Many thanks to those of you that came to my session and making the town hall discussion rich and beneficial for all the folks that attended.    I’ve learned a great deal from the session and look forward Austin’s next product camp.

Betsy Streeter provides a recommendation on how to let out your creative monster in 2 easy steps.

Other Articles:

• Does Your Content Marketing Make You Different? (myventurepad.com)
• B2B Marketers Need to Look Beyond Decision Makers (thecustomercollective.com)

So how long have you being doing Product Management?

I have over 18 years of product management experience. I have worked on many products, building my experience over 5 distinct “phases”. I began my career as a highly technical product manager working on submarine design for 5 years. After business school, I worked at Intuit for 5 years where I led Quicken product management and also launched an online brokerage. After Intuit, I led product management at Friendster.

After Friendster, I consulted to startups as interim VP of Product Management; my clients included companies such as YouSendIt, Box.net, Xing, and Epocrates.

My latest phase is as CEO and founder of my own startup: YourVersion,  a real-time discovery engine that helps users find new, relevant content tailored to their interests. I regularly speak about Product Management at tech/startup events such as the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, Startonomics, Facebook Fund REV incubator, and Stanford.

As you look at product management, do you see yourself more of a product person or traditional marketing?

While I have an MBA and consider myself to be a good marketer, if I had to pick, I would say that I am more of a product person at heart. I started hacking on a Commodore 64 as a kid, I have a BS in Electrical Engineering, and my first job out of college was designing submarines.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time building up my business and marketing skills. But at the end of the day, what I most enjoy is building a product that wows customers. I do feel that on the Web, the traditional lines between product and marketing are getting blurred. Many successful web companies excel because they understand and value that integration and have employees who are strong in both areas.

Since you’ve usually been in a head of product management role as part of a larger team, what was the biggest challenge to transition into starting your own company and being a CEO?

I have always taken a broad view of product management and consider product managers to be product and business owners, responsible for the overall success of their product (i.e., “the CEO of their product”). In all of my product management roles, I’ve had this broad scope.   Before YourVersion, I had been living in the early-stage startup ecosystem (which I love) for a while and was pretty familiar with it. For example, I had moved to Madrid for several months to help a friend get his new bootstrapped startup off the ground. As a result, while YourVersion was my first time starting my own company and being CEO, the change in role wasn’t a big adjustment.

The biggest adjustment was probably (in the early days) not having a team to lean on. For example, I had to do a lot of the initial coding myself. I enjoyed it for a bit, but when it’s mainly just you doing the work (even with a couple of part-time colleagues helping out), progress is much slower than when you have a larger team . The team has since grown and we are able to make much faster progress.

YourVersion has seen some great traction post launch, what is it and what problem does it solve?

The Web grows larger every day, on the one hand offering more useful content, but on the other making it harder to find the content you care about. Staying on top of your interests isn’t as easy as it should be. YourVersion is a real-time discovery engine that continuously discovers new and relevant web content tailored to your specific interests. You can then easily bookmark and share pages via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

YourVersion harnesses the collective intelligence of our users, so that the results grow increasingly better as more people use the system. YourVersion launched at the 2009 TechCrunch50 Conference, winning the People’s Choice Award.

How is addressing the needs of users integrated into your product delivery process?

Addressing user needs is a core part of my DNA and therefore a core part of YourVersion’s DNA.  Intuit was the best place to learn about customer-centric design, and I left there with a lot of great training and best practices that I’ve applied over the years. From when we launched YourVersion’s private beta to when we launched to the public, I personally conducted over 80 1-on-1 usability/user feedback sessions with new users. As we rolled out new features, we would solicit user feedback on them within days. We would react to the feedback, make changes, and launch the improvements very quickly. It was very rewarding to see the progress of our fast iteration loop from launching a new feature, getting user feedback, and launching the improvements. I was focused on ensuring we had what I call a compelling “first-time user experience”.

One of our developers noted that our process was similar to the making of a samurai sword, whose strength comes from many repeated cycles of heating, folding, and hammering. All our hard work paid off at TechCrunch50; after my demo on stage, YourVersion received a very nice compliment from Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, who said: “I thought the attention to detail and the usability testing was really obvious.”

