There are tremendous amount of hype in the online advertising network industry. But, I’m going to make a controversial statement today: most ad networks are ad agency in disguise. They’re essentially ad agency for the digital world.

Two groups of people have the power leverage in online advertising network companies: ad sales, and ad operations.

Online advertising is a transaction based business. Ad sales continue to sell campaigns to bring money to the company.

Ad operations run the campaigns. They do the dirty work to fulfill ad sales’ promise to clients. And the truth is: most of the work done by ad operation are manual work. There are some technologies, but most of the work are done by ad operation professionals.

As ad networks need to scale their business, they cannot afford to do everything manually. So, the software development teams become an IT support team to automate processes and create tools for ad operation team.

Now, it comes the brave product managers. They want to listen to the market, create product requirement documents, prioritize requests, and work with development to launch the product.

But, where is the “product”? While the product managers are arguing with everyone in the company and fighting for his cause, the sales guy just sold a campaign. To run the campaign, the ad operation person needed a customized tool from development. He would bypass the product manager, and told developer what he needed. He got the tool from the developer, and he made the client happy. The sales guy was happy. The CEO was happy because the company just made more money.

The product manager is left sitting there and arguing: “we need to be more strategic. We need a road map. We need to be more methodical in prioritizing.”

Nobody listened to him. Most ad network companies are not your typical technology product or SaaS company. They are largely service business. The senior management are most likely coming from media or ad sales background. They don’t understand the role of product management. They probably don’t give a damn about the role of product management.

I feel your pain, my fellow product managers who work in online advertising network. Don’t blame yourself — there are structural reasons that make your job really hard.

Related posts

• Is product management being marginalized in your organization?
• Know enough technically to be dangerous
• Is product management a good career entry point for new college graduate?
• GeekMBA360.com Publishes How To Become A Product Manager

• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition

Let me tell you: there are a lot of similarities between the stroller world and the car market.

The low-end of stroller market is like Honda Civics: reliable, sturdy, and plain. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against Honda Civics. In fact, it’s one of my favorite cars.)

The high-end of stroller market is like Mercedes: good looking, powerful, and luxury. Just check out the $979 Bugaboo Cameleon Stroller.

Then, there is the SUV equivalent of the stroller world for active parents — Bob Ironman Sports Utility Stroller. I can tell you from experience that it’s a great stroller for both parents and kids. I have talked to quite a few parents about their Bob Strollers. Everyone loved it.

What’s really interesting about Bob Stroller is that almost everyone parent I talked to purchased additional add-ons/accessories to the stroller.

Here are some examples of the add-ons:

• Car Seat adopter that allows parents to attach car seats from other manufacturers to the Bob Stroller.
• Handlebar console that holds water bottles, keys, cell phones, etc.
• Weather shield that protects kids from the rains.
• Warm and Fuzzy fleece panel and padded quilting that keeps kids warm.

These add-ons are not cheap. And the list of add-ons are expanding.

One could argue that the add-ons is a rip-off. They should be included as part of the stroller.

But, the bare bone Bob Stroller is such as a high quality product that many happy customers are willing to make the extra purchase.

The Bob Stroller is the platform.  It’s also designed in such a way that manufacturers could add many new features on top of the platform.

I thought it’s a brilliant strategy.

We often talk about platform strategy in the software world (e.g. Microsoft Windows 7, Mac OS, Linux, etc.) But, it’s not a concept that is limited to the software industry.

Regardless of which industry you’re in, you should think about a platform strategy: build a high-quality core set of functionality that customers are willing to pay, but also has the flexibility to add bells and whistles to generate incremental sales.

Why did I write this report? Because over the years I have met many people who were struggling to make a career transition to product management.

It shouldn’t be that hard.

This report tells you the good, bad, and ugly sides of product management. It provides detailed case studies and the New Product Manager action plan ,a step-by-step framework that helps folks to become a product manager.

More information on How to Become a Product Manager:

Who is this premium report for?

