John Mecke

About John Mecke

http://developmentcorporate.com

JJohn is a 25 year veteran of the enterprise technology market. He has led six global product management organizations for three public companies and three private equity-backed firms. He played a key role in delivering a $115 million dividend for his private equity backers – a 2.8x return in less than three years. He has led five acquisitions for a total consideration of over $175 million. He has led eight divestitures for a total consideration of $24.5 million in cash. John regularly blogs about product management and mergers/acquisitions.

Posts by John Mecke:

Proof That Medium SEO Works

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Google SERP

If you ever wondered if Medium is good for SEO, I can offer some tangible proof. I have been blogging at DevelopmentCorporate.com for 12 years. I write about enterprise software product management and mergers/acquisitions. It is a niche blog that gets some decent traffic. I have been republishing my content on Medium since late 2018. Recently I discovered that an article from my blog that I republished n Medium ranked #1 for a Google search term. My original post on my blog ranked #3.

Is Your Backlog Too Big? A New Technique for Prioritization

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Put it in the backlog meme

How many items are in your product backlog? 50? 100? 500? A favorite tactic for product managers dealing with stakeholder suggestions is to tell them they ‘will put it in the backlog.’ Unfortunately, many backlog items will languish in the backlog for months or even years before being prioritized for a Sprint. Many years ago I inherited the product management of a B2B SaaS Managed File Transfer solution. The backlog had over 300 items. On average we completed 8 items per Sprint. It would have taken us 3 years to complete all the items in the backlog, assuming no new items were discovered or added. Is Your Backlog Too Big? And are there some new techniques you can use to prioritize it?

Zillow AI Goes Crazy. Causes $8 Billion Drop in Market Cap, a $304 Million Operating Loss, and 2,000+ Jobs

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Zillow AI Disaster

On November 2, 2021, Zillow announced its third quarter results. While total revenues were up 88% in comparison to 2020, Zillow missed its guidance and announced that they were shutting down their largest revenue stream, Zillow Offers.. The news wiped off 45% of Zillow’s market cap in less than a week. Zillow also announced layoffs of up to 25% of their staff. The root cause has been laid at the feet of Zillow’s AI Zillow’s algorithms overestimated the value of the homes for which they paid. At the same time, Zillow was aggressively expanding its purchasing program, acquiring more homes in the last two quarters than it had in the two years prior. Zillow’s Offer algorithm leveraged Facebook’s Prophet Python AI library.

Late Majority Product Management: Somebody Has to Do It

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Late majority product management

2022 is an exciting time to be a product manager. It is a great time to be at the center of new product development. Product managers at firms that IPO’d in 2021 like Snowflake, Doordash, Palantir, Gitlab, FreshWorks, and Coinbase are riding high. Unfortunately, products in the early adopter and early majority stage of the technology adoption life cycle only account for a portion of the product managers working today. An equal, if not greater, number of product managers work on products that are in the late majority and laggard stages of the TALC. These products account for more than half of all software product revenue in 2021. Late majority product management is tough, but some has to do it.

Product Managers: How Can You Estimate Your Competitor’s Product Line Revenues?

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Sherlock Holmes

Understanding your competitors’ product line revenues is critical. Revenue information helps to put the relative strength or weakness of a competitor into the proper context. It helps product managers to make the best decisions about priorities, investments, and focus. It is relatively straightforward to understand the total revenues of competitors. Product line revenues are tougher. There are a number of techniques you can use to estimate competitor product line revenues

How Can a CEO Know How Effective Their Firm’s Content Marketing Efforts Are? It Takes Less Than 10 Minutes. And it is Free

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SaaS content mrketing 2022

As 2022 begins, many leaders are looking back at 2021 and wondering how they can drive more leads and revenue. Content marketing is often suggested as a free way to drive more web traffic and leads. How can a CEO know how effective their content marketing efforts are? Google Search Console can answer that question in a matter of minutes. Armed with that information, companies can leverage their own employees’’ knowledge to create web content that displays what Google calls Expertise-Authority, & Trustworthiness (E-A-T). Content with high E-A-T tends to rank very well on Google.

Software Equity Group November 2021 SaaS M&A Update 

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SEG November Update

The Software Equity Group (SEG) regularly publishes quantitative research on the software and SaaS market M&A activity. The SEG SaaS Index contains dozens of publicly traded SaaS companies. The SEG SaaS Index: November 2021 Monthly Update contains data on median Enterprise Value/Revenue multiples, key SaaS metric by SaaS market, and the performance of the top/bottom 25 pubic SaaS companies in the SEG SaaS Index.

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