SF Bay Area Tech

“Product managers have an incredible opportunity to leverage social business tools, beyond the typical sales and marketing uses in place today. I am looking forward to being on the Global Product Management Talk to expand the understanding of this opportunity to product managers across industries worldwide!” says Ed Brill, Author of “Opting In.”

Listen! http://bit.ly/19anIx2

Startups are constantly asking themselves: should we focus on the quality of our product or the strength of the sales and distribution strategy?

Award-winning Vancouver-based angel investor Boris Wertz says,

To be successful, a stand-alone company needs a top-notch product and a clever distribution/sales strategy.

• Startups are generally more successful when the founders are product-driven; much easier to add sales expertise to a product-driven organization than it is to add product focus to a sales-driven start-up
• a great product requires great leadership with the right product instincts;
  
• Sales-driven companies are often focused on maximizing short-term return on investment and this mindset can shape product decisions; sales-driven companies can evolve into service companies as they are starting to build every feature that clients are asking for instead of following a long-term product vision
• Products, no matter how great, usually don’t make money on their own; product-driven companies need to focus on distribution in order to succeed in the long-term

Written By Elaine Jung referencing views by Marc Ventresca, Academic director and economic sociologist at Oxford University

• System builders have a vision and implement it in complex ways that involve pulling apart what exists, reusing that, re-purposing what is already in place.
• Ideally, entrepreneurs address a need, and are solving a problem in a value chain of a community or a country or an industry, and that’s a very different image than one of a heroic individual who is motivated by “high risk, high reward”.
• (Product) Managers in general look at the big picture, narrow it down and get more precise and specific, and follow through with a solution.

By Josh Elman

To grow fastest and biggest, top companies today instead focus on building feature after feature that helps attract new users or more quickly convert them into active users.

• Many companies have started to realise that they can’t just build a great product and expect growth to happen, nor can they afford to pay for it, but that they have to engineer it.

In contrast to a traditional marketing team with managers, analysts and agency relationships, these growth teams include engineers, designers, product managers and data scientists.

• To keep producing these results, it takes a deep technical understanding of how those systems work and how to measure the effectiveness of the platform.

In the earliest days of a company or a product, finding the path towards sustainable growth is crucial.

• Marketing teams will include engineers and designers, and talk as much about “road maps” and features as about ads and budget.

Josh Elman is an investor at Greylock Partners. He held early product roles at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter @joshelman

• Josh is speaking at Startup Product Summit SF2 register before June 24 for $400 off! http://bit.ly/11J59AG
  

Basically, responsive means that the page will morph as the screen gets smaller.

I was trying to design a page editor application that gave a non-programmer power to make responsive pages using as much WYSIWYG UI as possible.

Responsive HTML Templates work best when your layout/content scope is going to remain static.  It sucks when your layout is changing all the time, like a public website or even an application of moderate-high complexity.

- how will you know the good posts from the bad if they are all good.

Glen Lipka, is VP of UX at Marketo. He will be speaking at the Startup Product Summit SF2 - register before June 24 for $400 off! http://bit.ly/11J59AG

Takeaways from IBM’s Innovate 2013 technical summit

• The IBM developerWorks software application development blog describes DevOps as a movement, rooted in the “agile” (as in Agile software delivery) community, to improve the collaboration between the development and operations teams with an ultimate goal focused on speeding software delivery and improving quality

• “A start up is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty,” Eric Reis said — it has nothing to do with the size of the company or the shape of the product.

• In 1911 - Frederick Winslow Taylor said that, “In the past, the man was first. In the future, the system will be first.”

• Steve Wozniak explained how he used to innovate in the early days of Apple. “I just used to like creating things, but then every time I did, Steve Jobs would find a way of making money out of it.”

• IBM’s Le Blanc explained how developers today develop, but that in the future they may be more focused on design and creation as they are able to focus more on innovation rather than the mechanics of building the software application development process.

Underlining the great points Chris makes, here’s some how to’s

1. eat lunch with engineers and find out what they like to eat/drink and drop by their desk bearing gifts

2. to gain respect from engineers - learn their language, code preferences, pains and provide solutions, data, information that they need at the right time. Don’t be a doosh.

3. be humble, have a tough skin, stand up to take responsibility for blame, frustration, feature fails directed at product team - protect them from harsh reality so they can stay focused and productive

4. provide visual representation of the goal - paper prototypes, anything that can be used as a dart board works…

5. take care of yourself so you can be a source of constant, continuous, and on-demand positivity

6. be a data geek - know how to access, query, present, identify and make sense of key data points at all times (will also enable growth hacking & your career growth)

7. Customers - this is number one. Add to it non-customers, competitors customers, and ex-customers - understand and love them also because they will tell you the truth about what’s wrong with your product, where customers will justify what’s right with it.

8. Answer to a higher power - keep your KPIs, product vision/mission and professional manifesto at eye level so you can say NO, be called a doosh, and deal with conflicts with sales and other stakeholders that want the product & YOU to serve their purpose, rather than your roadmap goal.

by Pascal Finette

This post answers the question, “What shall I look for in my first hire and how does she fit into the larger picture?”

1. Hire only people who are smarter than you are

2. Attempt to strike the balance between harmony and constructive discourse

3. No hierarchy: no difference between founders and employees.

Kyle Henderson, CEO, YouEye Discusses User Research, Rapid Prototyping, Emotion Recognition In An Agile World

Entrepreneurs recognize that whether you’re building a minimum viable product, new feature iteration or redesigning marketing pages, its important to test and test often. With valuable feedback, product managers can redefine the product’s priorities and roadmap, and bring those insights to the teams building the product. For everyone in the midst of bringing amazing products to market, how should you prioritize user research and user testing as you try to accomplish your end goal? Rapid Prototyping and agile research are important, but how does one go about doing both?

Listen! http://bit.ly/11VXMGq
Participants are welcome to listen live at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prodmgmttalk, call in to talk on the show (323) 927-2957 and to participate on Twitter by following @ProdMgmtTalk and tweeting using the hashtag #ProdMgmttalk

————————————————————————————————————————————
NOTE: DAY & TIME
Monday, June 3, 2013 at the simultaneous times of 10:00 AM Pacific Time, 11:00 AM MST Denver, 12:00 Noon CST Chicago, and 1:00 PM EST Boston.
————————————————————————————————————————————

• Charge different customers different prices based on how much they are Willing To Pay (WTP)
• Customers see price segmentation all of the time and have come to accept it.
• You don’t need to actually justify your price segmentation, but your customers need to able to justify it in their minds.