Should Business Schools offer a Product Management course?

A recent post by the Cranky Product Manager suggested that business schools have a gaping hole in their curriculum. What do you think? Being an adjunct professor and having been in product management for many years, I’m interested in development of a course syllabus on this. Would you like to help?

Searching MIT’s open course ware, I found the following relevant courses:

• Organizing for Innovative Product Development
• Product Design and Development

What would be a good syllabus, heck, what about the title – “Product Management” or something else? I’m eager for your input…

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Eight Tips for Job Hunting in a Down Economy

Since I recently finished an MBA and I’m in the middle of a job search I figured I’d pass on some tips I have while looking. These are things I have found that worked to get me in the door, to get that response to an email or phone call, which is often the hardest part.

(1) Stop looking for a job. Look for information. Target specific companies you’d like to work for and dig for information on it. Find out where they are in the market, read the news releases on it. Understand as much as you can about the company before going too much further.

(2) Never send along a resume unsolicited. If a person has not specifically requested that you send in your resume. Do not send it, especially if it is to be addressed to a generic, nameless person. This leads to number 3…

(3) Get a contact. In line with #1, connect to a real person at the company you’re interested in. Once you have that contact then reach out. How? Search LinkedIn, network with your friends, family and colleagues, do whatever you can to get a specific introduction to a current employee. Sometimes former employees are quite helpful too!

(4) Offer value. When you email anyone at the company, ask provocative, inquisitive questions which would be interesting and valuable to that employee’s job. Ask them to talk about their job, then just listen to the response. Perhaps see what challenges s/he currently faces. You may learn something valuable about the company, its current status, etc. This may be helpful to you later when you seek that job.

(5) Get offline. Try to get away from the website and email. Not that Google, a company website and email can’t help you with information (see #1), you need to drive a connection offline. It is far better to have an interactive opportunity where you can prove your worth and make an impact.

(6) Get active. Do something to show initiative that you’re not just sitting at home surfing the net and answering emails looking for a job. Organize a barcamp, write a blog, volunteer at a local charity, help your friends do things they struggle with, but you’re good at. You will stay busy, you won’t spend all your time on job hunting, you will have created a little network and maybe even increased your reputation some.

(7) Accept the responsibility. No one will “give” you a job. You’ve got to work for it and earn it, especially in this economy. By doing this, you will also adopt a more positive attitude and attitude is key. Even if you have been job-seeking for a long time, and I can certainly understand if  you may feel rejected, but think of it this way: who would want a dejected depressed employee?

(8) Stand out. Someone once told me: “I’d rather stand out than fit in.” Do you want to be like all those other job applicants? I didn’t think so. With an average of six applicants for every job opening, you need to stand out from the rest.

Oh and as for my search.. I think I’m almost there with two companies. Wish me luck!

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What’s your pizza experience?

I have to give a hand to Dominos for re-defining their experience for pizza consumption. Other pizzerias have had online ordering for some time. Beauty’s in Cambridge is a favorite, its so easy to order from them and their pizza is fabulous. Domino’s takes the experience a step further.

The first thing they did was make it easy.

Top left link is “Order.” Rather than me having to do the work of selecting my nearest pizza store, or entering my full address, I was asked for my zipcode. That’s it. Why? Because by reducing what I need to enter before ordering makes it easy. If I had to place my entire address in beforehand I may be wasting my time. Maybe I live in a location where they don’t deliver? Like Amazon, they only ask for that information when its absolutely necessary.In fact, I don’t even see the price of the order until I hit “price order” which is essentially the checkout cart. Very smart!

Not only was it easy to place an order, and there was imagery on how I could view my pizza as I selected the toppings when I was at the final confirmation page there was a status bar. Yes! A status bar, in addition to all the other information I needed: timestamp, cost of order, etc, was displayed so I was well informed.

Furthermore, I knew THE NAME of the person who prepped the pizza as well as the delivery person. I actually checked and yes, my delivery guy’s name was Daniel! How cool? What a great way to personalize the experience and give the customer real-time update of how their pizza is progressing until it shows up at your door.

Lastly I was given the opportunity to give feedback in the process both on Jerry (prep guy) and Daniel (delivery guy). The pizza, in my humble opinion, was slightly undercooked. The crust wasn’t quite golden brown and probably could have used another minute in the oven. That said: it did taste great and I am impressed with Domino’s new pizza. The sauce was quite tasty and the new crust is far, far, FAR better than Domin0s’ previous incarnation. I didn’t notice any 30 minutes or less (although it seemed to arrive quickly!) and I like this. Good food shouldn’t be rushed and I’m glad to see that Domino’s has done away with this. This also reduces pressure on drivers to take unnecessary risks to arrive within that time window.

My recommendation? Give it a shot. The pizza was good (again, slightly undercooked for my tastes) and the experience was.. well.. FUN! It also gave me a reason to speak to Daniel a little and actually interact with the driver so my interaction was not the boring:

“How much?”

“$9.36″

“Ok, here you go, thanks”

“Enjoy, bye!”

To something more engaging like:

“Hey! Are you Daniel?”

“Yep! That’s me”

“Oh that’s cool! What a clever way to experience pizza.”

“Yeah,  lots of people seem to enjoy it!”

Have you tried this? What do you think?

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My Bookshelf…

This is my limited bookshelf. I have many many more books than this, however this is the main shelf here in my room in Madrid.

Whats on your bookshelf?

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Slideas: Eight Steps to Compelling Presentations

I’ve put together all my thoughts and notes into a little eBook for my Powerpointology.com venture. I use the methodology at IE in my classes and workshops.

