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Marketing
Applying Product Management Principles to Small Business Development
147 days
In the course of nurturing our Atlanta crepe and catering startup, I find myself applying product management and principles and strategies to the development of the business. I thought I’d share a few examples:
Segmentation: My wife’s perception of the business is that it is a “farmers’ market vendor,” but I prefer to think of it as a mobile crepe vendor. We both recognize that her focus on farmer’s markets is a manifestation of her operations mindset. In reality, farmer’s markets are a way to gain exposure to the marketplace and get one’s name out; the real profit is found in private event catering that affords a higher revenue stream. We have implemented additional tactics to reach the previously unidentified segments of office personnel and wealthy party hosts.
Tactics and Strategy: Recognizing that party hosts and offices are a significant segments of the market that we need to account for, we implemented tactics to make sure we reach them. Our website and SEO activities are being deployed to reach those searching for crepe parties, crepe catering, and crepes in Atlanta in general. We’re slowly seeing results here, as we’ve had three private event inquiries in the last 6 weeks after zero in all previous weeks.
Partnerships: We are taking concentrated effort to reach out to friends with small businesses, with which we can imagine mutually beneficial relationship. In this way, we’ll be able to extend our offering to provide a more complete solution to clients’ needs that we cannot solve on our own. Over the next several months, we’re hoping to announce a few events in tandem with other related businesses.
Since the business is only six months old, there is plenty of ground left to cover! However, I’m happy to recognize the value that product management provides in terms of marketing and positioning a small business.
The business needs product management to be agile, too.
162 days
Let’s not kid ourselves, when it comes to building and marketing business solutions, we’re not building software as part of a science project–we’re in this for the ROI. The business doesn’t care whether you’re agile or waterfall or something we haven’t thought of yet, as long as that return is delivered as promised.
That ROI can only be delivered by fulfilling the primary purpose of product management: creating a compelling solution to a pervasive market problem that buyers are willing to pay to solve. Lean Startup refers to “product-market fit,” which ensures that not only do you have a market problem buyers will pay to solve, but that the solution you are delivering is the best one possible. That fit isn’t present until your users can’t live without the product. Such a fit can only be achieved by imagining a solution in tandem with a designer and a technologist, and then iterating based upon real customer input–or, as it were, being Agile. Agility is in product management DNA, and by far is NOT simply a more adaptive project management framework.
B2B products have traditionally focused less on design than B2C, but I firmly believe the consumer’s expectations have been raised so high by revolutionary User Experience (UX) in products like the iPhone that startups in B2B will overtake established companies if they don’t invest more in UX. Enterprise software can’t continue to underwhelm–so product managers can’t hand design over to engineering and avoid being involved in design.
Product managers are traditionally owners of the problem space, but they need to play an active role in the solution space also to achieve optimal product-market fit. By ensuring thoughtful, user-centered design, the solution can be as good as the definition of the problem. Agility is a product development approach that helps get to product-market fit faster, which is what Greg Cohen and others call Lean Product Management.
It is not enough for product managers to throw a PRD or MRD over the wall to engineering after passing the relevant gate, and for engineering to begin developing the product in two-week iterations. That’s not agile! The business needs product management to be agile, too. If your engineering team is iterating but you haven’t validated that the solution is the right one, why are you still building something you haven’t confirmed the market will purchase?
Product Management should be bringing new market insights on a regular basis both before and during construction, and Product Management leaders should track how frequently backlogs change. Markets change; customer visits reveal new insights. If a backlog is too static, the product manager isn’t getting enough input! Certainly the top of the backlog, the most important items, should be relatively solid, but anything below them is fair game for perpetual re-evaluation. And it’s the product manager’s responsibility to continually re-evaluate–or in scrum parlance, groom the backlog.
Product managers should think Lean Startup: Work towards MVP using prototypes [Build], get user feedback [Measure], and adapt [Learn] to achieve optimal product-market fit. Once released, each subsequent major enhancement should go through the same cycle–prototype, get real user feedback, finalize. Don’t just play product owner, sit in the scrum room and shepherd your static backlog through the development process. Be agile!
Lean Startup: Build - Measure - Learn
“No Salespeople! I’ll call when I’m ready to buy.”
0“No Salespeople! I’ll call when I’m ready to buy.”
That’s the quote I heard in a B2B Marketing seminar at this weekend’s B2BCamp. The quote was attributed to CIOs of major corporations, who are finding less and less time to be entertaining phone calls and visits from salespeople–even those who are trying to help them with real problems they’re facing daily.
