Category: Featured Articles

3 Big Data Secrets that Ignite a Product Launch

By Nishtha Chouhan Is Product Launch just an Event or Process that drives organizational growth? The latter provides a scalable process essential for on-going product roll-outs. Lots of hard work goes into a successful product launch. Since customers don’t like change, and new product launch offers new features, it’s important to showcase the value of…
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Why is Product Management So Undervalued until a Moment of Crisis?

By Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting Over the last 20 years I have noticed the same cycle play out time and time again. Organizations of all sizes continue to undervalue the product management function until they face a moment of crisis. Typically this takes the form of a change of control, difficulty scaling, and…
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Face Off: Value Propositions vs. Persuasive Messaging: Why Your Value Prop Is Losing and What to Do About It

by Michael Cannon Every company wants a great value proposition, the proverbial magic bullet that gets you in the door and gets you an order. The trouble is that most value propositions are more like blank or copper bullets. They don’t perform well.

Part Two of 9 Strategies to Increase Marketing Effectiveness: Enabling Greater Competitive Differentiation and Faster Revenue Growth

By Michael Cannon In part One; we reviewed the 4 biggest obstacles to improving marketing effectiveness and the solution to the first three root-cause issues including: Poor visibility into the true cost of ineffective customer communication Lack of clear differentiation among messaging, content, and tactics. Inaccurate model of the categories, styles, and types of messaging…
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9 Strategies to Increase Marketing Effectiveness: Enabling Greater Competitive Differentiation and Faster Revenue Growth – Part One

By Michael Cannon The question, “what do we need to do to make Marketing more effective?” has been a topic of discussion in articles and books for decades. The most recent reincarnation of this topic resides under the banner of sales and marketing alignment. And, while there are many good ideas for “what to do”,…
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Is There An Ideal Relationship Between Product Management and User Experience? Part of the ProdBOK® Series

By Greg Geracie As a follow-on to my “Focusing on the End User: Product Management and User Experience” featured article, the conversation continues with Rich Gunther, president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) and Sean Van Tyne co-author of the Customer Experience Revolution. You can read part one here.  Why did you choose to contribute to…
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5 Easy Steps to Make Your Customer Communications 30 to 50% More Influential

 By Michael Cannon We have all seen the research reports from IDG, AMA, etc. that say about 50% of our customer communications, content and sales conversations, are not relevant to their needs, and that over 50% of the content Marketing

Focusing on the End User: Product Management and User Experience: From Actuation Consulting’s ProdBOK® Series. This is part one of a two part interview.

By Greg Geracie As Editor-in-Chief for The Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge (ProdBOK) I have the privilege to work closely with many of the leading minds within product management and across the adjoining disciplines. Today I want to share a recent conversation I had with Rich Gunther, president of the User Experience Professionals…
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Lean Resources and Grand Ambitions: The Danger of Wearing Multiple Hats (on Product Development Teams)

By Greg Geracie In the recent Study of Product Team Performance©, 2012 we asked survey respondents what role they played in their organization. We then asked if they were playing multiple roles on the product team. The actual question was “If you play multiple roles, which best describes your secondary role?”

Gamification – more than just points, badges and leaderboards!

By Lesley Brownlie Gamification is becoming a much more common business practice. The definition of gamification is intentionally broad since there are many different ways of incorporating game design thinking and techniques into non-game contexts. Gamification can be applied to: · external business processes (customer engagement) · internal business engagement (employee productivity) · personal behavior…
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