Why I Switched From Tweetdeck to Seesmic – And the Lessons for Product Managers

An hour ago, I did something without much conscious thought at all. I uninstalled the Twitter client I used to like (Tweetdeck), and installed a new one (Seesmic). And there I went, merrily tweeting.

Then, I caught myself and started thinking why I did that. The more I thought, the more I realized that there are a few valuable lessons in it for all of us who are involved in building software or products in general.

Here is my story, followed by the lessons…
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Product Management – SaaS vs Traditional Software

Mark Kromer at TechProdo blog recently wrote a nice blog post titled SaaS Product Management: Is there a difference?

In his post Mark poses the interesting question (applicable to a lot of product managers):

I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved to the software-as-a-service model…

As our company makes a popular SaaS tool for product management teams, we have good first-hand experience in this – and I’d like to share my thoughts here.

My short answer to Mark’s question is… [Read more…]

Product Management Blogs – Top-10

Here’s our definitive list of the top-10 blogs on Product Management. We’ve found that all of these blogs consistently produce posts that are useful to product management professionals.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, we arrived at this list using a proprietary, patent-pending, 100% scientific formula. Hence it is infallible and is THE definitive list. Okay? ๐Ÿ˜‰

Without further ado, here is the definitive Top-10 List – drumroll please…
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Product Management vs. Product Marketing – 2 Departments or 1?

Today, at the vast majority of software companies that have 500 or more employees, there are two separate but closely related departments: “Product Management” and “Product Marketing“.

I believe this is a fundamentally flawed setup for today’s fast-changing markets – a setup that leads to confusion over roles, lack of ownership, unnecessary politics & poor morale – and often RUINS innovation.

This belief is based on my experiences at successful companies in Silicon Valley over the past two decades, and discussions with friends/colleagues in the industry who manage Product Management and/or Product Marketing departments.

In this blog post, I describe the reasons for my belief and provide an alternative solution.
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User-Friendly Error Messages – A Good Example

One of my pet peeves with most software is the cryptic, unfriendly error messages thrown up by so many of them.

At Accompa, we try to make error messages in our own software as friendly and useful as possible. I think we still have a long way to go, but we work hard at it.

I just saw the following error message from bit.ly – the URL shortening service used on sites like Twitter. On most websites, this is usually a cryptic “404 Error” message. See how bit.ly has made it so friendly and fun! ๐Ÿ™‚
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