I asked ChatGPT: “I am a software engineer working in an agile team. Explain the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner”. Got a pretty good answer:
generated by Dall-E2
As a software engineer working in an agile team, it’s important to understand the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager and a Product Owner. While there may be some overlap, there are distinct differences between the two positions:
Product Manager: A Product Manager (PM) is responsible for the overall strategy and vision of a product. They focus on the big picture and are involved in product development from ideation to launch. PMs are responsible for conducting market research, identifying customer needs, setting goals and objectives, creating a product roadmap, and prioritizing features based on customer feedback and market trends. They work closely with cross-functional teams, including engineering, design, and marketing, to ensure that the product is aligned with the company’s overall goals and objectives.
Product Owner: A Product Owner (PO) is responsible for the development and delivery of a specific product or feature. They work closely with the engineering team to ensure that user stories and requirements are well-defined, and the team understands what they need to build. POs prioritize the backlog and work with the engineering team to ensure that the right features are built at the right time. They are also responsible for testing and accepting user stories and ensuring that the product meets the acceptance criteria. POs work closely with the Product Manager to ensure that the product or feature is aligned with the overall strategy and vision.
In summary, the Product Manager is responsible for the overall strategy and vision of the product, while the Product Owner is responsible for the development and delivery of a specific product or feature. The Product Manager is focused on the big picture, while the Product Owner is focused on the details of the development process. However, both positions are crucial for the success of a product, and they should work closely together to ensure that the product is aligned with the company’s goals and objectives.
I admit I fall into a subsection of the culture that is skeptical (at best) of TikTok and the way brands are getting built there. I know companies are selling a lot of stuff. But, are they building actual brands? You know: Where the name has equity, and creates preference and good will in the minds of consumers, enable product innovation, extensions and pricing favorability.
I’m a fan of brands that are designed to last: Brands with a goal to be around in 50 years, with a strong company culture as a foundation, delivering high integrity products, serving an actual need, and a focus on contributing more than “net profit “good deals, great prices” to the community where they work. This sort of brand building takes time, commitment beyond ROI, and faith that consumers will become fans and eventually loyal customers.
I’ve recently started buying GoMacro Bars as I ramp up my training for some summer bike rides. The bars are great food for when I’m on the bike and need something to fuel the next two hours of riding. And, the bars are great pre-ride food to get me ready ahead of the training effort.
GoMacro is growing in a really competitive space: Nutrition Bars. The “job to be done” for this product is two fold: High integrity (good nutrition profile, high quality ingredients, great taste) snack, and a trusted/quality energy bar for workouts. The space is very crowded with Mega brands (like Nature Valley and Kind bars) and a lot of specialty bars with both functional benefits (allergen free, vegan, organic, sustainable, diet-specific, etc) and great taste.
So, if you want to succeed over the long haul you need to be great on the product, but you also need a differentiated way to communicate your brand, your story and your product information.
Tell the Origin Story
GoMaco does a great job of telling their story via Instagram and their site. It’s a cool backgrounder on where the product came from and the company’s reason for being in business.
GoMacro’s origin story is heartwarming and compelling. A mom with a cancer diagnosis, a mother-daughter duo creating a plan to use food for health, a company from a small town in rolling farmland of Wisconsin. The roots of the company are woven through their product development, their marketing and the way they interact with their community.
But, the story is not getting told in any of their TikTok. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to tell complex stories in Reels and TikToks? Does the slow music, soft focus, considerate pace get dropped by the algorithm? Or, is it just a mismatch between editorial intent (tell a meaningful story) and the point of the platform (stop/watch time)?
Values-driven Point of View
The values that drive the company and their efforts are woven through their marketing efforts and embodied in their product choices, with a focus on Ingredients with Integrity:
plant-based
Organic
Beneficial
No additives and preservatives
GoMacro does a pretty good job of communicating the product differentiation across their social channels, including TikTok. I mean, who doesn’t love to see organic peanut butter chips getting made (though “homemade” sort of stretches it a bit). This seems like a good match between the format and the content and the editorial intent.
The company is actively supporting the communities where there are shared values. They do this through active investment and flowing dollars to relevant programs. These deep connections are getting communicated well on their site, on instagram and on YouTube, but they aren’t showing up as much on TikTok. These sorts of stories probably don’t really drive dwell/watch time, the way other, more platform-friendly content does.
Reflect the Best Aspirations of Your Buyers
Great brands are aspirational. That is, they reflect the best aspirations of who the consumers want to be. Consumers see themselves, at their best, in the brand. The brand does use TikTok to reflect their buyer. Or, at least their desired buyer: Young, active, “greenish” buyers who are investing their food dollars as self-care. FWIW, there are no images of dads on bikes anywhere to be found (Perhaps an untapped, unknown audience for them?)
While they are running a pretty straightforward ambassador program, it’s a good start to demonstrate shared interests and support for the lifestyle aligned with the brand. But, it’s not clear how those ambassadors are being used within brand content, but the brand shows up a ton elsewhere, paid and unpaid.
I’m not a heavy enough user of TikTok to have deep, intuitive sense of how brands are effectively using the native content to build the brand. It’s one thing to shoot for virality (#donotattempt). But, in terms of building your brand equity, the best practices are still sort of emerging. My gut instinct is that the “vibe” is the thing and in order to deliver on that, you’ve got to be deeply fluent on the platform. The GoMacro team seems to deliver.
There are three great write-ups about the perils of near-intelligence found in Bing’s latest advancement. All three were the result of messing with the tech, trying to get it to do stuff that is outside it’s core purpose.They’re pushing the edges to see what happens. It’s the researcher version of asking Siri to swear or tell dirty jokes. In the case of Bing, it got weird fast.
But all three of these articles are getting at sentience: Are these chatbots actually thinking? They’re expressing feelings, and personality, too. How is that possible? And, the writers are exploring what happens when our normal relationship with computers – where we assume tech/computation is always correct – is being challenged and, perhaps undermined. Through almost all our experiences to date with computers, we’ve sort of trusted the data coming out. But, now, as tech moves beyond math, calculations and reproducing images, we are seeeing that we can’t always trust what the processor makes for us.
There are a lot of dumb, weird, inconsistent, humans that are being embodied by these large language models.
We want to believe Bing is right and smart, so we humans find a weird fascination when the “artificial” intelligence is not all that intelligent. We’re surprised and maybe a little outraged when Bing is wrong.
And we’re freaked out by the implied personality inside (which is a result of all the human generated content consumed to make the interaction model).
We’re projecting onto the tech the same thinking and decision making patterns we might assume a rationale, experienced human would use (which, as we’ve all probably learned through experience, is a bug in the human OS, not a feature).
AI will always be iffy. Because humans are iffy. And we can never trust the “judgement” of AI, because they’re using probabilistic models vs actual human intuition.
Even though it’s hard for humans to get better over time, the tech always does.
First, the unbelievably productive Ben Thompson wrote about his long chats with “Sydney”, the chatbot inside of Bing. Turns out Sydney has a bit of a personality. Actually, a couple of them (Riley is the nicer, more free personality whereas Sydney is a little more quick to judge and plays by the rules. And, according to Thompson, sort of seems female.
Thompson did what we all will do when we encounter something new. We’ll look for patterns that seem familiar, we’ll see “faces” everywhere, and try to match the experience we’re having to what we’ve experienced before. We spend a lot of time with humans, so we attribute human characteristics to the stuff we pay attention to. Dogs, cats, boats, pet rocks, and now our computer interfaces. It’s all normal, of course. But, it’s going to get creepy when the tech seems sentient.
And finally, after some back and forth between Kevin and Sydney/Bing, Sydney/Bing brought the conversation to a close:
These articles and write ups remind me of the stories from a couple months ago (feels like years ago!) about Blake Lemoine, the google engineer that was fired for arguing the Google’s AI was sentient. We all sort of laughed at that article, then. But, now, with broader access to “consumer” versions of the tools, we can see why he might think that.
All of these tools are being released too early, in my opinion. They are leaving the labs without fully testing what they’re capable of or what might happen if we use them in unintended ways. There are obviously very large commercial interests pushing to deploy tech before it’s ready. Damn the people, there is money to be made.
It’s a focus group of 1, but I can confirm the key point here: There is/was some value in commuting. And, I like the description of a “liminal” space here:
“A time free of both home and work roles that provides an opportunity to recover from work and mentally switch gears to home. “
There has been chatter for years that Google is a monopoly and should be broken up. Optimists (free market champions and probably, shareholders) primarily looked at the search side of the business to make their case, arguing that there is plenty of competition on all sides, and a breakup wasn’t warranted.
But the most recent action by the Justice Department is pretty serious and straightforward, arguing that Google rigged their ad markets to maximize profits, damaging the publishers that overwhelmingly us Google tools to sell adspace on their sites. And, it goes further, arguing it’s time to break up Google.
The whole legal document is pretty interesting for nerds like me (I’m on page 80), but the Emerson Collective-backed Techpolicy.org has a great summary / explainer.
DOJ shows how, due to Google’s ability to manipulate ad prices, publishers ended up at the mercy of a monopoly that once promised them prosperity in their transition to the web.
For those of us swimming in digital media for years, this level of deep-code chicanery won’t be a huge surprise. Digital media has always, from day one, been sketchy and fast. The deeper you go into the middle world of the ad tech and data stack, the shadier it gets. So, I’m not surprised at the bid rigging that’s been in place, just sort of shocked that the impact hasn’t been bigger.
From the outside, it would seem relatively straightforward for Google to spin out a couple pieces of their ad stack (i.e. AdX) to make some space between their tools and take themselves out as the middleware. Meanwhile, i would imagine there are some marketers giving a second thought to their reliance on Google.
I realize these sorts of cases aren’t always done for legal or business reasons, that there’s a strong political motivation here. And, I’m not a big fan of what Google is becoming. But, i’m also not sure what problem this particular piece of regulation is really solving and who really benefits.
