The past quarter has been an exciting one here at Ryma. Since I joined the company, we have worked hard in improving our business, product and our go-to-market strategy. With this, we have seen huge demand and interest for our FeaturePlan product. As our product team continues to develop new features such as Document Center, that will facilitate the lives of product managers everywhere, continuing to increase our business velocity has become a top priority. To help in this area and strengt...

Competitive advantage is at the heart of every product initiative.  It surprises me how many Product Manager teams still can't trace their daily activities back to the increase of competitive advantage. In 2009, almost every product manager in the world had to find a way to justify their existence. Even today, there are some who cannot. So let's walk through this together. The goal of product management is to increase your competitive advantage through product initiatives. We do this in tw...

It's a portfolio management problem! Out of all the factors involving pricing, what factors should the product management team focus on? Yep, we should select the factors that will have the most impact to us, to our organization, our customers, potential customers, and our competitors.  The book is titled "Impact Pricing: Your Blueprint for Driving Profits", by Mark Stiving. I believe it's a must read for all Product Management team members this year. The book makes a foundational case for...

Hut 1, Hut 2, Hut 3! If you were one of the 111.31 million people who tuned into the Super Bowl this year, then congratulations! You helped make it the most-watched television program for the third year in a row. And not only that, but you were also witness to what I’d consider probably the most awkward winning touchdown in the history of the Super Bowl – not that I’ve seen every one, but it would be hard to beat an “oh shoot I don’t really want to score this and take the lead yet” butt-flop i...

Traditional Market Sensing keeps the customer at an arm's length in that they are asked what type of offering they would like, but then have no further involvement in new product development. It's difficult for customers to articulate the type of features they would like, especially if they’re unaware of the technology possibilities – in short, interactions with market researchers. It’s largely recognized that the work of Professor Eric von Hippel at MIT showed the importance of user communitie...

I defiantly want to talk about Focus Groups, but in the context of mentoring. I want to avoid a potential misunderstanding about what I mean by "mentor" before we start, then I'll come back at the end of this posting to finish talking about the Focus Group Mentor. The notion of mentoring is changed over the years, and I've included this table to highlight some of those changes. When I talk about mentoring, I'm referring to today's concepts of mentoring. This method places our focus group as ...

How Agile Product Management has evolved in the last few years An interesting thing has been happening in the market, and it’s not just that everything is moving to the Cloud, or that Facebook is about to go IPO, it’s the very real, and very concrete adoption of agile methodologies across the software industry. Originally a concept that gave birth to the Agile Manifesto (I know I can’t believe I’m referencing Wikipedia), Agile has really taken over as a concept everyone strives for, but rarely ...

Ok. Regardless of where you are in a product's lifecycle, pricing will be an issue for the Product Management team. This posting is in anticipation of Mark Stiving's webinar, taking place February 8, 2012, which is based on his book "Impact Pricing, Your Blueprint for driving Profits", which I'm currently reading. I'm very tempted to include things from the book, but we'll have to wait. I'll try to post a spoiler alert if I do. I'll be trying to keep this posting as close to life as possible, w...

This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on-demand here. I had mentioned somewhere that Market Sensing was about conversation, not just listening. We always want to be aware of the fingerprint we leave behind. In fact, there are Market Sensing methods whose only real purpose is to leave a message, under the pretense of gathering data. Of course many methods of Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, and Customer Satisfaction are about ...

I have loved film for most of my life. I read movie reviews on a regular basis, check my local movie listings weekly, and attend at least one film festival a year where I can support independent filmmakers and happily see so many movies that they all blur together, to the point where I can’t remember which film was which and eventually have to watch them all over again. So with that in mind, you would think I might be one of those people that jumped at the chance to read over the Oscars nominati...

Ever think you should be tapping into your sales team for market information? Well you should. This post is about the befriending method contained within the customer satisfaction category of methods within the Market Sensing pillar. For context, consider the generic process below. I'd hate to say whether this was a Marketing, Sales, or Product Management method; everyone is involved doing these activities in one organization or another. If you're not involved in at least one of these steps now...

I'm putting this innovation lifecycle out here, not because I endorse it; it just happens to be typical. Different companies with different kinds of product will have a different number of stages, and the stage names will be different. However, even in the simplest processes, there are several distinct stages. For different stages, the objectives and type of work performed will be distinctively different. In this post, I'll be talking about Stage 0. Whatever you call it, this is where opportuni...

In my last blog on the Seven Pillars of Product Management, I mentioned some of the uses of the Seven Pillars. Today I'd like to take a closer look at how the Seven Pillars are used for deployment. But first: Warning: THE SEVEN PILLARS DOESN'T CONTAIN ALL THE ACTIVITIES OF THE INNOVATION VALUE CHAIN. The 37 activities within the Pragmatic Marketing Framework don’t make up a complete activity listing of the innovation value chain either. The Seven Pillars contain all the activities of the Produ...

This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on-demand here. So you want to change the world through product initiatives? Holly Buchanan suggests that by correctly leveraging user personas, you can better define products that your customers love. User personas represent different types of consumers. Instead of trying to figure out how you meet the needs of thousands, you can have a workable number of personas used as a framework which pro...

SOPA and PIPA – two acronyms that have been splashed across the pages of the news, taken over Twitter feeds with the #SOPA hash tag, and caused groups to form by the thousands on Facebook in protest against them. Seeing these words so often in the last month not only burned them into my brain (quite possibly forever), but also got me thinking about how these bills relate to product management – more precisely, the consequences of not addressing the right problems. Case in point – SOPA and PIPA ...

Ryma is very proud to be a platinum sponsor of ProductCamp Austin 8, taking place February 18, 2012 at the University of Texas. ProductCamps are an amazing way for product managers and product marketers, new and old, to gather for an informal, yet rich discussion arena on topics across the entire spectrum of product management. These regional events have had some very successful events, with new ones popping up in any city that has a decent-sized professional network for product managem...

There are two typical success models that companies use to create high values. With one type, the company has a commanding lead in either technology or brand recognition. Their products or brands dominate the market place and become industry standards. Examples include Microsoft, Intel, and Google. The driver for value creation for this type of company is technical or brand dominance, or technology-driven innovation. The other model for success develops products or services that capture the hea...

So how do you balance creativity and process? I get this question a lot. Apparently I haven't been able to make my point in 140 characters. For the fun of it, let's say that when you combine process and creativity, you develop a third entity altogether. No, I know, but we're pretending, OK? We’ll call this pretend entity "bliggity bloop". Now the question is no longer about balancing between creativity and process, it's about using the right amount of "bliggity bloop" within some other set of c...

Someone out in the Twitter world just recently typed out in frustration: "Not all products have to be social!". Well, that is an assertion that is requiring support more and more of the time. What once was an EXCITEMENT requirement, is now rapidly becoming a BASIC requirement. I don't think the majority of product manager's would agree with his notion. In Eric Von Hipple's book "Democratizing Innovation" (2006), a great case is made for social products, of one degree or another. Now this book w...

This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on-demand here. For any offering – service or product, for profit or non-profit – customer value and satisfaction can be improved by increasing customer benefits and reducing costs. Among the benefits, functional benefits are of key importance. People pay for function, not offerings. For example, people go to movies to buy such functions as people watching, laughter sharing, and emotional stimu...