Which way out? - The Importance of Exit Criteria

One of my fundamental criteria for starting a new product release is being able to define the Exit Criteria.

As a rule of thumb it is being able to answer the following five simple questions with accurate and complete answers (the questions are simple - the answers less so ...)

1. WHAT? - What are we building? What the key features and product values that the release will deliver?
2. WHY? - What are the key benefits that the customer will derive from the product when it is released? What are the values and advantages that the release will bring to the product family/company?
3. WHO? - Who needs the product? If this is a release for the market then define the customer - specific accounts or profile the type of user that the product is targeting. Also state who will help with the necessary integrations, GTM efforts and other internal stakeholders. If this is an internal development effort then who is the internal sponsor and who is tasked with supporting the integration and deployment.
4. WHERE? - Where should the product be delivered? Describe the internal or external deployment scenarios and any pre-requisites that will make the difference between a successful launch and failed one.
5. WHEN? - What is the timeline for this release? When must the product be in the marketplace or delivered internally? 

Once defined these criteria should be critically analysed to ensure that they are coherent and meet the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time-bound) criteria. Will they meet the overall objectives? Will the product as defined meet customer expectations? Is the product definition correct? Can it be delivered in the time-available? Is the target customer the correct one to achieve the overall aims? Is the target environment feasible. Answering these questions will often force a rethink and changes, but should result in a clear definition of expectations. The entire team can adopt the final definition adding purpose and clarity. It is also critical in managing any changes that maybe needed during development


Overall the Five W's set out to define what does the product need to do, by when in order to make somebody very happy?

In my experience this is an iterative process, but, answering these five simple questions adds significant clarity to the product objectives and can make the difference between a successful product and a poor executed product that takes significantly more time and resources to develop and then fails to deliver most of what was expected.

Being Customer Passionate

Customer service with passion makes a difference.  You can feel it. You know it when you get it.

An example -  my company recently changed cleaning contractors; you know the people in blue uniforms who sweep and clean and who seem to change with alarming frequency . (A small digression;  they make a huge difference to our lives and you see them every day so be friendly and grateful to them a quick hello is really appreciated.)

The new team are pleasant enough as people and seem to be full of activity doing the regular cleaning stuff. They sweep, their managers buzz around and they all fill in the standard inspection forms. So seemingly all is well. However, actually things are just almost OK, but are certainly not to the right standard. The floors don't quite sparkle, often there are shortages of paper and unexpected messes seem to take a long time to be cleared.

On our floor the old contractors had a super team. As far as I could understand (they were immigrants and we didn't really have a common language) they were actually a husband & wife team.  

What is for certain is that the worked very hard and cared for our office just like it was their own home. They did extra inspections and made sure that everything was just right or even better. I am sure that our toilets and kitchen were as clean as in their home. They cared- actually they really cared and they had pride when you showed appreciation. Some other company now has their services and is very lucky - Anna & Anatoly come back we miss you!

They were true cleaning professionals and worked from the heart and it really showed. The new team just do their job and that also really shows. We all appreciate people who are customer passionate.

We need that professional passion in all our products - that is a difference that the customer notices. It is true differentiation.

The Value of Business Value

Business Value is often the holy grail of Product Management (and rightly so) especially when working in Agile.

Business value is genuinely very important; product managers are tasked with building products that offer some real value to somebody. Business values impact almost everything that we do with our product - its positioning, its go to market, its roadmap and its customer centric focus. These core elements of the art of product management are derived from and driven by the business values.

Classically we build things that people want to buy, advancing the business plan of our company. In other cases we may be trying to build infrastructure or experimenting with some novel ideas. However, in almost all cases we can define the objective with business value even if it is a stage or more removed from an actual sale to a customer. I plan to explore business value in these indirect cases in a future post.

So given that business value is one of, if not the primary objective of our professional lives it seems surprising how little attention many of us pay to the business value. Sure we read and write documents with some lip service to the business value. When we do a kick-off meeting we feel forced to generate a couple of statements on the subject and every so on a senior manager will feel the need to talk to even more senior people and have a mini crisis trying to generate a set of business values across all the products that they sponsor. It is possible that this is mainly a feature of big organisations; but my suspicion is that it is a common feature. It is more fun to build and design than to make bold declarations of future business value.

The crux of the issue is that it is really very important and on the critical path of everything that we do. If you are lucky enough to be constantly customer facing then you probably have a pitch maybe even several for different segments, but for the rest of us it is rarely on the agenda.

So here is an idea that I plan to put into action tomorrow - to have a slide deck or excel or some other file with every product that I manage together with its business value. So far, relatively easy, now for the hard part -  to try to keep it updated - say four times a quarter. At most reviews I think it will just be a critical read through and add the review date; but every so often things will change.

I think that this exercise will help in a few ways -

• We will really understand why we are building the product
• We will be able to remain true to the objective and not get inadvertently side-tracked in the natural drift of a dynamic product
• We will make any necessary changes actively after due thought 
• Of course finally we will always be able to provide answers to anybody who needs to know right now

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.

Social Media Comes of Age as an Advertising Platform

Social Media is a theme here at JET and we are great believers in the power of Social Media and think that Social Media is an important or rather a critical tool for businesses of all sizes.  


