Product Management and Analytics

I am always excited to find new ways to introduce analytics to my role in Product Management. I spent three days at the “Pragmatic Marketing Course” in Boston last week. Pragmatic Marketing provides a framework to bring profitable, problem-oriented products to market. They teach the process for building and marketing products that people want to buy.

PragmaticMarketing

I attended three of their courses: Build, Market and Launch. One of my favorite phrases from the course is “you’re opinion while interesting is irrelevant”. Everything you plan and implement for your products should be based on market data.

Birthday gift from Youtube

I hit a milestone this week and it wasn’t just my age. My Youtube video titled “Seven Strategies for Awesome Excel Dashboards” topped 40,000 views. (In fact, as of this writing, the video has been watched over 42,000 times)

Youtube&StratTraffic

I published the video on July 13th, 2014 (my birthday – one year ago). My company, Autotask, gives all employees the day off on their birthday – so I made good use of the day. I made the video to highlight many of the strategies that I used in building the Autotask Excel Performance Dashboards.

Autotask Performance Dashboards 3.0

The Autotask Performance Dashboard suite will be undergoing an upgrade both in capabilities and visual presentation. The next versions of workbooks – to be released in the month of August – will be upgraded to the Autotask new UI look and have theme options.

PD30_NewUIb

All workbooks will also be upgraded with the UI improvements, a version update notification, improved refresh and enhanced security. Individual workbooks will be upgraded with gauges, additional ITIL support, additional slicing capabilities.

Read further for more details…

How to create your own AEM Alert Dashboard

It’s easy to understand the value of Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM). AEM will monitor your managed devices, automatically address issues where it can and then create alerts for issues that need your attention.

The Autotask AEM Alert Dashboard provides an easy way to manage your alert tickets visually. You instantly see what alerts need your attention first.


Setting up the AEM Alert Dashboard requires some configuration, so I’ve created a step-by-step setup guide.

Autotask Sales Excel Dashboard – Changing Groups [VIDEO]

As sales people come and go, you will need to update the grouping on the sales workbook.

The grouping is used in slicers on the explore screens as well as trending graphs. For a step-by-step overview of changing the grouping for a sales workbook, you can watch the below video.

Watch the Video …

Autotask Wallboards: Visibility Drives Accountability

Do you ever walk through your service or sales office and wonder “What’s happening in my business right now?” The staff may look very busy but are they aligned, motivated and accountable?

You don’t need to rent a billboard to get your employees attention.

Wallboards are mounted plasma screens on the wall which display our dashboards of the key metrics that matter to your business. The visibility of the public wallboards motivates employees, elevates problems to the entire team and drives accountability.

Seven Strategies to Awesome Excel Dashboards

We’ve received a ton of positive feedback on the Performance Dashboards since we released them in June 2013.

But we also get a bunch of questions from IT Service Providers like:

  • How did you do that?
  • Can I modify the workbooks?
  • Do you have advice on how to make dashboards for my clients to use?

So we’ve put together this video to outline the “7 secrets to building Awesome Excel Dashboards”.

In the video, I step through our actual dashboards and show you the formula which we followed.

So whether you are a business owner who’s interested in what needs to part of great dashboards or you are on the technical side and interested in how to build them – you find some great info here.

Project Excel Dashboard Beta Preview [video]

There has been a lot of interest in the project workbook which is under development. Our Beta Financial Workbook has gone out! The workbook will aggregate project and task data from your Autotask system.

The Project Workbook will provide:

  • Trending of Project and Task performance data
  • Project and Tasks Metrics That Matter
  • Task Explore screen
  • Project Explore screen
  • Overdue Task Explore screen
  • Project and Task Analysis
  • Backlog Analysis for Project Leads and Team Members

Are there other capabilities that you would like to see?