Creativity is hard to come by and the market pace nowadays is incredible fast with AI. How can we shorten the time of content creation? Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist introduced me the idea of a swipe folder.
After 3 years of collection, here’s what my Google Drive looks like. Since I use Windows at work and Mac at home, Google’s browser based approach made it flexible for me to switch between device and platform.
This part of the interview between Acquired Podcast and TSMC founder, Morris Chang, about the correlation between organization structure and customer gave me an explanation to my current role in product marketing facing a divisional structure.
Today’s surveillance is about solution selling as network camera and NVRs becoming a commodity. The increasing number of smaller retail stores adopting consumer security products, such as Xiaomi and Tapo, explains the fact that basic surveillance is no longer a technical barrier. Enterprise customers, on the other side, look for more curate business solution and services. Respectively, solution is a combination of overlapping mix of products.
Who should cover the ground of offering the solution if product development is in an divisional organization? The role often falls into the next role in line, be product marketing, regional product manager, sales engineer, pre-sales, and sales. This requires the next-in-line function team to be well versed in the product and customer pain point in order to build the solution stacks.
Product marketing, in this situation, is faced to be product first, marketing second to filter the influx products. Tactical implementations that gave me room to survive:
Nancy Duarte’s book, Resonate, maps out the rhythm for an effective presentation with the idea of sparkline. It diverges from the conventional understanding of rising action, climax, and falling action. It’s more true in most business presentation as the products or solutions are not that different and audience lacks patience to build up the climax.
Some tactics to build the what could be and the what is.
| WHAT-IS | WHAT-COULD-BE |
| – Pain point – Background information – Introduction to sections | – Product demo – Videos – Key feature – Advantage over competition |
In most situation, the what-could-be are known facts, the so start with that. Begin with arranging the sequence of what-could-be appearances, then figure out making the what-is later. It’s often easier to create the relative low point than the highlight.
Product demo is engaging, fun, and risky all at the same time. One unexpected fail ignites the chill that sweats our back.
Sudden voice drop, mic caught on nearby conversation, unexpected low battery notice; the problem is wireless connections are not always reliable. We can’t guarantee cabled network connection, but keeping the power cable and headset minimize the risk of equipment not going our way.
Give the device a fresh start so there’s no unused apps in the background occupying the RAM or hiccups from not closing the product app properly. Reboot solves most tech problems.
We’ve either seen this or done it ourselves, sharing the notes rather than sharing the slide. Each reattempt to share the screen is likely the audience switch to their Outlook or Gmail.
Midway through the screen sharing, message preview pops up, and continues to fire in on the top-right corner. We can’t turn open the app, that’s just unprofessional. We’re left to click the “x” button to close the preview, hoping we did it fast enough that no one read the message and the trash talk stops. Make sure only the essential apps are open, the presentation, the product, and the meeting app so we avoid hell.
Virtual presentation is hard to keep the audience engaged, so every engagement helps. Let people see your expression, gesture, nervousness; it makes the performance more human. Especially in an AI flooded world, this helps to keep them there.
I’m not a designer, and by no means am I trying to become one.
The objective of color is to highlight the information, and highlight is building contrast. I use 3 colors in my slide: grey, black, and one primary color. More colors requires more skills to maneuver, so I rarely do so unless I’m out of option.
Make the important information standout is the obvious approach, but it gives little room to highlight before red text, bold, italics, boxes, and arrows are added for indication.
Reduce the secondary information is the less apparent approach, but it’s often times simpler. Keep the important information as is and reduce the attention of secondary information with grey.
This works for general reports, which is usually mix of words and graphs, or any other simpler document.