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 The Short, Sweet Life of the Chief Marketing Officer
Five strategies to extend CMO longevity and value
The individual who holds the title of Chief Marketing Officer, or CMO, also carries a dubious distinction: it is the C-level executive post with the shortest tenure. Writing in Forbes.com this past May, former eBay CMO Mike Linton lamented that the average span of a CMO appointment is just over 28 months. And that may be a generous estimate.
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 Build, Buy, or Partner?
Three paths to product development
Getting innovative products to market can be brought about in different ways. FiServ product manager Desiree Wolfe examines three of the most common approaches and suggests how to weigh the tradeoffs of each.
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 How Thomson Reuters Lightens Up Its
Product Lines
Serious people like to have fun too
You don’t have to be a bleeding-edge technology startup to support genuine innovation, to make yourself memorable to customers, or to have a good time. The venerable Thomson Reuters information service has formalized a way to make it happen while pleasing some of the world’s most famously unsmiling clients. Product Management Director Michael Koppelmann explains how they did it.
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 IBM’s Tight-Fitting Middleware
Tailoring generic software to specific vertical industries
For more than ten years, IBM has directed its formidable resources toward making some of its underlying software a better fit for customers in different industries. That involves choreographing a whole horde of development partners. Lonne Jaffe, who leads that effort for the company’s Public Sector segment, explains how they do it.
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 Getting Sales to Improve Marketing’s Leads
Have them craft campaigns together
The natural tension between Sales and Marketing is understandable, but it’s frequently counterproductive. Christine Crandell, Chief Marketing Officer for Egenera Inc. and a PSN Member, has found that collaborative Sales/Marketing councils which create and implement marketing campaigns can yield huge benefits.
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 Fantasy Pharmacy Helps Sales Retain Training
For field sales reps, simulation beats collateral by a country mile
Training a company’s sales force to effectively represent complex products is difficult. Training them to make the case for an entire product category can be especially hard. For McKesson Automation, taking its sales force back to basics became a critical element in the introduction of a new drug dispensing system. Product Manager Wendy Armstrong explains how the company did it.
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 The Care and Feeding of Innovation
A dedicated, front-end development group can help a lot
How should you go about exploring the opportunity to turn fuzzy new concepts into category-killing products? At one company, they’ve created a special Innovation Group to handle the early-stage aspects of that assignment. Don DeLauder, who is responsible for that group at MEDRAD, explains how it works.
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 The Pathology of New Product Development
Reinventing a medical specialty requires a good bedside manner
Particularly for a breakthrough product with the power to radically transform a traditional industry, asking prospective customers for their requirements makes little sense; after all, they have probably never thought about it. So for Omnyx, a joint venture seeking to transform medical pathology, a different approach to product development was required. Curtis Stratman, an Omnyx product manager, explains how the company engaged its prospects in the design of a complete digital solution.
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Sales and Marketing Need to Sleep in
the Same Bed
Bad marriages between the two are epidemic
Differences in the way that sales teams and marketing departments are focused, managed and paid often leads them in conflicting directions. But there are strategies for harmonizing their missions that benefit everyone. Christine Crandell, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for data center technology provider Egenera, has seen it in some of the nation’s leading technology companies and helped repair their sales-marketing rifts.
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Case Study: How Ariba Became a Market Leader by Getting Sales and Marketing to Cooperate
Coordination between a company’s sales force and its marketing department sometimes requres direct and active intervention. Christine Crandell, who is currently executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera, was previously a marketing VP for Ariba, where she learned first-hand about bringing the two functions together.
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Looking Around the Corner at the Future
Turning market intelligence into a strategic weapon
Chessboarding and Forward Viewing are powerful tools which, in the right hands, can enable a company to anticipate where its markets and competitors are headed and to prepare itself accordingly. In her capacity as executive vice president and chief marketing officer for data center technology provider Egenera, Inc., Christine Crandell applies those disciplines to her company’s business development, alliances and global market strategy. Here she explains how and why to use them.
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 Earning Your Stripes Every Day
How high-speed SaaS markets force providers to excel
SaaS is more than traditional software delivered online. It’s a whole different type of business with its own distinctive set of challenges. Greg Coticchia, who has worked in both types of business, explains the difference.
