Of course, the market can find errors, but companies must be pleased to get help to find those errors, for the company to fix them and improve the product.

The key on digital product management is iterations. When you launch a product, iteration with a well-defined audience you can learn about the mistakes that you make and learn enough from your audience. The internet makes iteration and development on the fly possible.

The objective is to get the product out and then have the users to tell you where it is more important to spend your time.

Marissa Mayer, says “We make mistakes every time, every day. But if you launch things and iterate really quickly, people forget about those mistakes and have a lot of respect for how quickly your build your product up and make it better”.

Sheryl Sandberg, made an error while working at Google that cost millions, so she apologised to Larry Page who responded: “I’m so glad you made this mistake, because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we are just not taking enough risk”.

• Clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity

You learn to write by writing so consider these questions before you start:

• Who is my audience?
• What one point do I want to send across?

Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well. My advise get rid of words and sentences (omit useless words) without changing the core message and then get rid of half of what is left. The result is every sentence contains no unnecessary words and a paragraph no unnecessary words.

Managers at every level are prisoners at the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking.

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer.

Being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

• What are they doing?
• What are they going to do next?
• How should we react?

Every little move is analysed.

The competitive landscape changes all the time. Our competition today might be really different from the competitor of tomorrow.

The best advise is to focus on yourself, because when you spend time worrying and analysing the competition, you can’t spend time improving yourself.

You become reactionary instead of visionary.

If you are planing on developing the iPad “killer” or next Facebook, you are probably out of market. In this case Apple and Facebook are setting the parameters, establishing the rules of the market.

In order to compete, you need to define the rules, not launching something slightly better or cheaper.

If you are just replicating what the competitors are doing, there is no reason to exist.

The theorist say the right side of your brain is responsible for creativity, while the left side handles the details and implementation. The left side is analytical while the right side is artistic.

In order to define the differences between the both approaches (left, right), Marketo has produced this:

The content must have the right balance between being informative and entertaining while also making sure it supports a larger company strategy.

To put together a good strategy think about business considerations:

• Competitive advantage: your business content should focus on what your business does best
• Branding: every piece of content that you create needs to reinforce your brand in some way
• Audience’s goals will help to define the purpose of your content
• Audience’s interests will help define content topics
• Available resources content contributors, their skill sets, time are key consideration when defining the channels and schedule

You have also to define the purpose of the content: some common purposes include:

• To inform, teach, inspire, entertain, persuade, start a conversation, spark a controversy, express an opinion and share industry knowledge or resources

Identify typical content types:

• Articles or blog posts, infographics, videos, animations, tutorials, presentations

Mix purposes, content types and buyer personas:

Your content creation team will find this as a good resource to help focus the content on strategic objectives.

Continually test and evaluate: always look for opportunities to gain insight into how your audience responds to your content and then make adjustments and improvements.

The high jump is a good example of changing the way we think about progress and became a means for improving performance.

The athletes jumped before Fosbury using this technique:

And this is the Fosbury Flop:

What did we learn about this process?

• It was not easy: Fosbury took 5 years in getting to the top of the innovation curve, at this point he was ready to compete. Changes within companies are difficult to implement, and returns are not achieved in the short-term.
• It was easier the status quo: The straddle technique was being used for centuries. While implementing major changes within the company, the resistance is though.
• There are always detractors: The USA Track & Field took more than 6 years to recommend the Fosbury flop, even knowing that technically it was superior to the straddle method. The investments in transformation, change and innovation are always criticised, but even today where there is a credit crunch and the global recession.
• Change was not quick: The Fosbury Flop took a decade to start being used by the athletes. Companies usually take too much time to  assimilate the transformation produced by innovation projects. Complex and major projects are taking more time than planned.
• It was efficient and gave results: By using the Fosbury Flop the jump records increased by 10 centimeters.
• Change or die: Everyone who decided to ignore the innovation couldn’t compete

Reducing the gap between the theoretical best practice and even the demonstrated best practice is almost always a question of changing the existing way of thinking about how to increase performance.

This illustrates the idea that people can not simply be told to accept a new way of doing something, even if it will make progress happen.

People need to experience for themselves how adopting a new process will be beneficial and have to be taught this in a way that it makes sense to them.

You can do this by ranking 10 key factors. To do this, rate each of the factors on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is unattractive and 10 is attractive, if you have a doubt, please be conservative in the estimate.

10 Factors to Evaluate

1. Urgency: How urgent the market want or need what I’m going to offer?
2. Size: How many people are actively buying things like this?
3. Pricing potential: What is the highest price a typical buyer would be willing to pay?
4. Cost of customer acquisition: How easy is it to acquire a new customer? / (money and time)
5. Cost of value delivery: How much would it cost (money and time) to create and deliver the value offer?
6. Uniqueness of offer: How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market?
7. Speed to market: How quickly can you create something to sell?
8. Up-front investment: How much will you have to invest before you are ready to sell?
9. Up-sell potential: Are there related secondary offers that you can also present to customers?
10. Evergreen potential: Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put into it in order to continue selling?

