He described a division of serendipity achievements into three levels.

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Post tags: fun, luck, product, strategy

The difficult truth we have to face is that if we have the same facts and similar skills and resources as our competitors, we are likely to come up with the same strategies. Those strategies will pitch us directly against our competition and leave our customers unable to differentiate. How often have you seen two or three small companies killing each other competing for domination of a niche? Too often, I bet.

What I’ve seen happen next is even more unpleasant. Those two competitors start to watch each other more than the market, or their customers. Then single biggest reason for making any sort of move is either ‘because our competitors did it’ or ‘because our competitors might do it’. Their marketing focuses on knocking the competitors rather than explaining their product’s benefits. Their recruitment either ignores people who have worked for the competition (because they must be evil) or concentrates on them (because they must know secret stuff). All of this leads to just one thing: disappearing profits.

Read the rest of Going ‘Off-Strategy’

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Post tags: competition, MBA, strategy

The authors’ approach to this is threefold: thinking more deeply about customer behaviour, soliciting the underlying metaphors behind customer behaviour, and using a simple metaphor schema to help generate ways of connecting with those customer emotions.

“Thinking hard” is often difficult to achieve in our frenetic working lives when we are constantly interrupted. Our thinking tends to be focussed around the present and near future, it tends to be about the familiar, based on existing assumptions and focuses on surface differences rather than deeper similarities. More than anything else, employees fear punishment for thinking differently, or not appearing active. All of these factors get in the way of us thinking in a creative and structured way about our customers and offerings.

Read the rest of Marketing Metaphoria

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Post tags: Book review, ideas, psychology, theory

On the way down I could not help but imagine what woes may have befallen the car and how that would affect our travel plans. What if it was clamped, had been towed away or rolled down the hillside? All completely illogical ideas considering the circumstances.

Later that day I discovered that my wife had been equally obsessed by the idea that one of the sharp stones might have caused a puncture; a much more logical possibility.

Read the rest of Seeing the future comes [un]naturally

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Post tags: futurology, scenarios, strategy, vision

“The Product Manager’s Toolkit: Methodologies, Processes and Tasks in High-Tech Product Management”, Gabriel Steinhardt, Springer Science+Business Media, 2010

I was immediately drawn to this book by its title; there are so few helpful books on product management for the high-tech industry. I read a huge amount around the subject not only in order to keep myself up to date, but also to offer my clients pointers to books that they might find helpful, so I was happy to read it for review.

In it, Steinhardt sets out to provide ‘a consistent and holistic managerial approach to product management’. He points out, quite rightly, that every technology company seems to have a different definition of what Product Management means. He defines the role as covering both the product planning activities of figuring out what a product should be, but also the product marketing ones of presenting its benefits to the customer. He puts those two roles alongside the roles of Sales Engineer (often called product specialist, evangelist, pre-sales support, etc) and MarCom Manager.

Read the rest of The Product Manager’s Toolkit

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Post tags: Book review, lifecycle, theory

I read a lot, but I don’t read quickly. So reading is a significant and important investment for me, which is why, when a book irritates me, it often ends up being literally thrown out. (I’m not alone in this, Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat once admitted to me that she’d thrown a book she disliked across her hotel bedroom.) But sometimes, just sometimes, I come across a “cold-cuppa” book.

Read the rest of Cold-Cuppa Checklists

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Post tags: Book review, process

What they wanted to do was to find new sources of revenue from this IP, but they were caught in the very common trap of already being committed 100% to servicing their existing markets, with maintenance and new releases of their products in those markets. So if they did not have the time to create new products, how were we going to find new sources of revenue?

Effectivus stepped in to help them with the problem.

Read the rest of New Revenues from Existing Technology

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Post tags: commercial, projects, strategy, tech

STORM is a new product from The Foundry that assists the digital movie camera workflow in professional film and television production.

The Product team behind STORM is Richard Shackleton, James Wilson and me, Chris Steele. Between us we have contributed to a wide range of products such as Matador, Illusion, boujou, SOCRATTO, Film Master and Nuke. They’ve worked together several times and share a strong conviction that good products are born out of listening carefully to potential users.

Read the rest of Segmenting Storm

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Post tags: clients, customer, marketing, markets, product

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks to some of the experts who have studied this crash and its causes. There were a series of faults and errors leading up to the crash, making it more likely that it could happen, but none of them actually causing it. What it ultimately came down to was the inability of the cockpit crew to challenge the pilot (who was exhausted and clearly not thinking straight), and of the co-pilot to explain their situation to air traffic control. The crew’s inability to act was not due to poor ability, but the etiquette of the Korean culture. How can it be that someone could hold onto such etiquette in the face of imminent death?

Read the rest of Authoritarian leadership and innovation

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Post tags: commercial, creativity, innovation, management, psychology

When The Foundry was preparing to launch a new product, Mari, I stepped in to help with the marketing strategy and as part of that, had the chance to write a case study. It was slightly unusual in that this software product was written by Weta Digital who had created it to complete highly complex, computer graphics intensive films like Avatar. Great that the product arrives production proven with a film like Avatar behind it. Even better they were prepared to talk about that in a case study and allow us to use some stills.

Read the rest of Mari case study

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Post tags: 3D, clients, FX, marketing, users, writing