The Heretech

The Heretech, episode 33: Chor-Ching Fan's major mash-ups

Chor-Ching Fan of Jackbe tells us how to build good mash-ups, the reasons for their adoption, and the kinds of solutions that are good fits for mash-ups. Plus, some quick research news (the Agile adoption doc is published!), and a great article on the value of failure. (c) 2010 Tom Grant

Product marketing and massive yachts

I might write a long post about how product marketers often fail to speak the customer's language...Or, I could just post the following skit from That Mitchell and Webb Look that I saw last weekend.

UPDATE: Since posting this video, I now have a yacht dealer as a follower on Twitter. What brave new world.

Beta's marketing focus

April Dunford posted recently about how to incorporate marketing objectives into your beta program strategy. It's a good post, well worth reading, assuming that you're a company that sees betas primarily as product quality exercises (find bugs, get user feedback on design, etc.).

I also know that there are companies who have the reverse problem: they use beta for marketing purposes first. They know that customers get nervous when you don't have any beta, even a pro forma one. However, the bigger marketing goal is reference customers, which presumably pop out of beta programs the same way that flowers might appear after a rain storm. 

In some cases, these companies have good relationships with a few customers who always have something good to say about the company. Even if the customer didn't actually give the beta version a good thrashing, they're willing to say something like, "We give a thumbs up to the product direction that we see in the next version." Beta, in this context, is a set of talking points for case studies, press releases, and other marketing materials developed for the launch.

If this is your company's way of handling beta programs, someone needs to be fired. On the product quality front, betas really do have value. Even the best QA team can't achieve the level of real-world testing that customers provide.

Even if you're not concerned about product quality, any company that treats beta programs in this fashion is taking two gigantic marketing risks:

• Ceding an ever-increasing amount of leverage to a small group of customers. Your go-to reference customers aren't stupid. They know that there's a quid pro quo, and they'll expect to be able to call in favors at some point. These acts of reciprocal kindness might take forms that damage your business, such as the prioritization of features that no other customer really wants.
• Confining yourself to a small market. What happens when you need a reference customer in the public sector, but all your go-to reference customers are in financial services? Or, what if you want to expand your portfolio, but none of the familiar reference customers are willing to recommend your ability to deliver value in a whole new technology area?

If reference customers are the flowers you want to prosper in your marketing garden, you'll have to suck up the amount of work it's going to take to cultivate them. Beta programs are one important step in the cultivation process, but the work is really ongoing—as your relationship with any reference customer should be.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Agile adoption study now published

The research that Dave West and I did on the state of Agile adoption is now published. Here's a link to the actual document, and here's a quick snippet about it from InfoWorld. The short version: If the odds that you'll wind up on an Agile team in your next job is at least one in three, Agile has certainly gone mainstream.

I'm writing a separate piece on the implications for technology companies separately. Meanwhile, the research on requirements in the tech industry is in the final editing queue.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

No Iron Curtain for Java

The headline for a recent InfoWorld article about Oracle's plan for Java reads, "Java's Future Uncertain Under Oracle's Grip." Interesting choice of words, since we usually reserve grip to describe things like Stalin's handling of Eastern Europe after WWII.

The tone of the article is a lot less dire than the headline might suggest. Of course, no one knows exactly what will happen to Sun's IP, post-acquisition, but messing up Java is probably one of the worst possible outcomes, from Oracle's point of view. (OpenOffice, on the other hand...)

As the article recognizes, Oracle has been "more focused on monetizing its technology than Sun has been." Which might not be all bad, considering how at least one aspect of Java, the JSRs, might benefit from a bit more market discipline.

All we can say at this point is that Oracle's handling will be different. However, it's way too early to say in what ways it will differ from Sun's Java strategy, or even the magnitude of difference, which might turn out to be negligible. Java is now so widely adopted that even Oracle might have a hard time screwing with it, even if the company wanted to.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

I miss newspapers

While I was staying at a hotel over the holidays, I had the unusual experience of reading a newspaper. I normally read all my news on my laptop, along with feeds from blogs, forums, and other sources of content. And boy, it felt nice to read a newspaper again.

