NOTE: The following is a guest post by Shardul Mehta. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

If you are considering introducing Product Management into your organization, or are the first Product Management employee hired into an established business, then tread carefully! Having twice done the latter, I can attest there are fewer professional situations more fraught with ambiguity, unreasonable expectations, threats from every corner, and high likelihood of failure for the Product Manager and the organization.

Why would a successful business decide to introduce Product Management into the organization at all? In one of the companies I had joined, the business had been extremely successful selling variations of essentially the same product for years and years. But with potential new clients drying up, the execs decided what the company needed was more “innovation” and their answer was to create a Product Management department. Other reasons could be:

• With everyone in the company focused on marketing, selling, customer service, managing operations, hiring, and a hundred other things, the organization finds no one is focused on growing the product portfolio.
• On the other hand, the product portfolio may have grown like wild fire, and now there are multiple versions of the product, causing customer confusion and inefficiencies within the organization. Time to consolidate.
• The product itself has become so “feature rich” that sales and marketing no longer know how to position the product to customers, customers cannot be serviced efficiently, and delivery dates keep slipping as each additional piece of functionality adds exponential risk to development and testing.

For any of these reasons, the company executives decide its time to bring in Product Management.

Buyer beware

Although these situations may seem ideal to introduce Product Management, they abound with pitfalls for the unaware. It’s important for both company execs and Product Management to be mindful of numerous land mines:

Unfounded unreasonably high expectations.Product Management is suddenly looked upon as the silver bullet answer to all the company’s problems.

Not all expectations are created equal. Expectations are also different across each department:

• Engineering/IT expects Product Management to write requirements, project manage the delivery, conduct UAT, manage defect resolution, and make release go/no go calls.
• Sales expects Product Management to be available for every sales call, produce sales collateral, do product demos, commit to product features that will help them close the next big deal, and have them available by the date they already promised to the client.
• Marketing expects Product Management to provide the content for marketing materials or, worse, wants nothing at all to do with Product Management.
• Execs expect Product Management to come up with the “next big thing,” have a solid business case behind it, deliver it on time, and ensure it makes a ton of money.

What does Product Management do? Most times folks don’t understand the role of Product Management and the value it brings to the organization. Let’s see…

• Salespeople close deals.
• Marketing does market research and advertising.
• Operations manages call centers and business processes.
• Account management manages client relationships.
• IT takes care of “all that technical stuff” the rest of the organization would rather not be bothered about.

Pretty straightforward. So what exactly does Product Management do? And here’s the fun part: even the executives of the company – the same folks who decided to introduce Product Management – may not be clear on what exactly it does!

Why do we even need Product Management? Infinitely worse is when folks secretly question the decision to bring in Product Management. This is typically prevalent at the department head and rank & file levels.

The thinking goes this way: “We’ve been successful all these years without it, so why do we need it now?” Product Management represents a disruption to tradition and the status quo. As such, it is seen as a threat. We human beings typically don’t embrace change so readily. In one company, IT had historically written the business requirements and the business was more than happy with this arrangement. When Product Management came into the picture, the battle lines were drawn!

The scapegoat syndrome: A popular way for other departments to deal with the threat is simply to blame Product Management for anything and everything wrong with the product. Suddenly Product Management is getting blamed for deals not getting closed, because the product does not have the features desired by the last “hot” prospect.

If the product has holes, Product Management is called to task for writing poor requirements. If customers don’t respond to marketing, Product Management is accused of not understanding the customer. If customers report bugs in the product, Product Management is asked to immediately identify fixes. Product Management becomes everyone’s favorite punching bag. It’s amazing how fast this happens.

The bottleneck syndrome: Somewhat related to the scapegoat syndrome, except this one is often self-inflicted. The new Product Manager declares, “Product Management owns the product.” And sure enough, soon he or she does indeed own everything to do with the product. All decisions, all issues, are swiftly sent to the Product Manager, who quickly gets swamped with putting out one fire after the next. Pretty soon, no department is getting the support it expects, the backlog piles up, delivery timeframes get jeopardized, the execs are still waiting on the product strategy, and everyone is pointing to Product Management as the bottleneck.

Eyes wide open

So before you introduce Product Management into your organization, or sign up as the first Product Management employee, be mindful of these traps. In my next post, I’ll share hard fought lessons on how you can avoid them and prepare for long-term success.

Have you ever been one of the first product management employees hired into an organization? Please share your story. I’d love to hear from you!

Shardul

Tweet this: Introducing Product Management into an Organization http://wp.me/pXBON-37M #prodmgmt #innovation

—

Shardul Mehta is a simple product guy whose passion for great digital experiences is only exceeded by his love for chicken curry. He is the Founder of ProductCamp DC, and his blog can be found here.

Related posts:

1. How to Create an Effective Product Management Organization
2. 5 steps to building a great Product Management organization
3. 5 Steps to Building a Great Product Management Organization
4. Guest Post: Measuring Product Management (part 1)

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a What’s the Deal piece.  The last one was called “What’s the Deal with Software Product Management?“. So it’s kind of fitting, that I’m following it up (albeit almost 4 years later) with one on Product Marketing.

