Switching your customers ON not OFF

I have just read a fascinating piece that suggests that 74% of users are very satisfied with their Apple iPad but only 54% with the Amazon Kindle Fire.

The fact that the iPad is so popular isn't perhaps a huge surprise - after all that's what Apple does - creating brand recognition - making devoted consumers devoted to their devices with the ultimate user experience. Now the survey was not huge - around 200 tablet owning Americans, and I guess that the Kindle team have not quite made the leap from black and white e-readers to tablets (at least according to this study.)

The really interesting point was that many Kindle users expressed unhappiness with  the location of the on/off switch! At first thought that seems pretty trivial switch it on - use it - switch it off - there seem to be bigger issues with the user experience. However, on deeper analysis it reminds us how critical all aspects of user experience are in determining customer satisfaction. I am pretty sure that the Kindle team thought about all the buttons probably did some focus groups; but they still got it wrong for a sizeable number of respondents. Smaller companies would probably do a water cooler satisfaction study and then change the decision based on feedback (=resistance to changing the design) from the engineering team.

For software based products life is a bit easier - it is simpler to change the design of user interfaces and in some cases it makes sense to constantly offer slightly different versions and to constantly analyse performance and to tweak the product. See this great piece for a more in depth analysis.

Hardware or software, consumer or business product it is critical to get all aspects of the user experience exactly right; and as far as possible to constantly fine tune the product. At all times the focus must be customer centric. The product team needs to understand the customer segments, and to keep their understanding updated. Go to Market is a tough call balancing lots of conflicts and pressures and it's often hard to go the extra mile with RD and to meet the other constraints like time and budget.

User experience is critical; the survey didn't say how many users would not buy the product again because it had switched them off, but, given social media, peer reviews and recommendations - a poor user experience switches the competition on.

Spotting Disruptive Technology - Why It Matters

This is the first part of a mini-series on how to identify, analyse and react to disruptive technology. On this article we discuss why we need to be constantly looking for disruptive technologies.


As a PM one of the hardest things is to keep an eye on disruptive technologies and their likely impact on our product lines. In many cases it is nearly impossible to find time just to keep up to date on developments in our own field. Like in any other job we are focused on the daily routine and immediate needs of our product and on its internal and external customers. It is hard to find time to look beyond the immediate and work out what is happening out there in the big wide world.

Yet identifying disruptive technology is one of our most critical tasks – to bring a trivial yet valid example; there were probably teams of PM all working diligently on the latest features of typewriters such as electric, quieter, better ink ribbons whilst over at IBM, Microsoft and Apple they were busy working on mass produced PCs with word processors. There are numerous examples of major disruptive technologies appearing from no where and killing an industry dead almost overnight – DVD and videos – digital and film cameras.

However, identifying disruptive technologies is actually a difficult task, for several reasons -

1. It requires a substantial on going investment in general reading and research – something that we will all normally put off until next week when things are quieter.
   
2. It is often very difficult to identify where the challenge is coming from; in many cases the threat comes from out of market and not from our traditional competition. Did the typewriter teams keep an eye on the emerging computing market? Did Nokia spot what Apple were planning? Apple were a new player in Nokia's market, yet managed to blend their existing product capabilities with some new technology and a Palm Pilot concept and Nokia are still licking their wounds several years later.
   
3. The speed of development – all too often by the time you have heard of the threat it is (almost) too late.

Unfortunately, without have constant focus on disruption, we will always be surprised. Our natural focus is on incremental features and customer requests. This is often the case even when planning the Next Generation magical market leading product. We will become focused on meeting our product and time objectives and forget to understand what is going on outside our company.

To be fair, not all disruptive technologies will stop an industry in its tracks, but, by definition they will substantially change the way we could or should do business. If we spot them early enough they could be a substantial differentiator in our favour; on the other hand if we spot them too late .....

So one of the key tasks for any successful PM is to dedicate part of their working time to reading around – focus on your own industry (your customers and competitors) and segment but also look around you at other areas what's happening in other industries and let your imagination run wild about the possible impacts and changes.


