I know that when you wake up in the morning, the first thing on your mind is how you can improve your organization's competitive advantage? What set of new features can I add? There are two things that cause competitive advantage, product differentiation and/or improved cost-position. Let's take a look. Product differentiation is more about perceived value and cost than it is about being different. You can be different all you want, but if the client doesn't value the capability your being diff...

It’s sometimes a lot easier to build great technology than it is to properly identify your target customer and ideal market. Sure you may have found a market that has great potential. However, once deployed, will your solution have a significant impact? When defining your target market, here are three questions that you should be asking: Who has the pain? Before getting a chance of successfully selling a product, you need to have a very good idea of the target customer. This is the person th...

As members of a product management team, you're constantly asked about the product-line, product, and even features of your product. Regardless of what's being asked about, you typically have 1-2 minutes (tops) to convey a meaningful value proposition to your listener.  I don't believe the elevator pitch is used more often anywhere else, even in sales. The product management team needs to be extremely proficient in creating and delivering the elevator pitch to be successful. So, in a nut s...

Ask any high school student; they know just how much they have to do, at least for the short term. Let me call this the optimal level of instinctive competitiveness, after which point increasing competitiveness can only be achieved by increasing amounts of formalized product management processes. The question is how competitive does your company have to be, and for how long? If you and your company can be competitive based on your instincts, then why would anyone do anything more? The answer is...

Let's say you've done your homework and in one way or another you’ve identified a market opportunity. You define a product feature that you believe the market is going to run with. In fact, you're sure your product will be seen as something disruptive in the market with this new feature. What do you do? Do you keep your cards close to your chest and play them out? Do you tell your investors that things are about to change? How do you control the expectations of product investors? I mean anyone ...