Product Chats Podcast

Should your prices change as your costs change? Pragmatic Marketing Instructor Mark Stiving shares the shocking truth about fixed costs and their relationship to pricing.

Discover solutions to the top challenges of creating efficient product roadmaps from Jim Semick, co-founder of ProductPlan, a cloud-based roadmap software for product and marketing teams. Jim shares tips and techniques for communicating an effective product strategy through your roadmap and the best way to plan and prioritize product features. He also discusses how to create a simple roadmap that can be easily changed and widely communicated across your organization, including how to make a convincing case to your executive team about the importance of specific roadmap features.

Pragmatic Marketing instructor and pricing expert, Mark Stiving interviews Reed Holden, the author of several pricing books and Pragmatic Marketer article, Make Salespeople the Champions of Your Pricing Strategy. Reed discusses how you can create a strategy to solve market problems by using services to differentiate your product and get the upper hand on your competition. Does your sales team have too much authority in offering discounts? Do they really know how valuable your product is and how it compares to the completion? Learn how to resolve these potential issues by giving your sales team the tools they need to be confident in the price you set, and let them drive profit over revenue.

For practical strategies on optimizing revenue, check out our Price training course.

We love feedback and answering questions! Send us a message to experts@pragmaticmarketing.com.

It’s important to bring facts to the table to understand the performance of your product and what’s happening in your market segment. In this short segment, Pragmatic Marketing instructor Jon Gatrell shares the three questions he always asks to effectively measure product success. He also discusses some common—and highly effective—measurements to optimize product performance.

Learn how to sift through a mountain of data to discover metrics that are meaningful to your business in the latest issue of Pragmatic Marketer. 

Once again, we welcome back Johnathan Lucky to answer even more follow-up questions from viewers of our very popular webinar Falling in Love with Your Personas.

If you haven’t listened to Part I of this podcast, click here.

Read Johnathan’s article, Personas: The Journey, featured in Pragmatic Marketer.

In this week's podcast, we welcome back product management and marketing professional Johnathan Lucky to answer questions from viewers of February's outstanding webinar Falling in Love with Your Personas. For even more insight on understanding and using personas, watch for Part II on 4/14.  

Join Pragmatic Marketing instructor Dave Daniels for the final episode in his four-part series about creating a simple, 30-day plan to improve product launches. In this episode, Dave discusses six points to consider when evaluating market segments, and how to identify the best one for your organization. He also shares ways to use internal and external resources to execute your launch plans quickly while continuing to optimize revenue. Listen Now!

Check out the rest of the series:
The 30 Day Launch Plan Part 1
The 30 Day Launch Plan Part 2
The 30 Day Launch Plan Part 3
The 30 Day Launch Plan Part 4

See more information about our Launch training course and other Pragmatic Marketing courses here. 

Register for a MySBI account to get the latest on business news and thought leadership here.

Pragmatic Marketing Instructor Mark Stiving addresses one of his favorite frequently asked questions. Charging different prices to different customers can help you maximize profits, but how can you do it effectively?

Experience is important to consider in job offers and promotions, but some personality traits may be even more compelling. Join Pragmatic Marketing instructors Paul Young and Mark Stiving as they analyze the seven traits of rock stars at work. Paul goes beyond the premise of his Pragmatic Marketer article "The X Factors" to offer additional insight on how to be more effective in product management and marketing.

Learn how to align your departments’ activities with initiatives that support an effective cooperate strategy. Pragmatic Marketing instructor, Steve Gaylor will help you discover the key elements for building corporate strategies, and how to get your entire team to focus on objectives in alignment with that strategy.

It can be challenging to create and manage an advisory board. In this podcast, Eyal Danon, founder and president of Ignite Advisory Group, shares tips for building an effective advisory board and identifies mistakes to avoid when hosting an advisory meeting. He also shares logistical details like the optimum number of members and who they should be. And he discusses the importance of limiting discussion topics to ensure that you have enough time to focus on key initiatives.

It's a pretty well-known fact: People would rather get something for free than pay money for it. Pragmatic Marketing Instructor Mark Stiving takes a look at pricing models that allow you to differentiate from your competitor's freebies.

Are you marketing with a purpose or simply practicing random acts of marketing? If you don’t have your personas, positioning and purpose clearly defined it’s most likely the latter. Join Pragmatic Marketing instructors Mark Stiving and Jon Gatrell as they discuss how these three P’s represent some of the most important parts of marketing. Then listen in as they dig deeper into personas: how buyer and user personas differ, and what you can do to jump start your persona creation efforts.

Join Pragmatic Marketing instructor Steve Gaylor as he speaks about how to utilize a gap analysis tool to achieve alignment throughout your organization and prioritize activities within your company to get everyone working toward the same goals.

Pricing is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. Sometimes you raise your prices. On this episode of Pragmatic Live, Pragmatic Marketing Instructor Mark Stiving examines how you can do so without hurting current customer relationships.

Uncovering market problems is a strategic activity. But what tactical efforts need to be made in order to become market-driven? Pragmatic Marketing instructor Steve Gaylor gives us guidance on how to start down the strategic path in this Pragmatic Live podcast.

When you equip your sales team and other departments with a complete understanding of who you have built something for, why they would want it, and the pain points that you’ll solve for that audience, it’s easier to connect with buyers and demonstrate that your solution is the right one. That’s the power of product positioning. In this podcast, Pragmatic Marketing instructor Rich Nutinsky explains the power of product positioning and why it should be done before gaining executive approval for a product or feature. He also explains why product positioning should be treated as an internal deliverable that everyone in product management and product marketing is capable of doing. Plus, he shares how one senior executive used positioning messages—instead of leading with features and functions—to achieve the most successful product launch in his company’s history.

When John Wilson became executive general manager of market and product development at Veda in 2010, he was concerned about the Australia-based data intelligence company's inconsistent approach to product management. As a Pragmatic Marketing alumnus, he also knew the company should spend more time in the market-rather than waiting for customers to come forward with ideas and needs. 

He brought Pragmatic Marketing in to help Veda become more consistent across departments and more market-driven. As Pragmatic Marketing instructor John Milburn explains: "Veda decided to internalize and apply the Pragmatic Marketing approach. They began with the training, then analyzed their roles and gaps and built measurable action plans at all levels of the organization."

The product management at Ariba, an SAP company, has come a long way. In 2008, it was what Joe Fox, now vice president of marketing and strategy at Ariba, called a "tribal organization." The differing methodologies and approaches of the product managers meant the company struggled with silos.

Fox brought in Pragmatic Marketing to teach his company to become more market focused. Within a short time, the team's focus went from what it got to build or what its architecture was to "trying to win in the market."

Find out about how the team's efforts—including implementing market-requirements documents, an "adopt-a-box" program and an annual life cycle plan—turned it into what Fox now calls a "world-class product organization.