The Productologist

In a previous post, I wrote about passionate customers, but before you have passionate customers, you have to have people inside your organization that are passionate about your product. And that starts with the Product Manager.Product Managers are in a position to evangelize, motivate, and energize their company about their products. They are the product champion. They speak out at Sales meetings about the product roadmap and upcoming releases. They provide in-depth demos and answer the complicated questions for prospects. They stand in the trade show booth and regale visitors with all of the capabilities and how the product can solve problems that are mission critical.

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.