One is the “Introduction to Case Method” in day one, August 17th Monday.  The case is a Market Entry Strategy problem for Dolby Laboratories.

The second case session is today Tuesday’s Company Workshops.   Actually HP, Adobe, Deloitte, LucasArts, Abbott, Chevron, and Del Monte each has a workshop today with us.   I attended the Adobe session.  A Director from Adobe discussed a real case with us today:  Suppose you are an Adobe Product Manager, you are trying to evaluate alternative monetization models other than traditional perpetual license pricing model.

We discussed different alternative monetization models such as:

• Subscription
• Free (actually tiers like basic edition for free, but charge with standard or advanced edition)
• Advertising, like many share-ware, or GMail.
• Utility.  End users only pay for what they consume, but you need some monitoring or measurement tools.

It is an interesting and valuable session.  I learned a lot from the Adobe director and my smart fellow classmates.

Website title: Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG)
Intro: A website with lots of very good blog posts and articles about Product Management.
Website: http://www.svpg.com/
SVPG Blog: http://www.svpg.com/blog/blog.html
SVPG Articles: http://www.svpg.com/articles/articles.html
RSS Feed: (It seems that their feed has problems. It is better to subscribe their free newsletter via email on the website.)

Blog title: How To Be A Good Product Manager
Intro: Written by Jeff Lash, this sites provides regular tips on good product management practices. Every post is always structured as “If you want to be a bad product manager…” and “If you want to be a good product manager…”.
Website: http://www.goodproductmanager.com
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoodProductManager

Blog title: Ask A Good Product Manager
Intro: Put together by Jeff Lash, this sites provides real answers to your real product management questions. This site is an offshoot of How To Be A Good Product Manager.
Website: http://ask.goodproductmanager.com
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskAGoodProductManager

Blog title: PragmaticMarketing.com
Intro: Pragmatic Marketing provides training, consulting services and an online community for technology product management and marketing.
Website: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/blogs/productmarketing
RSS Feed: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/blogs/productmarketing/rss.xml

Blog title: Michael on High-Tech Product Management & Marketing
Intro: Although this website is not updated for a long time (most recent post was on December 17, 2006), Michael Shrivathsan published quite several excellent posts of Product Management and Product Marketing in the high-tech industry.
Website: http://michael.hightechproductmanagement.com
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MichaelHighTechPM

Blog title: The Productologist
Intro: A blog by Ivan Chalif, who is Senior Product Manager at StrongMail Systems in Redwood City, CA. He has over 10 years experience in technology marketing, building web-based products and services at companies like ValueClick, The Gale Group and Acxiom Digital. Ivan is also a founding member of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA).
Website: http://www.theproductologist.com
RSS Feed: http://www.theproductologist.com/index.php/feed/

Blog title: All about Product Management
Intro: By Derek Morrison, this blog is designed to give tips on various aspects of the Product Manager’s and Product Development Manager’s role including interview and career suggestions.
Website: http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AllAboutProductManagementByDerekMorrison

Blog title: On Product Management
Intro: Three professionals (Alan Armstrong, Ethan Henry, and Saeed Khan) co-author this blog.
Website: http://onproductmanagement.wordpress.com
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnProductManagement

Blog title: Product Beautiful
Intro: A blog about Product Management and Marketing created by Paul Young, who had worked in various Product Management and Marketing roles for Cisco’s Security and WAN managed services for several years.
Website: http://www.productbeautiful.com
RSS Feed: http://www.productbeautiful.com/feed/

Blog title: Product Management Tips
Intro: Gopal Shenoy is currently the Director of Product Management, Small Business at salary.com in Waltham, MA. Prior to salary.com, Gopal Shenoy has worked at RSA and also spend 11 years at SolidWorks Corporation, the leading manufacturer of 3D mechanical CAD software used by over 635,000 users in 80,000 companies.
Website: http://productmanagementtips.com
RSS Feed: http://productmanagementtips.com/feed/

Of course there are many other websites/blogs about Product Management and Marketing, such as 280 Group Blog, Forrester Product Management Blog, The Cranky Product Manager and many others. But generally speaking, the above ten websites/blogs are updated regularly and the article’s quality are generally very good.

Hello Freeman,

I ran into your Chinese blog site when I was searching “Femtocell” over Internet. Currently I am a test engineer working on home networking gadgets like xDSL home gateway, etc. My current job is way too far from customers. We do not have to talk with our customers in person. Instead, we just hold the PRD (Product Requirement Document) and make sure if all of the requested features are working fine. Therefore, it’s not easy to get a deep understanding of the industry and marketplace. Actually I feel that I am kind of losing the big picture. That’s why I am always thinking to be a product manager. But I just have no idea where to start.