• You’re an engineer who is tired of technical work. You want to leverage your technical skills to make a career transition to product management.
• You’re currently an MBA student. You want to get into product management.
• You’re a college senior or recent college graduate. You have heard that some companies hire product managers directly out of undergraduate programs. You want to find out how you can become a product manager with little or no work experience.
• You work in customer support, but you feel that customer support is a dead-end job. You want to leverage your understanding of customer problems to move into product management.
• You work in sales or sales engineering, but you’re tired of frequent business travel and constant pressure of meeting sales quota. You want to leverage your rich customer facing experience and product knowledge to become a product manager.
• You’re a technical consultant. You’re tired of moving from company to company to implement projects. You want to make a transition to product management.
• Anyone else who wants to become a product manager.

What does this report offer?

• What exactly is product management? This might sound like an easy and simple question. But, when I talk to folks who’re interested in becoming a product manager, very few actually know what they’re getting themselves into.
• What are the downside of product management career?

• Why are there still a lot of people who want to break into product management, given the negative aspects of product management career?

• What are the characteristics of good product managers?
• What kind of training would increase your chance to become a product manager?
• Should you get an MBA to make the transition to product management?
• What companies are good training ground for new product managers?
• Six case studies 
  1. William: From technical consultant at Accenture to product manager at Oracle
  2. Raj: From Java developer to product manager at an e-commerce giant
  3. Mary: From Competitive Analyst  to product manager at an internet start-up — Jennifer
  4. Brandon: From Supply Chain consultant to Product Management at a supply chain start-up — Manoj
  5. Mike: From Entrepreneur to Product Manager
  6. Matt: From college graduate to Associate Product Manager at Google
• The New Product Manager ^TM action plan to launch your product manager career

Buy How to Become a Product Manager at Scribd digital book store now!

Case #1: The company is run by sales people. It’s extremely deal driven. The company is doing well. Closing deals. Sales people are becoming more powerful as a result of their stellar performance. Instead of talking to product management about individual customer requests, sales people are going directly to engineers to customize the product so that they can close the deal. The deal driven focus is driving product management crazy.

Case #2: The VP of engineering just left a start-up company. Another senior technical manager really wants to get the VP of Engineering job. He wants to shine and prove to the company that he can run the engineering organization. Instead of working with product management, he is directly talking to sales to gather requirements, and get his engineers to ship products. He wants to show that he is a doer who gets things done. Product managers couldn’t stop him because he has access to the development resources.

Case #3: In a Fortune 500 enterprise software company, the software QA team did a very poor job to test the product. Product Managers are asked by the VP of product management to fill in and test the product thoroughly. The VP of Product Management didn’t understand the there was a problem with the QA team. And she didn’t listen. As a result, Product Manager is spending a significant amount of their time on testing the product, while the development team is writing their own requirements.

In all three cases, product managers are not doing what they’re supposed to. They recognize the problems. But, because of corporate politics, they’re having a hard time to do the right thing.

According to Pragmatic Marketing, the #1 Pragmatic Marketing rule is “if product management doesn’t do its job, the other departments will fill the void.”

What would you do to address the problems?

Related posts:

• Yahoo Mail is a great example of bad product management
• Is product management a good career entry point for new college graduate?
• Is Amazon Kindle Publishing For Blogs Beta Program a good deal for bloggers?
• Too many managers, too few leaders
• GeekMBA360.com publishes How to get a job at amazon.com: A definitive Guide

Excellent resources:

• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
• The Product Manager’s Desk Reference
• Software Product Management Essentials
• The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator

By the way, I’m not alone on this – Henry Blodget had also written “Deal Carol Bartz: You Need to Fix Yahoo Mail.” I agree with most of Henry’s points. Additionally, I would like to tell you a few of my own pain points of using Yahoo Mail.

I have been using Yahoo Mail since 1995. If I’m not mistaken, I was one of the "early adopter" of Yahoo Mail. I remembered I read an article on the San Francisco Chronicle, talking about two graduate students from Stanford University created an online directory, and had recently got funding. I checked out their site, and immediately became a regular user of the site.

Over the years Yahoo! has a lot of up-and-downs. But, I have remained a loyal user of Yahoo email. Lately, I have to admit that I’m thinking about closing my Yahoo Mail account and moving everything to Gmail.

Let me tell you why.

