Data is a Product

Much like one of Santa’s Elves I’ve been working hard to bring you the latest data blog - not so much Product this time, but certainly data! All wrapped up in a pretty bow. Now, before we all get stuck into Sprouts and Turkey on the 25 th (I’ll be avoiding that one this year by taking extreme measures – leaving the Country!) I wanted to somehow combine the themes of Christmas and Data. What I’ve come up with is of course something akin to Good King Wenceslas combined with the Dr Who Special. To start with we’ll look at Christmas cards. David Cameron (aka Santa) has been busily sending cards to his nearest and dearest. Included on his list this year are the President of Kyrgyzstan, the Prime Minister of Chile and of course, the Pope. The Guardian have a great article about the full list and who’s made Dave’s ‘Naughty’ list (we’re looking at you South Africa). Next up, Christmas Presents. I’ve found some nice data on US Christmas Shopping habits from last year. Did ...

Firstly, thanks to Duncan Ross for inspiring this post (@duncan3ross) about how organisations are using 'Free' products to get data they can monetise for profit. I'll be looking at this from both sides of the fence. In this post, we'll tackle what you, the consumer gets from these 'Free' products. This way of providing products and services is often called the 'Freemium' model and is one that has become very popular over the last couple of years. Anyone with a smartphone will probably have some free software in the form of apps featuring enraged feathered creatures or links to your favourite social network. You'll often see adverts pop up in these apps and games which is obviously a way for the developers to make money. However, how do they know which advert is going to appeal most to you? We'll cover this piece in more detail in the next post. Let's look first at what you get.

Last night, I watched the excellent documentary on BBC 2 about the growth of Facebook and how they use the data created by users to make money. If you didn't catch it, have a look on the iPlayer for Inside Facebook. So, Facebook take your data and use it to do several things. Firstly, they use your friends, links between them and your interests to suggest new friends to you. Very helpful! This often means that you end up with about 200 people in your network who can see what you do or like and vice-versa. That's actually quite helpful and is probably why you joined.. to communicate! Next up, you Like various company pages, band pages and so on. Again, your friends can see this. More importantly, Facebook can see what you Like, who your friends are and the basic details about you. For example, you are Male, live in London, went to school in Cambridge and are currently single. This then allows Facebook to sell you adverts based upon your details. It also allows the compan...

Before you start to visualize tents, camp fires and sing-songs; Product Camp is none of those things. Well, maybe the last one will be true later on. I'm blogging live from the 3rd PCampLDN in Smithfield and so far my experiences are that everyone is happy to share experiences and that Product Managers are a diverse group. The Twitter feed for the day (#pcampldn) features a great breakdown of the key points. I'll also summarize my thoughts here later. Later on I'll be giving a talk on my earlier post about Hack Days. Should be interesting to find out other Product Managers experiences of these. In the meantime, keep an eye on Twitter! Ging, gang, gooley gooley....

Or 'How to turn a Hack Day into something commercial' Anyone who has worked in an IT company or has been a developer will have been involved in a 'Hack Day' at one time or another. For the uninitiated, these are events that involve the 'techies' and usually involve them spending the day 'off project' working on some kind of tool that will help them develop more easily. Now, before I get loads of comments from you lovely development people, I'm certainly not trying to belittle the work you do on these days as I know the results can be valuable to you and in turn, to us Product Managers. So, as a Product Manager, I'm going to be far more interested in a Hack Day if I can get involved and come out of it with something properly useful to me. During normal projects, I never get chance to mess around with new ideas as all of my projects have to be done to deliver a commercial product on a tight budget and carefully considered commercial requireme...

Hello there! Welcome to my first Blogger post about Data and the important role it plays in Products. I'm a Product Manager for a successful software house in London focussing on address, location and contact data tools. What I'd like to do here is pretty simple: 1. Talk about my experiences of Product Management 2. Highlight the value of good quality Data to your Products 3. Share stories on how data and products combine to help people and organisations Obviously, it's important to start by saying that any views contained in this blog do not represent those of my employer so please don't make any assumptions! So, why is Data a Product? It's something that I'm constantly striving to define to people who focus on the software that they see and use. For example, when you use a mapping service like Google Maps on your phone, you're focussing on the user interface, speed of lookup and quality of result. All of this is surely down to clever software dev...