As PM&M we spend a huge part of our working day communicating both internally and externally. Despite this, we often get far into a product process and discover that somehow we don't have documentation or that we have very poor documentation. It may not, therefore, come as a complete surprise that we have a poor product definition and a weak customer engagement.
Sure, our creative skills and leadership mission don't leave much time for hacking away producing long word documents, but, as we will discuss in this post good functional documentation is an essential part of our mission and the craft, that can help or hinder the overall business success.
We welcome a guest blogger - Larry Lester - A Sales & Marketing Documentation Guru to discuss
There’s a host of reasons why small, emerging companies (aka start ups) should take documentation seriously. The problem is that most of those that I have worked with – don’t.
First and foremost they should take it seriously for all the reasons that larger companies take it seriously – it is a way of keeping your marketing, development, operations, and sales efforts – and the also the customer – in alignment.
However, for a start up the lack of good technical and marketing documentation – with the emphasis on good, or not having something basic at least – makes survival more perilous than usual. My phone usually starts ringing when these guys are about to crash land. If they have had the good fortune to make a sale, the customer is being nasty and delaying a milestone payment because a full set of technical documentation was supposed to be delivered and has not even been written. Or, if they have only got their foot in the door, discussions are about to collapse as the only marketing material they have to give to potential customers are a few pages of incomprehensible gibberish and a dreadful PowerPoint presentation! “We thought we could pull it off”.
The situation is, in fact, more serious than that. A company that does not maintain product requirement documentation is openly toying with suicide. There are two aspects to this assertion.
The bottom line: give both technical and marketing documentation the same priority you give to development and sales. All of these processes are fully entwined - together the product should succeed; without any one of them it will be a struggle and potentially a product failure.
I recently attended a conference on cloud computing, held by The Virtual Computing Environment Coalition (VCE), a coalition of three of the leading vendors in the industry: EMC2, Cisco and Vmware. Virtualization and cloud computing are two of the newer technological trends and gaining momentum every day. Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs indicates that in 2010 the first technological priority of the CIOs is virtualization and second is cloud computing. This is a major change in the IT industry; in the same survey in Jan 2009 neither of these were in the top ten technologies.
New technologies always represent a challenge to the Product Mangers. Should we invest and adapt the technology or is it only a “buzz” that will disappear? In some cases it introduces a disruptive force to the industry which actually changes the rules of the game, creates an opportunity for new players and might be a threat to the existing players in the market. So, the stakes are high, misjudgment of the affect of the new technology might cause a large impact on our business. We will discuss the importance of and ways to track technological trends in a future post.
In the case of cloud computing the potential affect might be more than only on the product. It might change the way we do business. Should the business be “product centric” or should it change to a xAAS model?
As we discussed in the post “the Craft of PM&M”, one of the main challenges is to make a decision in a world of uncertainty. The impact of Cloud Computing will be different between industries and between domains within a specific industry. There is no one answer that fits all. Each PM in his/her own domain should consider the wide view of the industry and take into account the users and usage habits, the competitors, possible new competition due to the change, the customers (if the users and customers are different), and the maturity of the technology related to the specific industry. Our task is to correctly position the product.
The decision to be made is not between ignoring the change and fully embracing it. There are several alternatives to implement or approach a change. We need to determine the correct product requirements in the light of the possible changes.
We can choose not to do anything and wait. The simplest approach, before making substantial investments, is to change the “marketing language” that is used to describe the offering and start using the newer, trendier, terms when describing the product and the offering. The next step is to create a demo which is more convincing than the marketing pitch. Moving up in the investment and the complexity, we can build a “Proof-of-Concept” which is not only a demo but still not a product that can be delivered to customers. Finally, if there is a decision to adapt the technology, only then we should implement it in the product.
Whether we choose to ignore the change for now, or choose any of the other alternatives we must decide on parameters or events that we should track. These parameters and events should signal us if a decision should be changed. They should indicate changes in the market that point to either the direction of adaptation of the technology by the market or that the market abandon this trend. Any change that indicates a deeper commitment and implementation in the market should cause us to reconsider our strategy and move to the next level of investments in our offering.
Cloud Computing is an interesting topic in its own right and it serves as a good case study for the wider discussion of technological change and product positioning. Constantly, there are technological trends to follow, but not all trends are relevant to all domains and products. However, it is crucial for a Product Manager to keep track and to be informed so that those trends that are relevant will not be overlooked. Missing on a relevant market trend might not have an immediate impact but can prove to be critical in the mid and long terms. It is also important to make the correct call on the required response.