We also make it very easy for users to give us feedback on our website. Every page has 3 links to our “Feedback” page.

We also use user surveys to proactively solicit both quantitative and qualitative user feedback to help us understand what our users like the most, dislike the most, and how we can make the product better.

I am also a big believer in using metrics to help build your understanding of how users are using your site and to identify how you can improve your product (see my presentations).

As organizations go to market with new products, one of the key challenges I’ve seen is getting that first big win – an super positive analyst write-up, an award, the first customer or first 10,000 users.  What is the big win so far for YourVersion?

I’d say the biggest win for YourVersion so far has been winning the People’s Choice Award at TechCrunch50. We launched to the public that day, and winning put us on the map and built awareness of YourVersion with a lot of people.

As a result, Robert Scoble saw my demo on stage and tweeted “Last session of day rocks. http://yourversion.com is now in my ‘must try’ list.”, which led to him conducting and posting a video interview.

In many ways, winning at TechCrunch50 was our “head bowling pin” (to use a metaphor from Geoffrey Moore’s “Inside the Tornado”) because that win helped us get invited to demo at other startup events where we also won the People’s Choice Award: SFNewTech, FailCon, and the Play Berkeley Digital Media Conference. Winning at all these events led to press coverage in TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Wired, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, and NBC News. That in turn made recruiting new team members easier. So winning the People’s Choice Award at TechCrunch50 created a strong positive spiral. The event wins and the top-tier press coverage give YourVersion a high degree of credibility with the press, prospective users, prospective team members, prospective partners, and prospective investors.

So why should I use YourVersion over other alternatives?

YourVersion is better than other ways of staying on top of your interests for several reasons. First, it’s very easy to use and by aggregating relevant content in one place it allows you to stay on top of your interests in less time. Second, YourVersion is highly personalized, allowing you to add any interest you like. Third, YourVersion is the most complete discovery solution, offering bookmarking and sharing funtionality as well as a free iPhone app and Firefox toolbar. Finally, YourVersion learns from its users and harnesses their collective intelligence to deliver results that grow increasingly better over time.

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• A Visual Way To Search Google News. They Called It Flipper. Now It’s Google Fast Flip. (techcrunch.com)
• Matrix: Google Buzz vs Facebook vs MySpace vs Twitter (Feb 2010) (web-strategist.com)

PCampATL has been a great time.  Good discussion, networking and session facilitation. Great job by @jbrett and the rest of the volunteers.

Many thanks to the folks that attended the session and provided your insights on the things we get bogged down on.  Based on the discussion, it is clear we all get bogged down in the daily noise, the tactical and the stupid things which stop us from doing the right things for the business.

Related Product Management Articles:

• Not everyone’s strategic and 4 other things to think about before you finalize the company’s 2010 goals
• The State of Product Management: Tweets, Conversations and Near Quotes….
• The 4 PM Confusion in Technology Companies

I really wouldn’t want one of my customers sending emails like this one I got today from Hertz.  As if being on the news wasn’t enough for Toyota on this recall and major rental companies choosing to opt out on Toyota until addressed, now one of their larger fleet customers is letting their customer base know – “we will make every effort to switch you to another brand (e.g., Nissan, Ford, GM) as quickly as possible.”

This note also makes for great customer service by Hertz.  I really hope similar notes went out to all email addresses Hertz had for the coming days/weeks.

Safety first just might mean 1 brand does well in this recall nightmare.  Another thought, they could have just been inundated with inbound customer service calls asking for a non-Toyota rental, whatever the reason I still liked the note.

Related articles:

• Ghosn: Toyota woes will be temporary (cnn.com)
• Honda, GM Gain Buyers’ Favor Amid Toyota Recall, Edmunds Says (businessweek.com)
• Toyota recall could help North American automakers (ctv.ca)
• Toyota to recall 2.3 million more vehicles as its troubles continue (businessweek.com)
• Toyota has few details on gas pedal solution as recall expands (thestar.com)
• Toyota extends massive safety recall (financialpost.com)
• Toyota safety recall spreads to Europe, China (windsorstar.com)
• Hertz, Enterprise, Avis remove recalled Toyotas (money.cnn.com)

Slide week is just about over, at least here. I have at least another 4 days heavily invested in PowerPoint.