It was a sweltering hot day and as we approached the theater, I saw the line of people extending down the steps onto the street, everyone waiting to get tickets and get into the air-conditioned lobby.

So, I did what any internet geek would do. I pulled out the iPhone, opened up the Fandango app, and bought my tickets while walking up to the theatre. There’s even an option to show your tickets to the attendant on the iPhone screen – so I didn’t even have to use the automated pick-up machine (of which there was only one operating, with another line extending out the door). The whole process took about 20 seconds because the app knew my location, suggested the Angelika, and showed the most recent show times for movies. A few clicks, and the receipt was emailed to me.

More businesses need to pick up on the efficiency and simplicity of this experience. For example, if I could walk around Whole Foods and use my iPhone to scan items into a virtual cart and schedule it for delivery at my convenience, I would do that — why make me cart it and wait in line? (That said, I could also just use FreshDirect and stay at home). It makes me think that Best Products was in some ways ahead of its time – if only we had smartphones while we browsed the catalog or walked around the store creating our list to give the cashier.

More likely, we’ll see apps and processes like this extend to places like zoos, amusement parks, sporting events and concerts. It’ll get really interesting when it makes it as far as buying or renting a car (Zipcar has a huge advantage here), renting hotels or taking flights, or making other large purchases.

The commonality in all of this: taking non-critical steps off the critical path. It improves the experience, accelerates the process, and increases efficiency.

That said, in many teams, especially startups, a single person performs both of these functions. Which, long term, just doesn’t work.

Product Management

• Product owners are key leaders of the team. They act as the direct link between ‘the business’ and ‘the dev team.’ Your product owner needs to be a team leader, excellent communicator, and incredibly detail oriented
• Responsible for product lifecycle development which becomes user stories, roadmap management, UI/UX coordination and oversight
• Develops how-things-work materials for internal use and discussion; evangelizes internally
• Owns product feature set, requirements, and delivery on them
• Focuses on minimum feature set, and negotiates to make sure the right features for the customer are delivered
• May also play a scrum-master type role, depending on your organization and its size

Product Marketing

• Writes the opportunity assessments; competitor analysis, ROI/NPV, market research, customer personas
• Influences product feature set and requirements for product; evangelizes the products externally
• Translates the features into sellable value propositions for sales. Communicates the technology in real terms; writes white papers, hot sheets, sales materials
• Runs outbound product related strategy (separate from corporate marketing strategy); may lead viral and social marketing as pertains to specific products
• Writes a product blog and owns the product feedback loop; influences the roadmap with this information
• Sets rate card and determines pricing with Sales; runs business modelling for ROI assessment
• Develops training materials for sales and customers

When I met Marty Cagan from SVPG, he said it best: Product managers get your product onto the shelf. Product marketers get it off the shelf and into the hands of customers. (For more, check out an SVPG post on management vs marketing)

As organizations evolve, they deal with the differences between Product Management and Product Marketing differently. Some keep the roles combined, some split them out. At some point, it becomes ideal to separate the roles, because the hiring profile and skill set is unique. The deliverables and motivations are different.

What I like so far:

• The UI is nicely integrated with gmail as are most google products – they keep I clean and simple (with a place for text ads)
• Auto following friends – this made sense at first until I heard about the privacy concerns
• Auto suggesting others to follow – Suggested contacts helped get the site going (although there were inherent privacy issues)
• Asking me about showing my profile – this was a key feature for me as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include this yet in my google profile or on other related web results

What Im not sure about

• Why it’s with my email – as a core daily task, I don’t like messing wih my email. I don’t use chat or any addons or mix email apps. It’s a business task and it’s about GTD so I like to focus
• Connecting other streams – I already have services linked with Twitter facebok tumbl friendfeed feedburnr and tweetstream. I am about at my limit for channeling my social graph to new places. And why do I need to send it thru buzz when the same people are seeing it elsewhere?
• Giving google more data – I didn’t used to care about this. But now that google is the new Microsoft I am getting concerned about how much I willingly give them in terms of my user data. They already have me for email search docs maps reader and more. Just like an investing strategy you don’t want all the eggs in the same basket.
• Is there a community – I need to wait on this one. I am noticing some buzz from a few new and intresting people that I see thru some of my more savvy friends. I like that. But I can easil get to some great content via Tumblr or the blogs I follow or best so far via Twitter and allthe freqt things that people are linking. I only need so much of this and Buzz isn’t doing anything else for me

For now I am peeking at buzz once or twice a day to see what’s happening but I expect it to drop off soon. Interested but not adopted.

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• Google Buzz: What is it Good For? (mashable.com)
• Spammers already targeting Google Buzz (macworld.com)
• Google Buzz: The Naysayers Are Wrong (seekingalpha.com)

With the new version of wordpress, it’s even easier b/c widgets are built in. I’ve got facebook widgets, linkedin widgets, music and book widgets, and am looking for just about anything else I can add to my blog to make it show all my public facing content.

What once felt like an empty and deserted blog now has ‘flare’.

I think I’m ready to start writing.