May 8, 2012 by aarnfeld
As a Product manager or product management team one of your goals is to ensure the sales force for B2B activity fully understand the product, price, position and promotion methods you wish them to initiate and follow through. Without this information, do not be surprised if your sales team deliver signed contracts for services that [...]
Continue Reading
January 19, 2012 by aarnfeld
We have all experienced periods of great change during the product development process and our approach to change management is crucial to the ability of the product management function to add value to the business, rather than act as an obstacle. We try to avoid having this scary face!
As individuals we can adopt the change [...]
January 9, 2012 by aarnfeld
As Product Managers we are involved in change on a permanent basis and it is a central requirement of our role to act as change agents. We may not be referred to as “change managers” but it is a central aspect of product management to introduce change. The level of change may vary from revolutionary [...]
Continue ReadingJune 12, 2011 by aarnfeld
One of the product challenges on the web concerns product optimisation. The value of product optimisation comes when one is able to allow decision making between competing alternatives, or where one is able to discover an error in design that can be rectified.
Product measurement and optimisation can have a wide variety of goals including
Improvement of [...]
Continue Reading
February 20, 2011 by aarnfeld
I saw a post the other day on Linkedin that asked the forum about developing an in-house Usabilty Lab / Department and it reminded me of an earlier part of my career when this as the topic of choice amongst aspiring and practicing Usability and Human Factors professionals.
It was so topical that we got together [...]
July 4, 2010 by aarnfeld
Delivering the requirements in such a way to ensure sign off from the business and full engagement from the development team, while at the same time developing world class – money making – products is no easy task.
Traditional approaches based upon producing large specification documents sometimes work, but more often have many problems. Some success [...]
Continue Reading
July 4, 2010 by aarnfeld
For effective, commercial, product development to take place it is essential to know the target users.
One of the practical best practice methods to align the team on the target user is to develop and share a persona, for each key market segment.
Meet Felix:
A persona provides fictional descriptions of typically 3-8 different user groups who either [...]
Continue ReadingJanuary 10, 2010 by aarnfeld
As a customer focussed company you will recognise that customers whether B2B or B2C, are value maximisers. They are looking for the best deal. But the best deal for one buyer is not the same as for another Buyer. The selection criteria are not the same. Some buyers will focus on price along whereas others [...]
Continue ReadingJanuary 10, 2010 by aarnfeld
Putting the customer needs or market needs before the company needs is the surest way of developing best practice products for the market. Understanding the voice of the customer (VOC) is crucial and companies that place the customer as the most important member of their team have demonstrated huge successes and revolutionised industries; examples include: [...]
Continue ReadingJanuary 5, 2010 by aarnfeld
As product managers when we work on “choose the value” we must understand the market environment within which we operate in order to build an effective strategy for our products as “CEO” for our product lines. One of the most influential models to assist us in this task has been developed by Michael Porter, published [...]
Continue Reading
Persona