Sunday September 24, 2006
Serving the audience -- segment by segment
Product management is closely related to marketing. Product managers
are the bridge between the users and the developers. As such, we have
the job of making information about our products easily available
to the users who need it, just as marketers do. The main difference
between us and the marketing people, other than the fact that they
dress better, is that we go into more depth with the information we
provide to the users.
Since we provide information in great depth, we have to make it simple
to get to, so that the users don't have to wade through a lot of stuff
that they don't need. One way to do this is to segment the user
audience. Segmentation often carries a negative connotation, as though
it consisted of classifying people like widgets. But done right, it can
be very useful to the audience, by giving them the information they are
most likely to need.
I was recently asked to take over responsibility for another Sun web
site, java.sun.com/integration. I was already running the Java CAPS site on developers.sun.com, so the first thing I had to do was to
figure out what the different audiences were for the two sites. In
other words, I had to segment them. I was fortunate to have some
guidance on this from my bosses, and from others at Sun.
In a nutshell, we divide the broad developer audience into three
segments: current users of Java CAPS, Java developers who would
like to learn more about the integration tools embedded in the Java
SDK, and developers who would like to download or contribute code to
the open source integration tools that are being developed with
community participation. The Java CAPS user community will be best served by the Java CAPS site
on developers.sun.com, while the community around the integration
capabilities of the Java SDK will find more useful information at
java.sun.com/integration. The open source integration community will find what it needs at various sites on java.net. Currently, some of this open source material, such as information about Open ESB, is still residing at java.sun.com/integration. Over time, we will migrate this to java.net. Of course, we will have lots of links between the sites, because our users often move from one community to another.
Posted by davidleetodd
( Sep 24 2006, 11:03:44 PM PDT )
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