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business

Supercharge, Not Stupefy, Your Next PowerPoint Presentation.

I came across a recent copy of CIO magazine, and as I flipped through it I found it had some articles that were interesting even to a marketing guy.

I especially liked a piece by Editor in Chief Maryfran Johnson about how poor use of PowerPoint can kill an otherwise promising presentation.  She tells the story of a conference where a CIO strolled on stage, told a humorous anecdote that caught the audience’s attention, and then “picked up the clicker, lashed himself to the mast of an absolutely stupefying, bullet-point-ridden PowerPoint deck and sank like a stone.”  Who hasn’t seen this happen? You begin squirming in your seat, start checking your email, and finally duck out to see if another presentation is any better.

As an executive coach notes later in the story, PowerPoint has become a crutch for people who need to give a presentation and don’t know the material that well.

While I think that’s true, I also think people just find it too easy to simply list bullet points on a page and read them off to the audience. New rule:  if the audience can read it, you don’t need to.  I try to elaborate on what’s on the screen, not repeat it.

Here are some other tips in the article:

  • “Storyboard” or brainstorm your presentation on paper first. I find my ideas flow better when they’re written by hand, and I’m not caught up in the mechanics of banging things out on a keyboard.
  • Use striking images to illustrate your themes.  Lots of low-cost photos and illustrtions are available at istockphoto.com.
  • Use bullet points as the exception, not the rule.
  • Know your story and supporting details enough that you don’t need to look at the slides.

For more help, pick up Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.

Drop me a line with your tips for a good presentation.

October 30, 2009 by
(1)

The 13 Troublemakers You Meet in a Startup

Don Rainey of Grotech Ventures writes a pretty good VC blog entitled VC in DC.  He covers the usual topics and provides a lot of insight into Grotech and their investment process.  Don also pens some amusing posts every now and then.  Two of my favorites are The 7 Troublemakers you meet in a start up and 6 More Troublemakers you meet in a start up.  I have worked in three different startups over the past 25 years and find Don’s tongue in cheek assessment rather accurate.  I’ve lifted rather liberally from Don’s posts and combined them into one post.  You should read the original posts and comments to get the full description of these personas.

“1. Ms. Strategy

This capable, driven, articulate young lady will meet any requests for tactical execution with a discussion of strategy.   In a start up, everyone is close to both the strategy and the supporting tactics.  Some people can’t help themselves from knowing better about either or both.  Plus, talking is a lot easier than doing.

2. Mr. Big, Hollow, Pipeline

He made $300k at Cisco before taking this job.  Now he has a huge sales pipeline of brand name companies with massive revenue potential and no disciplined approach to characterizing possibility of closing them.  Ask him how a 30% likelihood of close defers from a 70% likelihood of close and he will talk about people and conversations rather than steps and actions.  I now assume that Cisco pays all failing salespeople $300k.

3. Goldilocks

The ever changing roles and challenges of a growing start up provide an endless set of opportunities to try new jobs and responsibilities.  Most people love being stretched and many discover or develop new skills or interests.  Not Goldilocks, however, as this individual tends to be too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work.

4. The Big Time Scaler

No sense building any system today that won’t scale to size of General Motors.  Yes, every start up organization has plans and dreams but sometimes you need to sell one house to get another, larger one rather than live in a mostly empty, expensive one along the way.

5. Mr. Artiste – the programmer

He is creating software (sometimes the company’s core product/hope of future success) and he isn’t limited by the contents of the requirements document.  He isn’t limited by it because he isn’t reading it.  He is creating, damn it, and brings his own vision.

6. The Holiday Maker/Union Rights Leader/Salary Surveyor

Yes, a long title, but its a big job.  First, this person will seek the addition of incremental holidays to the company calendar.  What no Veteran’s Day?  We don’t get off the week between Christmas and New Year’s?   Friday before Easter or the Monday after?  Well, you get the idea. . . .This contributor will also “represent” the feelings of employees to management without consulting many of them first.   There’s no who in this group, its a group of “everybody”. . . Finally, this person usually investigates and shares salary data for the purpose of fomenting general dissension within the company.

