Lawyers can teach a simple rule to product managers and marketers that will serve them well. It’s an evil sounding rule- one you might not believe at first. But bear with me.

Never Use One Word When Two Will Do.

Well, not all the time, but getting to specific meaning is very hard in most business environments.

Words are fluid and have multiple meanings. Said a fancier way, words are connotational, not denotational. That is, their meaning is tied to other meanings and context in very subtle and not-so subtle ways. Context matters, and when you capture requirements, you are removing those ideas from their living, operational context. There is no human mind in a job function, interacting with other humans, with lots of surrounding context.

For instance, in any company that does product development the meaning of the word product changes per department (merchandising, design, development, testing, sourcing, manufacturing, support) or per lifecycle stage (ideation, development, sourcing, testing, commercialization, etc) or combination of both.

Or even better, when making changes when is that product no longer that product? Some departments use form/fit/function- if it’s the same, it’s the same product. But if a purchased component would it it still be the same product if from different vendors?

Often, from a design perspective, yes. From a manufacturing and quality perspective, no.

All these departments use the word “product”, and never suffer from ambiguity or confusion in their day to day operations. Context is king, and the human mind is marvellous.

But all hell breaks lose once that context is gone, and requirements are put to paper. I’ve seen arguments rage for hours, and then repeat every few weeks, all due to ambiguity arising from this brave new paper reality.

Not convinced? Let’s look at an example using concise, well written English:

“There shall only be one product per product number. Product numbers shall not be reused”.

System is built, rolled out to designers. Or if lucky, they are brought into a requirements meeting before building the system.

“What? Are you nuts. We do 70 prototypes per final product and you are saying we can’t link them all to a final intended product number? And that we can’t change the product number to the final number?”

(BTW- this is one area where Agile methods start falling down- when slight increases in complexity tend to completely make over your domain model)

Okay. We see the problems. Let’s bring in our lawyer-mind, and revise the requirements using our new almost-evil rule:

“There shall only be one Manufactured Product per Manufacturing Product Number. Manufacturing Product Numbers shall not be reused”.

“Designers shall generate a unique Design Product Number per Design Product. There can be any number of Design Products per Manufactured Product, but only one released design. Once the Manufacturing Product is released, the design product can’t be changed without a change management process.

The new requirements make each domain object a compound term, and add time context such as “released” and control contexts such as when change control is required.

Now the problem with writing like this is that it can get carried away, and become unclear by it’s very complexity. This is where you need to match your approach to the problem you are trying to solve. Lawyers need to solve for provability in court, to the point of moving way past clarity into a unique language all it’s own. Similarly, requirements analysts need to ensure clarity, communication and the ability to be translated into specifications and features. If there is no effective communication, then the requirements can’t be validated.

The other issue to watch out for is the separation of requirements from design. Just because you call something “Manufactured Product” in requirements analysis DOESN’T mean you call it that in the software. Unlike written requirements, software introduces context back into the equation. Manufacturing is using the manufacturing tools, or only seeing the manufactured products. You can design the software to say “Product”. You just can’t analyze it that way.

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Should You Trust a Blogless Marketer?

by Nick Van Weerdenburg on August 17, 2010

Starting a personal blog is one of the best marketing educations a person can get. The journey of a new blog to readership is marketing in its raw essence, the experience of which will make almost any person a better marketer.

The Inner World And Growth of a New Blogger

The silence of a crowded market makes you feel invisible.

You have a constant pull to sell out and republish common, boring, rehashed content that creates emotional rather then intellectual connections. I.e. it’s daring and hard to be original and authentic.

One piece of content is celebrated, the next two completely ignored even though you thought they were better.

You realize too late that a bad title killed your articles uptake.

You try harder, and what you thought was a good title is completely ignored.

You start to recognized your own authentic and inauthentic voices and become embarrassed for some of your prior work.

