answer: why demonstrate at trade shows

Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing asked the question:

Why demo at trade shows?

Going to the link above, I discovered a large-ish number of the Product Management tribe have already weighed in on this momentous question.

But I, dear reader, have not (beyond describing how it feels to Go To Las Vegas. . . again).

"Why haven't you answered this question yet?" you ask. "For ____sakes, Bob, you've been doing this stupid. . .blog. . .for almost two years and you haven't gotten around to this? You disappoint me."

That is exactly why I haven't written about it. It's the one activity that people expect of product managers, and the one activity that hurts us the most. It perpetuates the worst product management stereotype of all, the one I've been working for years to transcend and the one I hope you're working to transcend too.

"What stereotype is that?"

Demo Monkey.

"What?"

You heard me.

"No, you said it too softly. Speak up."

OK. You asked for it.

Demo Monkey.

Product managers are stereotyped as the company's number one Demo Monkey. And all too often, regrettably, the product manager takes great pride in being the Demo Monkey.

All too often product management is the here's a feature, there's a feature, bang the cymbals, pull the red fez up then let it snap back to your skull on its elastic chin strap Demo Monkey.

If that's what you want to do, swell. Have at it. But being a Demo Monkey diminishes you at the same rate it reemphasizes your place in the organization as an expert tactician - someone who knows how to create products.

It diminishes you because the people who care most about features are the people who have the least significant agendas, organizationally-speaking. Focusing on product - and being the person in your organization most closely associated with product - keeps you locked at the lowest level of alignment with your customer.

Products are what you bring to the buyer/user of that product. The buyer/user cares about price and pain avoidance. They will know the most about the features of your product and how they compare to competitive features.

Processes are what you bring to the manager of the buyer/user of the product. Middle management will want to know how the processes you contribute to or enable are better than other processes.

Outcomes are what you bring to upper management. They will want to know what the ROI over time is for the solutions (which equal your products, processes and unique value-add know-how) you offer vis a vis other potential investments. If the outcomes you can deliver match the agendas they've established for their company, you win.

Put another way:

Show a senior manager a product and he/she will aim you down the organization at a user. "We have people who look at products," is what you'll hear.

Show a senior manager how organizations like theirs (or best yet, their competition) use your solutions to help achieve their outcomes, and he/she will aim you at a contract.

"You didn't answer the question. Why demonstrate at trade shows?"

As the product manager, what you need to demonstrate at trade shows is:

• insight into how your
• solutions (product+process+unique value-add knowledge) can deliver
• compelling outcomes for the
• key senior management agendas
  

"But what about the demo?"

Let the systems engineer do that. That's what they're good at, and you win when they are tightly aligned with the user/buyer. As product manager, you need to aim higher.

considered: life without/with power

Living without power for four days in 2007 was a little like living with power in 1968.

Without power in 2007, you had no TV. With power in 1968, there wasn't much on TV, and even when there was, we spent all of our time outside during the day "playing".

Without power in 2007, you had no computer or internet access. Ditto for 1968.

Without power in 2007, you had no air conditioning, and slept with windows open listening to the crickets, tree frogs and amorous cats. Ditto for 1968.

Without power in 2007, we listened to baseball on the radio. Ditto for 1968.

Without power in 2007, we cooked on the grill constantly. Ditto for 1968.

Without power in 2007, after dinner we read books, talked, and played piano. Ditto for 1968.

Without power in 2007, we washed dishes by hand. Ditto for 1968.

I'll stop there. There were a few other parallels, but you get the idea.

Were it not for the absence of refrigeration (which sucked) or hot water (which sucked more), and the constant brain-stem poking whine of the sump pump battery, I could have lived with it for a while.

I actually felt a little sad when the power beeped on yesterday afternoon; I turned off the baseball game my son and I had been listening to on the radio, and as I closed the windows and turned on the dishwasher the TV turned on and I lost my kids to some cartoon. I sense future power outages in my future.

news: gfeller moleskine covers available to order

Updating a story I (kind of) broke a few weeks ago, I got an email from Steve Derricott of Gfeller Casemakers last night with great news.

Gfeller is now taking orders on their leather Moleskine covers.

This cover for the Moleskine Large Notebook really works. Priced at $39.95 it is an excellent value and will provide exceptional service, becoming a comfortable second skin for that valuable Moleskine.

Here are a few pictures of the cover in their traditional tan English kip leather.



Shows the cover on the notebook, opened to the last page.







Shows the cover closed.






If you needed any other encouragement, Steve went on to mention:

Initial production will include serial numbers stamped inside the front cover next to our well-known Gfeller Casemakers cartouche.

Yes, yes, I'm a geek for low serial numbers.

