From Chemistry to Clouds

Listen to Sales, Mostly

Jointly blogged by Laurent Gharda & Wayne Greene As good product managers and product marketing managers, we are told that one of the constituencies that we need to listen to are the sales teams. Those product sales specialists and system engineers that take leads, qualify them, align value proposition with customer pain points, enable a…

Won’t Get Fooled Again – A Story of Productization

Won’t Get Fooled Again – A Story of Productization Once upon a time, I was part of an organization that was selling application performance management tools. Our company was the leading provider of that market category and the product was clearly one of the top technologies in play. Being part of the competitive and…

Secrets of the Partner Series – Technology Partners – Part 2 – Changes in Direction

In this second blog of the Technology Partner Series, Justin Griffin and I will discuss the second chapter in our partner program and how being agile in your program is key to responding to success (and failure) as you scale. In our first blog, we discussed the need for the technology partner program, working with…

Secrets of the Partner Series – Channel Partners – Part 3 – Recipe for a Successful Channel

Secrets of the Partner Series – Channel Partners – Part 3 – Recipe for a Successful Channel In this final blog of the Channel Partner Series, Bill Petro and I detail our kitchen-tested recipe for a successful channel. Make sure you refresh yourself first with our first two blogs, Part 1 and Part 2. Recipe…

When & How to Listen to your Board of Directors on Product Plans

Jointly blogged by Laurent Gharda & Wayne Greene Laurent is the CEO and founder of LinMin Much is discussed in the Product Manager blog space around listening to your customers and driving your product direction to the most valuable features and capabilities for your customers. Sounds like eating cheesy nachos and a ballpark frank smothered…

Misty Place for the Clear Future of Services… (Part 3 of 3)

Emerging Science of Services – RADMA Conference 2006 – Lake District, UK By Guest Blogger – Kemal A. Delic As we sensed that the end of the splendid Camelot days was approaching, we tried to envision a very distant future in which services will represent the major part of the economy (+75%). Thus, we thought…

Once Upon a Time we Thought Analytically… (Part 2 of a 3)

By Guest Blogger Kemal A. Delic Looking back into the recent history of IT industry developments, one can easily observe the domination of hosting platforms—representing an intricate infrastructural entity combining technological systems and a clever business model. The most important feature of the dominant, global platforms is the ability to scale smoothly. You provide the…

Secrets of the Partner Series – Technology Partners – Part 1

A sign of a very healthy product (software or hardware) is a robust ecosystem of partners with product integrations. Just look at all the third-party products for the iPhone (or Surface Pro 4 which I am typing on now). My first role at VMware was to Product Manage from the Business Units point of view…

On Camelot Days —Or How We Have Missed Becoming Rich, Famous or Both…Luckily…

By Kemal A. Delic (with a bit of editing by his long time friend yours truly) Ideas are the raw material of innovation driving development of products, services and technologies and the importance of them becomes obvious only after many years (let’s call it decade+ endurance test) or when they are transformed into global success…

Secrets of the Partner Series – Channel Partners – Part 2 – Conflicts

Wayne: Bill, on our first blog on Channel Partners we covered a lot of ground on this issue, especially on setting up the motivational structure for those channel partners versus our direct sales force. When we were setting up enablement we had many discussions on curriculum for enablements: what was the 101 course, the 201…

You and Your Product Depends on These Two Things

There seems to be a big uptick in Product Management-centric blog posts and advice. Each of those articles tells and extends the group experience of the PM community. As a colleague mentioned to me, the domain of the PM has extended from managing the hardware or physical product, to firmware and to software. You have…