Recently, I attended a sales conference trying to promote interest in a relatively new technology trend. This was a large production – I am guessing over 1000 technologists enjoying the hospitality of 3 of the very largest international technology companies (together their market cap is just short of $200B.) –The companies flew in some of their best sales stars from abroad, so we assumed that we were in for a real treat. Unfortunately one of my main take away messages was that the skills of being an effective presenter are in short supply.
I want to focus on one unfortunate presenter let’s call him Jim (not his real name) who had flown through 10 time zones to be given the middle slot in a 3 person breakout session – just before a late lunch. So Jim has my every sympathy – he got a really rotten deal – I just hope that he was really in country for some excellent one on one meetings, to at least justify the time it took him to get here and return home.
However, Jim made pretty much every possible presentation error known to the PMM world – no small feat in only around 15-20 minutes. Let me state at the outset that I and at least several others only managed to figure out what the presentation was about in the last slide or so. It was very informative seeing Jim up there - here are a few of his mistakes – I hope it gets you cringing with shared embarrassment, find some sympathy for Jim who sacrificed himself for the greater good, and please firmly resolve not to make these mistakes next time you are up there.
Know your Audience & Speak to Them – Jim assumed that everybody in the room knew about his company, its product and the reasons why it had just been acquired by one of these huge companies hosting our lunch. WRONG – most of us had never heard of them; and were either passively learning or intrigued by title on the agenda. This is a really common problem that happens in webinars, at sales meetings and at internal briefings. Unless the session is very clearly understood to be at an advanced level you probably need to assume a much less savvy audience than you would like or intuitively expect – you need to find a way of getting them interested without insulting the people who have the background.
Never, never start a presentation with the Competition – Its negative, very negative and completely pointless until I understand who you are – tell me what you do, why you are good and why you are what I need – at the end maybe tell me about the other guys – but generally why give them free advertising?
Get me Interested at the Beginning– Jim’s last slide was a case study & it was wow! If only that had been the first slide he would have captured our attention & to be honest he would have got 90% of his message over whilst people were still in the room and still listening.
Timings – So we all do it – we need to share our knowledge and passion and give a complete picture. We need to share everything right now. I don’t know what Jim expected and what he really got in terms of timings, but he was literally panting from slide one, in a desperate rush to get through the slides. He wanted to get through the slides – what he should have been doing is focusing on his message. In any meeting like this you need to be ruthless in trimming the presentation and ideally you should have an emergency plan in mind about how to cut it even further if you are left racing the clock. Less is really more in these situations.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – So we all know this one too – but for most of us it is so much easier to throw down 1000’s of words. The problem that Jim had was that it was a large room, a huge projection and he had a small font so for most of the room it was like trying to read the newspaper of the guy 20 rows in front of you on the plane – it was just not happening. We all like having the info on the slides – it reminds us and lets the audience read and learn for themselves. WRONG – you need to know your message and the audience should be listening to you – that’s why you travelled half way around the world! For further information on this I recommend http://www.presentationzen.com that has many interesting tips and refreshing ideas on skills and approaches to presentation. Explore the ideas of the naked presenter. Guy Kawaski (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axzz1637iAUyr) who has a rule that the smallest font should be no smaller than half the age of oldest person in the room (and ideally 30 points).
Bob spoke after Jim – he was the session that should have been lunch and he was a techie and clearly also not a gifted public speaker, but, he was really engaging – he had some pictures, in the first couple of slides we understood the main messages and he used humour – not the stand-up variety, not vulgar, but just basically dumb engineer jokes. But most of the audience were there in their capacity as engineers and so he vey successfully connected with the audience, he got their attention and made an impact.
So Jim – thanks for being such a good sport (if it is any consolation you were not the only lousy presenter) and for giving us this opportunity to remember the principles of good presentations – it’s all about clarity of messages, good graphics, effective time management and speaking to your audience.
“Follow the yellow brick road” - this is the instruction that Dorothy got in order to get to Emerald City.
Product managers are responsible for building the product’s yellow brick road – the Product Road Map.
The road map generally should normally be planned for a 3 year period at a high level and for 18 months in a more detailed manner.
Probably the most important starting point for the road map process is the outcome of the strategic business process of the company. This is a critically important process performed periodically (often annually) by the senior management of the company together with the marketing team and actually drives the entire company. When we start to create or update the road map the last version of the strategic process is a major input.
Often this will be replaced or supplemented by a product strategic process where we systematically look at all aspects of the product and the market and set key business objectives within the overall corporate strategic framework.
