Tag Archives: product management

Are You Building a Feature or a Company?

New companies are started every day. Some are moonshots with brand new ideas trying to change the world. Some are natural extensions of their founders’ industry experience, having identified a clear opportunity to meet a market need. Some are essentially copycats of other businesses, maybe with a slight tweak but essentially just duplicating what is already out there and trying to do it better, cheaper, faster or just differently.

But there’s another type of company springing up much more often in the last decade. These companies haven’t identified a brand new market or created a new solution from the ground up; instead these companies are building on top of an existing platform and offering a piece of functionality or integration that doesn’t yet exist. And it is the “yet” portion of that sentence that should be troubling anyone who has started, works for or is thinking of starting a company looking to offer this type of add-on functionality as its core offering.

Read the full post on HourlyNerd.

We’re All Storytellers: What the Rise of Content Marketing Means for Your Product Organization

Content marketing may not have replaced social media just yet, but it is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for companies to connect with customers and prospects. Massive budget dollars are now being slotted for this channel that barely existed five years ago. While the action may be happening in the marketing department, content marketing ties back to the products and value propositions that product organizations are creating, so they need to be aligned to make sure that content marketers are telling the right stories.

This presentation covers:
What content marketing is and how it fits into the overall corporate and product marketing landscape
What is now expected of product managers with regards to content marketing
Some tips on how product managers can personally leverage content marketing to make their jobs easier and achieve their goals
How product organizations can use content marketing as a tool to better position their products in the marketplace and shorten the sales cycle.

Quit Talking About Features & Start Talking About Benefits

No business is immune from living inside its own echo chamber where their world starts revolving about their own product or service. This can lead to lots of unfortunate side effects, but one of the most common is to focus its messaging and sales efforts on “features.”

The problem is that most people don’t care about features, they’re not buying features, they’re not putting them on their wish lists or begging their account managers for them. What customers care about are “benefits.”

Why Care About Benefits?
Your product may be fast, but its actual speed isn’t meaningful to a customer; it’s about empowering them to maximize their resources or shrink their timelines. Your product may have more storage, but customers don’t care about gigabytes, they care about how many apps they can have or hours of video it can hold or transactions it can support.

Of course, customers have been forced to adapt because technology has gotten so spec-heavy in its messaging. They have had to do the math themselves to interpret arbitrary measurements into meaningful widgets of knowledge. But they shouldn’t have to.

A prospective car buyer shouldn’t have to figure out how many suitcases they can fit in the trunk based on the cubic feet listed on the window sticker; the car manufacturer should be boasting about how the car is great for vacations because it can fit all of your gear. A potential purchaser shouldn’t be sifting through supported APIs; they should be told that the built-in Salesforce.com support means sales commissions will be automatically calculated once payment is received.

Read the entire article at HourlyNerd

The Downsides of Leaving a Legacy

Don’t let your early triumphs drag down future sales success.

When you are working for (or starting) a new venture, you hope your solution is widely used, if not ubiquitous. You want millions of people utilizing your products, relying on your services and promoting your wares throughout the marketplace.

Truly successful firms may see this come to pass, while others may manage to penetrate and leave a mark on pockets of the market. With each new sale, that success grows and more and more of your “things” take their place in the world.

While you are in growth mode, every unit you move out the door is a good thing. You are not worried about what is going to happen three, five or ten years down the line because you’re worried about what’s happening this quarter and you are selling the latest and greatest.

Your R&D department may be working on the next version, and your account teams are reporting issues that you know must be addressed in the future, but those are problems for tomorrow. However, with every success today, tomorrow’s problems loom larger.

The Windows XP Example

… Windows XP, now 13-years-old and still the world’s second most popular operating system. It currently runs nearly 28% of the world’s PCs. Market research firm Gartner reckons up to a quarter of business systems and 10% of large organisations are still running XP.”
– From The Guardian

Since Windows XP debuted, they have released a number of new versions of their OS. But just because something newer and, theoretically, better came along didn’t mean everyone instantly upgraded. So now they have a legacy issue since, after 13 years, Microsoft finally announced they are no longer providing security updates for XP.

Of course, when you are Microsoft, legacy issues are a revenue-generating opportunity as they can sell $200 per desktop security upgrade plans and then eventually just force everyone to buy Windows 8 anyway. But when you are a smaller operation, your legacy can create some other issues.

Three Legacy Negatives & How to Mitigate Them

“Why Can’t I Buy More of the Same Kind I Already Have?”
Despite the fact that “Version 2.0” has 29 new features and improvements, it is still something new and different for your customer. It also may not “match,” creating aesthetic concerns.

To address this particular conundrum, you can take one of two routes: Offer to replace the existing models with the new ones for free or at a significant discount or give customers adequate notice so they can stock up on the old model before it is no longer available. But that second option may cause some problems downstream when you consider the next two legacy negatives.