It's not that I have some weird nostalgia for getting newsprint on my fingers again, or some quixotic desire to help save major newspapers from impending doom (brought on themselves, to a great degree). Here's what I liked about the newspaper:

• Encapsulation. Printed publications create boundaries of content. In this issue, you will read the following stories, and then you're done. In contrast, my normal way of reading the news is boundless. There's always one more news item that I could read, which might actually lead me, in some topic areas, to read fewer news items, instead of more of them. If there's always a huge number of things I might read, the sense of completeness in reading a day's news items could end at any time.
• Prioritization. You might argue with the primacy that newspapers grant some stories by putting them on the front page, but at least there's some prioritization. The "dump all the news stories on a floor and find what you like" approach, as exemplified by sites like Salon.com, create a sense that nothing is more important than anything else. My own sense of what's important won't change, but the publisher's certainly does. If it's worth putting on the front page, it's worth doing a little more fact checking, and adding a little more content than you might not afford in a lesser story.
• Presentation. I get tired of looking at the same laptop screen all day. I want something that isn't backlight, requires a power supply, and can present something that looks like the average size of a book page. Again, it's not a question of nostalgia for printed things, but simple efficiency. I don't like having to click Page Down too often.

Having said all that, you might think that I've already bought an e-reader like the Kindle. Nope, haven't taken the plunge yet. I share some of the same anxieties that Farhad Manjoo discussed in Slate, such as high price and freaky DRM rules. If it's not as functional a netbook, I don't want to pay more than the cost of a netbook. I just want something that I can load up with a permanent collection of PDFs and downloaded feed items and read on the couch, or in a hammock, or on a plane.

All of which presents an interesting challenge to product managers and product marketers working on e-reader technology. The people designing and marketing MP3 players had a relatively easier time, since the use case they created was nothing like past alternatives. Not only would your shelves of CDs disappear, but you could listen to your entire library anywhere you went, using a device that you could slip into your pocket.

The e-reader use case is a little more familiar. You can't bring your high-end stereo system on the subway, but you can still bring a book or newspaper. The file format for music files is a non-issue for users, but e-readers are forcing consumers to make bets on which e-book format will persist and which will die.

For the moment, e-readers face serious adoption challenges. Overcoming them will be one of the most challenging tests of ingenuity for PMs in the tech industry.

Fame Girl versus Goof: FIGHT!

The Tester might be the first reality show involving the tech industry. For those of you working in some dusty corner of an ERP company, don't get your hopes up. The show creates a Project Runway-style competition among people who want to be a QA person for the Sony Playstation. Unless you have strong opinions about the future of first person shooter games, don't bother applying.

It's also probably worth noting that the job isn't really QA, in the strictest sense. If you don't know what a smoke test is, or you've never had someone yell at you about inadequate code coverage, you're still a potential candidate for this position.

I have no idea if this reality show is for real or not. If "Barmy" gets the boot for saying Dr. Spock when he should have said Mr. Spock, the show's geek cred will rise significantly.

Unscheduled web design rant

Recently, the online magazine Salon changed its design. Now, it exemplifies many common  mistakes in organizing and presenting web content.

For starters, try making sense of the front page without getting a headache. A bajillion little boxes, all seemingly placed at random, each of which is supposed to encapsulate some category of content. The problem is, it's not always clear what those categories are. For example, the meaning of TMI and Open Salon are not self-evident.  (Hint: One of them leads to blogs. So why not call the link Blogs?)

Second, repetition rules, adding to the confusion. The same story appears in multiple boxes. The tabs at the top of the page repeat some of the categories of little boxes in the middle of the page. (But not all.)

Third, the design forces me to click more often than I should have to. Every time I start reading an article, I hit a couple of paragraphs down labeled Continue reading. But I'm already reading the article, dammit, so why make me click one more time to see the rest of it? (Perhaps because the page isn't visually confusing enough, so the web designers had to cram more article snippets into that space.)

Fourth, there's the confusion of ads. It's not that ads are a vice per se. However, when they're not clearly differentiated from the rest of the content--often because their positioning changes with each page--it takes your brain an extra cycle to separate the ad content from all the rest. Only a few ergs of mental energy necessary, perhaps, but in conjunction with the other design problems, it adds up.

Fifth, juvenile aesthetics. For a magazine that's supposedly pitched at literate news junkies, the graphic message is often, "You're all a bunch of teenage boys at heart." I don't know how many times I've clicked on a page to see someone's bare ass, or snarky photos of ugly people, or titillating headlines like "Mom's First Nude Shoot." None of these items individually is necessarily objectionable, but again, when you add up...

And finally, the layout keeps changing. If the editors are trying to fix the problems with the site, kudos for their good intentions. However, the more they tinker with design, the more confusing it becomes.

Many newspapers and online magazines have embraced many of the same design principles. By which I mean, the same mistakes, such as the random, ugly jumble of "contentlets." Just because The Washington Post jumps off a bridge doesn't mean you have to.

