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Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it.

This is a great article by Bob Weinstein on product management – with some excellent thoughts on sales engineering from Steve Johnson - an instructor at Pragmatic Marketing, a product-marketing training company in Scottsdale, Ariz. and webmaster of productmarketing.com.

You can find the article here.  If this link vanishes, then you may be able to find it through the Google cache.

Some quotes:

The typical [software] company is accidentally market-driven.  Rather than creating a product to solve a problem, they're betting on creating a need. Johnson calls that "possible, but stupid thinking." Sharper Image exemplifies that kind of thinking.

"Product management supports sales channels; sales engineering supports individual sales efforts," Johnson adds. "In fact, many companies would be better served hiring fewer product managers and more sales engineers."

SE's - Sales or Services?

In software companies, should sales engineers report to the services organization or the sales organization? 

It can be a challenge to keep SE’s in-sync technically with the services teams.  Your services organization is what makes your company bloom from a political entity (pulling strings, making promises) into an industry leader.  They build the last-mile connections between what your company is offering and what the customer needs.  Ultimately, it is the services team that ensures that your customer enjoys a successful implementation, and that your company enjoys a referenceable customer.  The alignment between the SE and services organizations needs to be solid, trusting and synergistic.

Remembering Names

A colleague asked if I had any tips on remembering people’s names.  She had just come back from a sales conference where she met dozens of people who chose to forgo the courtesy of wearing their name-tags.  The week-long conference had approximately 200 attendees – enough to make name-remembering a challenge, yet few enough for you to recognize most faces after a week.

Here are my tips: