Yes, summer is here, and the vacations are beginning.

Many of your co-workers are using this time to check out of their responsibilities, take a slower pace, to take some time off. Expectations are often lower in the summer, and your boss may also be checking out to some degree.

I am in favor of vacations, and you must take time to relax and be with friends and family.

But you should also use the summer strategically. Deliberately lower expectations of specific deliverables, and work on something for the fall. My suggestion: start a campaign of calling and visiting buyers. Kick off a series of win/loss analysis calls. Design and conduct a customer survey. Set a goal of writing a whitepaper or an ebook.

Use this time to do something different.

Use this time to tee things up for September.

When everyone returns to reality in September, what would really impress your executives or your team? Focus on that and slow-roll other projects.

Oh, and take some time off.

- Alan

PS: If you want some tips on conducting win/loss analysis, here are a couple of articles that will help:

• How to get a lost account to speak with you
• Competitive intelligence using lost deals
• Contacting lost accounts
• Product Managers: Do the opposite!
• How NOT to do Win/Loss Analysis: CRM Reporting

I recently had a good conversation with Tom Grant of Forrester Research.

We discussed a number of topics including organizational structures for Product Management, the maturity level of Product Management, Win/Loss Analysis and other related topics.

And then Tom stumped me with what should have been a very easy question about my favourite authors.

The podcast can be found here: The Heretech Episode 11.

Saeed

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Gopal Shenoy, author of the blog Product Management Tips.  If you feel inspired to write a guest post of your own, click here to find out how to submit it to us.

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Products (or services) succeed when they solve a relevant, widely prevalent problem in the market. The three hurdles every product faces before it hits or misses are what I call:

1. Awareness
2. Persuasion
3. Shelf Life

It is very simple. First of all, you’ve got to create awareness of your product amongst your target audience.

Second, once they become aware and come to you (online or offline) you need to persuade them that your product is the best in solving their pain point(s).

Third, you need to make sure that your product has a long shelf life – not from a perishable sense – but from a market defensibility perspective.  How long can your product maintain its uniqueness or its differentiation before it is subject to attack from competition? Success breeds wannabes – the question is how long do you have before the wannabes arrive?

So how do you figure all of this out? In my opinion, product managers have a big role in helping figure this out for the following reasons:

Awareness

Product managers typically best understand the pain points of the target audience that are worth solving. They are chartered to do the deep dive to understand the pain points, to understand the terminology used by the target audience, to understand where the target audience hangs out to gather information etc.  Given this, product managers need to be heavily involved in determining how to create awareness of the product among the target audience.

This is where many marketing departments in companies fail – they take all the upfront market research that has been done and believe that they know better and end up putting the marketing lipstick on it. The end result is what customers have learned to hate – marketing literature that is full of fluff that does not resonate with the audience – the “scalable”, “reliable”, “revolutionary”, market leading”, “customer centric”, “new generation” kind.

They then spend a ton of money spreading the word around in places where the target audience is not present. Would you buy a full page Wall Street Journal ad if you sell “malpractice” insurance to doctors or spend time sponsoring a session at the next Medical Convention in town? If your company rents private jets to corporations (oops, a touchy subject these days!) would you be better off buying a banner at the Boston Symphony Orchestra concert or a full page ad on the Wall Street Journal? Sounds silly, but it still amazes me as to how marketing departments squander money by targeting wrong marketing channels.

Persuasion

Once you have created awareness, the best way to persuade an audience is focusing on the business benefits of using your product as opposed to engaging in discussing features. You need to persuade your target customers on how they can improve their bottom line using your product.

For example, 3D CAD modeling software helped Boeing create the first airplane that was 100-percent digitally designed and preassembled on computer – the Boeing 777. The discussion likely did not revolve around individual features in the CAD software. Instead, the shared vision to take airplane design to a new level that reduced manufacturing costs by eliminating physical prototypes, likely sealed the deal.

While trying to persuade your audience, feature wars are a futile exercise – your product will have features that competitors don’t have and they will have features that you don’t have. Instead companies that focus the customer’s attention and time on how they can provide the greatest value for the customer that will result in tangible business benefits will end up being the winners.

Shelf Life

You could create all the awareness of your compelling product among the target audience, but you still need to figure out how you will defend your position and for how long. If the barrier to entry for your product is low, then your success could be short lived.

There are many ways companies lock up shelf life:

Solving a known, widely prevalent problem in a very disruptive way – for example, Apple’s iPod succeeded because it was the first product that did three things in a very superior way

• Extremely simple user interface
• Outstanding integration between the player, computer and the software that connects the two
• Focus on doing just one thing right – listening to music.

Though Apple was not the first company to launch an MP3 player, it quickly established a leadership position in a very competitive and overly crowded market. As you all know, its leadership position is untouched to this day.

Locking a service delivery model – If you are able to lock in a service delivery model via exclusivity, you have bought yourselves shelf life for the duration of exclusivity. For example, AT&T was able to buy a long shelf life via its exclusive agreement with Apple. Apple’s iPhone success left AT&T’s competitors scrambling to find other ways to defend their positions.

Protecting the intellectual property via patents – for example, Nutrasweet had a monopoly for decades in the aspartame market until its patents ran out. I am all for patents, but not many small companies have the wherewithal to bet their businesses on their ability to successfully defend their patents.

I believe that companies need to do all of these three things – awareness, persuasion and shelf life – extremely well to have a successful and sustainable business. And believe it or not, a lot of this will stem from the information gathered by product managers. Don’t stop using that information just for building that product. Use it for creating awareness and persuasion.

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Gopal Shenoy is a product manager with over 13 years of experience in the software industry at companies such as SolidWorks, RSA Security, Salary.com and OnForce. Currently, he is a Senior Product Manager at OnForce, Inc (www.onforce.com). He is a passionate blogger on product management topics at www.productmanagementtips.com

We have 3 different types of food blenders in our house. They are pictured below. I’ve tried to show them roughly to scale with one another.