Recently, there have been a few posts on other blogs related to the Product Marketing role and the viewpoints caught my eye.

• What’s the difference between Product Marketing and Product Management?
• The End of Product Marketing
• The Rise of the Product Marketer

The “What’s the difference” article attempts to delineate the functions of Product Management and Product Marketing.  You should read the whole article, but here are a couple of snippets of the definitions of the two:

Product management usually “listens” to the market and then works with the internal team to develop products to meet the needs that are articulated.  They do not usually to interact much with the market on a day-to-day basis  in a direct way, but rather listen to feedback obtained by sales and marketing.

…

So if that’s product management in a nutshell, where does product marketing differ?  Well, product marketing is a more externally focused role. The product marketers “talk” to the market more.  They evangelize what the company’s product offers the world, and help the company focus their messaging to the market.

We need to get away from these “complementary opposite” definitions of the roles. i.e. one listens, the other other talks. One is inbound, the other outbound. One focuses on putting products on the shelf, the other focuses on getting products off the shelf etc.

The roles are are definitely complementary, but are definitely not opposites. These kinds of definitions, while short and easy to remember are incorrect and only help to further confuse those who aren’t clear on their relationship.

Now, in The End of Product Marketing, Dave Wolpert (guest posting on A Random Jog) describes a death spiral he sees happening to Product Marketers. Caught between Product Managers, Marketing and Sales, Product Marketers are losing responsibility for any strategic activities and are becoming tactical, siloed content creators.

At many companies, product management has already replaced the inbound function I described earlier. At others, product marketers have evolved into field marketers by focusing mainly on sales tools that are only used internally; development of externally-facing content marketing tools, like technical white papers, are sourced to others.

In what seems to be a bit of a rebuttal of Dave Wolpert’s piece, Josh Duncan (the main blogger on A Random Jog), states the following in the Rise of the Product Marketer.

In most businesses, there is a gap between marketing and product that must be filled. Without an audience, a great product has nowhere to go. Likewise, a great marketing strategy can’t save you from a woeful product. I believe that business success can be found when you match a great product with a great marketing plan and this is where Product Marketing can have the most impact.

So with that preamble, here’s my take on the situation.

1. Product Marketing is not dead, but it’s also not on the rise.

I currently work with some really good product marketing folks. I’m not saying that just to be nice or polite. I’m saying that because it’s true. But it’s not like that in many companies.

Part of the problem is that many companies don’t understand what Product Marketing is. So they define the role incorrectly, or hire the wrong people, or both. And what happens then? You have ineffective Product Marketing and little need to expand on it.

A lot of companies look at the role like this – product MARKETING. i.e. they focus on the second word and thus create conditions like those described by Dave Wolpert. i.e. Product Marketing becomes a tactically focused sales support role.

2. Product Marketing is usually ridiculously understaffed.

I’ve been in Product Management for a LONG time. And while most companies I’ve worked in have small Product Management teams, they have tiny, and sometimes non-existent Product Marketing teams. Ratios of 5:1 (Product Managers to Product Marketers) are not uncommon.  Why? Because companies don’t understand the role so don’t hire properly. Or they feel that the work can simply be done the “the Product Manager”.  Yes, it can be done, with the right people in place, but at what cost? Having individuals splitting time between all the different tasks of both Product Management and Product Marketing is simply a recipe for mediocrity at best, failure at worst.

3. “Marketing” is viewed very differently than it was 20+ years ago

The word “Marketing”,  if you look at the business school definition of it, is very different than how it is understood in most technology companies today.

Marketing used to be viewed as a strategic business function. Remember the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place)? Notice that “marketing” included “product”. Today of course, the term “Marketing” is mostly understood to cover only “Promotion” – i.e. advertising, PR, events, campaigns, awareness, lead generation etc. It has become specialized and focused heavily on demand creation.

Product Management has taken over “Product” and “Price”. “Place” — i.e. sales/distribution channels — has been taken over by Sales and to a lesser extent Product Management. Thus the “Marketing” part of “Product Marketing” is viewed in this context. Not as a strategic business function, but an outwardly focused partner to Sales.

Perhaps we need a new name for Product Marketing to better align with the changes that have happened in Marketing over the last 20 or so years.

So, what does that mean for “Product Marketing”?

In short, I see the clear need for what I would call “strategic marketing”.

This covers the basics like positioning and messaging, but also other areas where market, customer and product knowledge are required. This could include (but not be limited to) the following:

• evangelism
• analyst relations
• sales funnel analysis and optimization
• working on product, market or competitive strategy
• high value content creation

So where does Product Marketing fit within a company? This role does NOT belong in Marketing and definitely not in Sales. Product Marketing should be part of the overall Product Management organization.

OK, Product Marketers, hear me out before you think I’m out to assimilate the role into that of Product Manager. I’m not. In fact, I’m advocating the opposite.

I’ve written and presented on the topic of How to Structure a Product Management Organization as well as The Need for Differentiated Roles in Product Management.

The fact is that both the roles of “Product Manager” and “Product Marketer” are poorly understood and implemented in the industry.  e.g. There’s too much focus on what a “Product Manager” does vs. what “Product Management” does.

