Jacob's comments (member since May 04, 2009)

Jacob's comments from the American Society of Business Publication Editors group.

Book: Expert Product Management: Advanced Techniques, Tips and Strategies for Product Management and Product Marketing.

This book teaches both new and seasoned Product Managers and Product Marketers powerful and effective ways to ensure they give their products the best possible chance for success. Topics include:

* Creating compelling product roadmaps
* Running effective beta programs
* Planning and running high-impact product launches
* Getting phenomenal product reviews

Learn four of the most critical elements in ensuring product success, and take-away practical strategies, insights, tips and techniques that Brian has learned from hands-on experience defining, launching and marketing over fifty products during the last twenty years of his career.

Expert Product Management covers how to prioritize features and build product roadmaps, which is absolutely critical for getting your team and company on the same page and for delivering the right features in your product at the right time.

It also teaches how to run effective Beta programs, which oftentimes mean the difference between shipping a poor-quality product and shipping a product that you have a high degree of confidence in.

"The Home Run Hitter's Guide to Fundraising" synthesizes strategic planning with the power of human empathy to turn a potentially uncomfortable, unnatural presentation into an opportunity to develop and deepen an important business relationship. This is a step-by-step guide to help you take the understanding of your business and marry that with the needs of the venture capitalist. When you follow this process you will be able to have a conversation that can help you close the gap between you and the people with the capital you need.

While this program will help you select the ideas you should share and teach you how to share them, ultimately the greatest strength is to transform your thinking and behaving in the course of these critical meetings. The more you look at yourself as a facilitator -- someone who moves a meeting towards a desired result -- the greater your chances of success. This facilitation requires a kind of presence and sophistication that few inexperienced leaders have, so using the concepts in "The Home Run Hitter's Guide to Fundraising" can be a real differentiator for your leadership as well as your business.

Readers of this book will walk away with a much better idea how to be successful in their interactions with others via the computer. It will help people who are on teams separated geographically, as well as managers and executives. The book filled with high-tech nuggets of wisdom for programmers and IT professionals. But it also has practical rules that apply to anyone who works with others.

Many organizations and businesses mistakenly believe that if they provide the tools for community engagement and interaction, a community will form on its own and ultimately engage and interact. Nothing could be further from the truth. A study of more than 100 businesses with online communities found that 35% had less than 100 members and less than 25% had more than 1,000 members, a clear indication that the tools are not enough. Engagement is the holy grail of building successful online communities and connecting with customers online and here's your chance to learn from someone with experience. In "18 Rules of Community Engagement," Angela Connor shares how she helped her online community surpass 11,000 members in 18 short months.

This book is a definitive guide for those seeking to facilitate and grow online communities and develop social media strategies for themselves or their organizations. It is a playbook on exactly what it takes to be successful, with insights from community experts and practitioners.

After reading this book, you will have the knowledge needed to drive user engagement and bring people together online regardless of the age of your community or stage of its development. Can you afford not to read this book?

Every day has 1,440 minutes and they pass quickly regardless if you are salaried, self-employed or owning a business. Everyone who wants to achieve goals needs to carefully manage time. You can create a lot of extra time by increasing your efficiency. If you can save one minute 60 times a day you gain the extra hour every day required to make your dreams happen.

Every person is different - and so are the proposed time saving tips. The book includes about 300 practical time management tips and everybody should be able to find at least 50 tips that work in one's every day life. Tips that are easy to implement are marked as "quick wins". These quick wins help generating first successes and increase motivation to apply more time saving tips. In the ideal case you revisit the book from time to time searching for new tips that can be applied at home, at work or on the go. Over the time you will achieve more within a given time.

This book explains mass customization (also known as build to order, assemble to order, configure to order, make to order and engineer to order) from the standpoint of discrete manufacturers and reviews why mass customization must be viewed as an enterprise-wide business strategy, not merely a departmental initiative. Companies with highly-configurable products need to combine the technical superiority of their products with operational excellence. A manufacturer needs to be able to seamlessly connect the customer to the enterprise so the hand-offs from organization to organization are efficient and keep the process moving forward to a timely completion and delivery.

'Mass Customization' is for anyone whose company faces a constant, uphill challenge with respect to quoting, configuring, and producing high-configured products; any company that has made an investment in product configurator software and wants to understand why operational efficiencies and profits haven't improved, and anyone who would like to get a better understanding of what is required to implement mass customization as well as the power mass customization has to transform certain businesses and industries.