help comparing […]
On #SAPJam surpassing the 20M subscriber mark. (And why customers are the biggest winners.)
This past week we announced that SAP Jam clocked over 21 million subscribers, sporting over 3X subscriber growth over the past 4 years. I got the word a few weeks ago but sat on it to reflect on two things: 1. What it takes to scale so fast across each function, and within constraints. 2. How […]
Who said giant bubbles in tech are a bad thing? SAP / Successfactors named leader by IDC!
IDC just announced that Successfactors is a leader for Worldwide Social Technologies specifically related to its Integrated Talent Vendor Assessment. This one meant a lot as it directly put to test our stated product and go-to-market promise and singular focus on solving core functional KPIs, with purpose built collaboration software. Back in 2012 we entered the cloud collaboration […]