Now I think maybe I can learn something from you. How did you become a product manager? Transitioned from developer? And what is important to be a successful product manager (of course I have read the articles like “10 tips to be a good product manager”, I just want to know what you think from your own experience).

It will be great if you can take some time to read and reply this mail .

Thank you.

As I have said in the previous post “Motivate team by Big Picture“, it is very normal for the email author, as a R&D engineer, to have a feeling that “losing the big picture”. I have had the similar feeling when I was doing my first job as an entry level software development engineer, and this became part of the reason that I changed that first job later.

Actually I have initiated career transitions to cover some different functions: R&D engineer, sales support engineer, department manager, and product manager. As a R&D engineer, I was involved in designing, implementing and testing some sophisticated telecommunication networking systems, giving me some solid engineering experience. As a sales support engineer, I did both pre-sales support such as having delivered presentations to many companies in different industry sectors, making me a good listener/communicator in front of customers. Also I did post-sales support job such as trouble shooting on site under the enormous pressure from customers.

I appreciate my sales-support experience very much because it makes me empathetic and considerate to different customer/partner in different companies. In short, it gave me deep people awareness and customer understanding. Actually, “people awareness and customer understanding” is a very essential skill (especially for people who transitioned from engineering team) for any managerial position and directly helped me later to work as department managers and product manager.

So based on my own experience, I agree with this article very much: February 09, 2004, “Where DO good product managers come from?“

This most consistently successful source of good product managers that I’ve found is from the ranks of successful pre-sales product specialists. These folks have lots of different titles in different companies, but they are the technical sales resources who work directly with sales reps on understanding customer requirements, they often take the lead in presenting solutions to customer problems, and on planning the implementation of the product/solution in the customer environment.

So basically I think, if you want to be a product manager, it is very essential to have some customer interaction experience, so that you can really know how customers think and behave, and what is customer really want.

Why? Because Product Manager is a tough job! Again, let us quoted from “Where DO good product managers come from?“:

The skills mix and knowledge mix for a good product manager is pretty broad.
You need someone who absolutely understands the needs of the customers that you are targeting.
You need someone who understands enough about the technology so that they can build credibility with the engineering team, so that they can translate user needs into something engineering can understand, and so that they can filter and evaluate the technology team’s designs and schedule estimates.
You need someone who is a good communicator and negotiator.
You also need someone who can negotiate with the sales force and distinguish between the one-offs that every sales rep needs tomorrow to help close whatever big deal is in their pipeline from the true broad requirements that are going to improve the marketability of the product on a broader basis.

What do you think? It is really hard to be a good product manager. So be patient, and you might just need more time to try different related jobs. I would like to recommend any engineering people to try to do pre-sales, post-sales support, or sales, marketing… whatever job that is more business-oriented and more customer-facing. Engineering itself is just too technical, and you need different mindset to move into other jobs. Then after you have real sense for those jobs, you might begin to know what is product management, and whether you want to do that.

Anyway, just my own experience and own idea, and I am afraid that this is primarily only make sense to engineering people. And of course there are quite many successful product managers who are from very different other background. There is just no uniform way to become a product manager, and there is no such a course, or degree program dedicated for product manager career. Yes, many MBAs start their post-MBA job as a product manager, but MBA is not a mandatory requirement. A lot of good product managers do not have MBA, or even do not have any graduate degree. It is totally up to you to have your own career path to move into product manager position. But I believe the “people awareness and customer understanding” skill is very essential.

Some related links that you might be interested:

Where DO good product managers come from? February 09, 2004
http://odnt.typepad.com/new_dog_old_trick/2004/02/where_do_good_p.html

The Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) articles (many many good articles here):
http://www.svpg.com/articles/articles.html

All About Product Management blog:
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/

The interesting part of this blog is that it has a section of interviews with different people how they move into Product Manager position.

How others have moved into Product Management
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-others-have-moved-into-product.html `

From R&D Engineer to Product Manager
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/02/from-r-engineer-to-product-manager.html

From Technical Support to Product Management
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/03/from-technical-support-to-product.html

If you want to get into Product Management – then ask a good Product Manager.
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/03/if-you-want-to-get-into-product.html

Other articles related to the career can be found:
http://allaboutproductmanagement.blogspot.com/search/label/Your%20Career

The sad thing is that the All About Product Management blog is actually banned from mainland China because the hosting site blogspot.com is banned in China. So you might have to find workaround to access it from mainland China.

Companies spend huge amounts of money to be ’socially responsible.’ Do consumers reward them for it? And how much?

