Global Product Management Talk on Twitter @ProdMgmtTalk

July 25: Product Management and the Sales Force.  Jock Busuttil, Senior Product Manager, Experian, London, Leads Twitter Discussion On The Pivotal Role Product Management Plays In Supporting Effective Sales Teams.   The effectiveness of your organisation's sales force ultimately determines whether your carefully-crafted product is a roaring success or an abject failure. As product managers and marketers, you play a pivotal role in helping your sales teams realise the potential of your products. We'll be exploring what you can and should be doing.

Some articles to stimulate thought on the discussion: CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs http://bit.ly/o3hO45 Discount gambit http://bit.ly/qhUkQ8 How to get your sales team selling value instead of discounting | I Manage Products http://bit.ly/r9MCNq Why aren’t Sales selling my new product? | I Manage Products http://bit.ly/r8GxFS Work effectively with sales : How To Be A Good Product Manager: Product management tips http://bit.ly/ofobJh Questions to be discussed: 1. What are your personal top 3 challenges when engaging with your sales force? 2. What information does a sales person need to know about your product to sell it? 3. What would a product manager's perfect sales person look like? 4. What have you learned from sales that has made you a better product manager? 5. What creative methods have you employed to focus the attention of your sales people on your product? 6. How does your approach change when working with indirect sales teams versus direct? 7. In the end, what is it that sales people really need from product management? About Speaker: Jock has over ten years’ experience working for B2B software start-ups and multi-nationals, the majority of which as a product manager or product marketer. He has a keen interest in product usability. Outside of work, Jock is into cooking, aikido, music and skiing. He is based in London and holds a degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge, UK. The views expressed by Jock are his own and do not reflect those of his employer. 

July 18: The Intrinsic Value Of Product Marketing with Jennifer Doctor.  Jennifer Doctor explains that product marketing exists to defend and uphold the buyer’s voice by injecting the target market’s issues in a balanced way throughout the entire product development process.  Product Marketing is often stuck in the unenviable position of defending its value within the organization.  Sales is focused on closing deals, marketing communications produces collateral, product development is busy building the product, and senior leadership guides the vision. 

“Only product marketing managers capture unique information about the voice of the customer and develop strategies based on solving identified customer problems that ultimately result in increased revenue,” states Doctor, the first woman to lead the Global Product Management Talk discussion on Twitter.

Q1 What is product marketing? Q2 What value does product marketing add to an organization? Q3 What are the responsibilities of a product marketer? Q4 How do you differentiate between product marketing and product management? Q5 What obstacles do you face in the role? Are these internal or external? Real or imaginary? Q6 Where do we grow to learn? to share? to educate ourselves and others in order to be more effective or more capable? Q7 How do you apply your own distinctive competence to be more effective? What is a distinctive competence? How do we continue our conversations?

Resources:  If Product Marketing is so Strategic, Why do I always get stuck in the weeds? | OutsideIn View http://bit.ly/rpgmsi / Justify Product Marketing in Your Organization | OutsideIn View http://bit.ly/qTps54 / Where Do You Belong? | OutsideIn View http://bit.ly/ramUAR 

July 11: This Week's Topic: Debate! Product Management vs. Scrum Product Ownership w/Lance Knight 

Background info: Should product managers be product owners in scrum?  This topic has created quite a discussion in the Agile world and there are various different opinions about this topic. On one hand product managers are the customer to the scrum process, and therefore should not be the product owners. On the other hand, product managers are already engaging in a lot of the tasks that product owners would. 

Scrum is a loose set of guidelines that govern the development process of a product, from its design stages to its completion. The scrum team is a self-organizing, cross-functional team supported by a Scrum Master and a product owner. The product owner represents the business, customers or users and guides the team toward building the right product.

Lance Knight, Certified Scrum Master as well as Certified scrum professional, explains that while the ScrumMaster focuses on helping the team be the best that it can be, the product owner works to direct the team towards the right goal. The product owner creates and conveys a compelling vision of the product to the team via the product backlog. The product owner is responsible for ensuring that the product backlog remains prioritized as more is learned about the system being built, its users, the team, and so on.

“This is a very interesting topic because as Agile becomes more mature, these are questions that need to be answered in order to guarantee successful Agile deployment,” said Lance Knight. “The Global Product Management Talk on twitter provides the opportunity for product managers in both small and big companies to share their direct experience about who owns this process and how they respond to this dilemma.”

June 27: This week's Topic: The Quest to be Market-driven:

What product managers and product marketers need to do to become the customers’ advocate

Background info:

Whoever understands the customer best, wins. This requires marketers to take responsibility for understanding customers, their pain points, and their buying process better than ever before. For businesses to thrive in the 21st century, product managers and product marketers must become the definitive source of customer knowledge. This starts with illustrating the persona as a reflection of the target market, crafting a clear positioning statement that defines and differentiates your product or service, and designing a set of relevant use-case scenarios and key messaging to engage the persona. With this information, marketers can ensure that the best product decisions are always made.

Prepare:

Visit "The Marketing High Ground" blog: http://marketinghighground.wordpress.com

Visit "Marketing Campaign Development" blog: http://marketingcampaigndevelopment.wordpress.com

About Speaker:

Mike Gospe is an accomplished leader, marketing strategist and corporate executive who understands what it takes to market and sell to today’s B2B companies. He is co-founder of KickStart Alliance, a sales and marketing leadership consulting team where he drives integrated marketing and voice-of-the customer programs, including Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. He’s the author of "The Marketing High Ground" and “Marketing Campaign Development“ (available on Amazon.com), and he's a faculty member of San Francisco State University where he teaches the course “Essentials of Integrated Marketing”.

Questions to be discussed:

1. What do product managers and product marketers need to do to earn a seat at their company's leadership table alongside sales, engineering, and operations colleagues?

2. How can product managers and product marketers distinguish themselves?

3. How can product managers and product marketers add more value?

4. How well do you understand your customers?

5. Do you know the difference between a compelling positioning statement and an ineffective one?

6. Successful marketing requires sacrifice in not addressing all markets at the same time. How effective is your organization in prioritizing market segments, use cases, features and benefits?

June 20: This week's Topic: Product Development – Iterating by Color  with Robert Swanwick.  Product Management must involve the stakeholders in the design and development of new product features, iteration and innovation.  Because it is so difficult to determine the reaction after the product is launched, it is best to build features  relatively simply and then improve over time.  This is a discussion about ways to simplify levels of complexity to guarantee acceptance of the minimum viable product.

Robert Swanwick suggests using 3 colors  as an indicator for the level of complexity that will be used to meet user needs.  There are many ways to get from A to B.  The color method helps to ensure that a Space Shuttle is not built when a horse and buggy would have sufficed.