If you have a habit of exposing your Moleskine notebooks to all manner of unfriendly environments, such as sales calls and airports, then a hard-wearing yet handsome Moleskine cover is a must-buy.

Contact Steve at (208) 884-3766 to place an order today. He reports that these are available on a first come, first served basis, with a 2-3 week turnaround. They take VISA or MasterCard orders by phone and fax card info if you wish.

Shipping was reported to me as:

First Class USPS shipping - $2.20
Priority Service shipping - $4.85

news: no mention of leopard upgrade when imac purchased

Tom T asked:

Was there any mention of Leopard along with your purchase? (e.g., vouchers for less $$ to upgrade when it comes out, etc..)

The answer is no in three different ways:

• No information was volunteered by anyone at the Apple Store in Oakbrook, IL.
• No information was included in any of the packaging associated with the iMac.
• No information was found on the system README files.

Have any of you asked? If you find out something different, let me know.

changes: living in a mac world

It's an odd experience.

All my life I've lived in an IBM world. From the original PC I played with back in 1981 at Ranbir Chawla's house (we called him Davi then) to the PS2 Model 30/286 in the early-90s all the way through to the HP Pavillion that the lightning killed a little over a week ago, I've always had PCs.

For years, PCs were just "what I used". Macs were toys, playthings of the creative classes, hardly a sensible tool for someone with "real work to do". Perhaps it had something to do with being part of an IBM family.

On Friday, my wife brought our new iMac home; I've spent the weekend getting "settled in", learning how to find my way around a Finder instead of Explorer, using a "Terminal" instead of a "Command" session, and considering a machine that has UNIX at its heart instead of. . . well, not UNIX.

So here it is, Sunday night, and I've gone over to the Dark Side. I may use a PC at work, but my home machine is now a Mac.

It isn't entirely perfect - things work and don't work at odd intervals; applications stop working, strange dialogs pop up.

But it's entirely fun.

When I can hit the F1 key to drop the screen brightness, and hit the F3 key to get my arms around all the windows I have open, I'm experiencing something new. There are dozens of small conveniences and consideations that reveal themselves upon even a casual inspection. I've come to appreciate that the Mac was made for people.

More specifically, I have the odd feeling that there is a user persona with my name on it. It fits.

More to follow. Let's see if I can find a decent fortune cookie program.

Until then, my world is upside-down.

illumination: jonathan gabriel's famous theorem

ha ha: avoiding hubris

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way.

(Mac Davis, It's Hard to Be Humble)




I'm not writing about myself, or anything specific I've experienced at any point in my career.

But you know the feeling as well as I do.

You find yourself looking at a competitive product. Not just catching a furtive glance, or reading through their glossies or their presentations.

But really looking at their product.

In a moment such as this one, you must have had the experience of feeling your chest swell with pride. You've had a gleam in your eye that would make Bruce Campbell nod in a knowing gesture of silent brotherhood.

Because in this moment, you've realized that it's crap. As in "not even close to you" crap, or perhaps even "you'd have to have the mental capacity of a yam to not see that this product is utter crap".

C-R-A-P.

You want to climb up a building, grab hold of a gutter and holler it at the top of your lungs; even better, you want to rub their noses in it. You want to point and chortle Ha Ha!

In moments such as this one, it is my dearest hope that you've kept your poker face firmly strapped to your skull and said nothing. Look at everything you can reasonably see, and say nothing.

Why, you ask. A few reasons, each originating from a different point of view.

The Paranoid View - They knew you were watching, so they served up an older version, or something engineered to be deficient.

The Whole-Systems View - What you may be seeing may in fact be a minor part of a larger system or solution, a part that needs to be personalized / customized in order to deliver value, or perhaps even a "selling feature" that was never expected to stand up to the sort of scrutiny a product manager can generate.

The Market Leader View - What you are seeing is a product created by a better-funded, more broadly-recognized competitor who doesn't have to invest in quality the same way you do, and their "good enough" product is sufficient.

The Marketing View - You need to do a much better job of communicating to your target market that you've got a better product, because the mere presence of an inferior product in the market means that the consumer isn't aware of your superior offering.

The Market Intelligence Failure View - What you are creating doesn't matter, and you are looking at the functional equivalent of comparing your ice machine business to his ice-cutting business. Both of you lose to refrigerators, so the fact that you're better is meaningless.

The Pricing Failure View - You may be better, but you've priced yourself out of the market; for what a customer is willing to pay, the level of functionality you see in your competitor's product is "good enough".

The Built for a Different Buyer Persona View - You added features and functionality to meet the needs of a specific buyer persona that your competitor doesn't feel any need to develop for. One of you is wrong.