In the end of the article, the author information are: Mr. Trudel is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business. Dr. Cotte is the George and Mary Turnbull faculty fellow and associate professor of marketing at the Ivey School.

Here are my excepts from the article as their key findings:

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

What’s more, consumer attitudes played a big part in shaping those results. People with high standards for corporate behavior rewarded the ethical companies with bigger premiums and punished the unethical ones with bigger discounts.

Finally, we discovered that companies don’t necessarily need to go all-out with social responsibility to win over consumers. If a company invests in even a small degree of ethical production, buyers will reward it just as much as a company that goes much further in its efforts.

Interesting research result?

Stay tuned.

An even more interesting thing is that an MBA student from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley responded in the Berkeley MBA Student Blogs by a blog entry titled “Does being ethical really pay?“.

Here are the Berkeley student’s key findings:

In our survey we found that consumers were not rewarding high ethical standards over a control group.

Unlike the study cited in the WSJ we found that in both the immediate questions and the delayed questions, participants actually had a lower willingness to pay when they were informed about the company’s ethical practices and we had to reject our initial hypothesis that ethical standards would increase our participants’ willingness to pay.

So at the end the blog article said:

So does being ethical really, really, really pay? As much as I would like to say “Yes”, all I can say is “Sometimes… Maybe“!

Anyway the Berkeley blog article mentioned their insights as:

It should also be noted that the way a company presents its production standards might influence a consumer’s perception and companies should carefully consider if they want to advertise their own corporate CSR standards, use press releases to communicate them or find other ways to make consumers aware of their practices.

It is very interesting to read these two articles together. And it is nice to learn from different perspectives to build our own critical thinking. And we can feel the beauty of academic research.

P.S. I pasted the full text of the Berkeley blog article here, because the Berkeley blog website is hosted on blogspot.com, but unfortunately the blogspot.com is blocked from mainland China, so most of my readers from mainland China actually cannot visit the Berkeley blog article easily. So I decided to paste the full text of the Berkeley blog article here.

The URL of the Berkeley blog article: http://berkeleymbastudents.blogspot.com/2008/05/does-being-ethical-really-pay.html

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Does being ethical really pay?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week titled “Does being ethical pay?“. The journal article was based on an experiment in which participants were asked for their willingness to pay for a pound of coffee or a T-Shirt. Different groups of customers were given varying information about the standards the company follows producing their goods. One group got positive information, one negative. A control group was provided with no additional information on the product.

In their experiment, the researchers found that consumers were willing to pay a premium for ethically produced goods over the control group and that consumers were demanding a steep discount for products produced following unethical standards.

Why do I mention the article in this blog? It reminded me of a quite similar survey I recently conducted with a team of students as part of my Consumer Behavior class. I would love to say we reached the same conclusion, but we did not. In our survey we found that consumers were not rewarding high ethical standards over a control group. (we did not test for unethical behavior).

Although we only tested for coffee products, our setup was quite similar to the one described in the WSJ article. We surveyed a total of 90 participants split into 4 groups: Two groups read a fictitious news article describing the expansion plans of a coffee house chain in purely financial terms. Two more groups received the same article with an additional paragraph that emphasized the company’s CSR and fair trade efforts. One of each groups was then asked for their willingness to pay for a specialty coffee drink (and some other questions masking the purpose of the survey). The two other groups received the same set of questions later – we wanted to see if the perception of a company’s ethical practices is sticky.

The results? Unlike the study cited in the WSJ we found that in both the immediate questions and the delayed questions, participants actually had a lower willingness to pay when they were informed about the company’s ethical practices and we had to reject our initial hypothesis that ethical standards would increase our participants’ willingness to pay.

There are some limitations to our results: We used the name of an existing coffee hosue chain. While that chain does not operate in the Bay area, existing perceptions might have tainted the results. We also did not sample random consumers: Our survey went to MBA students only. In addition, we did not control for people who do not drink coffee and the presentation of the company’s ethical standards might simply have been too short.

Yet, our results do have some significance. Just because one experiment tells you that consumers are willing to pay a higher price for an ethically produced product, this conclusion might not hold across different groups of consumers or different products. It should also be noted that the way a company presents its production standards might influence a consumer’s perception and companies should carefully consider if they want to advertise their own corporate CSR standards, use press releases to communicate them or find other ways to make consumers aware of their practices. The WSJ article mentions some of these limitations as well.

So does being ethical really, really, really pay? As much as I would like to say “Yes”, all I can say is “Sometimes… Maybe”!

Labels: academics, classes, CSR

posted by olistrut at 6:31 PM

The Strategic Role of Product Management: How a market-driven focus leads companies to build products people want to buy.

The e-book PDF file can be downloaded here.