The road map process starts with information collection which should include the following:
In the next step we need to analyze what is the likely impact of each item on the product and what we can or should be do in order to give the best response to the probable impact. The best way is to create a product requirements matrix with all the needed activities, new features, platform changes, etc. and then to prioritize this list.
Having done that, we need to figure out what is required in the development of each element in the matrix. We must get the rough effort estimation and / or the budget needed. Now we have the information needed in order to make decisions and to create a road map release plan, if possible for a 3 year period, but not less than 18 months.
Needless to mention that during all the process described here we need to drive internal collaboration and buy in by involving and getting the opinions of many other groups from within the organization for example marketing, R&D, sales, operations and so on.
This is a cyclic process, since we need to do it again at least once or twice a year and adjust the road map if needed.
The decision whether to let our customers be involved in the road map or more precisely to what extent they should be involved is not an easy one. See this article for some of our thoughts in this area. Generally we need to make the product ready for market, but at the same time, we need to be careful not to let the road map drift in the direction of one or two (big) customers, but, is not in line with the general market direction.
We should be very careful when externalize the road map document since it is has some legal status as a kind of contract and as such we need to enter all the needed legal and financial disclosures.
Hopefully this road map will lead us to Emerald City.
In subsequent blogs we will look at ways to share the roadmap internally and externally, getting internal buy in and some of the methods available to do competitive analysis and technology reviews.
The Product Management & Marketing (PM&M) profession presents significant challenges to its practitioners. The main challenge of our profession is: making good product decisions in an environment of uncertainty to drive long term sales, profitability and competitive positioning.
There are many methods and best practices that one can learn and use in the challenging world of PM&M, in order to to help. Occasionally there might be some fortunate PM&Ms facing projects where all the parameters are available, obvious and accurate, for most of us most of the time this is not the case.
Once we are over the decision making challenge, we have to face the organization and manage the “internal marketing” of the decisions within the various functions in the company. The PM&M has to coordinate and collaborate with almost all internal organizations – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Delivery, Support, Legal and R&D. To be able to do all this cooperation the PM&M has to build matrix management skills, but more than this relay on excellent human relationship capabilities.
Finally… after we have managed to make the decision and get buy in within the company, then we reach the critical stage (& our original objective) – going to the market and meeting our customers. In my view, the PM&M must face the customers. This is the way to “feel” and learn the market, find out what the customers are looking for, what are the advantages and disadvantages for our product and how to make it a winner with clear differentiation. Close engagement with the customers is essential to enable the right decision making. However, meeting customers successfully isn’t always an easy task, and the PM&M needs to have the human and technical capabilities to interact with the customers, to present the product and to face the challenges the customers present.
The Customer is King – But are they Always Right?
The customer is the king – they buy our product. We also know that the customer is always right. However, sadly they are not always right or at least not completely right; especially if (fortunately) there are many different customers with different needs. After we have engaged with the customer we will often be left with a conflict – do we meet the customer’s requirements or do we take them into account yet specify other product goals? Generally we are time limited and resource restricted and so our decisions will be (to a large extent) between mutually exclusive options.
As in many situations in life, there is the “easy way out”. When making decisions the PM&M can rely on what the customers demand. It will make everybody happy; internally in the organization no one can argue with the logic of satisfying the requirements coming from customers and the sales people will be delighted to go to the customers and tell them that all their requests are fulfilled. The customers will be delighted to get their exact requirements and to have their views influence the product. But, the “easy way” is not necessarily the “right way”, the popular decision will give the PM&M a friendlier environment in the short run, but will it be justified by the business performance in the long run? Did we sacrifice the future of the product for the comfort of making easy decisions? One of the classic PM&M dilemmas or minefields is letting one or a few key customers dictate the product design. Our responsibility is to make the best product decision in an environment of uncertainty and we need our customers to buy our product, but, we also need to ensure that one or two key accounts do not set the product back in terms of its wider market acceptability.
The PM&M is usually at the eye of the storm. The customers have their requests and crisis, the sales people demand that we satisfy our customers and also give the sales people some new exciting things to sell and to meet their quotas, the operations and support are complaining on the product capabilities and R&D is always short on resources. There are methods and tools that help sort things out in this chaos, but often there are no easy or even obviously right answers. The “craft of PM&M” is to be able to observe the surroundings, analyze the conflicting information, to assess the situation and in the end make the right product decisions that will maximize long term sales, profitability and competitive positioning.
