In this companion piece to the world-famous PMMPC blog, we’ll be looking at the hottest product management topics buzzing around the interwebs, comics, TV, and more — all in 10 minutes or less.

This week’s topics: Outsourcing Product Management; Amazing Spider-Man #617; Doctor Who: The End Of Time.

Listen now:

Show Notes For This Episode

• LinkedIn 280 Group Discussion: “Outsourcing Product Management”
• Techprodo: “Outsourcing Product Management”
• Steve Johnson: “Outsourcing Product Management”
• “No Quarter Asked, None Given” and other Claremontisms
• Amazing Spider-Man #617
• Doctor Who: The End Of Time on BBC America

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Tomorrow: We’ll use this story recap as a springboard into this week’s topic: Handling stress as a product manager.

< SPOILER WARNING >
Key plot points from this episode of Torchwood (guest-starring James Marsters) are pictured herein. You have been warned!
< / SPOILER WARNING >

A coked-up alien Blowfish steals a sports car and then takes a human family hostage. The Torchwood team saves the day, thanks to the timely intervention of their ’til-then missing leader Captain Jack Harkness.

While the team struggles with the reintegration of Jack into their lives, Jack receives a surprise hologram voicemail from an ex-partner/ex-lover Captain John Hart…

… who’s in town, murdering people and causing trouble. All to get Jack’s attention.

See, John says he needs help finding and disabling three, radioactive cluster bombs. Warily, the team splits into three groups of two. John teams up with Gwen Cooper–and poisons her with venomous lip gloss.

After seemingly killing Jack, John returns to Torchwood’s headquarters, where he steals a pyramid-shaped object from the Blowfish in the morgue — part of the puzzle that John has been trying to piece back together.

Team Torchwood pulls itself back together, and captures John.

John admits that the “bombs” weren’t bombs at all; they were actually part of a map, to the location of the Arcadian diamond hidden by the lover he murdered. Touching the pyramid triggers a hologram of the dead woman, and springs a trap–a real bomb–that attaches itself to John, and starts counting down.

Desperate, John cuffs himself to Gwen, swallows the key, and absconds with her. Gwen is willing to sacrifice herself to stop John. But the Torchwood team has a plan.

Working quickly, they mix blood samples from each member of the team into a single strain; track John down; and inject him with the blood mixture… which confuses the bomb. It detaches from John, and everyone narrowly escapes the resulting explosion.

Captain John agrees to let Gwen go–but, before teleporting to safety, tells Jack that he “found Gray”. Jack is clearly shaken by those words. But what they mean, he ain’t saying. Not yet…

THE END

Tomorrow: We’ll use this story recap as a springboard into this week’s topic: Handling stress as a product manager.

New Around Here?

Subscribe to the feed to receive future updates; follow me on Twitter to keep the discussion going!

Bonus Content

The opening four minutes to this episode…

So I was watching the Dalekmania documentary

and as the narrators are talking about the influence of Doctor Who and the Daleks on the UK in the 1960s, this weird image flashes across the screen, without comment: John Lennon side-by-side with a Dalek.

I paused the DVD and jumped online to see if I could find some context for the image. I couldn’t. But, if you play Hard Day’s Night backward, you can hear Dalek Caan ranting about exterminating the Doctor.

A Chance Encounter?

Was this just a chance encounter between two British icons? Maybe. But, more likely, this was a cross promotion between the producers of the Dalek movies and EMI playing off the Beatlemania gripping British teenagers and the Dalekmania enveloping the country’s children. The cross promotion (presumably) increased product awareness and retail sales for both sides.

A Good Team-Up

As anyone who has tried to launch a new product knows–it can be very difficult to get someone to notice you, or to get the right people to notice you, or enough of the right people to notice you.

Cross-promotion can help.

When the Xbox first launched, Microsoft partnered with Frito-Lay, Taco Bell, and Pepsi to promote the console and its games through instant prizes and sweepstakes. Why?

For Microsoft, it was a chance to make in-roads with male teenagers–the audience they were trying to reach, that these select partners had in abundance.

For Taco Bell and the other partners, it was a chance to drive food sales by pairing menu items with scratch-and-win cards, and drive traffic to their websites with special promo codes to win bonus prizes.

Does your company engage in cross promotions? How do you choose partners for maximum reach and penetration? And would your promotion be more successful if Daleks were involved?

New Around Here?

Subscribe to the feed to receive future updates; follow me on Twitter to keep the discussion going!

< SPOILER WARNING >
Key plotpoints are pictured below. You have been warned!
< / SPOILER WARNING >

In the previous episode, the Doctor and his companions Rose and Mickey crash-land in a parallel universe. The Doctor isn’t happy.

John Lumic, the owner of Cybus Industries, has developed the “ultimate upgrade”… a process that entails chopping out your brain and bonding it to a suit of armor. The Ethics Committee of Great Britain is aghast.

Lumic’s prototype Cybermen crash the birthday party of Rose’s parallel world mother, Jackie, offering everyone a free–compulsory–upgrade. The Doctor tries to calm things down, but the Cybermen reject his offer.

The Doctor and co. (including Rose’s ersatz dad, but minus Jackie) manage to escape. Lumic utilizes his hypnotic Bluetooth technology to compel the people of London to willingly submit to the upgrade process.

Mickey infiltrates Lumic’s Zeppelin, tied to the roof of his conversion facility; Rose and her “dad” fail to save Jackie from being upgraded; and the Doctor discovers the Cybermen’s secret weakness–an emotional inhibitor that prevents them from understanding what they’ve become.

The Cybermen order Lumic upgrade himself. When he refuses, they forcibly upgrade him. The Doctor, Rose, and Pete are captured by Cybermen and taken to see Lumic–the newly minted Cyber Controller.

Mickey decrypts the code that will deactivate the emotional inhibitors. He sends the code to Rose’s cell phone. The Doctor plugs Rose’s phone into a control console and blasts the shutdown code throughout the Cybus network. Every Cyberman–except for the Controller–is killed by the emotional shock.

While the conversion facility burns, the Doctor and his friends climb a rope ladder up to the Zeppelin. The Cyber Controller follows them!

They cut the ladder, sending the Cyber Controller plummeting into the burning factory and his apparent destruction.

Mickey decides to stay in the parallel world to help destroy the remaining Cyber factories and help his blind, parallel-world grandmother. The Doctor takes Rose back to her earth, and her own, non-upgraded mother.

THE END

Tomorrow: Doctor Who, Cybermen, and the bane of product managers everywhere: Product Narcissism.

Bonus Content

The original “coming attractions” for this episode…

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According to the solicitation: “Doctor Who: Time Squad will star the Doctor, along with many other familiar characters, enemies and monsters, in a cute and collectible super-deformed mini-figure format.”

(Yes, I just pre-ordered mine. And, yes, I know where each one will be placed, strategically, on my desk.)

Thanks to Jay Cochran at Toy News International for the tip.

The new version of Colorful Tabs supports a background image for tabs. Good idea. However, their default image is horrific. So I decided to make my own.

Being a big Doctor Who fan, I went with a colorful swatch of Daleks to exterminate that ugly default background image. The end result looks like this:

You can download the Dalek swatch yourself by right-clicking on the image below and selecting “save as” from the resulting menu: