Last week my “Meet Grace” presentation on SlideShare was narrated and turned into a YouTube video.  This YouTube video presentation is an example of how one can leverage social media and video for outbound marketing purposes.  

Ian Griffin, a professional speechwriter, generously converted the slides for me and posted it on YouTube.  My tags and description were added to help increase traffic to the video and my website.

To further leverage social media, I updated my LinkedIn status, ...
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If you need to put together a presentation to pitch ideas for a new product, whether it is for executive management or for an interview (as it was in my case), check out this post.

This blog post is related to a previous post—Next-Generation Conference Room Phone Design Ideas—where I talked about a presentation that I had put together for a job interview.  This post will review what I did in building and pitching of the presentation.

In building presentations for pitching ideas, keep in m...
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Recently I interviewed for a product management position and was asked to put together a presentation on next-generation product design ideas for audio conference room phones. Since my presentation was market problem and user experience oriented, I thought I’d share my presentation with you. In a separate blog post, I will review what I did to build and pitch the presentation.

To keep the company anonymous, I’m going to call it Company X. However, before I go into the design ideas, let m...
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Update your marketing and selling approaches by starting with pain.  Focus on what pain you solve for your customers / prospects.  People buy solutions to their pain, not features and benefits.  Pain is the only thing they identify with.  Lead with the pain and use products, features, and benefits as proof points to the solution.

Start with positioning the pain.  Traditional marketing teaches positioning as describing your product / service in terms of benefits, target customer segment, and k...
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It is an honor to be considered as someone who exemplifies the role of product management.  I want to thank Pragmatic Marketing for including me on their home page.  My picture is cycled with those of other product management, product marketing and executive leaders whose philosophy aligns with Pragmatic Marketing and who illustrate the best of the role.

I especially appreciate the fact that Pragmatic Marketing links to this blog on their Product Management Solutions page.

Thanks, Pragmatic Mar...
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Listed are some take away messages from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 that I thought would be important for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers.  I went to many of the sessions and also interviewed several of the exhibitors local to Silicon Valley.  This post will provide insight into trends, business challenges to address, and areas to innovate.

General Messages

• Be more agile – massive networking drives increase in dynamics and complexity
• Feedback loops rule �...

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We all need to anticipate for change whether we have a job or are in between jobs.  Change is stressful but it is how you deal with change that can bring you success.  To survive and succeed you must sense change, make sense of change, and respond to change.

Product managers and product marketing managers have an advantage when it comes to managing change.  For the products you manage, you are already (or should be already) monitoring the market for trends, updating your product offerings to k...
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I haven't found any simple yet comprehensive descriptions of Product Management for high-tech, so I created a two-page Product Management White Paper.  The link to this document has also been added to my Links & Resources page.

This White Paper on Product Management actually started as a blog but it just became too difficult to read.  There are so many dimensions of Product Management and it was easier to layout the information in a white paper.

I hope you find this document useful.  For other ...
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Product Management is a critical function during tough economic times.  Many organizations when they start staffing unfortunately don’t bring in product management until marketing communications is already in place.  When organizations build their teams, the first marketing person they should hire is one with a solid product management background.  Start with product management and add product marketing and marketing communications later.  

This blog was inspired by Rocket Watcher’s blog p...
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If you’re a product manager starting to add user-centered design processes to product development to create more user-friendly products, consider how the product creation team will look like.

First of all, congratulations in recognizing that the revenue stream will continue as long as the customer experience is agreeable.  Just having this bit of knowledge will help you get closer to user-friendly products.  If you still don’t see why usability is important, read my post called “Poor Exp...
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This website was nominated as one of the finalists in the personal website category of the Best of SynthaSite contest.  Although this site was not selected as the final winner, making the final five was a great honor—there were over 1,000 entries submitted into the competition.  I am very grateful for all the support and votes this site has received. 

I want to thank SynthaSite for providing me a great tool to build my website for free without the worry of ads and giving me the opportunity ...
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I am thrilled to say that this site, http://gracehm.com, has been selected as a finalist in the 2008 Best of SynthaSite contest!  It was completely unexpected because my site, built using SynthaSite, is still in its infancy.  In fact, I even forgot that I entered into the contest.

Today I decided to check on my site's traffic (with Google Analytics).  To my amazement, the number of hits had gone through the roof.  When I checked the traffic source, I saw that most were coming from bestof.synth...
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Many engineers have come to me asking for advice on how to get into marketing.  I first find out why they want to make the switch to the "Dark Side" and their expectations of the position.  If these engineers still want to transition into product management after I've provided them the gory details of what the role entails, my advice is for them to build their marketing skills and experience.

One option is to find positions, like technical marketing, that will allow engineers to build their ...

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Wenger Giant Knife

The picture above is a Swiss Army knife gone wrong.  This is what happens when there is failure to focus on specific markets and usability.

In Silicon Valley, many organizations are engineering driven.  Technology is king.

First of all, to assume that a technology product meets customer requirements for all market segments is delusional.  Providing 90% of the solution for specific markets is much more effective than providing 10% of the solution for 90% of the available...

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Just the other day a serial entrepreneur, who had a few failed businesses, told me that he painfully learned that marketing is needed way before product development.  Like many others, he unfortunately waited to bring on marketers because he thought there was no reason to promote a product that wasn’t been built yet.

Marketing is mostly portrayed and perceived as an outbound “marketing communications” function—promotions, PR, advertising, event management, etc.  However, for compan...

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