By Saeed Khan

If I gave you an assignment to hire someone to build a device to get cameras (still and video) into the upper atmosphere (at least 80,000 feet), take pictures and video, have the cameras return to Earth and then recover those cameras and images, who would you hire?

And what budget would you need?

If you said a $500 budget was sufficient, and you’d hire a couple of high school students to do it, you wouldn’t be crazy. You’d be absolutely right. I’ll explain more in a minute, but let me change one thing and see how that affects the answer.

What a difference 20 years makes

If this was 1992 as opposed to 2012, and I gave you the same task, would your answer be the same? Absolutely not. But if you gave the same answer in 1992, I would definitely have thought you were crazy! Back then it would have required some Ph.Ds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what what was asked. It’s amazing what a difference a couple of decades can make.

So what am I talking about?  Read this article about how two Toronto high school students, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad, did exactly what I described.  They bought second hand cameras, cell phones (for the GPS) and other parts from online sites, used the Web to help them plan their project and the flight path of the craft, so they could retrieve it later.

While this is only one small (but amazing) example, it is illustrative of the environment we live in. We have access to amazing technology  and data that either didn’t exist or was limited to large corporations and research labs only 20 years ago. And the pace of technological improvement is not slowing. It’s not simply about Moore’s Law (exponential increases in computing power), but about improvements in material science, very low cost manufacturing, and broad accessibility FOR THE PUBLIC to technology, products, services and knowledge to help bring ideas to fruition.

Look at the Maker movement, and sites like Instructables and Inventables and even companies like Quirky, for examples of how invention AND innovation are becoming easier for everyday people.

Culture needs to catch up with technology

But to really take advantage of all this, we need to change our thinking to be more like the two high school students. No one told them they had to do what they did. It wasn’t a high school assignment or a 3rd party contest. They did it because they thought it was possible.

While we definitely have access to 21st century technology, when it comes to truly innovative thinking, large parts of our culture and institutions (e.g. schools) are still mired with very old 20th century structures and cultures.

We need to change that so that we can encourage all the other “Matthews and Asads” (as well as the “Marthas and Ayeshas”) to truly think outside the (institutional) boxes they are in. Innovation can better every part of our society, but we have to change how we think if we want to truly benefit in the Age of Innovation.

Saeed

Tweet this: We are entering the Age of Innovation http://wp.me/pXBON-37i #prodmgmt #innovation #legoman

Related posts:

1. Canada’s Innovation Gap (part 1)
2. Product Management lies at the heart of Innovation
3. Canada’s Innovation Gap (part 3)
4. Canada’s Innovation Gap (part 2)

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?

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

Related posts:

1. Go to school, get an education, create a job!
2. Guest Post: Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life
3. Why customer needs don’t always matter
4. How to Create an Effective Product Management Organization

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

Related posts:

1. Open Question: Your worst job-related mistake and lesson learned
2. Lessons from 2 very different social media events
3. 8 lessons we can learn from Infomercials
4. Worth Repeating: 8 Lessons we can learn from Infomercials

By Saeed Khan

Here’s a question that’s troubling me a fair bit.

As much as we can talk about what is or isn’t good from a UX/UI perspective, the fact is that in the end there is a lot of subjectivity involved in defining “good” or “bad” UX/UI.

It’s really easy to spot a bad interface. Lots of unnecessary clicks or field or whatever. And when you see a great interface, it’s just obvious.

But there is a LOT of space in between, which is where most of us live. And in that space there is usually a lot of debate about what constitutes a good interface (dialog boxes, wizards, navigation trees, layouts etc.). Everyone involved will have an opinion of how good (or bad) something is, how a dialog or fields should be laid out, whether popups, tabs, wizards etc. should be used.

And some of those same people may actually have valid reasons to support their opinions.

The question is:

When designing a new user interface (or redesigning an existing one) what steps or process do you (or your designers) follow to minimize the amount of subjectivity in deciding on the merits of a particular UI design?