The first is a “traditional” blender with a base, a large 56 oz. (1.75 L) pitcher-style container and several speed settings for the blades.

The second is an immersion blender with a number of attachments for mixing, blending, chopping etc.

The third is known as the Magic Bullet blender. It has a small 16 oz.  (.45 L)  container for the contents being blended and a simple on/off mechanism for the blades.

While they all have benefits and are clearly different, guess which one gets the most use in our household? Given the title of this post, it should be pretty obvious.

Yes, it’s blender #3, the Magic Bullet. And why?

Simplicity in all aspects of usage. Most blending jobs are very simple quick tasks. e.g. making a smoothie, or blending some sauce or something similar. The usage scenario goes something like this:

1. Place the contents to be blended into the blending  container
2. Blend for 10-15 seconds (maybe 20 seconds in extreme cases)
3. Pour the contents out of the container

There’s not much more than that. In *most* cases, the amounts are small (< 16 oz) so I don’t need the large blender which is both heavy and a bit of pain to clean. Also the immersion blender is pretty good for a lot of tasks, but I find it inefficient unless I truly have to immerse it into a pot or other container for “in place” blending.

In short, for the majority of my blending tasks, the Magic Bullet addresses the needs well. There is a lesson here for software and technology PMs, and I think you know what that is:

A simple solution that addresses a use case well is likely to be used often by your target audience.

Of course, most technology products do a lot more than a blender, but that doesn’t mean they have to be complex to use.

Saeed

OK, the spelling is off, but a website whose sole purpose is to repeat my last name over and over again is impossible not to share.

http://www.khaaan.com

Saeed (Wrath of) Khan

Dear Readers,

I will be writing an article on how to measure customer satisfaction in B2B software. To prepare for that article I would like to hear your experiences or read articles that you find useful.

If you have a useful article on the topic, or personal experience measuring customer satisfaction, I would love to hear from you. Please email me directly at customersat@eigenworks.com

Here are some focusing questions:

Do you measure customer satisfaction?

• Simple question: do you measure it?

What to measure

• what are your “leading indicators” of customer satisfaction?
• is customer satisfaction the right thing to measure? what about customer success?
• how do you measure for referenceability?
• how do you measure for customer’s liklihood of re-purchasing?

How do you take the measurements?

• Do you use quantitative measurements? If so, how do you administer these? Direct calls? Web surveys?
• What kind of response rates do you get to your web surveys? To your phone calls?
• Have you ever used an external agency? If so, which one(s)?

Have you read any good articles or books on this topic?

Thank you. I appreciate your responses.

- Alan

For those of you email addicts, who prefer a message in your InBox vs. an RSS feed, we’ve recently added email subscriptions to our blog. Click here, or use the link on the right sidebar of the blog. Either way, just enter your email address and then whenever we post a new blog entry, you will get it in your Inbox shortly thereafter.

I’ve written about the CBC radio show “The Age of Persuasion” before. A recent episode entitled “Embracing New Media” is worth listening to.

By looking at how people reacted to and dealt with successive versions of “new” media (like the telephone and television) when they first came out, the host, Terry O’Reilly, teaches us some lessons about how to deal with the current slew of new social media in our lives. Enjoy.

Saeed

My recent post about Tom Grant and Rick Chapman got me thinking. Is Rick alone in his misunderstanding of Product Management? To be honest, I knew what the answer would be, but I was rather surprised by what I found within the Product Management community itself!

And not to pick on the following people specifically, but here’s some of what I found:

In an article entitled “What is a Product Manager for?” written by Jacques Murphy and published on the Pragmatic Marketing site, Jacques states:

A Product Manager fills in the gaps between different functions and departments in order to make sure that the product develops and makes progress, with the aim of making the product perform better relative to the competition.

I later saw Jacques being quoted by Chris Cummings (author of the excellent Product Management Meets Pop Culture blog) in slide 2 of this deck on SlideShare.

And on slide 12 of the same deck, Cummings writes the following:

The Product Manager is the glue that binds the team together and the grease that keeps the product moving in the right direction.

And finally, this deck was the basis of a presentation that was given this past November on the Product Management View.

Now I must say that both Jacques and Chris gave a lot more detail to better explain the gaps, grease and glue, but what organization in business would define itself that way?

• We’re Marketing. We’re the grease that enables Sales to do it’s job efficiently.
• We’re Support. We fill the gaps left by Development, Documentation and Training.
• We’re Project Management. We’re the glue that ensure Development and QA stay synchronized.

Do any of those sound like ways those groups would describe themselves? Not to me! So why should we refer to ourselves that way? Particularly when we believe we deliver a critical function within the business. Not only do the grease, glue and gap definitions diminish the value of Product Management, but they are fundamentally wrong.

As Nick Coster of Brainmates wrote in a comment on Chris Cummings blog,

Hey Chris, I used to see the role of the product manager as “the glue that binds teams together” but have now come to think that description grossly understates the imporance of product management.

…

By referring to the role as a binding or lubricating function, we acknowledge the dysfunction of other teams and accept the burden of resolving their inability to work together. If instead we lead the teams and focus their outputs then we, as the leaders for our products, can drive better outcomes for the business, our customers and ourselves.

I completely agree with Nick.

It’s time to stop describing Product Management as something that fills the gaps or greases the wheel etc. and start describing it consistently as a business critical role that helps optimize R&D investments, aligns teams across departmental silos and helps drive business success for the products under management.

Product Management is a critical enabler of business success, and like other departments such as Sales, Marketing and Finance, must be structured, staffed and directed in a deliberate manner to maximize opportunity for success.

Saeed