1. “You need to develop a culture where people actually are going to do what they’re going to do, and you’re trying to assist them”
2. “So the 20 percent time is a very good recruiting tool, but more importantly it serves as a pressure valve against managers who are obnoxious. So the way it works is, if you’re my manager and you say, “Eric, you know, we’re on deadline, we’ve got a problem,” and so forth. I’ll look at you, and I’ll say, “I’m going to give you 100 percent of my 80 percent of my time.”

It may be, I don’t know, that these rules don’t apply as there are build, but the base for them is people development. This is a very important aspect for each of us, that’s so easy to be ignored or reprioritized.  How many times have you gone to a training that was boring and you checked your emails during it? Or how many times have you left the training room only thinking on the task that you still have to do and with no impact from training day?

Giving the employees the opportunity to choice and sharing the managing authority with them is a big step and leads to a business that is driven by the employee’s creativity and intelligence.

• Continue create a plan: even if you do not discussed it with your colleagues or your manager.
• Continue watch what the competition is doing (if they launched a product one year ago, but they stopped the communication on that product and the support is not able to solve an issue, then the product failed. DO NOT included in your plan!
• Do not try to only copy your competition successful ideas.
• Listen to your customers and to your competitors customers. Analise better what does your competition do in order to keep their customer happy.
• Listen to market, read a lot about the new trends and analyze their impact in your products.

And we start with the classic action…

Emarketer.com has published an interesting report regarding what do the American users on the mobile internet.
I’m expecting that the top will change soon, mainly, due the penetration of smartphones and the continue growth of mobile application available in the market.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007868

1. The technical departments take the Business Requirement and implement as they want

2. If there is no follow up – there is nothing

3. The prioritization of requirements is invisible for the product manager

4. The manager requests with very high priority the development of a feature, which failed just some months ago. Main reason:”The VP has asked for this!”

5. After long discussions with Marcom team, the final materials are funny, but the message is not clear. The customers will not understand the new product and its benefits. Back to the long and painful discussions.

6. After lots of meetings, conference call and thousand of emails, the product or the feature is live! You announce it through the organization, thanking the IT and Marcom teams and wishing good luck to the sale team. What next? In an hour a new prioritization meeting for the new features. There is no thank you email for you. At a road map review meeting you discuss about your work and you get an “Ok, that’s nice but the company strategy has change and we must have a new road map! It’s not January or March…
I never understood what does expression like” Fair point” means. Is “the road” ok or not?

Lately, I’m wandering where is this going to, but I haven’t found an answer yet.

Free content is ok, but it may content errors or it  may even be false. On the other hand, due the free content, we all are smarter than 10 years ago.

I still think that there are lots of Product Manager who do not pay enough attention to the social media and company which don’t understand the new communication channel and its particularities.

Although, I think that most of business (and strategies) can use “social media” benefits, the uncontrolled and not thought growth can very create unhappy customers.

M: I was in a meeting today with the technical guys. I just needed the development of a small features and the email response was, like always, no

H: I was in a meeting with PM today. I proposed them a new feature. It’s something new and the competition doesn’t have it yet. We can do it in time for the new release, but they said that they will think about it. My God feeling is that they don’t care.

M: But my feature is so easy to be implemented and it will improve our customers’ experience.

H: We could be different! We could have been the first on the market! We could have developed interesting solutions.

M: After long discussions we’ve agreed on the light versions

H: I have sent them an email asking again if we can develop the solution and they said ok (after 2 weeks – through a new meeting) The product manager asked me if we can develop the same feature.

Since 2 years I still can not believe that discussions have the same tone. And I’m just wandering if we interact with different people or our companies have a different vision.

At my last job every presentation had at least 5 version, because everybody who seen it had a new idea of how the graphic would look better and hoe the red can be changed in dark red and a comma can be inserted.

After any presentation that I had to prepare, I was feeling confuse: the dark red, has to be switched into light red and next day in red and the day after that in dark red.  After some bad experience, I decided to first agree with my managers the content of the presentation and ask for further advices regarding the format. (Now it seems stupid, but this method has reduced the time need for finishing a presentation from 1 week to 1 day).

Looking back … this may be a good definition for “office time lost”

The video below is very interesting, although I have never done such a presentation because people want to see:

• bullets
• and

1. numbers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7S-KOJIfE&feature=player_embedded

This observation made me thought: do we “kill” our product in the same boring way? The answer probably is affirmative.

But why?

It’s true that it’s a bad experience and less exceting or motivated than launching a new product, but we should killed only after:

-          We are sure that the market does not need our product

-          We have done all the research and there will be no losses at the company level after killing the product.

-          We can mention which has been the strong and the week point of the product