The Cranky Product Manager has been neglectful of this here blog, once again. Good thing she’s not being paid to do it or anything, or else she’d be so totally fired.
Anyway, to break through the Huge Writer’s Block that has been in her way for the last 7 weeks or so, the Cranky PM is taking on a Big Ass Writing Challenge! To write an entire blog post in a mere 5 minutes! She’s calling it — wait for it — POWER POSTING! (you can tell she’s in software marketing because she thinks her completely boring, uncreative title is totally wicked awesome).
So here we go. And just a warning, it probably won’t be funny because the Cranky PM ain’t no Chris Rock — she usually thinks of her jokes about an hour too late.
THINGS THE CRANKY PM HAS OBSERVED ABOUT THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY
1. As annoying as those Sales Droids can be, they sure are fun to party with! And there’s nothing like having a conversation with someone who can actually, well, CONVERSE. Not to say your average developer can’t, but well, your average developer can’t. Unless it is about design patterns or Star Trek. And speaking of Star Trek, OMFG isn’t the new James T. Kirk, actor Chris Pine, just HOT? Yum.
2. Ever notice that at the Big All-Hands Company Meetings, that the Product Managers always ask WAY more than their share of the questions?
3. The Cranky PM has yet to meet a tech writer who can write a decent white paper. Didn’t these people ever try to convince their mothers to let them stay out late with the rest of those hard-partying High School Math-letes? (Or was that just the Cranky PM?) Is writing PERSUASIVELY really that hard?
4. Even though DysfunctoSoft is supposedly “Agile”, the Process Hawks still require about 2 man-weeks of documentation with N levels of sign offs, just to add a single check-box to a page in the UI.
5. If you’re a software company that actually ships working product to paying customers, don’t acquire a start-up whose founders are some professor and/or a collection of former grad students. They’ll never actually ship anything (they have no idea how to), and within one year all those brilliant minds you acquired will be out the door, looking for work at another academic-oriented outfit that never ships anything.
6. Marketing Weenies: please don’t post copies of press releases to the company “blog” and claim you’re doing “Social Media.” Please.
OK, five minutes are up. Later.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi:
It’s usually not the job of the technical authors to create white papers. Subject matter experts typically draft white papers.
Notice that I say draft and not write.
Of course, engineers usually have the damned oddest idea of what constitutes a paragraph, and agreement in tenses is usually beyond them. In my experience, the job of the tech writer on a white paper is to act as an editor.
It’s called teamwork. Now, that you want it done persuasively, well, that’s often a question of for what audience. SMEs can be persuasive, but typically only to other people of their ilk. This, surely is the audience of the average white paper. That marketing people find white papers unusable is understandable. (What do you mean you want to qualify what our technology does and doesn’t do? Never say our product won’t do something!)
In the end, it’s team work and teamwork is needed to reach the different audiences.
Andy, the Cranky PM agrees with you. In general, tech writers should not write papers.
But so many of them desperately WANT to write them. And who could blame them? Writing white papers is a lot more lucrative than writing product manuals.
Anyway, on several occasions, the Cranky PM had several white papers in the queue that were not even started, all while a tech writer (or two) in Doc was begging to write them. So, the Cranky PM’s boss thought, “Hey, why not have the Doc Dude interview the subject matter experts (PMs) for core content and the product marketers for positioning, and at least come up with the first draft?”
Well, BIG mistake. Came out sounding like a product manual. DULL DULL DULL.
Who said a technical writer is supposed to write whitepapers.
Get a marcom writer to do that for you. Persuasive writing is what marcom writers do, when they aren’t just laying down layer upon layer of bogus marketing claims. The hardest part for a marcom writer is keeping those bogus marketing claims out of whitepapers. It’s made harder by a management that thinks those bogus marketing claims are persuasive.
On acquisitions, a software company acquires other software companies, because otherwise it would have to issue dividends. The financial markets expect one annual acquisition a year. The way to avoid this is to not go public, aka not exit, and everyone wants to exit.
When you do acquire, you don’t integrate. Buy it and throw it away. That’s all it’s good for, the wasting of excess cash.
Regarding Agile – Haha you are so right about the company now using Agile, but still nobody wants to change their particular part of the process. And guess who has to sweat all night for a week trying to create a pile of docs that nobody is going to read? You got it, the PM.
Oh, yes, the unguarded comment to a sales droid after the odd glass or three can have disastrous consequences if they manage to remember it in the morning… Wrote a cautionary tale on that for Christmas: http://effectivus.com/2009/12/santa%e2%80%99s-hype-cycle/
As for academics and software try this one: http://effectivus.com/2009/03/the-danger-of-the-engineer-who-can/
Thanks Cranky PK for lightening our day!
You underestimate the sophistication of us B2B marketing weenies. Most of us aren’t just posting the PR to our corporate blog and claiming that as a strategy…that is obviously just a single tactic. Now, if we do that AND tweet it, that is not only strategic, but it is an INTEGRATED social media strategy. OK? (fonts and colors people….fonts and colors)