Of course expecting the unexpected is hard and predicting the unpredictable is much harder than that – but we need to do so. It is hard to conduct a strategic product review or to make intelligent product decisions without understanding the bigger picture and looking at the potential impact of disruptive technologies.


In the next blog we will look at ways of finding the information that we need, the dangers of trying to figure out the timing and how to promote discussion within the organisation. We will also discuss some formal methodologies that we developed to analyse the impact of these technologies on our business.

WAC - Innovation & Standardisation

As telecom guys, we can’t let last week’s Mobile World Congress go by without a mention. One of the announcements was about the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) standard. The WAC initiative was founded a year ago, has published v2.0 of the standard this week and plans v3.0 later in the year. A few telecom operators and suppliers have made some supportive announcements.

The basic idea of WAC is to allow developers a device agnostic way to bring their products to market and it will also improve operator involvement with application stores by allowing the operators to offer added value and services through their network. It is the latest in a series of initiatives to try to standardize this area of the telecom market.

Significantly Apple and Google are not members of WAC and are enjoying significant commercial success with their application stores. (In January Apple announced the 10 billionth app download.) They both choose to innovate aggressively, to create their own solution and to shun the standard approach.

The purpose of this blog is not to debate the merits of WAC, or its chance of success, but rather to consider the correct balance between standardization and innovation from the perspective of Product Management & Marketing.

Conventional wisdom (since the days of Henry Ford) has been that standardization rules. It simplifies the process, drives down costs and is at the core of mass production. WAC has the same objectives in mind – “WAC is …..dedicated to establishing a simple route to market for developers to expose their new applications to a customer base of over 3 billion customers.” It has been a brave PMM that has chosen non standard solutions – they increase cost, reduce the likelihood of success and are generally guaranteed to cause project delay.

However, Apple and Google have gone their own ways; and built their own solutions and created de-facto standards around their own eco-systems. Their strategy is that standardization should not be allowed to obstruct innovation. (There are many other technology examples in the past that followed the same basic strategy.)

However, also in the Telecom news was the agreement between Nokia and Microsoft. Behind the headline is the recognition that these two mega companies each with a strong tradition and proved track record of innovation have failed to deliver individually with Symbian (Nokia), MeeGo (Nokia & Intel) and Windows Phone 7 (MS). So clearly innovation even when driven by market leaders is no guarantee of success.

Often the process of standardization reduces innovation to the lowest common denominator to reach broad consensus and it can be driven by strong partisan commercial interests. In almost all cases it slows down the process – WAC is a good example. Compare the few early commitments with the number of devices and solutions in the Droid and Apple app stores.

Of course most PMM do not have the luxury of being able to create eco-systems on the scale of the app stores. However, we do need to balance standardization and innovation. Even today it is probably a wiser move to innovate in the context of app stores and not to rely on the WAC standard.

In many ways it is harder for the regular PMM; our product decisions are complex. We have to balance our need to differentiate with the need to be accepted via standardization. Our products are often expected to differentiate. We must also make some tough judgment calls on which are the correct standards and if it they are really appropriate for our product. If we are building a bleeding edge product we will often need to decide how we build a product that can be launched today yet is flexible to rapid change if a standard develops in a different direction.

Standardization is needed and should be supported, yet we need to remember when and how to innovate. Clever well executed innovation can be much faster to market and a strong differentiator and there is always the (remote) chance of creating a de facto standard!

When we manage our products we need to carefully evaluate what is our true ability to innovate and to generate product leadership and differentiation and when should we rely on standards and standardization. This is not a purely technical or tactical question. It is a strong commercial and strategic decision; just because a standard exists it does not mean that it will be commercially successful, nor that it is the correct product positioning for our product. The Telecom world has many examples of the standard that never caught on; Betamax is another example of the standard that didn’t bring commercial success.

However, to ignore an easy standard solution will ensure that we invest scarce resources in re-inventing the wheel rather than in creating the product we want in the time scale we need.

The balance between innovation and standardization is very difficult to achieve. Standards can simplify our product yet take time to evolve and are frequently not the best solution. On the other hand, wild innovation can produce an isolated, weak, expensive and late solution. However, without innovation it is very hard to differentiate at the product level. Finding the correct balance between innovation and standardization is The Art of Product Management & Marketing.