Product Management for Facebook Economy for P-Camp

I am planning to present this topic at p-camp, the barcamp for product managers at Yahoo Sunnyvale tomorrow (Sat Mar 15th).

My definition of Facebook Economy: I see it as the social networking world and the open platform play that Facebook initiated that has created a thriving economy of new facebook apps, businesses trying to reach users by extending their web product with a facebook app and the ecosystem of other platforms like Opensocial and APIs everywhere which was created because of the success of Facebook Platform.

I am finding that its an exhaustive topic so I am going to limit it to Facebook primarily at tomorrow's session.

Whats common in Product Management in all Facebook Economy is the mindset. Some would call it Web2.0, but show me an example that exemplifies all the points below except facebook.

The Facebook Economy Mindset:

• Customer believes to be in charge
• Customer communicates with other customers independent of company, this becomes part of product in the case of user generated content and user's social experience
• Total Transparency
• Shorter product life cycles leading to Agile development
• APIs and platforms from everyone - Y!, AOL, Google, Dash as a new way of extending your product roadmap and doing market assessment at the same time

Applying Product Management 101 to Facebook Apps:

| View

I plan to cover the 101 of Product Management as it applies to facebook apps.

• Define the Product - Customer Definition, Roles and Responsibilites - use cases
• Develop Product Requirements - PRD and MRD
• Market Assessment, A/B Testing vs Multi-Variant Analysis
• Product Phases and Decisions- A phase gate development strategy
• Managing the Product Roadmap
• Launch Plans

ok, the slides look more colorful, hope its helpful to get a feel for what I am presenting.

The Lesson from Sarah Lacy-Mark.Z SWSX interview twitter uproar

Sarah lacy and her interview of Mark.Z is all over the blogosphere. I don't believe in linking to prominent posts and write unless I have a sincere passion or point of view worth of you readers time.

I wasn't there at SWSX. I trust Dave McClure's honest and quick summaries and he represents the audience geek's view well. Arrington seems to want to bring some balance and decency to the topic with his post. Brian Solis does the best job of providing a neutral decent post.

I am a little biased here as I am a Sarah Lacy fan and everyone knows I am crazy about Facebook not just as an active user but for Mark.Z's vision and execution to bring our real world social networks to flow through facebook creating a new paradim shift in marketing, advertising, online content, community play and how we evolve as a species with the next generation of the Internet.

I see this event as a strategic inflection point in the maturing of the live web, though everyone may not agree its for the better.

What is ironic is that SWSX grew twitter to a phenomenon and SWSX was for college students for not just geeks, but young geeks who went to party with each other. This year Twitter has reciprocated the favor and elevated SWSX to a notable conference with enough pageviews and web referrals!

Lets get out of taking sides and acknowledge that this mobbing on twitter and blogs is a testimonial to the power of social media to let people speak their minds and gang up in numbers virtually, however we maybe divided on whether it was right or not!

Companies started taking bloggers seriously after Apple lost 40% in 3 hours. Sarah herself referred to the audience ganging up against her as "mob like Digg" which is a episode where users ganged up to speak their mind to control Digg content.

Sarah in all fairness seems to have done her homework well in preparation for the interview. She is not any old media business writer, she is someone who has lived the transition to social media with transparency in her response to her fans. She was transparent in her approach to reply at her own fan's page on facebook last night.

I see this event taking regular conferences to unconference BarCamp mode where audience want to run the show! This is the beginning of users on twitter or blogosphere ganging up any product or service one way or the other to truly let companies focus on the consumers.