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 ) Permalink