Monthly Archives: May 2013

Product Management as CEO Training

What is a Great Product Manager ?

You have to be good at…

• Road mapping
• Prioritizing feature list (and Prioritizing decisions)
• Use of Engineering mandates wisely, since you have very few shots
• Calibrate your predictive skills and metric abilities
• Talk in different languages when talking to engineers, business people
• A good sense in understanding of the customer
• Understanding all of the features
• Understanding revenues & Profit & Loss(P&L key metric in PM performance)
• Understanding ALL the pieces

If you can be a product manager, you can acquire the experience of acting as a CEO. The skills gained in product roadmapping, prioritizing tasks, interoffice communications, customer understanding, and product marketing are absolute necessities for being an effective enterprise lead.

Being a product manager is a demanding and high profile job. Individuals should make sure they’re up to the challenge. Here’s why product management as CEO training makes sense:

Marrisa-Mayer
Marrisa Mayer is Engineer turned Product Manager turned CEO

Good Product Managers

  • Good product managers are extremely detail focused throughout the full product development lifecycle. You should be able to identify and resolve inconsistencies in features/applications you are defining and participate in the entire development process. Leading a quality product to release may require hundreds and hundreds of minor adjustments, clarification and decisions to get to that highly polished state of a truly great user experience.
  • Good product managers command strong leadership of the build & release & feedback & iterate process. Putting a qualitative and quantitative feedback system in place that actively monitors all systems and uses signals to inform future decision, and is adaptable and willing to quickly change thinking & approach when data indicates the reality is contrary to a hypothesis.

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Social Gaming DAU/MAU ~ Measures your Game Design

Social Gaming Ghost Town ~ How engaged are your players?

When building a social game you need to make sure your DAU/MAU metrics measure up if you want a successful or sustainable game. You get it wrong and you will have to put a screen of death up, saying that your game has been removed. DAU/MAU needs to be correct before… heavily investing into marketing.

DAU = Daily Active Users MAU = Monthly Active Users DAU/MAU = Engagement

  • DAU/MAU measures the people that come to your application everyday. If your DAU/MAU is .2 (or 20%) then 20% of your total users are coming to your application everyday.
  • DAU/MAU is a great measure of game design quality. It shows how engaging your game is or how addicting. The more often a player return to your game the more likely they are to spend.
  • Try to achieve 20%+ is a good rule of thumb for a sustainable free social game. 20%+ shows strong user retention and monetization. Getting 20%+ is easier said then done though. The top games get 15% to 30%.
  • Your game being fun is not good enough. The application market is saturated. There are 100+ fun games. If I played your game yesterday. There should be specific reasons that I feel obligated to play your game today and tomorrow.
  • Create your social game so players want to visit your game everyday. The quality or virality needs to made into the game design start from 1 day. Game design should be high quality. You should ask yourself “why will people come back to this game everyday?” in the very early stages of application development.

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Kixeye’s Recruiting PR Video

Facebook app developer Kixeye has created one of the most creative and funniest recruitment videos (at least in the social gaming) … called “The Interview”

4 games companies are compared and Kixeye tries to show why they are the best. There is alot of Easter eggs so you might need to watch this video a few times.
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