7. The Angry Support Person

I can never figure out what makes them, or keeps them angry, but they can be the Energizer Bunny of anger.   Maybe the line of work, or being the starting point of a feedback loop for whatever is going wrong with the product or customers, but in any case, the Angry Support Person can create a special kind of crisis

8. The IT Support Guy/ Flannel Bob

He’s busy but he is working?  Does every computer need to be taken apart?  And how come you can never make a point that he doesn’t already know about like “Did you see the next version of this has that? or “I saw they’re coming out with ….”  Answer is always, “Yeah, I saw that.”

9. The New Marcom Manager/ Captain MoonRocket

He is much cooler than you. He dresses better.  And he has come up with a new campaign to re-position the product and company.   You just don’t know how a picture of a rock in a bed of sand does that.  It makes sense to him.   Just not to you.  Or anyone else.  But boy he is convinced and it is as if he needs to reach across the time/space dimensions to reach you.  He can really talk with his hands and his framing gestures are intended to create breakthroughs in your understanding.  Where did he get those glasses?

10. Joan of Accounting/ Defender of the Realm

New customers and, worse troublesome accounts receivable, just make more work for her.  If good accounts don’t make it through her screen, it is just less work. Since the collection of bad debt will inevitably fall to her, she sees her primary job as the prevention of bad accounts that will become work for her later.

11. The Time Traveling Middle Manager

Always ready to visit in your office and spend some time, he is ready with insightful commentary, nay advice, related to everything that HAS BEEN done by you or anyone else.  If you had that advice AND a time machine, you would really have something

12. The Triathlete Production Assistant

She arrives at the Monday morning staff meeting to describe an extreme fitness weekend which included a 48 hour race with running, swimming and cycling.   She got almost no sleep at all.  She looks ok.  And she will be fine for the next couple of hours.  Then she begins to fade.  Completely fade.

13. The Project Manager

It can be dis-spiriting to create fabulous GANTT charts for unfabulous goals. All the start up organization’s dysfunction in a walking, talking person.  He is characterized by his unanswerable questions –“How can the developers lose more than one week in their completion date, when only one week has passed?” or “Couldn’t we have known that people will take off work on Christmas day? or “Why does our one and only Q.A. staff need a month notice when they’re going to test the company’s only product?”


October 29, 2009 by
(16)

Cross-Functional Diplomacy aka Product Management

French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-...
Image via Wikipedia

So with all the UN hub bub in NY a couple of weeks ago and Obama and Michelle’s plea for the Olympics in Chicago, it got me to thinking about the role of diplomats and in general diplomacy on the world stage.  Then after a couple of beers I thought that on a much smaller scale that product managers are effectively corporate diplomats.

Ultimately, Product Managers are given some mission to drive forward, with little or no authority or ownership of the resources to accomplish a task which is kinda like a diplomat.    PM need to do things like increase profit, revenue or “on time delivery” from bar napkin estimates and executive talking points.   Kinda like taxation and political promises.

PM’s try to push agendas, negotiate the scope of product releases and define what is important for our stakeholders through release planning activities, roadmap development and corporate strategy sessions.

Granted not every meeting for a product manager is a positioning initiative or platform for moving the agenda of the business forward, but many are and the negotiation/tact required to deliver on the strategic needs of the product and/or business is often a negotiation.  A negotiation where all you may have is the promise for a future feature or prioritized defect for the next sprint.

There are other ways to look at this negotiation, a friend of mine, Tim Davis over at Techlinks, used to refer to it as “horse trading”.    A negotiation which if we aren’t careful ends up with poorly prioritized activities and features which may serve one stakeholder, but doesn’t deliver on the overall needs of the product – that’s the horse trading part.  I’d probably use the horse trading concept, but as a political science undergrad I have a little more comfort in the diplomat comparison.

As corporate diplomats, when you get the opportunity to move a product, project or team right way it is often done with indirect authority and without direct ability to influence actions outside of the of negotiation/deal making.  So when we get an opportunity to turn the dial a little we do, since those opportunities are not frequent and require some patience, not unlike diplomats.