I know there is no absolute right answer here, but any techniques, processes or other aids you can provide would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks

Saeed

P.S. I posted this question here on Quora. I’ve copied some of the responses below in the comments.

Tweet this: How can you minimize subjectivity in UX/UI Design? http://wp.me/pXBON-32Y #prodmgmt #ux #ui #interaction

Related posts:

1. Open Question – One thing you wish you had known when you became a PM
2. Open Question: How and When do you define usability requirements?
3. Open Question: Why doesn’t Engineering report to Product Management?
4. Open Question: Your worst job-related mistake and lesson learned

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

Related posts:

1. Screw the Sales Process. Study the Buying Process
2. Rules and Laws Product Managers Should Understand (part 2)
3. Rules and Laws Product Managers Should Understand (part 1)
4. The Origins of Product Management (part 1)

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

Related posts:

1. Agile/Scrum and Product Roadmaps
2. What's the deal with Product Roadmaps?
3. Roadmaps
4. Tom Grant Kicks Some SaaS

By Saeed Khan

Not all features are created equal. Not all features are useful or evident upfront. The value we derive from products can be multi-layered or multi-faceted.

In his article – Come for X, Stay for Y – Braden Kowitz eloquently writes about the concepts of Apparent value and Discoverable value. He writes (using Gmail as an example):

• Apparent value — This kind of value is easy to explain and gets users to sign up. It fixes a pain-point customers already experience. It’s typically better, faster, cheaper. In Gmail’s case, it was storage space.

• Discoverable value — This kind of value appears when benefits are delayed or when a product requires users to develop new habits (which takes time). It also appears when many slight improvements combine to make a big difference in the experience. This kind of value is powerful because it keeps people around. For Gmail, this was search and conversation view.

When you think about your product or service, do you consciously thinking about how you deliver value in these ways? What are the immediate needs — BTW this is the stuff that is typically marketed — that are being addressed, vs. what are those needs that will be addressed later on through discovery.

As a non-high tech example, take a look at the picture of the bridge above. The Apparent value of the bridge is to enable people to safely cross the water without getting wet. But the Discoverable value is the view of the river you have once you are in the middle of the bridge. And you’d only discover that once you were half way across.

Read the whole article as Braden discusses several companies and products — such as Zynga and Apple — who understand this distinction and implement it well.

Saeed

P.S. I prefer the term emergent value vs. discoverable value, but that’s just me.

P.P.S. There’s another value — hidden value — that you typically want to avoid when building products.

Tweet this: Apparent value vs. Discoverable value. Why both are important. http://wp.me/pXBON-319 #prodmgmt

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2. Little features and a lesson for Product Management
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4. Lessons from Harry Potter

by Saeed Khan

I’m going to try something a bit different this time. Here’s your chance to help a startup founder with some common startup challenges.

Max Cameron is a cofounder of Big Bang Technology, the makers of Woople, a hosted eLearning platform for enterprises.

Max’s company has grown from 2 founders to 10 people and while they’ve hired a full-time Product Manager there are several hurdles they still need to overcome.

Max has 3 current challenges that he’s facing and I’d like to enlist all of you to collectively help Max address them, buy watching the video of Max talking about his company, and then leaving comments at the bottom of the blog post.

If you are shy but still want to give some advice, you can use the Contact Us form. I’ll keep your identity secret but share your advice with Max.

While the challenges are listed below, I strongly urge you to watch the YouTube video of Max — it’s only 6 minutes in length — to get all the details before answering. You can click the image below to launch the video. Unfortunately it cannot be embedded directly in this page.

click image to launch video

The 3 challenges Max needs advice on are:

1. Metrics in the software. What metrics should be instrumented into the product to see if implemented features are effective in solving customer/user problems.
2. Optimizing the onboarding process for new clients. What are the right collateral pieces for the sales people? What is/are the right pricing models? How to best get in front of the business people — i.e. the buyers? How to work with technical/IT teams to perform integrations?
3. How to take the collateral that is built and have Marketing work with Product Management to create compelling stories to identify and target new customer segments.

