(This article is cross-posted at onproductmanagement.net)
This is a simple post about being simple.
I was thrilled and honored to have a visit by my good friend, Jim Holland, for the recent Product Camp in Minnesota. While he was here, he scanned my business book shelf and borrowed a book, my copy of Seth Godin’s “Poke the Box.” Jim enjoyed the short read and wrote a nice blog post based on his learning from it; in exchange, he brought me a small token gift, a simple non-descript cube that has somehow changed my life.
(This article is cross-posted as a guest post at onproductmanagement.net)
Do you work in product marketing? Have you ever tried to explain what you do, to someone who isn’t familiar with product development and management? Ever want to pull your hair out after the conversation? It probably goes like this:
In this week’s #prodmgmttalk (a weekly virtual twitter discussion/gathering of people who identify as professional product managers and product marketing managers, globally, held on Mondays) I contributed through a comment that said “trust can be earned after credibility is established”. I applaud Jim Holland for leading this discussion amongst the community following his blog on the subject. And, I wanted to explain my contribution in a bit more detail.
In the post World War II industrial era, a very distinctive management style emerged. It featured such aspects as defined start and stop times to the work day, a tall hierarchy style chain of command, numerous meetings, few decisions made, prevalent fear of failure, lack of innovation and huge internal silos leading to a general lack of teamwork and collaboration.
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I am working with a small business client – a very small business and we had an interesting discussion around marketing her services. After getting past the concept of the product is a service… we talked about building trust and relationships with prospects and customers. I broke down the discussion into some simple non-marketing language that might help you in explaining all of this as well. I told it was like making a great sandwich. (more…)
