A Response to Marty Cagan’s “Product Management vs. Product Marketing”

Although over 6-1/2 years old, Marty Cagan’s “Product Management vs. Product Marketing” remains the Silicon Valley Product Group’s top blog article. (It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s popularity is self-reinforced due to its prominent position on the SVPG home page…) While I generally agree with Marty’s premise and proposed solution, I believe that the article was written primarily from a Waterfall perspective and that an Agile perspective offers a better way out.
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2014-03-31T08:47:13-08:00March 28th, 2014|0 Comments
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The Customer is the Marshmallow

Spaghetti and Twine

Many of you will be familiar with Peter Skillman’s Marshmallow Challenge, an exercise frequently given to teams and business school students. Teams of four are given 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, one yard of twine, and a marshmallow. They are then given 18 minutes to build a free-standing structure that places the marshmallow as high off of the table as possible. The team with the highest marshmallow wins.

If you haven’t seen it already, Tom Wujec’s TED talk is a good place to learn about the challenge. And if you haven’t introduced your team(s) to it, take 45 minutes out of one of your days to administer the challenge and see what revelations you get.

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2015-01-20T12:43:18-08:00June 1st, 2012|5 Comments
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Apple App Store Sales Numbers

From Bernard Chen and TechCrunch, an interesting summary about the economic implications of the Apple App Store for developers.

For all of you App developers (Amy!), TechCrunch had a great article describing sales numbers for AppStore products. Of particular note:
Across 96 developers who responded, the average app sold 100k copies over 261 days with a median price of $0.99 at a development cost of $6.5k.
Removing the top 10% of products, the numbers drop a lot, which is a common in competitive markets. The numbers for the remaining 90%: 11k copies over 44 days. That’s a big difference. The lesson there: Go big. The smaller apps don’t get the same amount of time in the spotlight (44 days vs 261) and don’t make as much money ($11k vs $100k).
About staying in the spotlight, the author suggests providing a compacted, bunched marketing campaign when the spotlight is on your app instead of spreading the campaign out over time. Use any press to springboard your way into other press and maintain your marketing momentum.

That final bit is a good takeaway for any of you who are entrepreneurs/indie developers. Developing a good product is an important part of the business, but harnessing the powers of marketing and P/R (mostly PR for indies) is what drives the revenue that allows you to develop a version 2 and 3.

The link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/iphone-app-sales-exposed/

2012-07-26T11:00:44-08:00May 16th, 2010|0 Comments
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