The Heretech, episode 32: Brian Lawley on the PM profession

Brian Lawley of the 280 Group tells us how the PM profession has changed, and what it takes to be an exceptional PM. Plus, advice for taking your application to a social networking platform like Facebook. (c) 2010 Tom Grant

Facebook's counterproductive privacy approach

Earlier this month, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his company's privacy policies:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time...

So now, a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and think: what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

If you ever need an illustration of how technology companies don't understand their customers, file this item away for later reference. Zuckerberg's mistake goes beyond overlooking the genuine and justifiable discomfort that many individuals feel about Facebook's privacy guidelines. A bigger problem lies with how organizations feel about Facebook.

Certainly, many private companies and public agencies worry that their employees may be wasting time diddling with social networking sites when they should be working. This battle may already be lost, as social media adoption continues to roll forward across every demographic, and personal mobile devices make unsanctioned access to social media that much easier. The situation may not be as hopeless as King Canute dictating instructions to the ocean, but employers are increasingly accepting that there will always be some level of social media activity happening under their noses.

Where these organizations draw the line already is workplace content on Facebook or other social networking sites. Post pictures of yourself dressed in a ridiculous Halloween costume, and your company may not like the implication that it would hire someone as goofy as you. Post pictures from an off-site meeting, in which your company's plans for the next year are visible on the white board in the background, and expect the jumbo-sized can of HR whoop-ass to open imminently.

These concerns go beyond photographs, profile information, and other user-generated content. Applications deployed on a relatively new platform like Facebook open a new front in organization's war on unnecessary corporate risks. Any work-related application, deployed to a platform that appears to have a laissez faire attitude about privacy, or unplugged holes in its security, is going to generate executive-level conniptions.

Therefore, while many users treat Facebook as the center of gravity in their social media universe, they won't be doing their work from Facebook, even though there's no technical obstacle to doing so. Companies like SAP, salesforce, and Netsuite already have made portions of their applications available as widgets, mash-up components, plug-ins, or other fractions of bigger systems. In fact, nearly all companies that have "widgetized" their applications encourage their customers and partners to build their own widgets through a supported framework.

However, if you search the list of Facebook applications, you won't find a big library of comparable widgets. While some SaaS companies, such as Zoho, have invested in Facebook application development, others have yet to hop on the bandwagon. As of today, Facebook is a great place to play Mafia Wars, or send virtual flowers to someone with whom you're flirting, but it's not the place where salespeople enter opportunities, or loan officers get alerts about documents that need their attention. Why is that, do you think? (Hint: Last week's flurry of news reports about breaches of Google's network security didn't help matters.)

Even if Facebook utterly failed to attract work applications to its platform, it can still be a big success. Still, one has to wonder why Facebook would choose to limit adoption. Facebook's privacy policy aggravates tensions between itself and employers, not to mention many individuals who don't want to keep monitoring what Facebook has revealed about them. Unless there's some security-related defect in Facebook's underlying technical architecture, the company's decision to base its privacy model on the habits of people who market social media appears unnecessary and counterproductive.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes...In 3-D!

Since it's almost the weekend, I'll share something frivolous. I'm planning on seeing Avatar finally this weekend...IN 3-D!

Whoa, sorry, didn't expect to be shouting. It's just that every time that I've seen a poster for a movie in 3-D, the "in 3-D" part was always really, really big.

While I'm keen on seeing the 3-D version of Avatar, a little part of me still can't help associating 3-D with gimmicky B movies. Which, perhaps, Avatar is exactly that, a big-budget, really well-done B movie, much like Cameron's other films.

So, for anyone who has ever seen one of the old 3-D movies from decades ago, I give you a spoof of them from the old SCTV show.

Google: The other shoe drops

I'd postponed saying anything about Google's withdrawal from the Chinese market because it smacked of being incomplete. Google's official statement earlier this week--we don't want to do business with a regime that tries to hack into its opponents' e-mail accounts--was certainly laudable. But was that the really the whole story?

Now we see another big piece of the puzzle: Google wasn't the only company hacked. According to Juniper and Symantec, Adobe, Yahoo, and other companies were also targets of the same "cyberespionage" incident. Using an Internet Explorer security hole to gain access to Google's and Adobe's internal networks. Given how these companies view their IP, that's about as provocative as trying to defang a tiger.