Legacy Compatibility Issues
If your solution relies on a third party and they go away or stop supporting something you relied upon, you now have to upgrade everything in the field, often at your own cost. And your design has changed significantly, that may mean designing and building new parts just for old devices, or writing new code for things you don’t even sell anymore.

You can minimize the impact of this by doing a full technology lifecycle assessment before your first version hits the street, including talking to your vendors and getting a commitment from them for ongoing support. You should also be fully prepared to upgrade anything you have let into the wild that your customers expect will still work, which might be a big expense for products that are no longer generating much direct revenue.

At BigBelly Solar, we would have been happy if every customer who had bought this version would have retired them… but they didn’t.

Tarnishing Your Image
Once you sell something to your customer, you can’t stop them from using it and in many cases it may be something you don’t really want people to see anymore. So even though you are thinking “we’ll sell this for a year and then put something way better out,” every unit that ships will stay out there, somewhere, giving potential and current customers a negative impression of your brand.

If you are only releasing a small number of products into the wild for a proof of concept or limited “version 1.0,” you should plan on replacing all of them with version 2.0… on your own dime. Additionally, your customer service and account management teams should be constantly keeping up with the elder statesmen of your install base and not just focusing on the shiny new customers. Proactive support, cleaning, upgrades, etc. will avoid those early sales successes from coming back and torpedoing future enterprise deployments.

These older customers will be references for you… even if you’re not actively promoting them as such since careful buyers will reach out to them to research how your products hold up over time.


It’s OK Everyone Didn’t Like What You Made (at Work Today & for Dinner Tonight)

A supper-time snub is just more evidence that you need to narrow your target market expectations.

Assuming you don’t live alone or you never cook, you have inevitably faced the following situation:

It was your turn to make the meal (which might be your entire adulthood depending on your situation). You assessed what you had in stock and maybe even went to the store to acquire special ingredients. You researched or made up a recipe, putting some thought into it and saying to yourself: “This will be good, people will like it.” Then you spent time actually preparing the meal, and the moment of truth comes when you set down the plates in front of your fellow diners.

You might get a few different negative reactions. The first may come when one of the people at the table (almost universally a child) pushes the plate away and says “I don’t like it” without even taking a bite. Another might come after a few tentative bites and then another flat-out rejection. Alternatively, you may not get people refusing to eat, but you might get comments along the lines of “it was too spicy” or “too sweet” or “not my style” or “I wouldn’t make it again.”

Now, if the entire table gave you one of the above reactions, then maybe you’re a terrible cook, or maybe they are just not adventurous enough for your creative take on Serbian-Malaysian fusion cuisine. But a far more likely outcome is that a subset of your crowd gave it a negative review, while others thought it was pretty good or downright amazing.

So, Was That a Success or a Failure?

Well, this first depends on what your goal was. Were you trying to ensure that everyone loved dinner? Were you trying to expose your family or friends to something new and potentially delightful? Were you trying to avoid being forced to bring out some leftover mac-and-cheese for a less-than-adventurous small person?

In my house, I have given up on trying to make everyone happy every time. To me, it’s a success when a majority of the people like it, and it’s an unexpected victory if I get 100% approval. But this isn’t because I am setting the bar low, but rather because I am raising it.

If my goal was to make everyone happy all of the time, then things would get pretty boring. I would stick to making the same few things I knew everyone liked and not bother introducing new things to my family and my repertoire. For me, success is when I get most of the people at the table to like it.

From the Dining Room to the Board Room

This same mindset applies to business. Every company has a target market in mind. It might be “the Fortune 500,” it might be “the 18-35 male demographic,” it might be “suburban moms with a three-car garage,” or it could be “people who live in a 5-mile radius that like pizza.”

Regardless of how your target market is defined, no rational business plan would set a goal of meeting the needs and tastes of every single individual or company in that market. 100% market share is not going to happen for a whole host of reasons, so a company must instead raise the bar for the type of customer that they are seeking. You want customers that are both in your target market and want what you have to offer.

You won’t always know exactly who in that target market wants what, so you need to do your research first. After some surveys, interviews and secondary research, you should have an informed opinion that of the “people who live in a 5-mile radius who like pizza” there is a strong interest in delivery, or that among “suburban moms with a three-car garage” there is a desire in having built-in voice-activated GPS systems.

As you define and expand your offering, you may very well incorporate those services, but there will be some moms who couldn’t care less about GPS because they have lived in the same town their whole lives and some pizza eaters that prefer to eat out in kitschy restaurants with tchotchkes adorning the walls. Those folks aren’t going to like your offering (or at least not those specific aspects of your offering) and that’s OK, because you are matching the tastes of enough customers to make a go of it.

So the next time you have to slap together a PB&J because Junior wouldn’t eat any quinoa, don’t hang your head in defeat. You are just narrowing your focus and raising the bar for your true target market for this meal… the other three people happily asking for seconds.