Outside-In View

After more than twenty years of work around the area of marketing – without ever going to executive management – you tend to have some interesting perceptions. This blog is the time to take the dive and issue commentary, raise questions, and simply share some of the observations.

I don’t pretend to have answers. I hope to generate thoughts, questions and discussions.

But, to help in your perspective, my career has gone like this:

• graduated college with liberal arts degree
• worked in non-profit management
• needed $, so moved to management of non-profit associations
• recognized as having tech knowledge so boss said, learn about this “web thing”
• web manager for networking hardware firm
• figured out there was so much more you could do, learned online marketing
• took skills to enterprise software firm, working on ASP product, where product marketing and product management path became more clear
• went to large retailer in IT role as “translator” to business partners
• learned oodles about processes, methodolgies and dev challenges
• served as IT process consultant
• back to product management and marketing for small firm with a telecommunications software product
• went to work for analyst firm, building a model for product management of services
• spent some time on small contracts to pay the bills while looking for  next great, challenging, stimulating, etc. opporunity in arena of product management and/or product marketing - and served as lead organizer/project manager for the first Minnesota Product Camp (with a great group of product people)
• starting what I know will be a great opportunity as Senior Product Marketing Manager for a SMB software product. (social media case study at its best – ask me and I’ll tell you the story.)

I currently hold:

• BA degree
• mini-MBA
• PMC (Pragmatic Marketing Certified)
• CPM (AIPMM – Certified Product Manager)
• CPMM (AIPMM – Certified Product Marketing Manager)
• ITIL – Service Foundation
• ITIL – Change/Config/Release Practioner Level
• CMMi – Lead Assessor training

I work hard. I play hard. Most important, I am not a dead fish.

[ If you need and/or want the full resume, you can click here.]

And, if you’re not already, please follow me on Twitter:  @jidoctor. I only tweet about relevant product management and product marketing topics (and the occassional sports comment when my team is kicking it!)