While there's not enough information to say that, because the server from which these attacks originated was in China, the Chinese government was involved, Google officially is treating the situation as though that were the case. Whatever is really going on here, it's bigger than just two dissidents' Gmail accounts.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Please take the Forrester Marketing Budgets 2010 survey

My Forrester colleague Laura Ramos is looking for tech industry marketing professionals to participate in a survey about their company's marketing budgets. If you fit the profile, here's the direct link to the survey.

Want innovation? Hire a good SE.

Service companies definitely understand business problems better than product companies. Case in point: I've been talking a lot lately to both kinds of companies about innovation. When you ask vendors the question, "How do you approach the innovation process?" service companies, on average, say something about business problems first. Product companies, on average, talk about technology.

By no small coincidence, many product companies are now trying to figure out the kind of solutions in which they might play a role. That question has two sides:

1. How do we fit into solutions where we already play a part? If we were to learn how customers really use our technology, we might have an easier time marketing and selling it to them. We might make better investments in our product roadmap, or in our larger portfolio.
2. How might we fit into other solutions where we could play a part? The path of least resistance for market development is finding new business problems to address in our existing accounts. But do these opportunities really exist?

While "technology in search of a problem" might sound silly, that's exactly the challenge that product companies face. They might genuinely want to understand customers better, but they're starting from a greater distance from the actual use of technology than service companies.

Happily, within product companies, there are shortcuts to understanding the customer better, and learning how to think about solutions first and technology second. In product companies, there are employees who deal with customers on a daily basis. They see how technology snaps into place as part of a larger solution architecture.

Many heads of PM teams have told me that sales engineers often make the best new product managers. They've been close to both the customer's use cases and the vendor's technology. They've learned how to speak the customer's language, and they've met the business and IT stakeholders who play critical roles in projects.

Therefore, if you want to hire someone who can help innovation start with customer problems, SEs are good candidates. Unlike support technicians, they participate in both the successes and failures. Unlike consultants, they have greater participation in the phases when the customer is struggling to figure out how the technology will be part of the solution. They have the technical bona fides to deal with the development team directly.

SEs also have a good sense of the features and capabilities that are essential to delivering value to the customer. Many good SEs can help filter enhancement requests better than someone who has not had as much direct experience with customers. For any tech vendor who wants the biggest bang for the smallest development buck, that's a pretty valuable skill.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

When communities smother your product

Any PM who has worked with customers extensively learns how to deal with the hard cases. There are different species of difficult customers, such those who exaggerate every problem to the level of a showstopper, or the ones who think there's only answer to every implementation question.

Product teams often worry that social media will just open the door to a larger, louder group of problem customers. That's not the typical result, for a variety of reasons (healthy communities police their own members, teams sometimes exaggerate how unreasonable customers are, etc.).

What product teams should worry about is the potentially insidious influence of the customers who love them. That phenomenon may be part of the explanation why Second Life, once touted as the vanguard of virtual world technology, seems to be getting a lot less attention than it used to. (Certainly, the public attention to Second Life pales in comparison to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

Second Life: The new "vast wasteland"?
Although I never felt a strong compulsion to use Second Life, I try to keep an open mind. Maybe there's more valuable activity happening in Linden Lab's virtual world than I've experienced, or read about, or heard from organizations who have experimented with establishing a presence in Second Life.

That's why I read "What Ever Happened To Second Life?" at PC Pro, editor Barry Collins' experiment in jumping back into Second Life. The executive summary: hard to find anyone at all, except in the carefully-delineated porn enclaves.

That conclusion inspired many outraged Second Life afficionados to give Collins a piece of their minds. If only Collins had dug deeper into Second Life, they argued, he would have found a thriving community busy doing useful things, such as teaching. And, obviously, Second Life has considerable potential as a creative outlet, particularly for people who want to create 3D, moving representations of things normally depicted in 2D, static terms.

Collins' critics may be right. Beyond the small slice of Second Life that's immediately visible, there are interesting things happening in Second Life. Some of the people who responded to Collins cited live concerts, college courses, NASA's 3D museum of the space program, and the "steampunk" community of New Babbage. Depending on your tastes, at least one of those Second Life offerings should sound interesting. (Truth in advertising: I haven't checked them out personally, so I can't tell you how good the experiences really are.)

The user experience of yesterday, now for today and tomorrow!
Unfortunately, Collins is also right. The initial experience of Second Life is at various times bewildering, frustrating, and disappointing. When I tried out the client application about a year ago, it was still how I remembered it, slow and buggy. Where MMORPG companies like Blizzard and Paragon have honed their UIs to the point of maximum usability, accommodating both first-time and veteran users, Second Life's UI is a pain to figure out and use.