Far too many companies have Product Management organizations that are populated solely with people with titles of “Product Manager” at varying levels of seniority. e.g. Technical Product Manager, Product Manager, Sr. Product Manager, Product Management Director, VP Product Management etc. Is there any other department that looks like that? No.

All departments have a spread of roles that have particular complimentary (there’s that word again)  focuses (foci?) and that work together to achieve common goals.  Why should Product Management be different?

There’s little disagreement that Product Managers and Product Marketers should work closely together, yet for some reason, there is pushback (mostly from Product Marketers in my experience) to be functionally within the Product Management organization.

Take a look at the following presentation. I delivered it last year at ProductCamp Boston. In it I present my case for the various roles, the place of Product Marketing within overall Product Management, and the problems this structure solves.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Saeed

Tweet this: What’s the deal with Product Marketing? http://wp.me/pXBON-371 #prodmgmt #prodmktg

Related posts:

1. What's the deal with BizDev? pt. 2
2. What's the deal with BizDev?
3. Should Product Management and Product Marketing be parts of the same department?
4. Open Question: How did you get your first Product Management or Product Marketing position?

All over the web and in all the product management communities, there are articles and discussions about gamification. If you’ve been offline for a while, gamification is about applying design and development efforts to software in a way to make it more engaging, more “fun.”

Not only have whole applications been born under the premise (i.e. Foursquare), but gamification has also had great impact in some of the more traditional business software, (ie. Salesforce.com) allowing for more interaction and amusement when performing daily tasks.

I’m all about having more fun in my interactions with technology, and can truly appreciate making the more mundane less so; but, I believe sometimes we have taken the concept of gamification too far.

Not every piece of software or every interaction within should be designed around fun. Stanford professor Elizabeth Corcoran, in her book on the subject, “The ‘Gamification’ Of Education”, suggests that the gamification of businesses and virtual worlds is creating an expectation among people that real-life interactions follow simple mechanics and some disillusionment when they do not. Are we making our software more of a toy than a productive tool?

I recently heard of a software company’s UI meeting, held to introduce the upcoming planned release to the internal audience, where the  discussion quickly went from what the planned for now to the planned for later. In the “planned for later” talks, the designers were sharing their vision for the upcoming UI changes, which were focused on including more opportunities for social interactions. The problem? No one had talked with more than 1 or 2 current customers to find out if this is what is truly needed or wanted.

Conversations need to start with the market, not just customers. Does your market want to play a game when they are in your software? Will it help them do their job better? More effectively?

Luke Hohmann, with his company Innovation Games, does great work in promoting playing collaborative games with your customers to build  engagement. He states that engaging customers in a well-designed Innovation Game frees them up from the constraints of typical focus-group sessions and delivers deeper, more accurate information than is available through online surveys or other tools.

There are some very successful elements that need to be copied.  Gaming elements do and should belong in SOME software. Luke’s reasons and use make sense. In consumer-facing sites, I support using gaming elements to make the site more engagement, building more loyalty, etc. In business programs,  I can no longer remember the “old” training programs where you didn’t even see your status on the module much less your achievement. Gaming made training more fun. But, once you start entering the enterprise software realm, gamification is an area that needs to be evaluated carefully.

Gamification elements that are added in by designers because they are the latest and greatest, will quickly get subjected to the sideline and prove to be a waste of your time and effort. In the competitive software market, time and effort need to be focused on those areas which deliver the differentiation. And, it might not be about the game.

(Please share this on Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google+: “Not Everyone Wants to Play Games” by@jidoctor: http://wp.me/pXBON-36h #prodmgmt #gamification”)

Related posts:

1. Games executives play: Guess what's in the envelope
2. Book Review: Innovation Games
3. I clicked "Play", mommy
4. On Product Design

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Veronica Figgarella. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

In a recent post entitled Open Question: Product Management Challenges at a Startup, Saeed asked for community input to three questions posed by a startup founder. Looking to scale his company, the founder asked for input on the following three questions.

1. What metrics should be instrumented into the product to see if implemented features are effective in solving customer/user problems?
2. What are the right collateral pieces for the sales people? What is/are the right pricing models?
3. How to have marketing work with Product Management to create compelling stories to identify and target new customer segments?

I want to address question #1 and share a few thoughts about developing the right metrics for measuring product success. I hope to address the topic in a broader sense, and not limit my answer to the B2B software industry.

Measurement is necessary to monitor progress in all areas of the business. We measure sales to track progress towards quota; measure bug counts and bugs fixed as a quality indicator. Product Management needs measurements to identify value creation and product improvement. And especially in a startup company, Product Managers are most worried about measuring how much cash flow their product generates thus working hard to solve customers’ problems.

Measure Cashflow

If you want to learn how your products are helping your customers solve their problems, your first metric should be how much cash flow your product is generating? If your product is not producing the expected earnings it is most likely not generating value for the customer either.

Proper metrics need to be:

• precise and sensitive to change,
• reliable,
• relevant
• and cost/effective to implement.

