Tag: Sales
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The regrettable features you have to do
Sometimes as a product manager you get a feature request that’s fun and challenging and moves your company forward. Then there’s demands that just make you feel like a sad clown: stuff that doesn’t fit your plan at all. It’s hard work to ignore the nay-sayers and make a new…
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Planning your Year
The plan is maybe accurate, but probably not. The act of planning is a useful time to step back, evaluate strategic position and rethink investment. Using financial targets is a mechanism. If target is thirty percent growth, does the product org have a realistic answer for how that will happen?…
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Using a Technical Edge in Products
“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” — Howard Aiken Innovative technologies are different than what came before. Product buying patterns are based on what has come before. If you have an innovative technology you will need to…
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The Mystical Art of Getting New Things Done
The process isn’t actually mystical: it’s selling an idea to everyone who must work together to execute it. People who would use it. People who will fund it. People who will build it. People who will sell it. Eventually, people who will buy it. Tell people what you want to…
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A Simplistic View of Venture Capital
I have a lot of conversations with people. 1:1’s, interviews, &c. When the opportunity arises, sometimes those who’ve done startups will talk about their experiences. There’s sometimes a flag in those conversations about startups that raises my hackles. It’s a description of the money raised as if that were a…
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Product Tempo versus Deal Tempo
Going from sales engineering to product management was a jarring transition at first, because it represented a change in tempo. As a sales engineer, I lived by the fiscal quarter. While a given customer might be a multi-quarter job to convert, my sales partners and I had money to make…
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Conference Giveaways
Remember going to conferences? When I was a young sales engineer and going to my first conferences, it was clear that an attempt to attract visitors with a freebie or a lottery for a big thing was a strategy. Maybe not a great strategy, but there it is. Notable factors:…
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Consulting’s Bad Rap
Naming no names… but there’s a type of management consulting shop with an unsavory reputation among middle managers and individual contributors. Let’s look at how the reputation is earned: by training to a model that produces failure as often as not, but always successfully deflects blame. It’s easy to find…
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Licensing Roundup
I’ve written a number of articles now about licensing software: here’s a guide through them. Since I wrote these, usage-based pricing has become an area of interest… I have yet to do my own article, but in the meantime here’s Metronome’s round-up of UBP challenges and opportunities.
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Finding the Price
Let’s dive once more into the licensing breach! Here’s the background: What’s not covered? Well, when I wrote this post about evaluating a side business, it came close to the process for defining the price of a cost-plus service or product. That’s not a particularly hard task in theory: Of…
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