1. I have my spam filter turned on, but the amount of spam emails fall into my Inbox has been increasing exponentially. I don’t know what kind of spam detection technology Yahoo uses, but it definitely doesn’t work. 
2. Sometime I’ll receive 20+ spam emails on my Inbox from the same spammer. I would select these emails and mark them "spam". But, if the same spammer sends me an email in 2 hours, the spam email will still show up in my Inbox. Marking an email address as spam doesn’t prevent email from the same address showing up again in my Inbox.
3. The ironic thing is that in my "bulk email" folder that stores the spam emails, there are a good number of "false positives". I have to check my bulk email folder every few days to make sure I didn’t miss any valid emails. Furthermore, I cannot bulk-select multiple "false positive" emails and mark them as "no a spam". I have to open each "false positive" email, and then mark it "not a spam" individually. 
4. When I mark a "false positive" email as "not a spam", the particular email will go to my Inbox. But, if I get another email from the same sender in a few hours, it’s more often than not that the email will end up in my spam folder again although I’ve marked it as "not a spam".
5. Auto email forwarding and POP email support are pretty standard email features. Yahoo! made both features as "premium features" with a fee around 2002. I could do both on Gmail for free. Making email forwarding and POP Support premium features made it  harder for regular Yahoo! mail users to switch (i.e.  there wasn’t an easy way for you to move all of your emails off Yahoo! without paying a fee).  However, it’s becoming much easier and less risky for me to make a switch now — I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, IM, etc. It’s virtually impossible for me to lose touch with someone. Even if I miss a few emails, the person could still get hold of me via other social media channels.

So, it was quite annoying when I got messages from Yahoo! asking me to switch from the "classic" Yahoo! mail to their new interface. I tried the new UI once — it had an user interface that is very similar to Microsoft Outlook. But, Outlook is a desktop application while Yahoo! Mail is a web application. Maybe it’s just me, the Outlook-like UI looked really cluttered to me. More importantly, it didn’t address any of my pain points!

Lately Yahoo! has been aggressively promoting the "All New Yahoo! Mail " — these are "nice to have features". Some of them are responses to competitive pressure. But, are these features "pain killer" or "vitamin"?

Spam emails and lack of email forwarding and POP download are causing users like myself a lot of inconveniences and a drop in productivity — a good product manager will focus on solving the real problem and address the pain points now.

Yahoo! Mail Product Management — It’s time for you to wake up, and go to work!

Related posts:

• Are you doing "usability design" or "market research" in your head?
• New Balance store associate recommends me to buy shoes at Zappos.com
• Mediocrity at Barnes & Nobles and why Amazon.com is winning
• Is Cafe in the coffee business?
• It’s a lie: the owner went to Hawaii

Excellent resources:

• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web (VOICES)
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

I was looking to buy a pair of New Balance running shoes last weekend. We went to the New Balance store in the local mall.

The sales associate in the store was very patient and helpful. I finally decided on a particular model. But, they didn’t have the color I wanted.

So, I asked. "Do you have gray color for this model?"

"We don’t have it in the store, but I know we make gray color ones. You can order online".

"Oh, cool. So,  I just go to NewBalance.com?"

"Yeah. That’ll work. But, actually, Zappos will be better. They’re really good, and really fast. You’ll get the shoes the next day, and you return for free. Highly recommended. "

Wow! As you might know, Zappos has a very dominant position in the online shoes retail market — it’s the "amazon.com" for buying shoes online. But, this is flattery at the highest form — when your competitor/suppliers are pointing their customers your way, you’re doing something right.

New Balance is a supplier of Zappos. So, I’m not sure how the economic works here — will New Balance make more money from sales on their own online store comparing to sales via Zappos? I’m not sure. But, still, it’s very impressive for zappos to establish such respect and positive word-of-mouth.

Interesting enough, the current issue of Inc Magazine runs a great article on Zappos — The Zappos Way of Managing . Check it out.

Related posts:

• Only one waiter takes orders at a very popular restaurant
• Is starting a company in Silicon Valley stupid?
• The Hot Dog Guy
• Is Cafe in the coffee business?

Recommended reading:

• Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
• The Cult of the Customer: Create an Amazing Customer Experience That Turns Satisfied Customers Into Customer Evangelists
• The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

A year later, he called me. He had received multiple job offers. Most of them were software developer positions. But, he also got a job offer from Google for "Associate Product Manager" rotational program. The key selling point for the program was that the college graduates would work under Melissa Mayer, the celebrity Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google.

Google is a great employer and Ms. Mayer is a very capable executive. But, I have to say that I don’t like the idea to train new college graduates to become product managers.