The amount of cash flow your product generates depends on multiple factors (i.e. channel supply, vendor supply, sales effectiveness, etc) which can be tracked through market performance metrics. Although metrics vary from one industry to the other, market performance needs to be linked to cash flow especially for a startup where initial revenue is vital for company survival.

Some of the most relevant market performance metrics are:

• Sales effectiveness (acquisition):
  • # of trials vs. purchase,
  • # of referrals vs. actual adoption
  • Wallet share: How much of the customer spend is in my product?
  • Price Premium: Are my customers willing to pay a premium for my product?

As money comes in, you can start thinking about your second biggest worry:

How do you generate future cash flow?

Your metrics need to be linked to your strategy, mission and vision statements so you can monitor how your products contribute to your corporate strategy. They will also help you deliver continuous value to both customers and shareholders.

Some helpful long-term value delivery metrics are:

• Return on product and marketing investment: a simple way of calculating it is (return – investment)/(return), the tricky part is defining what return means for your product. Return can be total revenue or, gross profit or net profit.
• Customer satisfaction: it is a measure of the value your product gives to customers, so define satisfaction in a way that is simple yet relevant to them.
• Market share in targeted segments and
• Loyalty (are my customers willing to buy from me again?) Satisfied customers are more likely to repeat a purchase therefore loyalty impacts long term business profitability. Identifying which components of your product/services drive loyalty and monitoring them, is key in generating future cash flows.

Several academic studies show that future cash flow is related to customer satisfaction. This is because a satisfied customer is more likely to repeat a purchase and a loyal customer is cheaper to maintain than acquiring a new one. Let’s dive a litter deeper into measuring Customer Satisfaction.  After all, if your products are solving customer problems, it is very likely they are satisfied customers.

So… How to measure customer satisfaction?

There is no right or wrong metric to measure customer satisfaction, but the following considerations are pretty much what many experts and best practice reports agree on:

1. Identify what service/product dimensions are relevant to your customers

For example, If you are in B2B arena and each sale is different, then you need to be able to identify a common driver for purchase among your customers: i.e. how fast your RFI was answered, or the inclusion of a clause that allows discounts when the product fails, or if a specific option is included with no additional charge. It works pretty much the same for B2C; you still have to investigate what does your customer value from your product/service? Identifying these relevant dimensions will help you define the important metrics to monitor.

According to Leonard Berry in his book Competing Through Quality, there are 5 areas customers’ weigh as important in order to achieve satisfaction (and this is mostly for services):

• Reliability
• Responsiveness
• Assurance (related to how the company and its employees convey trust and confidence),
• Empathy (to customers’ problems)
• Tangibles elements of the service are primordial in providing satisfaction because they are the evidence of the service, for example: appearance of physical facilities, of service personnel, tools or equipment used, etc.

Customers will be satisfied if they believe the received what they expected in these areas.

2. Encourage complaints to understand dissatisfaction

Sometimes customers are not clear about what satisfies them before they try a product, but when they return it or call to complain they are pretty clear about what’s not working for them. In Berry’s book, he explains some of the gaps where managers need to look to find sources of dissatisfaction:

• Misunderstanding of customer requirements
• Poor specification of standards;
  • management may not have instructed staff properly on how to implement desired standards
• Capability gaps
  • staff might not be properly trained
• Creating over-expectations
  • advertising and sales people can promise too much leading customers to have inflated expectations

The importance of these dimensions needs to be clear especially to sales representatives, front line staff and marketing people as they promote your products/services and interact directly with the customer.

3. Not all communication channels are equal

Be careful about the channels you use to encourage complaints and be true about embracing customer dissatisfaction. According to a recent study by Maritz Research most customers expect the company to read their Twitter complaints but only a third received a response. Jay Baer comments on this topic on his blog Convince and Convert.

Social media doesn’t create negativity, it puts a magnifying glass to it.

So companies need to be aware of this and respond. Secondly he points out the following:

…social media doesn’t close at 5pm, and in fact many customers use social media during the night and on weekends, when it may be inconvenient for you to monitor and reply. But your corporate convenience is not the prism through which you should be gazing upon social business.

So in short, not only is responding to these public complaints important, but the responses should be done in a timeframe that is convenient for the customer.

social media will put a magnifying glass on dissatisfaction and you will need to expand your “complaining hours” after 5 pm.

4. Customer satisfaction needs to be linked to financial reports to be taken seriously

Unfortunately, financial reports and product line incomes often dominate the thinking of a business that lacks of customer orientation.  However market-based assets such as: size of customer base, quality of supplier relationships and customer satisfaction needs to be tracked and linked to earnings in order to make it everybody’s business (finance, customer support, engineering, etc).

5. Keep customer feedback mechanisms simple

When collecting information from customers, make the questions simple to answer. This has additional benefits as short surveys tend to reduce user fatigue and return more reliable information.

Here is an example of a good satisfaction survey Amazon sent me recently. I was really happy with how they handled my problem; especially because it was my fault that the item I bought had not arrived on time (I entered a wrong address ooops!)

_____________________________________________________________________
Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A1CSAT0DV4C6JL&k=hy
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A1CSAT0DV4C6JL&k=hn

When I pressed the YES link I was directed to here:

It was really simple, all I had to do was rate each questions with stars, it did not take a minute and the answer was very true to my feelings.