I’m not saying all product managers are opportunist who take the opportunity to speak for 96 minutes at a general assembly, but we do try and take our 3-4 minutes where we can to try and impact change/drive the agenda forward and at times take a little liberty with the “All Employee” email lists.

Hold on a second, let’s baseline what a diplomat is since I’m bouncing around a little:

diplomat (plural diplomats)

  1. A person who is accredited, such as an ambassador, to officially represents a government in its relations with other governments or international organisms
  2. (figuratively) Someone who uses skill and tact in dealing with other people

So under both items 1 and 2 it may be easy to associate a product manager to a diplomat. So the translation is fairly easy – government = company.  So what diplomatic missions do Product Managers go on?

Accreditation Drives Influence

Product Managers should be by their very existence in a company accredited to carry if not the corporate strategy, at least the product strategy throughout the organization.  The nations in which they travel are the internal cross-functional groups which are required to be successful in the marketplace – sales, marketing, support, development and the leadership.  Product Managers are taking issues in the marketplace and relating them tactfully to the key stakeholders.  The I realized, not all product managers carry the same charter or accreditation, I was reminded of this the other morning when I was a Starbucks with a friend that happens to be a CEO and the conversation went something like this:

ME: Blah… How was that last round of golf… blah

CEO GUY: Blah… Blah… We really need to get out on the course… blah… How’s the new gig?

ME: New gig is great, every place has a different view of product, so it makes it fun.  Doing some real PM work again and strategy too.

CEO GUY: How many product managers do you think can actually drive strategy? What 1 out of 10 – if that.

ME:  I think the better question is how many product managers have the charter? Do they drive strategy, P&L or even market requirements.  In your company what titles do you have in product management”

CEO GUY: Technical Product managers, business analyst types or what they are now calling product owners.  In fact we are going so far as considering product owner the new official job title.  Then we have general product managers and the director of product management.  The director is the only one who has the closest thing to P&L accountability, we don’t really have that skill in the organization, so we don’t really require it in earnest.

ME: OK so you haven’t given them the charter to manage that way, I understand. Do you have Product Marketing?

CEO GUY: No, there is a enough complexity with managing the organization to understand product management, so we don’t need another not well defined or understood role.  I Think only 3 people actually know what we expect from the director of product management.

So just as diplomats can execute on a topic or theme, they don’t have the charter to negotiate anything out of scope, so you sometimes just need to keep track of the chits.  So not only are you the dimplomat your are responsible for remembering what favors you have out and which could be called in for the next real.  So you ask yourself questions like – Are you up or down with support right now?

What you can do is as much predicated on the charter, as it is on the influence, credibility and trust you have with the other nations/cross-functional groups.   For diplomats, there is a zone of acceptable execution and negotiation by the nature of your rank/title, the geography they cover and perhaps a functional/departmental definition – such as being associated with agriculture or energy if you were a diplomat.  The same is true for product managers – if you are the product manager of old crusty shit, then you probably have less influence than the product manager of cool hope for the business shit.  Multiply that by title or rank and you have some math result which means something like you have more pull on cool strategic stuff, than old declining revenue streams.

While I don’t have a pithy little close on this piece, I think the metaphor of diplomat has helped me understand that directional successes in product management are just as important as explicit success with metrics, revenue and general market execution.  Thinking about it, without a focus on moving the organization directionally towards a goal the ability to have repeatable and scalable success is a challenge, so try a little diplomacy and chit management.

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October 6, 2009 by
(9)

Lazy Brand: Get your brand out of the living room!

Brand spend, brand awareness is so different today than even 12 months ago thanks to the interwebs and an increasingly over burdened attention span. Crowdsourcing, multi-tasking and interactive media preferences require a different approach, since as noted in Helge Tennø‘s presentation the internet is a connection machine!

This is not the time for Big Lazy Brands

View more documents from Helge Tennø.
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September 16, 2009 by
(1)