Hubris is an odd thing, it is. A little goes a long way, kind of like anchovies.

hu·bris
Pronunciation: 'hyü-br&s
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek hybris
: exaggerated pride or self-confidence
(source: Merriam-Webster)


When it comes to taking a full-frontal look at a competitor's product, try to see the whole picture and put it into the right context. Once you've thought it through, you may discover that it's deficiencies tell you more about your own failures than it does about your successes.

proof: the power of the intuitive interface

Where: The Apple Store in Oakbrook, Illinois.

Scene: After two minutes talking to a guy wearing a black "genius" t-shirt, I find my 7-year old is rooted in place in front of a display.



Me: "Sweetie, what are you doing?"

Sweetie: "I'm playing with an iPhone!"

Me: "Were you able to figure out how. . . "

Sweetie: "Yes, let me show you, here is a video I found of the Llama Song, I had to type in the name in the search box."

Me: "I can't hear it very well."

Sweetie: "I'll turn up the volume for you, you have to use the on-screen buttons. Like this."

Me: "How. . . "

Sweetie: "I'm good at this sort of thing, Daddy."

Lessons:

1. What passes for "intuitive" is entirely a subjective affair, I think.

2. Objects of desire produce an "anti-defeat field" that prevents the desirous individual from giving up on it until the individual "figures it out".

3. If a 7-year old can figure your product out in less than two minutes, you've done something right.

4. Never, EVER listen to the Llama Song.

zap: lightning and computers

It has been a bad week for me and my computer. I'll distill the "experience" to the following facts:

1. Lightning storm came through earlier in the week.
2. Computer turned off, left plugged in to the surge protector (as always) (see below)
3. Lights in house Get Very Bright in the split second before power goes out.
4. When power comes back on (later), computer is found to be non-functional.
5. Further investigation shows power supply has been compromised.
6. Computer brought to local Large National Electronics Retailer (LNER) for new power supply and power supply installation.
7. After new power supply installed, computer goes into "boot loop".
8. Hard drive removed, hooked to test harness; drive visible, but no time left in the work day to transfer the files to an external hard disk.
9. Next day I get a call that "the disk won't spin".
10. Tech at LNER continues to work on project, "will call with news".

Here are the scenarios:

1. She manages to get the disk to work, transfers the files, and formats the disk to its Factory Original state. Inconvenient, but the best of all three possible scenarios.

2. She manages to get the disk to work, transfers the files, but disk melts down in spectacular conflagration of spinning plastic and metal, I go pick up the remains of the PC and my data and contemplate a computer purchase.

3. Disk fails to spin, I go collect remains of my PC and consider not only a computer purchase but the hideous expense associated with recovering data from a "dead" hard drive.

Lessons:

1. Back up your important files. Duh. Yes, I am an idiot for not doing this.

2. When storms are in the area, unplug your so-called "surge protector" from the wall.

3. Buy a Mac. This doesn't have anything to do with anything other than I want to buy a Mac. So sue me.

challenge: need vs. needy

As a product manager, you are beset on all sides by the needs of different constituencies.

• A customer needs a particular feature.
• A salesperson needs you to talk to a particular customer who needs a particular feature.
• A marketing person needs you to document what you say on the call with a particular salesperson who needs you to talk to a particular customer who needs a particular feature.

And so forth, and so on. I've written about the importance of helping individual salespeople before, so I won't do it again. Thank your stars I know how to hyperlink.

Needs on their own are OK. Needs are discrete, have some motivating force behind them, and generally have a payoff that can be compared to that of other discrete needs. This helps you to prioritize what you do and when.

When any given constituency goes from "needing" to being "needy" is difficult to determine. But you can generally look to the following as indicators. I call them the "Effs" (as in plural letter 'F'):

Frequency: A needy will ring your bell often enough for you to notice. Do you get more calls from a particular salesperson than others? One customer? One reporter?

Forceful: A needy will look for any and all leverage to get you to do what they want.

Flattery: A needy will make you feel like you are the "only person who can help" by virtue of your "superior understanding" and "ability to get things done". This is the most dangerous one of all, because it makes us feel good to help people, especially when they make us feel good about helping them.

The strategies for dealing with a needy vary, but the most useful one is to try to get them to commit, and then see what they say. Try this template out for size:

"If I do x for you, will that solve your problem?"

"If you get this feature, will this allow you to be successful with the product?"

"If you have these five sales pieces, will you be able to close business?"

"If I explain the product on this call, will you be able to do it yourself?"

Based on the answers you get some clarity on where to go:

If they answer "no", either you don't understand the problem or they're needy.

If they answer "yes", then either they're lying or they are expressing a discrete need.

If they answer "I don't know", then you can start pressing for success measures. If they can't come up with any, they're needy.