________________________________________________________________________

If you want to read more about the links between market orientation, customer satisfaction and profitability I recommend reading: Chapter 1 (it’s a free pdf) from the book Market-Based Management byRobert J Best.

6. Understand how to manage your data.

If data collected is not managed properly and acted upon timely, measuring customer satisfaction will be a wasted effort. This links back to defining the quality of what is being measured and stabilising a relevant score card to assure company’s commitment to customer satisfaction.

So next time you decide to measure satisfaction, think backward and establish what data will help you make decisions so you can create the questions that will accurately yield the information needed.

References

Why Customer Satisfaction Matters – article on cvent.com

Marketing Management by Gregory Whitwell

Tweet this: A value-based approach to Customer Satisfaction and Product Metrics http://wp.me/pXBON-35B #prodmgmt

Related posts:

1. (How) do you measure customer satisfaction?
2. Go-to-Market and Organizational Metrics for Product Success
3. Product Management Metrics (part 2a)
4. A Model and Metrics for Tracking Product Success

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Ninon LaForce. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

I was asked  to formulate a 90-day plan for a new Product Manager role. This role was created to drive the strategy around the “right mix” of partners and solutions in a new emerging technology area. A 30-60-90 plan shows a potential employer how you plan to hit the ground running and can set you apart during a competitive interview process.  Here is my plan:

Before The Start Date

• Obtain all information relevant information I can find to get up to speed on what is happening with the organization (e.g. annual reports, website, press releases, internal contacts if I have them). Also get a good understanding of what is happening in the industry.

Day 1-30: Learn my way around and get to know the team

• Meet with my manager to identify top priorities for my department and what is expected of me. Set up a time for weekly status meetings.
• Meet with each member of my team to learn their role, challenges and opportunities. Find out what they expect of me and how I can help them.
• Meet with as many top influencers as possible and ask them valuable suggestions about my role and about navigating the
  organization.
• Learn the corporate systems, the internal workings of the company and read the company policies and procedures.
• Attend any orientation or training offered.
• Review the list of existing partners and study what is known about them, how they have been performing, etc.
• Subscribe to industry online news, thought leadership, and any other industry online resources.
• Go to lots of meetings and offer to help on small initiatives.
• Read as much as possible and study to continue to improve industry and product knowledge.
• Draw up the logical value chain (ecosystem) for the industry and find out as much as possible about each value step and how the organization adds value (or could add value).
• Listen and take lots of notes.

Day 31-60: Take ownership

• Meet with my manager for a first 30-day review. Ensure I am focusing on the right activities and adjust as necessary.
• Take ownership of some projects.
• Contribute my thoughts/ideas on how to streamline industry partners and programs.
• Make a list of activities/project that will contribute to meeting the department objectives and set up a plan to reach the goals.
• Go to lots of meetings and begin to run some of them.
• Continue to build relationships.
• Begin to write materials (drafts)
• Continue to learn and read as much as possible.
• By this time I hope to have uncovered some promising unexploited opportunities for growth and have begun to figure out how to exploit them.

Day 61-90: Begin to take on more of a leadership role

• Check-in with my manager for a first 60-day review. Discuss how things are going, review progress on projects I am involved in and offer new ideas. Reach agreement on how to move forward and secure sufficient resources to get things done.
• Obtain constructive feedback from team members on my progress.
• Start to recommend new partners.
• Use my integrative thinking and propose new solutions or better ways to add-value to partners or programs. Ensure the
  strategies I am proposing match the business environment.
• Share my ideas on developing new ways to reach out to partners and engage with them.
• Start making decisions.
• Take a fuller leadership role.
• Start being a resource to others.
• Keep a focus on problems/projects/activities that are priorities. Create some momentum in a positive and collaborative way.

I consulted the following resources for the formulation of my 30-60-90 plan. They are:

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
by Michael Watkins, Soundview Executive Book Summaries, 2004.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/09/06/leadership-pink-careers-cx_ag_0906ninetydays.html

http://www.thedailymba.com/2010/06/21/your-first-90-days-at-a-new-job/

Thoughts on my plan would be appreciated. Please do not hesitate to comment.

Ninon

Tweet this: A 90-day Plan for New Product Managers – http://wp.me/pXBON-34i  #prodmgmt

—

Note: This article was originally published on Ninon’s blog – Product Edge — in 2011.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: Do you have a roadmap for your Product Managers?
2. Questions for Product Managers
3. Product Managers need time to breathe…
4. Do Product Managers need Domain Knowledge?

by Saeed Khan

It’s only the 3rd day of the year, and I already have a great customer experience story that I want to share.

I have to say, that barring any changes in the policies of this particular vendor, they’ve got a customer for life in me.

So what do I want as a customer or purchaser of products? Simple – three things:

1. Products (or services) that work as advertised or expected.
2. Honesty and competence from the vendor’s employees.
3. Post sale service that treats me fairly and efficiently.

Now how hard is this for companies to understand and implement?