So there it is. What advice do you have for Max and his company?

Saeed

Tweet this: Open Question: Product Management Challenges at a Startup http://wp.me/pXBON-30F #prodmgmt #startup #marketing

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3. Open Question: Your current biggest challenge in Product Management/Marketing?
4. Open Question: How can Product Managers and Product Marketers work better together?

I posted this originally back in 2009. I used to watch the show Pitchmen on television. Unfortunately one of the two main characters — infomercial star extraordinaire Billy Mays — passed away suddenly that year. The show lasted one more season but I don’t think it’s on TV any more. Regardless, it was an interesting show while it lasted and after watching a number of episodes there were clearly some lessons for product success that we can all learn (or remember ).

—–

You know you’re a Products Geek, when you find a show like Pitchmen appealing.

Pitchmen, on the Discovery Channel, is a behind the scenes docudrama about infomerical marketers and how they identify products to promote, develop the pitch and then take the products to market.

The show stars the late Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan, two very successful and well known television direct marketers.

While it’s very easy to brush these guys off as selling gimmicky items to uninformed consumers, there are lessons to be learned from watching these guys operate.

And that’s what I like about the show. It presents some of the discipline and process they follow for the products they market and sell. Here’s a list of some of the behind the scenes work they do.

1. They look for problems that a lot of people have.

• Stain or smell remover: Yes
• An acoustic shark repellent: No

2. They test out the products and validate they actually live up to their claims.

• Can the odor remover get rid of foul smells from hockey equipment?
• Can a vertical grill actually cook as well as a traditional horizontal grill?

3. They listen to others carefully, getting feedback from potential users of the product.

• For a self-rotating pool side lounge chair, aimed at removing the need to manually rotate a chair to get optimal exposure of the sun, they enlisted some swimsuit models to test them out. After the trial, they not only asked what they thought of the product, but asked how could the chair be improved. One of the testers suggested cup holders. Not a bad suggestion.

4. The benefits of the product have to be clearly demonstrable with a number of use cases.

• For a food grater, they grate garlic, chocolate, cheese, citrus zest and other foods. The objective is to present a broad number of real use cases to show utility and value. This is clearly an area where technology companies need to improve when thinking about how they demo their own products.

5. They always try to find at least one “Wow!” aspect for each product.

• For a shoe insert product that claims to eliminate impact from running or other sports, they put their hand under a pad made of the same material as the insert, and then hit the pad with a hammer. Then they took their hand out and wiggled all their fingers to show they were undamaged. Can you say “Wow!”?

6. They craft the messaging and the pitch, being very particular to the words they choose.

• Whether via rhymes or alliterations or carefully crafted wording, the right word at the right time can make a big difference in how a product is perceived. For example, with a product for grating food, the lines “grate cheese with ease” and “for zest it’s the best” are used. Don’t think these stick in people’s memories? Remember that line from the OJ Simpson trial? “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must…”

7. They ensure price points that will be appealing for their audience.

• With a vertical grill product (think of a big single slice toaster that grills burgers, steaks etc. vertically) they went to one of their partner companies who tried to source a manufacturing partner that could build product cost-effectively enough that they could sell it for $50. The partner couldn’t bring the price point low enough and so they said “No” to the product, even though it met all their other criteria.

8. They are data driven business people.

• While they may come across as shady marketers, they are clearly rather sophisticated (and successful) in what they do. They test out their pitches in local markets, measure the results, adjust their pitch, and test again. When they go national, they are very confident that they have something with mass appeal that people will buy.
• This is probably the most important lesson that Product Managers should remember. They definitely follow the “Nail it, then scale it” mantra.

Overall, I find Pitchmen to be a bit of a guilty pleasure. I’ve got it scheduled for recording on my PVR. Even so, it is educational and every episode reminds me of basic marketing principles that have broad applicability and value.

Saeed

Tweet this: Worth Repeating – 8 Lessons we can learn from Infomercials http://wp.me/pXBON-30i #prodmgmt #marketing #launch #innovation

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