Search Result

Shaun Russell Rocks SaaS Product Management Like It’s 1999

Shaun Russell Goes Future to the Back A few weeks ago  I received a mailing from, I think, the BPMA (Boston Product Management Association) whose main headline was a link to a video entitled Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Product Manager given by a nice looking fellow of the name Shaun Russell, who, judging by his accent, is of British extraction and is currently a PM at an online website called the Outfittery. The website’s SaaS business model is based around consulting with an online stylist who periodically sends you clothing they’ve picked out for you best on

Read More »

A SaaS Planning and Transition Tool For SaaS Companies

If you’re a SaaS company, you’re probably a major consumer of SaaS technology. Today’s cloud companies have access to a wide variety of tools and systems, including Email, SEO, marketing automation, project managers, social networking tools, sales contact management and on and on. It’s all available and in just about every case, SaaS systems offer flexibility and 24/7 connectivity that makes their usage not only useful, but just about mandatory. The Age of Corporate Servers and Desktops is drawing to a rapid end (at least until some major catastrophe shuts the web down for an extended period. Then we may

Read More »

Business After Windows: Why the Microsoft Desktop OS Model is Irretrievably Broken and What the Future Holds, Part II of II

by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman, Softletter Managing Editor In Part One of this article, we took a look at the impending demise of the desktop monolith as epitomized by Microsoft and the problems it’s had with the industry’s most successful product of all time, Windows. In the interval, it’s easy to see that Microsoft itself understands that the current Windows model is in trouble. A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced “Universal Windows,” a write once, run on all device strategy. Windows for smartphones is now free to developers. Office is now available on the iPad. A few days ago,

Read More »

Silly Agility: The Myth of the Saas Agile Product Manager, Part I of II

by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman We’ve been seeing a great deal of industry press these days discussing “the Agile Product Manager.” There are a plethora of new books, new training courses, and new “tools” that are supposed to transform yesterday’s slow and sluggish product manager into a new sort of sleek, streamlined being, something akin to Tony Stark in an Iron Man suit streaking through the sky on a mission to save the software industry from the Sloth Monster and pull trapped revenues and profits from the Slough of Despondency. Unfortunately for all involved, these articles, training courses, and tools

Read More »