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.

Be A Better Speaker - Tips from Steve Jobs

As PMM we are all often called upon to make presentations or to speak. We need to enthrall our customers, motivate our team and convince our management (or sometimes we need to enthrall management, convince the team and motivate the customer.) Effective communication is part of our day to day activity.

So we prepare a few slides, work through our basic arguments and stand up. I once went to a customer meeting and whilst we were waiting in the lobby my colleague was still busy making changes to the presentation - let's just say that overall that meeting was not our finest hour!

We have discussed some of the common mistakes that happen; even at a relatively senior level, and I also shared a neat time limited presentation style. In this post I want to share a few insights from one of the world's communication masters - Steve Jobs. Most of the key information can be found at this link from Business Week - watch the video and the slide show - well worth the time.

So a few thoughts from the master -

• Jobs prepares his story thoroughly and apparently unlike most of us a long time before he opens Powerpoint
• He focuses on the benefits and engages the audience by showing them why they should care
• Jobs is brief and succinct and also he breaks his pitch into 10 minute sections to stop boredom
• His slides are elegant and often devoid of all words - he captures you with his visual images
• He sells dreams not products

Some of these concepts are hard to implement in a mundane meeting discussing the finer points of our design which seem far removed from a vision, but with some effort they can make all the difference.

It has just been announced that Steve Jobs has had to take a second period of medical leave. JET wishes him a speedy return to health.

The Role of Product Management Leadership in a Crisis - Are we the Problem or the Solution?

I recall reading a description of a cabinet minister who was radically different - different because whereas most ministers brought problems to cabinet meetings this particular minister brought solutions. This candid view of ministerial capability and crisis management is interesting and very revealing - perhaps even a little worrying! There are some key lessons for product management.

Although I can't find the exact source now* it has always stuck in my mind as being one of the key differences between a real Product Manager and a wannabe.

Product management and marketing is has its share of problems and when we don't spot them in advance then we have to manage the crisis. It is too easy to get tied down in the problem when we should always be thinking about being the solution and finding the solution.

We have to be very focused and believe that we and our team are the solution and that we have the capability to find and implement the solution. Our product, our company, our team and our customers are all depending on us to do so. We must believe and act as success driven professionals.

For sure we need to understand the problem in order to solve it, but, there is a difference between being the solution or wallowing in the problem and undertaking blame-storming and inactivity. I am not advocating a superficial approach to the analysis, nor in using artificial time pressure to force our team towards poor solutions - we need to work professionally; but we need to focus on delivering and on our product.

Finding the solution may be far from trivial and we may need to call upon all our professional, communication and inter-personal skills to find and implement it on time. We may have to make critical product decisions in a very hostile environment. - However, we can substantially increase our chances of success just by staying focused on solutions - this critical winner mindset makes all the difference and is one of the key elements in the Craft of PMM.

Equally, when we build our team we need to find others who like us believe in solutions not in celebrating the problem. Developing and nurturing a team that can operate under pressure, remain focused and deliver solutions is a key contribution to the organisation.

Effective crisis management is one of the hallmarks of a true professional PMM Leader. We are leaders and we need to lead.

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* I believe that the quote can be attributed to Mrs Thatcher although I have been unable to find it deffinitively. In any case the issue here is not of political endorsement but rather as an interesting attitude to the role of leadership and crisis management.

I think that we have much to learn from political leaders - a topic that we shall return to in future posts.

The Importance of Documentation

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.

1. Poorly documented development is bound to result in a bug-ridden product. If you don’t write about it (requirements) then you don’t talk about it, and if you don’t talk about it, you brush aside the problems. Lack of a standard process and workflow causes product decisions to be made in an ad hoc way. At best, it is inefficient. At worst, it will kill your efforts to make a sale.
2. A good product requirement or a spec can serve as the basis for installation, operation and maintenance documentation. The saving in time, energy and money can be substantial. Somewhere down the road, you will need a technical writer, whether you like it or not. The more solid information you have to provide, the easier your lives will be.

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.

Cloud Computing - should it / will it impact our product?

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.

Product Management - The Longest Race - Part 2

In a recent blog (here) I discussed the product management and marketing lessons that could be learnt from the recent Nike 10K night race in Tel Aviv. I discussed the event planning (impressive and complex) and the event objectives (which were probably significantly more than just a fun run).

In this blog I will discuss some of the results of the event.

As a runner I can say I had an amazing time, and that on the whole this was an impressively run event.

However, the main question is what did Nike think? What KPI's did they set in advance for the event (number of runners? low number of problems? set up/clean up time? News minutes? Facebook group members?) Were their targets met? More importantly were the targets the correct ones or were they chasing the wrong things - were they were focused on their own issues and not on being customer centric?

During the course of the race itself there were other aspects of product management in action. Every once in a while there were music and water stations, we can consider them to be product features, helping the customers to enjoy the experience more, to engage with them - what will make them happy customers that will come back next year and recommend to their friends?

On the assumption that they plan to run a similar event next year, how, are they acquiring data and how are they planning to review and improve?

On the subject of next year we can consider product extension; will they feel the need to enhance the offering - perhaps by offering a shorter or longer version or by diversifying into a cycle race or triathlon? Perhaps there is a market for more than one event a year?

There were strict rules, we were all supposed to wear the official race shirt and run the course in an orderly manner. There were a few people who ran but I guess hadn't registered, and so ran in their own shirts and there were a few who wanted to stand-out and so ran in other shirts (last year's race etc) - on the whole this caused no problems to the runners. However, we can certainly view them in the context that the product was excellent, but, that it wasn't perfect - it was fit for purpose. Of course, since we mostly followed the rules, then we were complying with a certain standard, specification or protocol.

The race had a strict delivery schedule - it had to be ready on time and it had to work adequately well on the night. So part of the secret here is in team work and execution. The PM&M can have designed the perfect race, but if his project team didn't get the water in the runner's hands or publish the results then the product experience would have been irrevocably tarnished in the eyes of many of the customers.

So in conclusion I had a good run that evening and I believe that the experience was shared by the vast majority of the runners; I suspect that Nike felt that it was a success, but, that they have some points to improve or change in the next year. Overall this was a fine example of the craft of product management and marketing.

More importantly, I hope that by looking at an event that is outside of our day to day we can see the implications of strong product management leadership on all aspects of product design, management and marketing in general.

The Craft of Product Management & Marketing

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.

Welcome to the JET Blog

Welcome to JET - The Craft of Product Management & Marketing.

Our motivation for writing the blog is simple, we want to share our experience and the fun that we have in leading the development and deployment of technology systems.

We have had the privilege of doing some mega product management tasks, both with real bleeding edge technology and also on the scale of the product development. As you can see from our profile we are very experienced in the field and can and do walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Our recent experience is in the Telecom space, but, most of our insights work across the technology domain and indeed in many other product spaces.

We are very hands on in our products and have spent face time and energy with customers, sales guys and the development and operational teams that are key to getting a product to market on time with the right functionality, at the right time and at the right price.

Over the years we have had many successes, but, along the way we have made many mistakes ourselves and we have seen many mistakes being made. It is really true that mistakes are part of the secret of future success, but, then again it is far more fun to learn from success than to learn from failure.

We believe that if we have to learn from mistakes then we should learn from new ones - it is so 90's to repeat old ones.

So our KVP on this blog and the purpose of sharing our experience is to inform and entertain whilst helping you to avoid some of the pitfalls and to advance the Craft of Product Management & Marketing.

We hope that you will find our posts informative and fun. We invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section and so to join JET - The Craft of Product Management & Marketing.