To be an effective product manager, I believe there are five essential ingredients:

1. You need to have excellent political skill — entry-level product managers don’t manage anyone, but you’re responsible for a lot of things. You have to be able to lead by influencing, not by manager-subordinate relationship.
2. You need to have deep domain knowledge in order to set the right direction and requirements for the product you manage
3. You need to have the ability to think on your feet and make a lot of important judgment calls with regard to strategy, prioritization, positioning, etc.
4. You need to be able to communicate effectively to both internal and external audiences at the level they feel comfortable.
5. If you manage a technical product, you need to be comfortable with technology

Let’s examine a new college graduate’s skill set according to above five criteria.

Most college graduates are very inexperienced in dealing with office politics. There are exceptions. For examples, I have noticed that students who were heavily involved in student government in college tend to be more adept at handling politics. But, as a whole, new college graduates need a year or two (or even longer) to become better at handling work-place politics. Unfortunately, product management tend to be one of the most political jobs in a company because it’s cross-functional by nature, and you’ll be dealing with a lot of people with conflicted interests.

Domain knowledge is also very important. Let’s say you manage a product that servers call centers representatives. If you never worked in a call center or worked on related product, how do you know what features/enhancements should be added to the product? How do you know customers’ needs and pain points? Unfortunately, most new college graduates lack the domain knowledge.

I have no doubt that a lot of the new graduates can make decisions on their feet. However, as a product manager, the decision you make requires experience — e.g. which feature should be ranked higher? Which feature should be triaged? Should you roll back a new feature due to a limited system outage? How should the company react to a difficult customer’s unreasonable request? It helps if you have accumulated experiences in one or several areas in the company before you move to product management. Your experience will help you make better, more informed decision.

I’m a little bit less concerned about the last two criteria (i.e. communication skills and technical skills), because I do think some new college graduates are pretty good at these two areas.

But, overall, I think that most college graduates are better off by working in one or several functional areas in the company before transitioning to product management — e.g. sales, sales engineer, post-sales consultant, research & development, support, etc. are all good starting point for your first job after college.

Of course, there is always exception — some kids are so bright and capable that they can become a product manager in no time. But, I think for most people, you’ll be a better product manager if you spend your time to hone your skills in each of the areas above before you move into product management.

Related posts:

• Career transition from software developer to product manager
• 8 Things you should do if you feel stuck in your career
• Flow, career satisfaction and happiness
• "My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents" — do you need a break from career management?
• Are there diamonds in your backyard?

Excellent resources:

• Software Product Management Essentials
• The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

The business model is simple: if you have a blog with RSS feed, you can sign up for the program and make it available to Kindle readers. Amazon will charge a monthly subscription fees to Kindle readers for each blog. Amazon splits the revenue 70/30 with bloggers. Amazon determines the subscription price for each blog based on market demand. Currently, most blogs have monthly subscription rate of $1.99.

Is this a good deal for bloggers? Should you sign up for this program?

Let’s break this down into two use cases: you have an existing blogs, or you will start a new blog exclusively for Kindle.

Use case #1: you have an existing blog

Amazon Kindle currently has 1 million users. Although Kindle has very impressive growth rate, 1 million users is still a very small number comparing to blogsphere. Furthermore, I think most Kindle users will not pay for $1.99/month just to read a blog while the free version of the blog is readily available.

From a monetization standpoint, bloggers with existing blogs make little money.

However, there is one big advantage: this could be a great marketing tool for your blog. Through this program, you’ll make your blog visible to 1 million Kindle users. If they like your blog, they probably will visit your blog via their computers.

In summary, my recommendation is that you should still sign up for this program and use it as a marketing tool to attract more users to your blog, but don’t bet on it as a monetization tool.

Use case #2: start a blog exclusively for Kindle

The key assumption for this use case is that you can create such compelling blog content that you’ll attract a significant number of Kindle users to subscribe to your blog (since your blog is exclusive for Kindle and is not freely available.)

I think this might work, but you better have something really unique and compelling to say. And your blog is in a niche market that have large enough audience within the Kindle user community.

Let’s say that you can attract 5% of the overall Kindle user base, which is 50,000. The total monthly revenue from your blog would be $100,000. Amazon will get $70,000 while you get $30,000. You get paid at a rate of $0.6/user.