Businesses are now dealing with needy customers in pretty draconian ways. Sprint recently dumped what they characterized as needy customers based on the frequency of their calls to support. Talk about having balls - they are actively terminating contracts with customers who ask too many questions. How many of these customers were in fact "needy" is hard to determine - my guess is that some of them would qualify as "needy" and impossible to please, while others had valid and persistent issues with the service.

Discerning between "customers with needs" and "needy customers" is, I believe, essential for understanding how your product is actually used. In all cases, the needs of needy customers obscure the needs of other customers. . . regardless of whether the customer is internal or external.

It's hard to do.

congrats: a-rod's 500th dinger

Note the ball in the upper-left of the picture.

(photo: my sister-in-law at Yankee Stadium)

willy wonka: koan fountain

At the turning of the day I find I have, for a few brief moments, new eyes that afford me the ability to see differently.




Try this on:

Mike Teavee: Why is everything here completely pointless?
Charlie Bucket: Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy.

Now go pore through the list of so-called "memorable quotes" from both the 1971 and 2005 Willy Wonka movies and see which ones speak to you.

Have a great Sunday.

archive: my only game review

Backstory: I was a huge fan of the PSP. Who knows, I might be again someday. My enthusiasms led to opportunities to review games. Ultimately, I wrote exactly one review. This experience informed my decision to sell the PSP and never, ever write a game review again. The fellows at Penny Arcade do it so much better, anyhow.

----

Title: Death Jr.
Platform: PSP
Date: 9/17/05

Is it possible for a game to be both fun and unplayable? If so, that game is Death Jr.

I really *really* wanted to like this game. Oh, how I wanted to like it. I mean, conceptually, there was so much to love about it.

Characters named Stigmarta and Dead Guppy? C4 Hamsters as weapons? Too cool!

So when the music first started and the opening movie played I was entirely ready to enjoy.

Then. . . I found myself hollering at the camera. "Suck less!" I commanded. I tried to use the left shoulder button and analog pad to reset it a few times. A few times. Ultimately I gave up.

Then. . . I found myself getting swamped by baddies I never saw coming. "Crap!" I blurted in frustration. I attempted blind button-mashing, but repeatedly fell to the blasts of the shooting guys.

Then. . . I found myself trying three, four, eight times to do scythe hops and hook swings and line grabs and hovers and failing. "Did I just have a stroke?" I wondered.

Nope, no stroke. A few rigorous minutes with Ridge Racer confirmed that my eye-hand coordination was as peppy as ever.

So here's what you get to do in Death Jr: you go kill things, you go back to the museum, you try to figure out what those zillion different power-ups do, you go back and kill a few more things. You struggle with the scythe, scream at the camera every time you find yourself staring at the wall, and howl impotently at the never-ending waves of enemies, fully half of whom shoot s^^t at you, appearing behind you out of nowhere without warning.

I loved the Death Jr concept, Konami. I loved the music, the characters, and the care you put into the little things like the sound effects and the fully destroyable environment.

But between the retarded camera, the never-ending ambushes and the lack of a compelling story, I had to put the game down, delete the saved game, and trade it in.

If you're interested in something a bit different, if you're patient enough to deal with the camera, and if your kung fu is *much* more powerful than mine, you may enjoy Death Jr more than I did. It will reward you with the coolest original music for any PSP game so far, characters that are memorable and beautifully distinct, and the pleasure of throwing exploding rodents.

Of course, I could be wrong.

sunday morning: official quote

"His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum."

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis

lesson: making your own good news

My dearest friend and college roommate told me tonight that his wife had a miscarriage. They've had no end of difficulties throughout their marriage conceiving a child and have never carried one to term. To make their own good news, they adopted a child a few years back, a wonderful little boy who has thrived under their care.

Then for his second act he told me he had colon cancer.

As he continued with "the doctor says it's unremarkable, they caught it early, I'm going in on Tuesday for the surgery" I spun quickly through denial and anger, skipped right over bargaining and was well on my way towards enjoying a nice full plate of depression when he said:

"But on the good side. . ."

That's my friend. Other men would have broken under the constant sorrow he's had to endure with his wife so many tragic times. And I know I'd be absolutely shattered with debilitating fear if I had cancer.

But he was telling me about how he and his wife had made their own good news in the face of this.

I'm humbled and amazed that in the face of all of his troubles, he was concerned that I'd be worried and was trying to make me feel better.

I don't know what to say. Except to ask all of you to cast a good thought out to a good man next Tuesday and wish that his surgery goes well, that he recovers, and he can go on living a long, long time. I'll do what I can, and will pass on your wishes to him and his family.

I'm sure I'll look at this post at some time in the future and find some blithely meaningful way of relating it to product management. When that happens, hit me.