Douglas Karr's Articles on Martech Zone
-
Sales and Marketing Training
Avoiding the Featuritis Trap: How to Prioritize Features and Reduce Creep for Happy Users
In their insightful blog post Features vs. Benefits from the Creating Passionate Users blog, software designer and author Kathy Sierra astutely breaks down the perils of “featuritis” – the tendency of products to accumulate more and more features to the detriment of user experience. Sierra’s post, which she graciously allowed me to draw from for this article, lays out some…
-
Marketing Tools
I Canceled My Basecamp Account Today
In the past, I’ve been a fan of 37 Signals. They were ahead of their day in user interface design and simplicity. Their book, Getting Real, still impacts how I develop, design, and build product requirements. Since last summer, I’ve utilized a Basecamp account to track several projects and clients. While reading the 37 Signals blog over the last year, I’ve noticed…
-
Sales and Marketing Training
Consultants, Contractors, and Employees: Where Are We Heading?
Often, I hear the screams of pain when we turn to external consultants or contractors to get work completed. It’s a delicate situation – sometimes employees feel like they are being betrayed that you’re going external. Quite honestly, there’s a learning curve and additional expense to going external. There are advantages, though. Source: Despair, Inc. Humor aside, consultants and contractors…
-
E-commerce and Retail
Borders Live at 01: Borders vs. Amazon Email Marketing
If you don’t have a Borders store around you, I’m sorry. If you do, you might like this site that Borders has launched, Borders Live at 01: Wow… books, live music and Seattle’s Best Coffee! That’s like heaven for me! It also appears that the Borders Email Newsletter has gotten an overhaul, it’s really fun to read now. Borders is…
-
Content Marketing
WordPress: Disaster Recovery
The last few days I’ve been working furiously on getting my good friend Pat Coyle’s blog back up. (My vacation continues to get more interesting – today it’s snowing slightly… in April! Whatever happened to Global Warming?) I want to share what happened and then discuss the preventative measures that I took as well as how it was corrected. Here’s…
-
Marketing Books
Kiss Theory Good Bye: The Five Crippling Habits of Companies
Yesterday, I completed reading Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. If I were to rank it, it may be a 3 or 4 out of 10. It’s a quick read and the message behind it is both timely and incredibly important. In all honesty, though, it could have been published as a white paper and had…
-
This is Spring Break?
This week I’m on vacation. It almost makes me chuckle saying that out loud. Here’s how my vacation is going thus far: About a dozen of my sites (or my clients’ sites) are being upgraded right now. The sites are being moved to new, faster servers with the latest versions of all software. That, of course, leads to DNS issues…
-
Scrapblog Preview!
Shel Israel’s signature reads “Writer. Consultant. Nice Guy.” He really is a great guy! Today Shel wrote us to tell us about his client, Scrapblog, opening up their site for bloggers to Preview. I took a stroll over to the preview and was blown away! There’s a lot of talk on the net by conventional programmers that believe that Internet…
-
Content Marketing
Happy 500th Post to You!
Thanks to all of you for reading my blog and keeping me going. This is my 500th blog post and there's so much to celebrate!
-
Learning to Ride Bikes and Building Software
Work has been a real challenge recently. Being a Product Manager is a fascinating job – when you actually get to do that job. I know that’s a flippant thing to say but you’re really the central hub in an ongoing tug ‘o war with Sales, Development, Customer Services and leadership in the company. Some people lose site of the…
