About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
Earlier this month, the Silicon Valley Product Management Association kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about the state of PM as a profession. Since the role has wide...
IBM recently launched CityOne, a serious game that poses the kinds of questions about water, power, finance, and retail that city planners face daily. It's a powerful tool for a B2B company like...

[For earlier posts in this series, click here and here.] Imagine that you're dining at a new Italian restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood. You've heard that the chef is well...
In my previous post about Agile practices and compliance requirements, I described the first of two big surprises encountered while doing the research. Compliance, as it turns out, is not quite as...
Future Look: The Agile And Lean Playbook
This report outlines the future look of Forrester's solution for application development and delivery (AD&D) executives working on Agile and Lean. It is designed to help AD&D execs discover Agile and...
By now, the arguments for improving product requirements are very familiar – all too familiar. Bad requirements lead to misconceived projects, many of which fail outright. The...
[Another interesting finding about the requirements tool market, from research by Yours Truly and Mary Gerush. For other observations about this very interesting market, click here and here.] ...
The Market Expands And Diversifies To Address Diverse Problems
The requirements tools market has expanded and diversified as the business problems that compel teams to consider adopting a requirements tool have multiplied and intensified. Gone are the days in...
When it comes to home improvement, I'm barely competent. My biggest hurdle is ignorance: when I was growing up, no one in our family was a do-it-yourselfer. Unless I had the opportunity to watch...
Today's a very exciting day for me. As you know, I'm a member of a team of Forrester analysts who write research specifically for product marketers and product managers in the tech...
Undoubtedly, when you read the title of this blog post, you thought, "But politicians are users." No, I'm not talking about that kind of user. Instead, I'm thinking of the user we normally...
As readers of this blog know, I have a keen interest in serious games. Among other virtues, they provide a way to deal with tough circumstances by changing the way team members interact. In an...
War Games Help Top Leaders Build Better Strategies
An increasing number of application development teams are using serious games to make better decisions about their work. Where other new techniques, such as Agile, have helped teams work better,...
Follow The Road Map Toward Agile Success At Achieving Compliance
The application development and delivery teams that have achieved the greatest success in balancing Agile practices with compliance requirements treat compliance as a product. From building the...
In a recent blog post that I wrote right before the Agile 2012 conference in Dallas, I expressed my hope that the conference sessions would be full of specifics, not generalities. No, thank you, I...
Democracy is great, right? We'd all prefer to have direct participation in the decisions that affect our lives, from which multimillionaire will represent us common folk to which features...
Fiction writers I've met have said that the hardest section of a novel to write is not the beginning or ending but everything that happens in between. The middle chapters trace the course of the...
During last August's Agile 2010 conference, I attended a session that used a board game to simulate the collaboration between developers and UX professionals. The object of the game was to...
In the last couple of years, an increasing number of technology companies have discovered, or rediscovered, or redefined their own portfolio. Here are a few examples of where you can see this new...
A big part of my research agenda for this year is productization. Many app dev teams see productization as a way to innovate better, achieve more sustainable results at a lower cost, deal with some...
[For earlier posts in this series, click here, here, and here.] Imagine yourself back in childhood, sitting in the back seat of the family station wagon, en route to one of those long, high-stress...
Just a quick reminder, our open house on thought leadership in the technology industry is tonight (Thursday) at 5 PM in the Foster City, CA office. Recommended for any product marketer or product...
A while back, I had a spirited exchange with someone who took a rather extreme position about the role of product management in software as a service companies. The less polite version: He staked out...
Google's decision to pull the plug on Wave was hardly surprising. Not only did Wave stumble out of the gate and then never quite get its footing, it violated a core principle of software as a...