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MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Product Marketing and Human-Computer Interaction Courses


Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We concluded our course on Product marketing this week with a little get-together for the local students after the final presentation at the plenary session. Students from India, North Carolina, Washington, and Southern California missed a lively conversation and some excellent food and drinks.

But that was all they missed. This semester was exciting and the students, regardless of their location, shared in these experiences. This was our semester to choose an elective course. The reasons for choosing the electives ranged from wanting to learn a new subject area to improving in an area that would have an immediate impact on their career. However, whatever the reason for their choice of elective, they were unanimous in their feedback – they learned new ways of looking at problems and challenges when dealing with a product requirement, product design, or business strategy and launch.

The Product Marketing course and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course together provided a foundation for successful design and launch of products and the critical process we need to follow and controls we have to keep in place. The course challenged us to bring our focus back to customer needs and to design and deliver a solution to the customer problem. Too many a times as engineers we get engrossed in our view of the world and completely miss the voice of the customer in our products and then in the delivery of these products.

We had some excellent guest speakers for the product marketing session which provided us a pragmatic view of customer-focused marketing and a perspective from sales, product management, marketing operations, marketing communication, product launch, and strategy functions. They reinforced the customer as the most critical cog of the business. This augmented the learning from the excellent mandatory reading and optional reading assignments.

I can summarize this course as well as the learning so far – “Its all about the customer”.

We have a three-week break before the start of the next semester. I am really looking forward to spending some quality time with my family. The next semester will have to wait.

A piece of advice for the season based on a personal experience, I highly recommend you test for carbon monoxide detectors in your homes or install new ones in case they are not working. Please have a safe holiday season.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you … I will see all of you on the bright side of year 2008.

posted by Chandra @ 2:05 PM 

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