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 Next Gen SaaS Strategy
How to enhance online software services for competitive advantage
Chris Gormley, PSN Member and executive with peer-to-peer information technology provider Tiversa, explains three ways to increase stickiness with subscribers to Software-as-a-Service applications. With growing competition among SaaS providers, finding ways to seamlessly deliver human expertise and knowledge assets through a SaaS application can also lead to new sales opportunities and new sources of revenue.
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Five Steps from Recessionary Turtle to
Rebound Hare
Plan your recovery now, before it’s too late.
Implementing a deliberate strategy for identifying early signs of recovery and changes in the market along with your company’s responses to them, can turn a sour economic time into a period of healthy transformation. Christine Crandell, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera, explains how to do it.
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 Searching for Your Inner Google
Focus on authentic strengths
Particularly during tough times, a company’s ability to survive requires knowing what its core values are and then focusing relentlessly on building the business around them. At search giant Google, whose profusion of new products has been the awe of American industry, economic contraction has prompted the company to sharpen its focus on projects that match its core strengths. Google New Business Development Manager Robert Meese explains.
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 Harvesting Good Ideas
At Bayer, they’re going out into the field
Doing it all yourself is so last century. And it’s probably going to lead to the wrong answers anyway. So at Bayer, the quest for innovative ideas has become much more outwardly focused with the wisdom of crowds unseating the solitary inventor in identifying relevant product concepts. Ten-year Bayer veteran Brian Long, who is charged with managing innovation at the company’s New Business Creative Center, explains.
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 Revving the Product Management Function
Better company performance requires a better-performing product management team
Transitioning a technically-oriented product management function into a market-focused one requires re-engineering people's expectations as much as reorganizing their workflow. Veteran product strategist Jason Baim has led that effort at TeleTracking Technologies and talks about the evolution.
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 Morphing Maps
The number, substance and detail of a company’s product roadmaps evolve along with it.
Product roadmaps, along with their extended family of product line and company strategy roadmaps, have different applications at different stages in a company’s life. Andrew Hally, Vice President of software maker Unica, tells how.
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Getting the Most Out of Field Interviews
It may look like a casual conversation, but it's not
Okay, so you've figured out who you need to interview to help develop ideas for product design. What now? Where do you go? What do you ask? And how do you get the most useful results? Tom Bonnell, Director of Industrial Design at Respironics, and Julie Gulick, Product Planner at MEDRAD, have been conducting field interviews for years. Contacted separately, the two offered insights which included strikingly similar recommendations.
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 Making the Case
Preparing and presenting your business case is serious business
Building a compelling business case for creating a new company around a breakthrough product idea is an essential step in securing startup financing. It’s equally important in securing support for resource-intensive development projects that extend existing product lines for established firms. So getting the case right is critical. But it’s almost always addressed to a notoriously tough audience – senior corporate executives and potential investors with famously short attention spans. At a recent Product Strategy Network forum devoted to building better cases, four seasoned executives, representing the receiving side of the pitch, discussed what worked for them, what didn’t, and why.
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Getting Everyone on Board
Product roadmaps work a lot better when people feel their ideas are on the map.
A product roadmap – even a good one – doesn’t work very well if the people whose work it applies to feel that their point of view has been ignored. At least that was the case at Heatcraft, a well-established manufacturing company whose earlier attempts at roadmapping excluded a number of key players. Product Manager Tameka Brown talks about how the company is now taking a different approach.
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 The Right Price
Finding the right price for a technology product is part art, part science, part strategy
A company's pricing strategy is strongly influenced by its larger market strategy. But for a new type of administrative software, Philips-Respironics Global Product Manager Bob Barker found that it can also be determined, as well as supported on the sales side, by figuring out the actual dollar value it brings to the paying customer.
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Peer Learning 
Product Managers require a number of skills to succeed, but many have gaps in such critical areas as business savvy, market expertise, operational know-how, or entrepreneurial ability. As a result, the leaders of product management groups have to spend a great deal of their time coaching individual product managers on day-to-day tasks, frequently at the expense of other strategic priorities with longer-term implications.