You finally become comfortable blogging, a feeling similar to when you’re at a party for 30 minutes and finally relax and join the flow.

You become too comfortable, and confuse your readership with content that doesn’t follow your theme. It’s self-indulgent or chases trends.

You recognize that trying too hard shows, and you go back to being quietly authentic.

You realize promotion is 50% of your effort per post.

You realize that promotion is a mistake, and that participation is 50% of your effort per post.

Twitter finally starts making sense to you. An epiphany strikes, and you realize that Twitter is like any market, just much faster. Authenticity, personality, focus, adding value, visibility, relationships are all core.

You realize that face-to-face connections are 50x more powerful then online connections. You start to realize that most top-bloggers are also top conference attendees and top conference presenters.

You realize that constant effort, strong focus on a theme, and lots of persistence are what make things happen- ripples, not splashes. Or drips if your prefer Seth Godin’s description.

You realize that you need to grind it out inch by inch, not try for the hail mary pass.

You realize that your new blog relationships are in fact soft-partnerships. People recognize when you help others, and in turn, help you.

And, ultimately, all this is in your bones because it was your credibility, your reputation, and your ego on the line.

You are now a way better marketer then you were six months ago.

Should you trust a blogless marketer? Of course. Maybe they have more important and valuable things to do, or they just don’t care for it. However, it’s worth taking into account, as one experience among many, what a blog means to a person’s marketing intuition and outlook.

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How to Manage the Coming Content Explosion

August 5, 2010

The Challenge is Filters, Not Overload
We tend to think we live in a age of information overload.
Yes, we do. But we have for over a hundred years. Information overload is not the problem.
Clay Shirky nailed this with a talk called It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.
The filters we developed have failed, and we [...]

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Do You Need Obsession-Driven Marketing?

August 3, 2010

Who Should We Market To
Marketers often talk about who we need to market to, and how we should be market-driven, customer-driven, buyer-centric, and at all costs avoid being product driven.
However, there is a danger here. It doesn’t consider the the question of who we can effectively market to.
Say you’ve done all the modern marketing [...]

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Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?

July 30, 2010

The Dawn of the Hyper-Literate Society
In Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development we discussed how marketing was becoming Test-driven and Agile, driven by the demands of the Internet business environment.
The basic reason for this was that the Internet has created hyper-literacy in buyers, radically changing the sales process in ways companies have been very [...]

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Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development

July 30, 2010

Software development is influencing marketing a lot these days with the emergence of Agile Marketing and Test-Driven Marketing- Agile and Test-Driven concepts being two concepts that have dominated software development for the last 5 years.
The reason is not a fad crossing over, but rather a more fascinating and powerful phenomena. As the Internet has [...]

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Why Don’t B2B Marketers Test More?

July 22, 2010

There was a post yesterday by Seth Godin on testing and how B2B marketers often avoid the early testing work that can save so much money later:
“Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. ”
and
“Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. [...]

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Are You Serving Extra Chunky Products and Messages?

July 19, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce | Video on TED.com http://bit.ly/9K6Amd
A great video on how testing uncovered hidden diversity that 20 to 30 years of asking questions didn’t and led to the creation of extra-chunky spaghetti sauce.
Another interesting example from the video- creating one coffee roast for a group would test an average of 60/100. Segmenting [...]

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How to Effectively Delete a Blog Post

July 19, 2010

Google Reader Loves Your Content So Much It Just Doesn’t Want to Let Go
Sometimes when you delete a post, it doesn’t go away- Google Reader keeps it around. And with up to 65% of your readership using Google Reader directly or indirectly (many standalone readers sync with Google Reader, including NetNewsWire on Mac and [...]

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TED for Marketers

July 19, 2010

TED has become a phenomena, and an addictive one at that. It is a great source of inspiration for both presentation and content.
Top 5 TED Talks for Inbound Marketers is a great set of links and comments regarding TED talks of particular interest to marketers.
As a bonus, there is also a good eBook on content [...]

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