I am hoping to make this a collaborative project. Would you like to collaborate with me on the next version? Drop me a line and let’s get started!

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Is ‘Inbound Marketing’ Really Inbound? A Review..

I finished reading Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah‘s “Inbound Marketing Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” recently and per my previous post, I committed to post a review of the book.

The term “Inbound Marketing” is a little bit confusing and here’s my reasoning: Previously a company would place an ad in some form of media with the expectation that prospects will see the ad and respond to it by ultimately buying (more of) their product or service. In this case Halligan and Shah advocate placing blogs, videos, tweets and even search based ads online, with the expectation that prospects will find the piece (blog, video, tweet, etc) and respond to it. In both cases a company is producing a piece (whether it be traditional print ad, video, webinar, etc) and sending it outward. This is still an outbound action. However the media environment and the characteristics of the outbound piece are very, very different. The “inbound” pieces no longer interrupt the masses as they did in radio and television, and they also are far more advanced and often contain something far more value to the consumer of the piece: they call this “remarkable” content.

Since I was always taught to end on a high note, I’ll start with the negatives.

What I didn’t like

The repeated usage of “remarkable” was unnecessary. After the first 50 or so pages, I got it.

I found that the level of technical expertise of the user somewhat varied. There was a big image taking up 1/2 a page to show the RSS icon, however there were sections which spoke in greater detail of technical terms I found it hard to imagine that some of their audience would follow (for example, how would one start a blog?).

What I wanted to see

I would have liked to see a case study, even if fictional, which traverses the whole book on how to setup many of the mentioned tools and techniques to increase Inbound Marketing. I think their audience was primarily for those with not a significant web presence and a case study showing how one company could position themselves online would be very helpful. They used the example of a “left handed monkey-wrench” a few times which was nice, and I would have like to see that taken further to setting up a twitter page, Facebook page, etc, to use those tools and what some initial results/analytics might look like.

There are many analytics on how to measure the exposure and the interactivity of the tools they present. However I would have liked to see more ROI in dollars. How much did sales and profits increase in the examples they cited? I think this would really help nail home the power of this type of marketing, which in reality, is what marketing today has become.

Perhaps some thoughts on where marketing is headed. If Inbound Marketing is marketing 2.0, what is marketing 3.0? A little visionary, predictive teaser would have been interesting from these two.

They had a section on how to setup a LinkedIn page, complete with screenshots and all. I would have liked to see more of this for Twitter, Facebook, and perhaps setting up a blog as this would give equal rating to those vehicles.

What I liked

Halligan and Shah did a great, no fantastic, job and explaining the process “in plain English,” and aside from the comment about the slightly inconsistent technical level, nearly anyone can pick up this book and learn something for marketing their business online. I especially liked the description of how Google’s search algorithm functions.

At the end of every chapter they give a “To Do” list which is a nice summary of the chapter disguised as what your next steps should be. The pragmatist in me was all warm and fuzzy on this one.

The cartoons! They had great little cartoons sprinkled throughout the book which helped drive home their points. This kept it fun, lighthearted and showed Halligan and Shah’s human side a little bit.

Overall I recommend picking up a copy and taking a read, even if you are a web-savvy marketer, there may be a gem of two for you to pick up. It is worth investment.

The book leaves me with two final questions:

(1) When the radio and television advertisements which started in the 1900′s and then grew to a proportion where many things became “white noise,” what will happen with this new form of marketing? With RSS readers bulging with feeds, millions and millions of web pages on nearly every topic, millions of people on Twitter, how will companies avoid becoming white noise in this new media?

(2) As mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous and the mobile web is fast becoming the “first screen,” how will marketers take advantage of that to continue to attract users in an “Inbound” manner to their content/product/service?

I was fortunate to have a coffee and a chat with Halligan in January and think he’s got an interesting take on how to help other marketers become more online savvy. I’m looking forward to their next book!

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To start your business: Write a book.

Or “To write a book: Start a business.”

You know them, they are the books between 200 and 350 pages and often found in airport bookstores in the ‘business’ or ‘popular’ sections and they have been written by CEOs (or founders) of companies. Each book is essentially a promotion for a company’s particular philosophy, recipe for their success, or other type of guide aligned with their business.

Let’s take a few examples:

Frog Design‘s CEO wrote “a fine line”
IDEO’s Tim Brown wrote “Change by Design”
IDEO‘s Tom Kelly wrote “Art of Innovation”
Duarte Design’s CEO Nancy Duarte wrote “Slide:ology”
Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates wrote “Wired to Care”
Hubspot‘s top brass Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote “Inbound Marketing”
Squidoo‘s Seth Godin has written a whole pile of books.
Rubicon‘s founder/CEO Nilofer Merchant wrote “The New How”
Wine Library’s Gary Vaynerchuk wrote “101 Wines” and “Crush It”
Jason Fried and David Hansson of 37signals wrote “Rework” and “Getting Real”

See a pattern?

Many of these books I have read or are on my reading list. (Inbound Marketing is getting a review here as soon as I have the time to type it up).

To be a successful business person, one needs not to focus their time and energy on building their business. No, no, no! They need to write a book! All this time I thought it was important to focus on all aspects of your business (sales in particular), but entrepreneurship is not about that apparently. Its about writing books! Therefore I am pleased to announce that I’m writing a book.

Yes. A book. An eBook, actually.

The first version is due on Monday and I hope to make it a collaborative effort. Somewhat open source. More information soon.

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