Many times, I’ve had the opposite experience of the 3 points above.  I’ve blogged about my horrible experience with Future Shop (a large Canadian retailer) here.  They pretty much violated #2 and #3 above right from the get go.

On the flip side, one of my first posts on this blog — back in 2007 — was about the Dyson vacuum cleaner I had bought.

During the almost 5 years that I’ve had it, it’s continued to work well. We had a problem early on with a small plastic clip that broke. I called up Dyson — via the toll free # very conveniently visible on the front of the unit — and spoke to a customer service rep. He verified the problem over the phone and shipped me a replacement clip free of charge. Nice.

But now I have another problem with the unit. The telescoping hose — a feature I really appreciate in the unit — is wearing out. It tore sometime last year, and we patched it with some duct tape. But, over the holidays, the hose got to the point where tape was no longer a solution.

So this morning I called up Dyson intent on buying a replacement hose. What’s actually very neat about the Dyson machines is that they come apart and snap together very easily, and virtually every part except the electrical bits can be easily removed and replaced by the owner. I could write a whole post on the implications of this, but I’ll save that for later.

So, I called up their toll-free line, waited a few minutes in the queue until a service rep answered the call. He verified which model of vacuum I had, confirmed that I was still at the same address, and  listened to my problem. And before I could ask him how much a replacement hose would be, he said he’d ship a replacement hose to me — NO CHARGE!!!

Yes, 5 years after I bought the unit, replacement parts are shipped FREE– no cost for the part, no cost for shipping. And he added, once I get the part, if I have any problems in replacing the hose, I could simply call them back and someone would step me through it over the phone. Awesome!

As long as Dyson doesn’t change their policies or their level of service, they have a customer for life in me for their vacuums.

When I bought the vacuum several years ago, I did it mainly due to a VERY positive recommendation from a friend of mine. His wife had bought one a year earlier, yet he said he loved using it. Doesn’t get better than that. I wondered if the premium price of the unit — at $500, it was about 2X the price of other competitive models — was worth it.

Well, without a doubt the answer is yes.  So how do you create a customer for life? Let me modify the 3 bullets I started with at the top of this article just a bit:

1. Products (or services) that work as advertised or expected AND do it better than the competition.
2. Honesty and competence from vendor’s employees REGARDLESS of who you speak with.
3. Post sale service that is so far ABOVE THE NORM, I’d be a fool to switch brands.

How does your company rack up against these three traits?

Saeed

Tweet this: How to create a customer for life http://wp.me/pXBON-34M #prodmgmt #custservice #dyson

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Hi

This blog has a number of contributors. We tend to all post individually at various frequencies, but for the end of year, we thought it would be a good idea to look at one question and get several reflections on it. Perhaps this is the start of a tradition.

For this post, the question is:

What is something important that you learned this year, and why is it important in our profession?

And of course, we’d love to hear from you. Either comment on what we’ve said, or leave your own answer to the question in the comments.

Jennifer Doctor – Engage in Communities

This year, I learned a lot about the importance of actively engaging in communities, both online and in person. As a result, I have taken the following pledge:  “always be building your network, especially when times are good – when you don’t necessarily need it”. I invite you to join me in this pledge.

I think that networking gets a bad name because many folks only leave their cocoon when they need to take from it. They need a job. They need a reference. They need to sell something. Take, take and even more take. Yet, if you focus on the give side, giving freely at any time, then you will never eat alone in a strange city or be wanting for a job. In one of my all-time favorite movies, Pay it forward with Helen Hunt, her son Trevor applies this lesson to life in general.

It is so very important to our chosen profession, because most of us didn’t actually choose to be Product People – we fell into it. What we didn’t necessarily realize when we took the fall, was that we would be alone in our company. Seldom are there companies with large defined Product Management groups. But, by utilizing social media, Product Camps, classes and local product management communities, I know that I have built my own knowledgebase, expanded friendships and contributed to the collective pool of information available to others who join us as Product Professionals, but didn’t earn the education for it.

Moving forward, this is an integral skill and a necessary element for growing your professional knowledge. It is not as easy as it sounds, and takes a dedicated effort. Like so many other efforts, you only get out of it what you put in to it. So, as you plan to end this year and start the next, the question is “how will you contribute?”

Saeed Khan – The Power of the Individual

Perhaps this is a lesson re-learned as opposed to a lesson learned, but it’s one I think is worth reminding myself over and over again. This year has been a tumultuous year worldwide, from protests and uprisings such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, to natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. There were many events that affected each of us in different ways.

The 2011 Nobel Peace prize was awarded to 3 women from Africa who, each in their own way, strove for and achieved remarkable change in their countries.  Tawwakol Karman, one of the recipients, is only 32 — tied for the youngest person to receive this distinction.

And while his name may not be familiar to most, Mohamed Bouazizi, an unassuming vegetable vendor in Tunisia, had an enormous impact on the world in 2011, and his tragic act of protest and frustration on Dec. 19, 2010 in the city of Sidi Bouzid, will be remembered by many as the starting point of the Arab Spring movement.

In a more inspirational story, following the tragedy of the tsunami in Japan earlier this year, the Japanese women’s national soccer team won the Women’s World Cup of Soccer, beating many strong teams such as the United States (in the final), Sweden and Germany.

