by Joe Johnson Gift giving season is upon us. You’ve finished all your shopping, right? Right?! Okay, so maybe not. But it’s not too late to find the perfect gift. Musing over some spice cookies and mulled wine, it struck me that excellent gift shopping shares a lot of parallels with excellent customer research, which makes [...]

Ah, spring!  Time for new growth and limitless possibilities, and any product manager worth his or her salt would be remiss to pass up the opportunity to bring new innovations to market to spur growth.  The most successful new product launches uncover a real but unarticulated customer need.  But, especially in crowded categories, the earnest [...]

  Some product managers in technology and B2B products think that the way consumer companies work isn’t applicable to the tech space.  In fact, on a recent panel, “Building Products that Win,” at Web Inno, one panelist joked he “runs away” from consumer-type focus groups.  But consumer packaged goods (CPG) vendors have really mastered the [...]

Strategic product development teams include a mix of people and skills: coding, architects, usability experts, marketing and more. Take a walk through most high tech shops and you’ll see this type of team working on the next version of their product. But there’s one crucial person who’s missing from many strategic product development teams: your user

Last week’s BPMA meeting featured David Meerman Scott talking about “Real-Time Marketing and PR.” Here’s my take on what product strategists can learn from Meerman Scott.

Here are three New Year’s Resolutions to help ensure successful new product launches.

2011 is the year smart enterprise software companies will reinvent how they approach product development. Those that don’t will face shrinking revenues, disinterested customers and lost sales opportunities.

Many organizations start by creating a product or offering without first figuring out who their market is, or whether a market exists at all. So they end up stuck trying to figure out how to sell said product. Having a good product is not enough (Betamax, anyone?) — you should have a pretty good idea who your target customer will be before you invest valuable time and resources in product development.

In my last blog post, I talked about very small businesses (under 50 employees).

In this post, we’ll look at the businesses who are ‘on the grow’ – the larger of the smaller in SMB, so to speak.

When marketing and selling to the SMB audience, be sure to factor in the size of the SMB. While employee size is only one of many ways to segment this large, highly diverse group, it is one that is useful when thinking about how to develop and market products to SMBs.