X Marks the Spot: Following Pirates to New Software License Revenue

Each year, Google’s annual “Frightgeist” survey ranks the most popular Halloween costumes by search traffic. Sitting squarely among the top 20 this year were many traditional garbs, with Pirate in the number 16 spot. As a product marketing professional focused on software monetization and usage analytics, I often wonder how creative (and in my geeky opinion, hilarious) it would be to try a different take on the traditional pirate costume and wear…

November 5, 2020 Michael Goff

Is Delivering On-Premise Software Becoming a Challenge? Take Some Cues From Domino’s.

Domino’s Delivers While the pandemic has been especially hard on restaurants (where I live in Massachusetts, the estimate is that 1/5 have shuttered permanently because of business slowdowns), one restaurant chain actually managed to grow sales by 16% according to the Wall Street Journal: Domino’s. That said, Domino’s may not want you to categorize it as a restaurant. For more than a decade now, it has been busy remaking and resurrecting itself a…

October 8, 2020 Michael Goff

What Working Remotely Can Teach Us About Insights into Software Users’ Needs

Among the sea of remote work-related articles populating my LinkedIn feed these days, a recent Forbes article caught my eye. Most employees working remotely want their employers to have greater visibility into workdays, the author wrote referencing a recent survey, and are open to having software in place that measures their productivity. Feeling somewhat invisible, they are “frustrated by their efforts to be recognized,” the author wrote, and wi…

August 5, 2020 Michael Goff

Rollerblading’s Resurgence and Roadmap Lessons for Software Product Managers

Sales of many items have surged over the last four months, such that sourcing and acquiring them have turned us all into amateur procurement specialists. But the resurgence in popularity and the difficulty of obtaining one item in particular was tough to foresee: inline skates. Sales of Rollerblades–the most iconic brand of the inline skate family–are up 300% (which several articles attribute to lockdowns and closures born of the pandemic along w…

July 14, 2020 Michael Goff