When you are done, add up the score.

• If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising business, go ahead
• Anything 50 and 75, has the potential to pay the bills
• Below 50, move to another idea

Check out the How to evaluate a market – Done by Carlose Lopez

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1. Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine scans each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website‟s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
2. Who’s linking to you: As the search engine scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has.

The search engine considers few factors when deciding what information to show in the search engine results page (SERP):

• Geographic location of the searcher
• Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
• Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
• Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
• Back end code or HTML of webpage
• Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)

But essentially, there are  3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP:

1. Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered.
2. Authority, search engines determine how authoritative and credible a website‟s content is by calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) it has.
3. Relevance is one of the most critical factors of SEO. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search engines will review your website‟s structure, use of keywords in your URLs and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text.

The more customer centric you are, the better able you are to get good rankings.

On-page SEO:  It covers everything you can control on each specific webpage and across your website, but optimising your on-page SEO is time-consuming, and it is an ongoing process that you will need to take care of for as long as you run your website

1. Implement a good content marketing strategy
2. Update your site frequently
3. Use social media
4. Link to trusted sites
5. Give your pictures, photos, images, graphics a name
6. Interlink your inner pages, link all your important pages from your homepage
7. Optimise your meta description, writing a well thought out, creative meta description
8. Validate your code, insert your website URL into the W3C Validator and it will tell you exactly what code you need to change
9. Vary your keywords, over half of your traffic will probably come from keywords other than your target keyword
10. SEO is not just about which keywords you use on your website, but it is just as much about where you place them
11. Use header tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.)
12. Do not over do flash
13. Optimise URL’s
14. Optimse title tags: include all of your target keywords; place your keywords near the beginning of your title, not the end, keep your title under 70 characters, create a title with click-through rate in mind
15. Optimise 404 pages

Off-page SEO: It covers all aspects of SEO that happen off your website to garner quality inbound links.

1. Create community in Social Networks
2. Have a blog, this is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online
3. What about guest blogging
4. Submit your news releases to Distribution Services
5. Co-Marketing partnerships are a great way to get inbound links

To complete this post you can also check this out Good content and SEO

How do I evaluate the customer I want?

The quest for good customers starts early on. It starts with deciding who your ideal customer is and this is tailor to your business objectives.

You can start by considering some parameters to evaluate:

• Company size: What sizes are the companies you have enjoyed working with? Do you prefer to work with small family businesses or large corporations?
• Budget: What is your minimum project budget? Will you take on a project with a tight budget if the customer is strategic?
• Payment schedule: Would you agree to receiving the full payment at the end of the project? If not, what’s the minimum up front that you require?
• Technical knowledge: Are you willing to work with a customer who has minimal technical knowledge? How might this affect the outcome of the project?
• Marketing knowledge: Are you willing to work with a customer who has a poor marketing strategy (this include social media, communication, PR)? How might this affect the outcome of the project?
• Project dynamics: Are you looking for a customer who will just give you the requirements and then wait for the deliverables, or would you prefer a more engaged client?
• Length of relationships: Are you interested in one-time project or a long-term working relationship? If you are thinking long-term, estimate whether a particular customer would have enough projects to sustain that relationship.

If you get this right, you will be less likely to wake up asking yourself why you are working on your current project.

Keep it simple, I recommend a total of four to five principles; but tailor this to your own business goals. Set your principles in a spreadsheet, rank them (0 to 10), where 0 is unattractive and 10 is attractive, if you have a doubt, please be conservative in the estimate.

When do I have to say good-bye?

No matter how many hours you have invested, if a project doesn’t work, it will continue not to work, and you will only experience more grief. Kill it as early as possible. That would be best for both you and the customer.

• The customer is abusive: You should not tolerate any kind of abusive language or behavior.
• You do not get paid on time:  A customer who does not understand this will hurt your cash flow and, eventually, your business.
• The scope of the project perpetually increases, but the customer refuses to increase the budget and the release date. The responsibility for setting expectations is yours, but if you do that, and the customer still pushes for more without being willing to increase the budget, then you will end up with an unprofitable business.
• The customer ignores your recommendations.

If you have many projects waiting on deck, you could probably fire a customer without hurting your revenue. In fact, by working with someone who don’t fit your business values, you are probably giving up on great customers who could take your company to the next level. Take all of these factors into consideration when deciding.

If you do decide to fire a customer, you should seriously consider how to go about it without hurting your relationship with them and without risking your reputation.

How can I fire a customer:

• Look hard again at your decision to make sure it is the right one.
• Explain the reasons for your decision, and point out that it was a business decision, not a personal one.
• Help the customer find someone else who would be willing to work with them.
• Bill what you deserve.
• Note what you learned from the relationship, and add it to your qualification process.
• Most importantly, life goes on.

Check out the How to identify a good customer – Done by Carlose Lopez

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