(2009-09-29) Cranky Product Manager Lessons

Ten lessons on Product Management from the Cranky Product Manager.

• 8. On the usual Product Marketing activities: 80% of the "standard" product marketing activities have zero or negative return on investment, and 95% of product marketers don't give a s#!% and just do them anyway. Seriously, no one reads data sheets.... but that doesn't stop product marketers from producing them! And trade shows do almost nothing to drum up qualified prospects, yet even in this crap economy companies are still wasting man-years of time. Nowadays, let's add Twitter and Facebook and blogging to the "suspect ROI" list. The stuff that does have a high ROI is often unexpected: case studies, white papers that were thought to be "too technical", posts to forums, etc. SO....if you ever end up in charge of product marketing, start measuring ROI on marketing activities.

• 9. On product communities: If you build a product community (Virtual Community), NO ONE will come.... until you hire people to populate it with content that is genuinely useful to your target audience (no rehashing of press releases!). Maybe then you can get get that snowball rolling down the hill so it can grow into a huge snow MONSTER of DOOM.