Posts tagged Product Management
Book Review: Tuned In by Craig Stull, Phil Myers and David Meerman Scott
Jan 4th
Product managers are the jacks-of-all-trades living behind the great and the ordinary products all around us. They are in charge of the product’s position in the market, its features, and ultimately its profitability. One of the biggest challenges is crafting a product that truly strikes a chord with an audience, immediately feeling comfortable. The authors of Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs describe a six-step process for creating a products that do just that, using several case studies as well as personal experience to illustrate their points.
The six step process is as follows:
1. Find unresolved problems
2. Understand buyer personas
3. Quantify the impact
4. Create breakthrough experiences
5. Articulate powerful ideas
6. Establish authentic connections
The authors are thought leaders with Pragmatic Marketing, a highly-regarded consultancy in the world of product management. They teach a proprietary framework of 37 elements of product management which at a high level describes the process of identifying a market, finding problems in that marketing, developing solutions and bringing them to market. In the framework, while not diminishing the importance of the others, Tuned In focuses on the identification of market problems, requirements, use scenarios and positioning elements to illustrate the point that only by interacting with existing customers and prospects (tuning in) can one identify the problems people are willing to pay to solve. Products that do not solve a problem people are willing to pay to have solved, in Pragmatic’s view, should not be developed.
Tuned In is written in a highly readable style that is short on jargon but long on stories that hit home. A prime example of a “resonator” from the book is Zipcar, which the authors point out solves a need for a market that had not previously been met by any existing car rental company: the urban dweller who needs a car for a short time. In a recent article in Money magazine, stalwarts Ford and Hertz are cited as wanting “in” on Zipcar’s market–one which they had failed to observe and fill at any point in their long history. [It can be argued that companies like Ford and Hertz may have considered a car-sharing market but decided in self-interest NOT to fill it; the article claims that for every shared car, 20 are taken off the road, which is not good for the traditional car business]
This is a very common-sense book that is not hard to understand, but at the same time does not delve into extreme detail on topics such as market-research; academic analysis is not the point of Tuned In. Tuned In is “tuned in” to the fact that product managers need a simple, easy-to-understand process to “tune in” to their markets. And, on that, the authors deliver.
Healthcare Reform as a Product
Dec 23rd
For those of us in product management, the drama unfolding in Congress with regard to the healthcare reform package is a too-familiar refrain. Without wading into the merits of the proposal on the table right now, we’ve watched a team set an initial objective to solve a specific problem (provide healthcare for the uninsured) which has morphed over the past year as deals are cut to obtain the approval of hardheaded stakeholders. As further bargaining takes place to get votes and get the solution through Congress, we have a solution coming up for a vote that both major constituent groups are disowning for different reasons.
Take all this within the context of working in different realities (some not acknowledging the problem really exists/defining it differently), with different value systems and beliefs about whether the current forum is even the right one to address the problem, and it’s no wonder that what comes out of such a process is often clumsy and–ultimately–a poor solution. A guest blog on HBR illustrates this point with the “successful” Medicare Part D episode earlier this decade: a solution that many don’t even understand, much less support.
In product management, we advocate that there needs to be one “owner” of a problem space and solution, who makes the decisions about what form that solution takes and avoids feature creep. Those decisions need to be made with a laser focus on the problem being solved and the market itself. What we’re seeing in Congress–with all bills, really, but highlighted in prime time for us now–is the exact opposite: features added and features cut arbitrarily for the purpose of gaining stakeholder support, not because it makes the solution better. The goal of delivering something to market has taken precedence over actually solving the problem.
This is no way to build a quality product.
Startups and Product Management
Oct 11th
As I spend more time in startup-heavy Austin, I think more about the role of product managers in startup companies. In most cases, that role is implicit–there is no “product manager,” per se, but rather a CEO and/or CTO who have a vision for a product and who chair a personal quest to bring it to market. There is plenty of risk here for those who understand product management and have delivered products to market.
The fact is that as demands placed upon a startup company mount, the focus of the CEO begins to split to operational and technical issues. If someone is not dedicated to the product itself, it seems very easy — to cite but one example — to experience feature creep where people think additional functions “can’t hurt,” while they’re really not focused on the specific target market and whether or not that target market will actually use the feature being considered.
In a recent On Product Management post and the related comments, several of my peers argue for hiring experienced product management early in the life of a startup to avoid missing the target and delivering a product that isn’t a winner. I hereby add my “ditto” to those opinions.
ProductPotluck Austin
Oct 3rd
Attendees at each of the ProductCamp “unconference” events held in Austin have provided feedback reqeusting more frequent events for the product management and product marketing communities. In response, the folks behind ProductCamp have unveiled a smaller version of the unconference, calling it ProductPotluck Austin. Before you make any plans, be sure to “bring ideas — not food.”
The agenda includes networking and 2 presentations, to be voted upon by the attendees. For the first meeting on October 21, two topics have been selected: Marketing and Product Strategy. Participants are asked to submit topics, and registered attendees can vote upon the sessions offered between October 12 and October 16. On the 21st, the participants will vote from among the top 4 vote-getters to determine the two topics to be presented that evening. Much like ProductCamp, this format engenders a bit of good-natured competition and brings out better presentations.
We hope that this periodic mini-unconference between the biannual ProductCamps can help advance the product management and product marketing community in Central Texas.
Currently, 54 people are signed up out of a maximum 150. Hope to see you there!
NOTE: Please see Paul Young’s more extensive write-up of the event.
Internal systems
Aug 30th
One of the takeaways I’m finding in Bill Jensen’s book Simplicity is a reaction to the effect that information overload has on company productivity. As there is more and more information to process to do one’s job, it becomes ever more important for a company to provide tools that not only provide access to information, but which help interpret the information in the sense of analytics. So how does this manifest for a large company aiming to produce streamlined products for the marketplace, that will address (and solve well) a specific problem?
As a product manager with a multinational corporation, I find that (at least at my company in my specific division/subsidiary) there’s a contrast between the streamlined solutions we’re being asked to produce, and the cumbersome internal systems we use to collect and analyze the information we use to design such products. The systems we’re building are “push,” but the systems we use internally are “pull.” Some of this may be due to our company’s implementation of off-the-shelf requirements management and project management tools, but the net result is that the company does not make it easier to easily understand the decisions we need to make, much less make them.
I suspect we are not nearly the only ones.
One of the products I’m developing now is a service which can run client-server or on the web, in order to maximize the base of customers to whom we can provide a solution. I’m finding that questions about–and design of–the internal management components to be used by company support representatives are getting short-changed due to the pressure to meet release targets. This is certainly not unique to this one product, and the support angle hasn’t been ignored, but at the same time the support team’s “use cases” have not been considered with nearly as much diligence and interaction design as the product itself. So in one sense, the sub-optimal experience product managers have with requirements tools is being propagated to the experience support reps will have with service management.
Something I need to reiterate within my organization.
