Create a list of your direct competitors - undertake research (recorded data, observable data, opportunistic data) - create a simple table - analyze data - maintain the data.
"Judgment can be broken up into three different sets of skills: picking who will be on your team (people), picking what challenges you take on (strategy), and picking what to do when tough times hit (crisis decisions)."
If you are building mockups for social software web applications using OmniGraffle, the this is for you. Comes with Page Utilities, Social Interaction, Friending Objects, Media Interaction and General UI.
An excerpt from Forrester's pricing predictions for Enterprise 2.0 applications. Prices will drop as volumes increase due to commoditization (I would call it featureization, as there are substantial switching costs, bundling (from individual tools to more or less integrated suites) and subsumption.
"Question: How do I manage two separate products on the same platform?
I am responsible for two products that use the same underlying code, but I have to plan out the new features. Should I try to get a few upgrades to each product or release upgrades for each product separately?"
Great collection of templates for product managers: Marketing Requirements Document, Customer Use Case, Whole Product Bill of Materials Checklist, Positioning template, Product and Service Revenue Models, External Sales Roadmap, Security White Paper, etc.
One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, one of the jobs that keeps coming up over and over is how best to deal with a Request For Proposal (RFP) from a customer.
Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications (image editor and others) that run in a web browser. It also includes a community of artists to share and collaborate with.
"At long last, we have shipped To Dos. It’s been a long time since I worked on Windows Live Calendar and we were talking about building To Dos. The best part about To Dos is that they work with Shared Calendars. In other words, if you and your spouse have a “Family Calendar” you can now create and manage a shared task list… something Google Calendar still doesn’t have."
Dave Kellogg, CEO of MarkLogic: "I’ll tell you one thing that I think is wrong with search: magic. If there’s one lesson I learned in 20+ years in the data world, it’s that magic doesn’t sell. Customers don’t like magic. Consider the fate of data mining, for example."
"How many people in your organization have ever held the position (CIO, CFO, etc) for a company you are looking to target? If that number is less than 30, how do you know you are getting enough of a sample size to build an engagement strategy to target that role?
How much access do you have within your client base to that targeted role? Does your organization assist these executives through the entire problem solving process, or typically engage at key points in time?
How do you develop hot button topics for that executive, and once you do, how do you maintain that information?
How do you connect executive level hot button issues with industry accepted best practices, and then relate that back to the specific capabilities your organization can bring to bear for that customer?
If you are creating this program, how do you validate what’s being said, and how do you make sure it’s different than what your competitors may offer?"
"PMs have but two configuration variables from which all interactions with them (APIs?) derive:
Has technical skills = (True/False)
Knows what he wants = (True/False)
All the rest of a PM’s character is just volume control, circumstances, personal compatibility and personal hygiene. If you take these away, there are just four combinations of PMs which derive from the above two Booleans."
55 links here