Even after you've soldiered past these problems, Second Life gives you very few clues about what kinds of content might be out there, somewhere in the Lindenverse. Therefore, the claim that one of Collins' critics made, "You get out...What you put in," overlooks the fundamental flaw of  Second Life: new users have no idea what they could get out. Or even what's already there.

There's no question that Second Life has a lot of very happy users. The aficionados are right: if you put sufficient effort into Internet searches about Second Life content, or search within Second Life long enough, you'll probably find something interesting. Unfortunately, the investment in time is probably more than most people are willing to invest (if they even considered Googling for content about Second Life outside of Second Life). Second Life may work for the people who responded to Collins, but that doesn't make Second Life poised for growth.

Customers who love you to death
Gaetano Mosca noted the tendency of an elite group to form in any organization--what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The elite wields some combination of power and influence, more or less of each depending on the setting. In the US Senate, senior senators have power over things like committee appointments. The parents who really call the shots at PTA meetings may not sit on the PTA board at all, but have considerable influence over the faculty, staff, and other parents. (And then there's this comic but terrifying story of a bare-knuckles political battle among department store Santas...)

The same Iron Law holds true of user communities. Over time, a subset of customers emerge who participate regularly in user group meetings, discussion forums, the comments sections of blogs, groups in social media channels, and other channels of face-to-face and electronic communication. Because vendors are interested  in feedback, this group of notables get increasing attention from product managers, product marketers, and the like. Unless the company takes deliberate steps to mitigate the Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users will wield disproportionate influence over the vendor's thinking about products and services. 

Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can't say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.

It's odd, in an age of social media that pull in millions of new users every month, to see one of the original members of the social media glitterati fade into the background. Stripped of the most dorky or pornographic elements of Second Life, there's definite potential there to attract an audience of people who may occasionally want to tour the ruins of Rome, or talk with band members after a concert. While the Second Life diehards might know if these were more than just possibilities, the larger world of people who might be Second Life customers do not. And Collins isn't the only person to have had trouble finding signs of life in Second Life.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The Heretech, episode 31: Mike Marfise on innovation

After an unintended hiatus, we're back! This week, Mike Marfise of Jive Software tells us how the tech industry's understanding of innovation has matured. Plus, a good example of how to use social media to share product details and plans with your customers. (c) 2010 Tom Grant.

The social fact of social media

Getting dismally sick over the holidays had an upside. An incredibly geeky upside, the sort only someone doing research about social media could care about, perhaps. But it was a good occasion to test a hypothesis.

A lot of social media observers look at 2009 as the year that social media crashed into the pop culture mainstream. When a significant portion of the population use a technology for both personal and work purposes, we've reached a significant landmark in its adoption. When people regularly use a new technology to inform both B2C and B2B buying decisions, we've also reached some significant point in the history of advanced capitalism.

But how deeply have social media changed the way we live? Or, to put it another way, have social media become a social fact?

If you're not familiar with the term social fact, it's one of the oldest concepts in the history of the social sciences. Way back around the turn of the 20th century, Emile Durkheim proposed a way of separating psychology from sociology: the former examines how individuals thought and behaved; the latter looks into the forces external to them that shaped their lives.

The best example of a social fact is the Christmas holiday in the US. There's no escaping it, even if you wanted to. Unless you're an adherent of a faith that explicitly does not celebrate Christmas, you will spend the month of December meeting the responsibilities of a second job (all the Christmas-related tasks, from wrapping presents to making special meals), re-visiting the way you relate to other people (how you greet them, who gets presents, etc.), spending more money than normal, and mentally and emotionally preparing for the great crescendo near the end of the month. Christmas is such a powerful social fact that people worry what would happen if they ever tried to ignore it.

If Christmas in the United States is the social fact against which all others are measured, have social media reached the point where you cannot ignore them? Even if social media were 1/1,000th of a Christmas-level social fact, they might slip back into your life even if you tried to push them away.

My time stewing in my own bodily fluids is certainly not the critical test of this hypothesis, but it was interesting to see what happened as a result of being disconnected from social media for several days, except for a quick update on Facebook. Otherwise, no blog posts, podcasts, Twitter traffic, LinkedIn invites, or forum discussions.

