ChristopherCummings.com

This December, Virgin Mobile begins charging customers a $2.20 Paper Bill Charge.

That’s right: If you want to continue receiving a paper bill from Virgin Mobile, rather than switch to electronic billing, you’ll be charged $26.40 extra per year for the privilege of receiving your bill by mail.

After considering a number of factors, including rising costs for paper, printing, and postage, the environmental impacts associated with printing paper bills, and the wishes of our Dark Master, we’ve decided to charge customers who would like to receive a paper bill…

Electronic billing is becoming pervasive. Those who don’t convert are being punished. Worse, they’re also being condescended to by a number of companies masking price hikes behind concern for the environment.

Guess what? Your alleged concern for the environment alone does not justify charging customers extra to receive paper statements. And a pox upon any product manager who doesn’t try to stem that tide.

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Last time we looked at three truly terrible ways businesses have apologized to customers.

Today, we’ll discuss the elements of truly great apologies–with examples. And see what we can learn from the experience I had recently apologizing to thousands of confused, angry, and irritated customers…

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“I’m sorry.” Two tiny words. Two tiny words that said the right way can help repair broken trust, and said incorrectly can burn bridges forever.

Brought to you by the marketing department at Pepsi

Business school didn’t teach me the art and science of how to apologize appropriately and effectively. (That’s something life and server outages have drilled into me.) Judging from some of the corporate apologies we’ve seen recently, we all have a lot still to learn.

Today, we’ll look at three examples of truly terrible ways to apologize. Next time, we’ll discuss the elements of a truly great apology–and see if the major outage we had this week on the product I lead yields any lessons that could benefit product managers who finds themselves in a similar situation.

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Exactly one year ago today, Product Management Meets Pop Culture officially debuted on The Internet with the post What Does A Product Manager Actually Do? — and 105 Posts later, here we are!

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Iconic pro-wrestler and entertainer Captain Lou Albano passed away yesterday at the age of 76.

Some will remember him for the rubber bands. The penchant for Hawaiian shirts. The boisterous rants.

But I’ll remember him best for demonstrating what it takes to make it in business…

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Yesterday: We’re recapped 1985 martial arts cult classic “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon“, where Bruce Leroy searches for the mystical kung-fu power known as The Glow, and ends up dating Vanity.

Today: We’ll use that story recap as a springboard into this week’s topic: The importance of confidence in product management.

And I don’t mean just the outside world’s confidence in product management; I mean our own confidence, in ourselves, as product managers. Because some of this week’s conversations on Twitter made me question whether or not we really have The Glow.

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Today: We’re recapping 1985 martial arts cult classic “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon“… in 10 Panels Or Less™.

Tomorrow: We’ll use this story recap as a springboard into this week’s topic: The importance of confidence in product management.

< SPOILER WARNING >
Key plot points from this Taimak-Vanity-Julius Carry opus are pictured herein. You have been warned!
< / SPOILER WARNING >

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Personas are tools, fictional representations of your product’s target audience. These tools help provide the product team with context and enable better decision-making in the feature prioritization and development process.

But, like any tool or Magic Mushroom, they can be used for good or evil.

Or, less dramatically, they can be misunderstood or misapplied, and that can lead to trouble…

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Today, we’re looking at “The User Is Always Right: Making Personas Work For Your Site”. This presentation focuses on websites, but provides a good general overview on the subject and usage of personas.

Next time, we’ll dive deeper into personas, including the perilous pitfalls of personas.