Product Management thinking and bite size learning

Maintenance vs innovation

Maintenance vs innovation
How do product managers balance the needs of their current product versus investing in new ideas? We’re working with a company where about 80% of development effort is directed towards product maintenance, some towards enhancements and the little bit that’s left goes to innovation. The result? A very frustrated senior management team who see a huge spend and nothing new to sell. There can be many reasons behind this (badly architected product, fixed sized dev teams, etc) but it clearly cant be sustained. Our fix? Set a target maintenance spend (say 20%) and a target date to hit that spend (say 3 years) and then ratchet spend down each quarter. This gives teams the time to address the fundamentals, get a plan in place and move towards a more appropriate spending level.

What is a product

What is a product - this question comes up constantly in our world. On the surface this would seem a simple question to deal with , but teams get wrapped in knots as they try to work out what it is that they sell, how they should structure product teams etc.
We think the answer is pretty simple. ‘ A product is any deliverable that provides value (tangle or not) to a target customer group. All products need to be managed, the level of effort being a function of the risk and reward associated with the product’

Product Impact

The impact of getting a product wrong
You can get a product wrong in many ways - badly designed, poorly build, doesn’t solve any specific need, too expensive etc....
We often think of the cost of the mistake in relation to the product - x million in development effort has been wasted, but the cost is much bigger than that. Think of it from a brand perspective. If a company delivers a bad product then customers don’t just reject the product, but they become wary of brand. An example from two brands- Alfa Romeo and Porsche; Alfa have a history of highs and lows. Sometimes they delight, sometimes not. Porsche have consistency. Now imagine both companies announce a new sports car for 2019 that you can place a deposit on today. Guess who would have the fuller order book? Brand confidence is a war that products battle to win

Market Research

Market research is essential for product managers it centres your business on your consumers and keeps you focused. It allows you to pursue the most lucrative growth opportunities and keeps you relevant and future-oriented it also improves your decision-making capabilities and reduces your risk.

A great example of this Harper Collins found sales of Agatha Christie novels declining.
Quantitative & qualitative research was commissioned, and they found that :
Readers liked “niceness” of the crimes, but covers were gruesome and bloody.

Result: New cover designs commissioned. Sales rose by 40%

#productmanagement

Crossing the Chasm

An article on the bbc this morning described the ‘shockingly’ slow take up of the electric car and how many consumers were unlikely to buy electric for their next purchase. These were my the figures:
- 5.5% of new car purchases are electric.
- 56% of those surveyed were very unlikely to buy an electric car as their next car purchase.

I think they might want to get a copy of ‘crossing the chasm’ in their library. The electric car market is almost textbook adoption model - innovators are in, laggards and late majority need more convincing.

Do you know your customers?

I’m often shocked by how little contact some product managers have with their customers. Think about it for a second - potentially spending huge amounts of money building a product for group of people you’ve never met! I know it’s expensive and time consuming and sometimes difficult, but a product manager who does not regularly meet customers and understands them is really just taking a huge bet at the point of product launch.

Who Does What ?

Product owners vs product managers vs product marketing managers!!

We don’t make our life easy in product management - trying to untangle who does what across the multiple job titles we see can be a nightmare.
Here’s my take on it; product marketing managers own markets, product managers own products that serve those markets and product owners own modules that make up those products.

Take the Ford Focus as an example. My model would have a product marketing manager for Ford UK working with the full Ford product set, a product manager for the Ford Focus, another for the Ford Mondeo, etc, understanding the needs of each product marketing manager across the globe, and a product owner for suspension systems, another for Interiors, etc working with the product manager of each car.

Discounting

Dealing with discounts.

Customers ask for discounts. In the b2b sector it’s pretty unusual for customers not to push the price point down. This is obviously something for sales teams so how does it impact product management?

Firstly, we can help sales teams deal with discount discussions in how we structure the product - a modular approach to pricing means that when a customer asks a £10k solution, we have a £10k product. We can strip out the higher value components and hit the price point with a suitable product offer. But we all know customers often want all the features and the discount. In this case, think of what the sales team can ask for in return for a discount that might benefit your product - reference site visits, a quote to use in some marketing piece, a joint presentation at a conference, access to end users to conduct market research...

The point is this, don’t let discounts be given for ‘free’. It’s much easier to get the quote agreed during a negation than trying to secure it afterwards when the customer wants nothing from you.

Competition

Tonight is one of the most important England matches for a very long time. All the way through this competition the team will have been closely looking at their competitors and trying to make sure they understood what they could do to give them the edge and win.

Do you know what your point of difference is with your competitors ?
What do you do differently that gives your product the edge ?

Give this card a try from our 30 Tasks to Improve Product Management card deck.

Communication

Communication is a vital skill for a product manager. It might be a 5 minute elevator pitch or a full technical review. Either way you need to keep your audience engaged and interested in what you saying. Here are a few tips :

1. Tell the audience why they are there
2. Pick three major points you want to talk about and focus on those.
3. Don't overload your presentation with text and pictures.
4. Keep an eye on time. Use a parking lot to collect points that can be answered later.
5. Don't just deliver dry facts.
6. Deliver with passion.
7. Banish your nerves.

Product Naming

What do think about when naming a product ? There are so many things to consider. Below is an example of BAD product naming. In Iran where this product is made the word "barf" means snow, so ideal for the idea of making your whites nice and bright. However where the product is sold it has a whole other meaning. I don't think anyone wants there clean washing to smell like Barf !

Themed Roadmaps

A themed roadmap is the perfect framework to manage your product along strategic lines. It enables long term objectives & product deliverables to be realised but can flex to meet shorter term demands or agreed variations on the importance of each product strategy.

Moreover, a Themed Roadmap is a single "view" of product strategies and deliverables that can be used in all discussion with major stakeholders as you seek to gain alignment and agreement on a complex set of future product deliverables.

Product Plan

Are you keeping your product plan up to date?
The product plan is the place that product managers catch all relevant market data. They use it to help direct their product and make evidence based decisions. Contact me if you'd like the latest product plan template from Tarigo.

Product Failure

There is actually a museum of product failure. The purpose however is not to mock those who have failed but to provide visitors a learning experience about the important role of failure for innovation.

Not every product will be a success but we need to look at those failures and learn from them.

How do you innovate and ensure your product success ?

Agile

Does agile development need agile marketing?

More of a thought for the day - really interested in opinions and how you’re solving this issue....

Over the past few years, agile processes have become the dominant process-type in the development and delivery of technology. Promising a level of agility and customer focus, variants of the core agile method are now commonly used for developing products from gaming apps through to sophisticated medical technology. But whilst product teams have embraced the brave new world of agile, their colleagues in marketing, support, finance and other functions have not seen the relevance to them. The net result? A fragmented response - technology is delivered through regular sprint iterations whilst messaging, marketing, support and other deliverables follow a much more static delivery path and fail to match the agility of development. This presents a market problem; customers buy solutions. Building agility into the development team and not matching that through the other functions is like building a car with one wheel that can spin faster than the rest.
Thoughts...…..

#productmanagement #productmanager #blog #tarigo

Is Product Mgmt art or science?

Is product management art or science?

I’m helping an organisation build out their product management team. We’ve looked at their needs, built a skills gap canvas and identified what they require in terms of hard skills. Even with all that in place, the stand out skill that I’m always looking for is an ability to balance art and science. You can describe this in a number of ways; creativity and structure, ingenuity and discipline. Great product managers have enough creativity to define a truly compelling proposition and enough structure to get a complex product to launch without dropping a major component. It’s a mix of skills that is makes the role pretty special and it’s difficult to find discipline and creativity in the same person