Here's what happened:

• People did notice my absence. Certainly, if you're a regular participant in social media, people notice your absence. That's not exactly the same as shutting off your e-mail, which gets people angry at you for not responding to their messages.
• I lost track of discussions. I'm a regular reader and poster on some discussion boards. After a week away, I couldn't quite keep up with some conversations. Later, I realized that I had missed some altogether.
• I spent time catching up. There's enough value in social media that I felt obliged to devote some extra time to reading content that I had missed, and writing content that I might have posted (such as this blog entry).
• I cut back on some activities. It was probably a good time to prune my RSS feeds, or take a second look at how often I really needed to take a peek at Facebook.
• I felt guilty. The parallel to Christmas here is obvious. People would forgive you if, for personal reasons, you needed to take a break from Christmas. Unfortunately, you'd probably feel bad anyway.Similarly, I felt as though I had done something mildly wrong, even if I couldn't articulate exactly what it was.

This evidence is hardly conclusive, particularly since I disconnected from the social media channels for just a few days. Still, I did feel the mild force of something "external to the individual...with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him." (Which, coincidentally, is also a good description of the flu.)

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The limited lifespan of many component technologies

As anyone who has worked on component technologies can tell you, the time in which you should treat your product as something that can stand on its own is limited. The tricky part is figuring out when that transition should occur—and that's where people in product marketing and product management can really earn their paychecks.

"Just give me what I want, even if I don't know what I want"
Collaboration-ish, social media-esque technologies will reach that point. But is it here yet? One company in this business, Jive, seems to think so. Their Social Business Software (SBS) suite bundles discussions, social tagging, blogs, and other capabilities in what used to be a smorgasbord of capabilities. Pass down the line and fill your plate with whatever components you want to consume.

Of course, this model presupposes that you know what you want. Unlike Swedish meatballs and macaroni salad, you may not know your own taste for dashboards, polls, and document collaboration, which may be as mysterious to some users as the menu at an Eritrean restaurant's lunch buffet. And if you can't decode the menu for yourself, you certainly can't be trusted to pick out the right components for other people.

That's the cue for some companies to switch their product strategy and marketing approach from products to solutions. Instead of the befuddling list of 100 items, just package related components into the Meat Lover's Special, or in the case of Jive, "solution architectures" like Employee Engagement.

"Give it to me when I want it, even if I can't tell you when that will be"
Without giving a thumbs up or down on Jive's specific approach, they provide a good example of how important this timing issue can be. If Jive were to wait too long with a solutions strategy, the market might pass them by. Competitors with inferior products might do a better job of explaining how to use them, which will attract users and customers like iron filings to a magnet.

On the other hand, Jive might jump too early into the solutions business, with tragic results. When you start thinking less about generic technology, and more about specific use cases, you make product roadmap and feature design decisions much differently. For example, if you want to capture the medical records market, you can't just build a generic approach to roles and privileges. You have to design access control lists and other security components in a way that will serve how practitioners and patients share information with insurance companies.

Unfortunately, back when HIPAA first started getting momentum, some companies tried to steal a march on their competitors, but they marched swiftly in the wrong direction. As it turns out, there wasn't a single correct way to conform with HIPAA privacy guidelines; instead, organizations had the latitude to figure out the HIPAA puzzle in their own ways. Instead of bringing to market a one-size-fits-all "HIPAA solution," these vendors had built themselves a one-size-fits-none straitjacket. Oops.

"In other words, your job depends on reading my mind"
Product marketers and product managers, therefore, are a key resource in technology companies for seeing over this horizon. Is the technology well-enough understood, and widely-enough adopted, that the shift to a solutions strategy is imminent? If so, which among several different solutions is the one that will generate the most business?

These are questions with huge ramifications, beyond just next quarter's sales. For example, a small company that has done a great job building a best-in-class component technology may be ripe for acquisition. Or, it may be kidding itself about the possibility of finding a buyer, if bigger companies don't see the kinds of solutions into which these components will fit.

Clearly, a group of smart people sitting around a conference table aren't going to reach the ultimate answers. Research into a combination of technical and business issues will be necessary--which, again, is the raison d'etre of the PM team.

[By the way, this week's podcast, to be posted soon, features an interview with Mike Marfise of Jive. We don't talk about this particular issue, but Mike has a lot of interesting things to say about a particular solution area, innovation.]

If you're sick, stay at home

That's the life lesson that someone in San Francisco needed to learn, but never did. Instead, he sat behind me on Christmas Eve, coughing and sneezing and hacking until he spread his phlegm-filled season's greetings to everyone in the surrounding area.

Which was my introduction to this year's strain of the flu, which has kept me away from the blog and the podcast for the last couple of weeks. I'll be returning to regular programming this week.