Yes.
Inspired– Marty Cagan.
This book was embedded somewhere in my “To Be Read” pile for several years. It should have been closer to the top. Marty Cagan, founding partner of the Silicon Valley Product Group, former VP, Product at eBay, and other things… has provided a really great group of insights in this work. [Read more…]
Internet Of Things, (IoT), can run from a sensor to keep track of watering your lawn to your car to who knows what. Pressing a button or just giving a voice command to have your vehicle pull up in front of the restaurant sounds like a great idea. So does having your car call for help if you hit something with it and you’re non-responsive.
Still, we’re not quite there in terms of all the smarts with smart devices just yet. It’s called the Internet of Stupid. Here’s a fun summary of some idiot savant servants, (perhaps one day our masters), have been up to over the past few years!
SaaS (Software as a Service), and its variants, PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), DaaS (Data as a Service or Desktop as a Service), and more… are all on a tear right now. In the classic Buy vs. Build argument, we’ve now got more reasons than ever before to hire out for more and more components of our businesses. Unfortunately, these still nascent services may often lack core analytics capabilities or the ability to provide hooks or tags to insert your own collection capabilities.
There remain some key reasons for continuing to build your own technology, even when there’s some great aaS out there for you. Among them… [Read more…]
After so many years in digital commerce, we still see what I think I’ll call “average practices” in surprising places.
I’ll admit I’m not a typical user or digital product manager. Probably from having been in this business for some time, I’m just amazed at some of the things I still see brands doing online. (Or not doing.) William Gibson, the guy who first used the term “cyberspace” in print once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This certainly seems true of Best Practices in ecommerce. [Read more…]
Know Your Customer. Know Your Customer Journey. Understand their Messaging Needs. Do this… Before you send messages!
It’s funny we’re still here in terms of minor league mistakes for major brands. I’m not here today to pick on Macy’s in particular. I like Macy’s. Decent store and brand. They’re a generous corporate citizen with a great Thanksgiving Day parade and they put on great NYC fireworks. My wife and I get stuff there sometimes. I think my mom used to take me there when I was a kid. And then there’s this email my wife got Christmas Day I’ll show you below. So even though I like Macy’s just fine, it’s important to point out errors like this so that maybe digital marketers or more junior digital professionals can learn from the mistakes of others. [Read more…]
Professionally, I’ve only been involved in the Payments industry peripherally. However, as any industry observer would note this industry has changed drastically over the last decade or so. This stands to reason of course as all things digital have evolved. Once upon a time, a merchant would pass a variety of checks, get themselves a merchant account and could then take credit cards as payment methods. Varying rules applied – and still do – for those at retail, (card present transactions), and those taking payments remotely, (card not present transactions), be they Internet, Mail Order, Phone, or whatever. On the Consumer side, things have always been easier. Unless your credit rating is wholly in the dumper, just about everyone wants to get their plastic in your hands. (Or more recently get you signed up for some form of digital wallet payment using traditional banking systems as a back end. And then there’s the nascent adoption curve of Bitcoin.) [Read more…]
My prediction for 2016 going forward: Politicians, Senior Execs and others will increasingly skip the wonderful convenience of electronic communication and start meeting face to face more often.
Last week I posted about some issue regarding safety and such for autonomous vehicles. My goal was to make some points about the nature of some new technologies and to a degree how they relate to product management and such.
What I really didn’t anticipate is that within a week a new product craze would create a major public safety hazard. [Read more…]
The first known fatal car crash with use of autopilot driving engaged was on May 7th in Florida. This is the first of what will likely be many crashes and injuries involving partially or fully autonomous vehicles. It’s very likely true that over time, autonomous vehicles will make our roadways safer than ever before. This will be from direct benefits such as less accidents, to less obvious cascade effects from less pollution, less traffic jams holding up emergency vehicles, and much, much more that’s already been written about extensively. Motorists will be so happy, they’d be shooting sunbeams out of the exhaust if cars still had exhaust. (We’ll leave aside the reality that for now, most electric vehicles are likely juiced up from electrons being produced at coal fired power plants. So the pollution reduction benefit may have to wait. See Coal Powered Electric Cars and Electric cars and the coal that runs them)
Well, there’s a whole lot of reasons. [Read more…]
Yes.
In the buzzword compliant world of business we so often hear about the importance of the customer. Seems obvious. After all, that’s where the money comes in, right? And yet even with better tools like customer journey maps and user personas, as consumers or business customers we still experience challenging interactions with business from brand and product level information seeking through purchase and so on.
I think this is because even when companies, (through senior management, brand or product managers), WANT to have a customer focus, they might not necessarily have frameworks, roadmaps or tools to take them from strategy to execution. This book offers ideas to do all of this. While I like to think that I’ve had a good customer focus as a product manager, the ideas here – though concept and example – offer solid methods for doing a better job in both understanding and execution.