Is this a good revenue for your blog? Well, how much revenue do you think a regular blog with similar number of unique users (not on Kindle) will make? Johnchow.com had about 200,000+ unique users and it made about $40,000 a month (based on the most recent income numbers John Chow reported on his blog, which was several months ago.) And he monetized a hack out of his blog. He gets about $0.2/unique user. In fact, I think the actual rev/user number is lower since Johnchow.com also have a lot of RSS subscribers in addition to the 200,000+ unique users.

So, I would say that if you can convince enough Kindle users to subscribe to your Kindle-only blog, you could make good money.

Summary:

1. If you have an existing blog, sign up for this program and use it as a promotion tool
2. If you think you can create a Kindle-only blog that attract thousands of Kindle users to pay $1.99 a month to subscribe, you should give it shot. You might end up making good money, more than the income you’d have earned from ad/affiliate support revenue stream.

When she runs into product managers, developers, and operational folks in the company, she always asks: "what have you done today for help my team?".

When someone asked why one of her accounts is generating $50,000 while costs the company $200,000 to support, her response is "Stop it. Nobody can suggest shutting down the account except me. Don’t even go there."

On a given day, Account Manager A complained to her that it takes him 2 hours to manually produce a monthly report. He needs a developer to automate the task. Account Manager B complained to her that his account asked for a new feature, but it was prioritized low in the product queue. Account Manager C complained that he needed developer to fix a small problem.

Rose didn’t think critically — she basically went to the product managers and VP of development– yelled at them and said that all of them must be done. She then went to the President of the company and escalate.

The Product Manager, VP of Development, and software developers are stressed, frustrated, and angry — there are a million things that needs to be done. But, there are also more strategically important stuff that needs to be done. Some of Rose’s requests are so trivial that it simply doesn’t justify to allocate any resource.

But, Rose doesn’t listen, and she doesn’t think critically. In fact, she has virtually zero understanding of the system her team is supporting. She thinks her job is to manage and remove every complaints/barriers her team members have raised.

This is just one example. I’ve seen this happen too often in almost every company.

We need more leaders. We need fewer micro-managing, incompetent, bullying managers.

A leader inspires ordinary people and achieves extraordinary results.

Related Posts:

• Fooled by Randomness, Start-up  and serial entrepreneur
• What if you have fix 17-year old Kobe Bryants on your team (And why you should never hire someone directly from McKinsey to Run your business.)
• Duke Blue Devil Jersey Number Three

Recommended reading:

• Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
• On Becoming a Leader
• On Becoming a Leader
• The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results

I’d like to offer a few quick thoughts:

1. This is a brilliant strategic move by Larry Ellison, a master of acquiring enterprise technology companies.
2. Oracle’s bread-and-butter is database. Its single biggest threat is the open source MySql database. With the acquisition, Oracle essentially removed its single biggest competitive threat to its database business.
3. Now Oracle will have control over the entire technology stack from hardware server, to storage technology (e.g. via Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek a while ago), to database, to middle ware technology such as JAVA, to business applications (e.g. via  acquisition of PeopleSoft and Siebel.) They’ll be a very formidable competitor to Microsoft, IBM, and HP.
4. There will be massive layoffs – take a look at Oracle’s acquisition records (e.g. PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc.) – they’re not shy to consolidate redundant operations and lay people off. Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate has jumped to 11%, and this acquisition will further worsen the unemployment rate in the bay area.
5. Oracle’s enterprise sale machine will do a much better job to sell Sun’s software products. For years, Sun has been trying to get into the software business, and had limited success. Oracle is known for its aggressive sales force. I think Oracle will do a much better job to sell Sun’s software products.
6. I’m not sure how Sun’s hardware business will do in the future – Oracle’s core competency is in software. It’d be interesting to see how they manage hardware business.
7. What’s the future of MySql? Should Oracle spins it off and take it public? It seems strange to me that Oracle will keep MySql under the wrap and manage it as part of their database businesses. It might make sense to keep it separate, and grow it as a low-end alternative to Oracle databases.

Books on Larry Ellison and Oracle:

• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle
• Difference Between God And Larry Ellison*, The *god Doesn’t Think He’s Larry E: *god Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison / Inside Oracle Corporation
• Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison
• Larry Ellison, Sheer Nerve