Executives and decision makers have less than zero time. When they have problems, they turn to Google. It’s up to you to make sure you’re there when they go searching. In the early stages, your marketing automation needs to be feeding that buyer subject matter expertise and thought leadership to help them understand the symptoms they’re seeing daily and recognize the core problem. In the later stages, you need to be there with the appropriate product information and an easy way to transition to a sales representative. But be certain, it’s all about the buyer.
This is profound. And it’s the future.
Judy Mod and others call this being “buyer-centric.” I call it knowing your target market and all the personas within the buyer team. Sadly, my presentation with Kevin O’Malley–an earlier version of which, recorded without Kevin, is available here–was not offered at B2BCamp, but it would fit nicely into this narrative. The personas relevant in this discussion aren’t necessarily the primary users of the product, but rather are the person interested in the purchase, influencers who need some sort of dashboard type data as output, and so on. Modern B2B selling requires that the information needed by each be available and offered up on a platter at the right time.
If you don’t understand those buyer types, go out and listen to the market. If you do, make sure you communicate them effectively inside your organization–and consider using personas to achieve that objective.
Inaugural B2BCamp Atlanta
069 days
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural B2BCamp Atlanta, an unconference aimed at the growing B2B Marketing concentration in Atlanta. Lots of great thought leaders were present at the event hosted at Matrix Resources, and 12 educational sessions were offered.
Unfortunately the session that Kevin O’Malley and I offered was not selected, but that gave me the opportunity to sit in great sessions about being Buyer-Centric, the use of video, and a marketing automation panel. All in all, great learning opportunities all around!
Opening Session - photo by Adam Needles
As organizer of ProductCamp Atlanta, the format was refreshingly familiar, but the content was a nice foray into content I’m not exposed to quite as often. I want to commend the team on their execution to deliver a first class marketing event in Atlanta, and I certainly look forward to the next B2BCamp!
Lessons from ‘Crossing the Chasm’
0315 days
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a classic reference book for marketers of technology products. As a review, there are a couple of key takeaways in the book that serve as reasons everyone marketing technology products should read it.
First, this book’s central thesis is that in the technology adoption life cycle, the most difficult progression is from the visionary innovators to the pragmatic early majority. Contrary to the risk taking innovators, the pragmatic early majority is looking for validation from other buyers in its niche, who can validate a product will solve problems in their business. By ensuring that the “whole product” is marketed to a specific market segment, Moore argues that a company can establish a beachhead from which to expand its presence.
The focus on a single market segment illustrates the second key takeaway: the need for proper segmentation. Moore defines a “market” or “market segment” as a group of buyers with similar problems who reference each other during the buying process. It is this description that helped me remember and internalize the importance of market segmentation: By posing a compelling value proposition to specific segment of the market, a company can “land” in preparation to “land and expand.” ”Landing” requires becoming the market leader in that market. Without market leadership, a company’s offering isn’t seen as credible. Once market leadership exists, the members of that single market segment become referenceable clients who can speak to the company’s leadership to buyers in tangential industries, and this provides a way to get into other corollary markets.
If a company does not focus on a single market, and instead gets a buyer or two in many industries, the product doesn’t assume market leadership in any single area, which prevents it from winning any potential buyers by the power of the market leading position. It is this rationale that helps establish why segmenting the market, and focusing on a single segment, is so important with a product and company struggling to establish itself in the marketplace.
For those learning or reviewing marketing fundamentals, this is a goldmine. There’s a great deal of meat that Moore places around these key concepts, and so Crossing the Chasm is certainly worth reading if you haven’t already.
Interesting post about forgetting feature requests
4I ran across a blog post today suggesting that the work of tracking and logging feature requests is unnecessary. As the thought goes, the ideas that keep coming up are the ones worth considering anyway, so those repeated mentions serve to remind the product manager of the market’s needs.
I find this interesting in its minimalism, but within a large software organization it seems like this might be difficult. The product manager is often several levels removed from support calls, which is where a high volume of customer contact is made. The product manager’s site visits, interviews and observations may be only a small percentage of the company’s contact with its customers. So is it wise to trust that the product manager’s selection of contacts is wide enough that those same important ideas will bubble up to the top?
The degree to which a product manager spends time listening to the market also plays a part. If the product manager carries products all the way through commercialization, time in market may be sporadic or limited; in which case, this concept would seem to be more risky of not hearing the “right” messages from the market.
Still, interesting food for thought.
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