Japan beat Germany 1-0 in the quarter finals.  The lone (and winning) goal for Japan was scored by a Karina Maruyama, a substitute on the team, who had worked at the now crippled Fukushima nuclear plant until 2009 and was inspired by the Fukushima disaster to win the game.

In all of these cases, and many others this year, previously unheralded individuals made a huge impact with their actions.

Now, nothing we do as product professionals is going to have the impact of what these people did. But it’s also worth noting that the problems they confronted are so much greater than those we confront in our jobs. And so we can learn a real lesson from them — that a single individual (for example you!), through determination and perseverance has the ability to affect real change and inspire others to do the right thing — whether it be in the area of human rights, freedom, sport, or simply driving great products through the barriers set forth by those who don’t believe what you believe or see what you see.

Jim Holland – Simplicity

1. Imagine it
2. Prove it
3. Build it

Prabhakar Gopalan – Experimentation is key

This year I learned the power of figuring out things along the way and to stop strategizing in vacuum.

As unattractive as it sounds for master planners and strategists, the reality is, a lot of things around us do not behave the way they are supposed to. This includes ourselves. Understanding the behavior of people and things, and how that challenges a lot of (supposedly) rational hypothesis is something critical to successful product management.

For example, it is easier to draw and force fit a bell curve distribution for your product adoption, but much harder to figure out the real adoption over time and the variables that affect it.

This blog was started by three people – Saeed, Alan and Ethan.  Over this past year, Jim, Jennifer and I joined as regular contributors. Given the sudden increase in the number of writers, we struggled initially to coordinate and schedule our posts, and decide what topics we should blog about.   I suggested the following experiment – why don’t we assign a specific day of the week for of us, let each writer decide what they would write about, and leave it that way for a few months.  We could track progress and decide how to proceed after that.

It was a simple idea.   When we met three months later, we knew answer – it was working. Our page views and traffic were up significantly. We had been consistent in posting on our own. In short, we were doing just fine, without an overarching strategy or ongoing coordination.

Switch to scene two at a large company where a friend of mine works. Over the summer there was a complex project he was working on.  The project was in an emerging technology space, where neither the market nor the products were developed or mature enough, even for early adoption.   It required a very experimental approach towards problem solving – learning as you go.  But the smartest thinkers and ‘strategists’ in the room put forth their biggest plans.  But by the end of the year, after 6 months of PowerPoints and more PowerPoints the project had barely moved and there was nothing to show except PowerPoints and meeting minutes.  No sales funnel or sales leads.  If only the team had approached the whole problem with humility and taken one small step at a time the results could have been different.

My lessons from 2011 – start with small experiments, learn from their outcomes and continuously improve over time.

Tweet this: Lessons Learned in 2011 – http://wp.me/pXBON-34k #prodmgmt #prodmktg #innovation

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By Jennifer Doctor

This is a simple post about being simple.

I was thrilled and honored to have a visit by my good friend, Jim Holland, for the recent Product Camp in Minnesota. While he was here, he scanned my business book shelf and borrowed a book, my copy of Seth Godin’s “Poke the Box.” Jim enjoyed the short read and wrote a nice blog post based on his learning from it; in exchange, he brought me a small token gift, a simple non-descript cube that has somehow changed my life.

The product is the One Less Drop by Heckler Design. What does it do? It’s a cord keeper for my iPhone (though I am sure it will work on other devices.) This 1 inch cube has two channels in it; one is on the top and one is on the bottom so I could manage two devices with one cube. By placing the cube on a table or desk, the channels hold your cords without letting them fall to ground. Brilliant.

What’s the use case? I keep a power cord for my iPhone on my nightstand, and I fumble around looking for that cord every night I don’t anchor it down with something – often it was a bedside book, the alarm clock, another knickknack – basically anything already on the night stand, or else I am fumbling around on the floor looking for the cord when I am tired and all I want is some sleep… and I do this all so I can simply plug in my phone to charge it up overnight. Now, this simple cube means no more fumbling around on the floor in the dark. Brilliant. Do you take your smart phone to bed and plug it in right by your side, so that you never miss a call? Am I the only one with a problem to solve here? I want to think I’m not.

I never thought a one inch square cube could make me so happy, yet I was very excited by this. Why? Because it solved a simple problem and, as a product manager, we are always searching for solutions. What did I learn from this cube’s design? A simple rule – sometimes the smallest aggravation can be solved by looking a simple solution. The solution doesn’t always need to be over-engineered just because “we can.”

In our world of developing products, we all too often look for elaborate solutions. And, worse yet, we put all too many features in our product hoping that it solves all the problems our market may face. What if we simply stepped back and tried to simplify our product instead of building it out to solve many of the world’s problems? Take a step back and look at your own product portfolio. Have you been trying to solve the world’s problems with everything you have added to meet everyone’s interests and desires; or, are you trying to simply solve the basic problem in the easiest and most basic manner? If you don’t know, ask the market and your customer how simply they want their problem solved. The simple way is always preferred.

I know that I will be sleeping better tonight knowing exactly where my iPhone cord is without having to fish around for it when I am exhausted. Thanks, Jim.

