(Cross posted on onproductmanagement.net)
All over the web and in all the product management communities, there are articles and discussions about gamification. If you’ve been offline for a while, gamification is about applying design and development efforts to software in a way to make it more engaging, more “fun.”
Not only have whole applications been born under the premise (i.e. Foursquare), but gamification has also had great impact in some of the more traditional business software, (ie. Salesforce.com) allowing for more interaction and amusement when performing daily tasks.
I’m all about having more fun in my interactions with technology, and can truly appreciate making the more mundane less so; but, I believe sometimes we have taken the concept of gamification too far. (more…)
(This article is cross-posted at onproductmanagement.net)
I don’t know when it happened but it officially became fall in the Northern Hemisphere. Typically I would moan at this thought, which makes me think about how many bags of leaves I need to rake this season (typically 100 around my house,) or worse yet, that winter and the freezing temperatures are approaching. But this year I’m hoping the new season brings a breath of fresh air. This summer, I realized my parents are getting old. Three out of the four had a significant health problem. And while, thankfully, all are doing better now, it made me face the reality that needs, plans and provisions need to change.
It happens to our products too.
In the next few weeks, there are several opportunities to attend a ProductCamp. Maybe this is your first? If so, there are several primer-type articles out here and here.
Whether this is your first, third or tenth camping trip, you should ask yourself the same question – how do you prepare for a ProductCamp? Should you volunteer? Should you create a presentation? Will any of my colleagues be there?
In a recent blog post, Forrester CEO George Colony wrote that CEO’s want better sales forces. As the sales enablement arm of the organization, how do product marketing professionals, ensure that our sales team is effective and ready to sell our new products and have well designed sales tools aligned to the ever-changing sales cycle?
We often find ourselves in a sort of practitioner leader role, where we have no real authority over our cross-functional team, yet we HAVE to lead the team in order to reach a set of shared company goals. So, how do we do this?
