I think that this book has been invaluable to me in my role and I will refer to it often. Most product management and marketing books I have seen are too high level where they discuss thoery but not practical ideas on what to do. Other books get too deep in areas that a product manager needs not be the expert but rather a participant. I appreciated the brevity of the overall book and found it also to be quite specific and descriptive where it needed to be. I think anyone who is a product manager can appreciate how valuable time is in trying to juggle the many aspects of a product - Dver understands this and it is reflected in the book and its writing.
Lastly, I also think that Dver captures well the fact that software is a very different product to manage and draws out these differences in each chapter's topic. I had read other product management and marketing books and they never seem to get that software is quite different and therefore needs to be managed differently. I also enjoyed having a reality check of smaller companies and what is done versus larger ones where they can afford to apply more resources and time towards marketing and sales. This book gave me a lot of excellent ideas on how to manage my product in a low-budget, resource-starved environment. That in itself is worth the price of the book.
The author mentions that the 4 P's of marketing are: Product, Place (distribution), Pricing, and Positioning (usually called Promotion). However, she doesn't go into depth on any one of the P's nor does she try to explain how to integrate them. The deepest section is on product development but there are much better books on this one subject alone. Similarly, readers needing more information and advice on pricing should read other books such as The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. However, I really liked how Dver included the S-curve as a 4th C of pricing (Customers, Cost, Competition, and now Change). Unfortunately, positioning is only covered in a few paragraphs! Distribution is also glossed over.
Perhaps this lack of substance reflects the adolescent state of the industry, with its overemphasis on Product above all the other P's (perhaps this made sense in the hypergrowth stage as firms quickly leaped to the Next Big Thing but not in a maturing industry), and lack of integration between the P's in most firms. By contrast, think about consumer brand management (where product management originated) for a moment: does P&G only emphasize one P or do they do a good job integrating all 4 when bringing a product to market? Considering who Redmond hires as new product managers, no wonder Microsoft is the only firm in this industry seen as having great marketing (debate over the quality of its software notwithstanding).
The book also seems to lean heavily on quotes from Pragmatic Marketing (course and consulting firm). We have a long way to go, both in the industry, and in guidebooks on the software product manager's job. Perhaps the second edition of Ms. Dver's book will be more helpful.