Five on Friday: May 22, 2015

As the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), Diane Pierson is constantly keeping and eye out for information. Here is her “Five on

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here is my “Five on Friday” list for May 22nd, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. Unmashed

Great mUmBRELLA article on Mashable Content Chief, Jim Roberts that shows one way to successfully scale a digital media product.

Key takeaway: Mashable is getting brand expansion right by extending their mission from tech-on-tech reporting to tech-on-everything reporting. They’re extrapolating the Internet of Things to become the Reporter of [the Technical Perspective On] Things. They connected the dots from what was happening in the world to what it could mean for their publication – bravo.

2. Empowerment Outage

Anyone struggling to find better way to empower teams? Zappos “eliminated” management amid great fanfare earlier this year, leveraging an interesting methodology called Holacracy. I blogged about it at the time, and today the Wall Street Journal gave an update on their progress.

The first article I read on this topic had a headline clearly designed to send a message; the body of the article, not so much. I’m not sure anyone but the Holacracy guys knew what Zappos was getting into.

Even though the Holacracy constitution is longer than the U.S. Constitution, it’s worth browsing the site. If you do, you’ll see a pretty good framework, especially if you’re a smaller, creative-services-type company.

Is “self-directed work teams” just another way to say “wild monkey chaos?” Maybe, maybe not. But insincere, confusing non-change change is, for sure. My blog on the topic.

Finally, the WSJ update shows Zappos in full transition mode; go to MarketWatch if you don’t subscribe. 14% of employees leaving is not necessarily a sign of failure, but a 7,500 word memo from CEO Tony Hsieh exhorting the team to “go faster” is not a sign of success. We’ll be watching, Zappos.

3. Timing is Everything

Wondering which of the gazillion marketing channels, techniques, systems or smoke and mirrors will help you most right now? Gartner provides a good list, including the “Prevailing Trends” we should be leveraging today:

Social marketing

Advocacy/loyalty marketing

Lead management. Especially B2B

Email marketing. “No, email isn’t dead.”

See the list of Emerging Trends, and the rest of the article, here.

4. Busy and Busier

Product managers and marketers: words to live by:

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.” Lao Zhu

If you’re so busy getting email campaigns out the door you don’t know what the goal of doing them is (or worse, you never set the goal in the first place), stop, drop and roll out a marketing strategy.

5. It’s All about the Lists

According to Folio‘s “Survey Report on Publishers” 2014″, the top two email marketing priorities for 2015 are List Growth (60%) and Improving List/Data Quality (58%) – no other goal was chosen by over 50% of respondents.

For readers in the U.S., have a great Memorial Day weekend. To everyone who watched (and liked) the finale of Mad Men; wishing you apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves.

Diane

Diane Pierson, our INSIDER Guide to New Product Development, is a leader in product management and marketing, having delivered results to companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, American Lawyer Media and Copyright Clearance Center. She has built products & services that have delivered over $100 million in revenue and knows what works, and what doesn’t, when executing product plans and strategies. (Read Diane’s full Bio)