Links to the original page at Pragmatic Marketing website:

• The Strategic Role of Product Management.
• The blog page: The Strategic Role of Product Management

Some words in this e-book are very hilarious, while some words are very thought-provoking:

In page 2, when it is talking about “definitions of marketing”:

Technology businesses use two definitions of marketing:
1) the market experts and business leaders for the product
- or –
2) the t-shirt and coffee mug department.

In page 6, when it is talking about the missing of voice of the market:

The VP of Development says,”Customers don’t know what they want.”
The VP of Sales says, “I can sell anything.”
The VP of Marketing says, “We just have to establish a brand.”
The VP of Finance says,”We have to control spending.”

In page 7, when it is talking about what is “Listen to the market”:

I’m convinced that developers, engineers, and executives want to be market-driven.
They just don’t want to be driven by marketing departments.

In page 9, the e-book quoted David Packard (co-founder of HP)’s word:

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

and Peter Drucker’s words:

“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling.
But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer
so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

In page 10, when it talks about promotion:

promotion isn’t marketing;
promotion is marketing communications.

In the last page, page 33, the e-book summarized what a Product Manager should do, by comparison to Marketing, Sales and Developers:

Product managers bring a powerful combination of skills:
product and technology expertise
combined with market and domain knowledge
as well as business savvy.

Marketing people know how to communicate;
product managers know what to communicate.

Sales people know what one customer wants to buy;
product managers must determine if the deal represents a single customer or a market full of customers.

Developers know what can be built;
product managers know whether it should be built.

Anyway, I strongly recommend this e-book to anyone who is interested in technology product management, and technology business.

Download The Strategic Role of Product Management e-book (pdf)

The article is reached as a PDF file here in Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) website’s Articles and Publications area.

The article’s author is Martin Cagan. He has over 20 years industry experience, and he was most recently Vice President of Product Management and Design for eBay. Prior to that, he had worked for HP, Netscape Communications, America Online. Martin said in the paper that the paper is based on work originally done while he was at Netscape Communications. More introduction for Martin Cagan can be found here in SVPG website.

Below I listed the structure of the article:

• Role And Responsibilities:
• • Identifying and Assessing Opportunities
  • Right Product/Right Time
  • Product Strategy and Roadmap
  • Manages Product Not People
  • Represents Product Internally
  • • Evangelism
    • Executive Review
    • Sales and Marketing
    • Represents Customer
• Characteristics of Good Product Managers
• • Personal Traits
  • • Product Passion
    • Customer Empathy
    • Intelligence
    • Work Ethic
    • Integrity
    • Confidence
    • Communication Skills
  • Knowledge:
  • • Know Your Customer
    • Know Your Product
    • Know Your Competitors
  • Attitude:
  • • No Excuses
    • Defining Success
    • Nothing Sacred
  • Skills:
  • • Applying Technology
    • Focus
    • Time Management
    • Written Skills
    • Presentation Skills
    • Business Skills
• Summary
• • Where To Find Product Managers
  • Tough Questions

It seems that this article was written in 2005. But do not get me wrong. Although it was written almost three years before, the article is still very valuable and deserve to read.

The pre-sales documents are used “before sales”, so the primary intention of pre-sales documents is to trigger the customer’s interests, so usually pre-sales documents are brief, succinct, attractive, fascinating, and/or tailored for the certain customer, industry or solution needs. The target readers of pre-sales documents are somewhat decision makers or shapers, but not necessarily the end users. For example, fancy and brief slides, an executive summary, or a nice brochure is a pre-sales document.

On the other side, the post-sales documents are used “after sales”; the target readers are most probably the end users, so usually the post-sales documents are supposed to help the end user to understand deeply about the product, how it works, and trouble shooting. So usually post-sales documents are much detailed and technical. A product function explaining (specification, anatomy or some other words), or a detailed user manual is a good example of post-sales document.

Recently I met a problem when I was doing work to release a new version of my product (a big enterprise software) to the market. I found some documents were used as pre-sales documents as well as post-sales documents. We had much controversy, debates and arguments when we were reviewing such “dual purpose” documents. For the same paragraph, some marketing colleagues thought the words were OK since they were from a marketing/pre-sales point of view; however some other colleagues did not like the words since they were from a post-sales point of view.

I believed the root reason of the controversy was the confusion by the “dual purpose”. After all, there are distinctive differences between pre-sales and post-sales documents, so I think we just should not place a same document as both pre-sales and post-sales document. I think it just does not work well. We should be aware of the distinctive different purpose, target readers of the two kinds of documents. We should not give a certain document “dual identity“. It should be for pre-sales, or it should be for post-sales. But never both.