(Please share this on Twitter, LinkedIn & even Google+:  Make it Simple by @jidoctor –  http://wp.me/pXBON-33q #prodmgmt #design #ux)

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By Saeed Khan

I had the pleasure of meeting with a number of international region sales managers recently. They covered geographic regions including Western Europe, the Nordic countries, Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, the Middle East and parts of Africa. There was a mix of direct sales staff and distributor/partner managers. This was the first time I’ve met with such a diverse group of  sales people all at the same time.

What was really amazing was the diversity of views and issues that were discussed.  The product in question was an enterprise IT software product, and while we do have price lists in numerous international currencies, the issues of pricing, discounts and difficulties selling the product were the focus of much discussion.

Now a cynic would say that when are these things NOT a focus of discussion with sales people? But there were many  interesting points brought up by the group.

• A very simple and seemingly clear value proposition in North America can be meaningless in another country because of different regulations or different business priorities.
• In some countries buying decisions are VERY heavily influenced by the relationship between the buyer and the vendor and actual product functionality is less important.
• In some countries there is a prestige factor (for the buyer) associated with certain vendors and certain products and that can heavily influence purchase decisions.
• In some countries, local partners (e.g. system integrators and consultants) play a large role in the buying decision and implementation of a product, so their needs must be understood.
• Not all regions viewed the value of product functionality the same way. Some regions valued certain functionality, while other regions saw little value in that same functionality.
• In some regions, particularly emerging markets, piracy is still rampant, and security (or lack of it) in a product can be an influencing factor.

These are just some of the examples that were discussed, but it quickly became very clear that there was a lot of factors across the different regions that required different approaches to convince buyers to purchase product.

Buyer personae can be regional

When we typically think of buyers, we often talk about “THE buyer persona”.  But clearly there are MANY buyer personae that need to be understood. The sales managers understand their buyers — or at least are supposed to understand their buyers — but how well do we in Product Management and Product Marketing understand the diversity of buyers and buying criteria around the world? And how well can we stay abreast of the changes that will impact these personae? And with different personae, there will be a need for different messaging and likely different positioning. This has a fundamental impact on how the product is marketed in different regions.

These recent meetings really opened my eyes. I had a general sense of some of the regional issues prior to the meeting, but honestly, they were at a very high level, without much detail. Now I have a much deeper appreciation of the challenges we face in different regions, and I have a lot to think about as we plan product strategy and go-to-market activities for next year.

How do you handle regional differences with respect to your product? Is it an issue? I’d love to hear from you.

Saeed

Tweet this: How well can you really understand your buyers? http://wp.me/pXBON-32m #prodmgmt #persona #sales

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By Saeed Khan

Roadmaps are always a popular topic when discussing products. I can’t tell you how many times people ask whether something is “on the product roadmap”. One of the most consistently popular articles on this blog is this one that I wrote back in 2008 – Agile/Scrum and Product Roadmaps.

Recently I noticed some thoughts on the Web and decided another post on the topic was in order.

The first was the Twitter #prodmgmttalk on the topic of roadmaps. Here are a few tweets from that discussion:

Note @bfgmartin’s tweet about the roadmap (potentially) changing every week. That’s pretty granular IMHO and is really more of a backlog or at best a release level view of the product.

Coincidentally, Fred Wilson had a post on his blog a few days earlier called Long Roadmaps. In it he wrote the following:

I interviewed Dennis Crowley yesterday at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival….Dennis said that all the way back to Dodgeball, the predecessor company to Foursquare, he and Alex had a roadmap for the product that was years ahead of what they could actually build. When Dennis and Naveen decided to start building Foursquare, Dennis pulled out that roadmap and updated it to reflect the power of modern smartphones. And that roadmap goes way out, well beyond what Foursquare is today or what it will be in a year from now.

Just to be clear, Fred is saying that Dennis Crowley had a “roadmap” for a product so forward looking that the technology for it didn’t exist. i.e. it couldn’t be built at the time it was “envisioned”.  This is not a “roadmap”, but more of a vision of the future.

So the question is what exactly is a “roadmap”, because it seems to have quite a broad definition in terms of timeframe and granularity.

If we think of Releases, Roadmaps and Visions as plans, they can be described and differentiated as follows:

This breakdown makes sense to me. It’s what I’ve used pretty consistently for many years. For example, back in 2008, in my Agile/Scrum Roadmap post, I defined a product roadmap as follows:

A roadmap is a planned future, laid out in broad strokes — i.e. planned or proposed product releases, listing high level functionality or release themes, laid out in rough timeframes — usually the target calendar or fiscal quarter — for a period usually extending for 2 or 3 significant feature releases into the future.

For startups or companies in fast moving and growing markets, those 2-3 releases might only cover the next 12 months of time. For other more mature companies in less dynamic markets, those releases might cover several years.

So what do you think? Are these three things clearly defined now? Is it still possible to confuse a roadmap with a release, or a roadmap with a vision? Let me know.

Saeed

Tweet this: Releases, Roadmaps and Visions http://wp.me/pXBON-30T #prodmgmt #innovation #roadmap

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