The Productologist

I wouldn’t label myself an environmentalist, but I try to do my part. I recycle paper, aluminum and glass in my home. I make homemade notepads out of old printouts. I drive a Honda Civic on my workday commute. I use reusable containers instead of disposable ones. When I have to print documents at work, I print two-to-a-page and double-sided. I also fancy myself a new life re-user.

Popularity: 35% [?]

[Business2.0 homage #1]

Back in July 2007, there was a article in Business 2.0 about making mashups easy for non-technical users. As more and more users embrace web technologies, companies have looked for ways to provide a way for the unfettered masses to take advantage of the latest and greatest that the Internet has to offer. Internet publishing is a prime example of how a previously complex process (coding HTML, creating images, creating dynamic pages, FTP’ing files, etc) turned into blogging, which is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection who can type and remember their login and password.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Many years ago, when I was going off to start grad school, BW (at the time, she wasn’t BW, just B) and I rented a big yellow truck to haul all of our prized personal belongings to our new home (at least for the next two years). It was a long trip (2 days worth of driving), so we did the prudent traveler thing and went to AAA and got a bunch of maps to plan our route. The maps were not only for us, but others, too. Since this was the age before cell phone ubiquity, for safety reasons, we gave a copy to BW’s parents so that they would know what route we were following in case we didn’t show up at our destination or check in periodically.

On my way back from a trade show, I spied an article in the airline magazine about how companies are starting to use the “novel” technique of Ethnography to understand how customers really use their products or to test out prototypes in real-world situations (this seems to be a hot topic, because after seeing the article in the airline mag, I also found a recent post about it at Requirements Defined, a blog from the folks at Seilevel and Experientia).

One of my goals for this year is to establish Product Councils for my products. Product Councils, or Product Advisory Boards, as they are sometimes called, are made up of people who are familiar with your product and/or the market. In most cases, they are external, meaning that the members are customers or industry experts who can provide strategic guidance or provide feedback on tactical implementations, but they can also be made up of, wholly or in part, internal members.

I plan to have two; one made up of internal team members and one made up of customers. Both are necessary to help me grow the product to meet the needs of the market.