Archive for November, 2006
November 6th, 2006 by Mark Ramm
Most programmers (myself included) have an innately negative reaction to marketing and sales. Recently Philip Eby blogged about how his natural reaction to a particular marketing technique was so negative that he was literally afraid of the way he would be perceived if he used it. And the fact of the matter is that, in the minds of many of us marketing has become synonymous with mind games, manipulation, and outright dishonesty.
The other day we had an emergency need for a new parallel printer cable, which I went to pick up at a local electronics mega-store. Somebody greeted me at the door, asked what I was looking for, and helped me find it right away.
I knew I was going to pay some insane 1000% markup over the actual cost of the cable, but since we needed to get the printer running right away, I was willing to pay it. Sure enough the cable that I could have bought at buy.com for 5.99 was 34.95. But I needed the cable, and the salesperson was very helpful, so I was happy about the experience.
But then the salesperson tried to sell me a three year extended warranty for the cable! She told me that the didn’t work on commission (which I know is true). But she didn’t say they get an “incentive” every time they sell a warranty. I pointed out that the box for the cable said “Lifetime Warranty” and she responded by telling me that the manufacturer would never honor the warranty.
This girl had her pitch down cold. She flirted a bit, looked hurt when I didn’t buy the warranty, and pulled every trick she could to do what her employer told her she should. It didn’t work, but I’m sure she sells a lot of extended warranties.
It would be easy to think that means that success in sales and marketing is determined by how many unethical games you are willing to play.
Don’t get stuck with the sucker’s choice between “honesty in marketing” vs “effectiveness in marketing.” You can be honest about your product, passionate about what it can do for your customers, and effective in getting the right message to the right people at the right time.
I needed the cable, and the salesperson at this particular mega store was about to sell one of the highest margin items in the store. She could have turned this into an opportunity to make money, and provide an experience that would make me want to come back. But she did what she was told, she tried to sell me something I don’t want, need, or care about.
The key is to sell things that your customers will actually value. Then your marketing plan isn’t a game or a trick, it’s a free service. You are helping people find things they care about. Software that makes them more productive, software that allows them to connect with their friends more regularly, or software that helps them make a difference in the world.
Fundamentally I think programmers, project managers, and marketing people have to all be on the same team — creating things that make people’s lives better, and helping those people find that software so their lives can start getting better.
The whole team should be focused by user stories. Before you have users, tell stories about how you will help them, when you have users, gather their stories and tell and retell those stories. ake an actual difference in real people’s lives — that’s the stuff of great software and great marketing.
November 2nd, 2006 by Mark Ramm
Yesterday I spent too much time complaining about bad management, and MBA programs. As a young manager, I had some time to think about what I wanted to be as a manager. But, my recent thoughts have been sparked by thinking about what I want to see in a manager when I do various interviews for a new job.
So, it’s in the context of reflecting on what I’ve learned as a manager over the last few years, and what I’m looking for in a manager over the next few years that I’ve been trying to define how I see “good management.”
Management the negotiation of shared aspirations, goals, and tactics.
When it is done well it is marked by the allocation of resources to achieve the highest dreams of the team, the company, and the community in which they are embedded.
One of the keys to good management is understanding that the most abundant, and most fickle resource of the community is passion. Passion is motivation, it’s the energy it takes to get things done. And everybody has passion for something. A manager’s job is to find the right people with the right passions, organize them in a way that directs their passion into group accomplishment.
Management is helping others become great.
In the book First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham points out that great managers are characterized by an appreciation of individual differences, individual performance hang-ups, and individual talents. They treat employees differently than one another, not because they are “playing favorites” but because they strive to give each employee what they need to succeed.
Management is not budget accounting, or status-log maintenance — it’s coaching, negotiation, organization, and motivation. I’ve been lucky to know some great managers: but many of them weren’t officially managers. They were just people on the team who “magically’ made the team better, and helped get things done.
Management isn’t about authority, it’s about serving the needs of the team in service of the goals of the organization.
By this definition many of the best managers I know are volunteers who understand that if they help people engage their passion in the service of a greater good they can make a lot more impact than they ever could by themselves. They care more about the goal than about status, and they are willing to let other people do the “fun stuff” and have their moment in the spotlight.
November 1st, 2006 by Mark Ramm
I know it’s popular for programmers to bash Managers, and MBAs. And I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon –especially since I’m also a manager.
But I know that the image of the pointy haired boss is pretty thoroughly ingrained in our culture, and popular mythology exists to explain a shared experience.
Clearly there are a lot of bad managers with MBA’s from prestigious institutions out there.
Henry Mintzberg does more to explain how this happened — and what we might be able to do about it — than anybody else I’ve read recently.
The central argument of Managers not MBAs is that Management as taught by MBA programs is a failure, because they:
- choose the wrong people,
- educate them in the wrong way
- and produce the wrong results.
In other words, the selection process and educational format of most MBA programs actively undermines the practice of good management. MBA’s are a self-selected group of people who “want to get ahead in business,” and the entire program teaches them to compete rather than cooperate.
The result is that graduates of MBA programs have a pretty dismal record at actually starting, expanding, or maintaining stable, productive, businesses.
Mintzberg doesn’t blame MBA holders — they were taught strategy, and accounting, and analysis, but never management.
In particular, MBA programs never taught them the meaning of good management, or the skills they would need to actually grow and manage teams of real people. They aren’t even pointed in the right direction, the structure of MBA programs reward the kind of people who like to compete. And years of “case study” exercises have made them into the kind of people who make snap decisions based on limited data.
MBA graduates generally aren’t the kind of people dedicated to helping other people achieve greatness.
Instead, they want to achieve greatness on their own — which can be a worthy goal. It’s just a terrible goal for a manager. Good managers are relentlessly focused on helping the people they work for perform at their best.
I don’t believe an MBA degree is just a liability.
The MBA’s I know have learned useful terminology, analytical skills, and the training they recieved in in economics, accounting, and business law can be a huge help in the right moment.
An MBA can prove to be an net asset to a manager, but only if you unlearn some skills they teach you (snap judgments, and me-first competitiveness) and make it a point to learn the “soft” skills that are infinitely more important.
The second half of Mintzberg’s book is his proposal for creating better educational institutions, which can identify the right candidates, train them with the right skills in the right way, and ultimately produce much better results than current MBA programs. The broad outline of that plan seems right. But most managers need something they can use to get better at their jobs right now, without spending a lot of money.
- Never stop learning from the people on your team – they are on the front lines learning every day, if you’re not working to learn from them, your loosing potentially critical information.
- Always believe that there is more to their job than making money. Greatness comes from productive passion, and greed doesn’t inspire passion or loyalty.
- Elevate the people who actually produce value — These people actually do the work, and they know infinitely more about the nature of that work than MBA trained managers, so they should be respected, valued, and included (or put in charge) of improvement processes.
Good managers care about people, not head-count, and they strive to make their job a meaningful contribution to a shared vision.
Hopefully I’ll have time to write more about good management tomorrow.