Conifer Consulting

Inviting you to Product Marketing & Management Roundtables

by Reena Kapoor

I invite you all to the Product Marketing & Product Management Roundtables for the BMA in Northern California.  I am going to be hosting these starting October 15th.  These are typically held as breakfast meetings in Palo Alto on the 3rd Thursday of every month.

Launching your Product: What to Avoid

by Reena Kapoor

I've worked with many clients to help bring new products (and services) to market and even when the offering has real value to offer and a strong, differentiable place to occupy in its universe, I find some common mistakes get in the way. Often a launch that can be great, is simply good or worse, mediocre.  Such an undesirable - and in many cases, undeserving - fate can be avoided. I offer here a check-list of some of the most common mistakes I've observed. These are based on my experience helping consumer-focused companies but they apply just as well to business-to-business (B2B) enterprises:

Finding a home for Product Management: Part 2

by Reena Kapoor

So it took me longer to get back to my blog than I thought  (I had to be out of the country at short notice). But I want to get back to reasons for why product management belongs in marketing - and not in engineering.  The first factor was of course around defining marketing properly (it's much more than marketing communications).  Another key reason is that product management needs to reflect the voice of the customer and market realities in the product requirements.  If product management is part of engineering then this imperative risks being lost. 

Finding a home for Product Management

by Reena Kapoor

Product Management is a key function in any company involved in innovation; and that includes all the tech companies I have the opportunity to advise.  And often I ask myself this question: where in the organizaion should this function reside? More often than not the choice posed is: Should product management report into Marketing or Engineering?

Consumer Product Management & Other Follies

by Reena Kapoor

I've worked in consumer product management in a few different industries — tech and non-tech — and want to talk about that I've observed about successful product management.  Even that terminology "tech vs. non-tech" in itself is telling.  I started my career nearly 18 years ago in the new product development function at Procter & Gamble (P&G). We defined requirements and developed the detergent formulas that would go into products like Tide, Cheer, etc. And while that was not a "hi tech" job, it was very driven by technology — AND consumer need.