Even in large organisations we think that product managers and marketeers should be out there engaging with the customers - talking to them but also listening and learning. It is an easy and significant way to be relevant to our customers and customer centric. It is no longer a secret that social media can drive revolutions and depose dictators and in this recent post on Social Revolution we looked at some fascinating work by Shirky - Here Comes Everyone about how we all play a part and engage and how  Social Media gives us an accessible low cost platform to share information. We also looked at how Social Media allows us to recommend and find information to and from our social circle - a knowledge enabler perhaps on par to the invention of the printing press - See Social Media - Changing Society Forever 


The next stage of Social Media is to use it as a direct advertising channel - and many companies do use the social media platforms in their ad mix. The platforms also provide some great on board tools that are useful, accessible and affordable even for very small businesses. In this fascinating article it seems that Social Media has now come of age and for the first time a mega company - British Airways will be launching their new campaign on Social Media rather than on the more traditional media and advertising channels.Yet at the same time Sir Martin Sorrell the advertising legend, questions the value of large brand social media advertising. He also makes the very valid point that social media is now the new letter - its the way that we talk to each other and so advertising in this context makes it the wrong channel. Sir Martin also believes that their should be a subsidy for quality journalism (Sir Martin's speech) - surely a sign that opinion, blogs and personal news sources are having an ever increasing impact.  


Sir Martin is not a person to be taken lightly and many have commented on how difficult it is to get advertising right in a social media context. However, successful ads have always had the ability to engage our imagination and provoke discussion outside the delivery channel. There are a handful of ads that were popular on British TV 20 years ago where many of us still remember the slogan and joke about them today - ultimate success in brand recognition. Social media just makes it easier and more engaging to share and provoke the discussion. Many ads on social media will flop, but the clever ones will do exceedingly well - ultimately Social Media will be a channel that succeeds. I am sure that the BA ad in question cost a small fortune to produce - but the entry threshold for producing slick, clever and successful ads on social media platforms driving brand recognition and customer engagement is so low that even moderate success will make it compelling for many businesses.  At a small business level we have found that relatively cheap and unsophisticated text based ads from Google are very effective at driving quality traffic to our Israel travel website.  

Social Media - Changing Society Forever

I have recently discussed the power of Social Media where I argued that these are key tools that are generally off limits to most product market managers – which was a mistake because social media tools provide you with the ability to communicate with a large group of people, for the group to share information and to coordinate and organise very quickly all at almost zero cost – a marketer’s dream. I also discussed the fact that social media has the proved ability to provide the tools needed to organize a revolution – of citizens and consumers (See Social Media Strategies & Social Media Revolutions)

In this post I will reflect on the far reaching nature of social media and explain why it is therefore critical to the way that we converse with our customers.

One of the most far reaching changes in civilization was made by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439 when he invented the moveable type printing press – essentially enabling the economic mass production of books. This destroyed the market for manuscript copiers and more importantly allowed knowledge to be acquired by the masses and not just the privileged elite. This (the ultimate disruptive technology) invention changed the balance of power in civilizations forever.

I think that many of us would regard the Internet in general as being of similar importance as it provides almost everybody with access to limitless information. However, I think that the Internet is not the complete information revolution.

I think that the true Gutenberg style Internet revolution will be driven by two factors:

1. The Kindle (& similar devices) as a reading book is of equal or greater significance – allowing people to simply build, access, annotate and store their personal library.
2. Social media as a way of sharing pre-selected information that interests me; and is probably of at least mild interest to some of my friends and an economic way of sharing commenting and discussing this information.

Sharing and discussing information with social media is incredibly powerful. It is without doubt apologetically subjective personal information. However, it is incredibly compelling information – cleverly presented and recommended by a friend. In many cases a discussion emerges among the social circle. We start of with small pieces of information or knowledge and refine and enhance it by sharing. This in my opinion is similar to the invention of the printing press – I have access to all the information and will generally glance (at the very least) at these recommended items – instant access to important or pre-selected information.

This accessibility and relevance explains why we often see small localized businesses investing in Facebook and other social media. They know that they are not going to get thousands of followers – that is not the objective. Their objective is to be significant among their customers – to be part of the conversation and be part of the small instant information exchange. It is pure customer engagement and customer centric communications.

Equally so discussing what the business has done wrong is trivial and stunningly effective (see Social Media Revolutions) over social media. I believe that it is essential that we understand that society has changed with social media and that we need to embrace the new world – for the sake of our product and our customer engagement.

In my final comment (for now) on social media I would like to recommend this post from Jeff Cole discussing Google +.

Jeff makes some excellent points that are directly and indirectly relevant to product managers – in particular, I would like to reflect on the difficulty in being an expert in social media – and the very best never call themselves experts. This is often the case in many fields. My takeaway from Jeff’s article is that this is such a new and dynamic space there are many right and many wrong ways to do it. Think about what you want to achieve and the best way to do so – but most importantly get out there use the social media tools and do something – social media is enabling revolutions and it is changing society forever - your product and your customers can’t afford to be ignored.

Social Media Revolutions

In a recent post I discussed how Social Media has become an important marketing tool that is often missed or off limits to most product marketers in larger companies. Using them correctly, I believe can increase customer engagement and simplify product positioning.

Over recent months we have seen the power of social media to command people's attention and to motivate them to take part and be involved in activities. Many of these activities were previously well out side their normal comfort zone and in many cases caused them to endanger their lives. I am, of course referring to the Arab Spring and to a lesser extent to the on going Israeli Summer.

In the Arab Spring regimes were overthrown, or revolutions brutally suppressed. In the Israeli Summer on the other hand, we have mass demonstrations that are calling for a new social agenda and consumer price reform.

Both of these phenomena illustrate the power of social media – because they are both being organised and facilitated using combinations of Facebook, Twitter and other media.

The power of social media was discussed (and this year's revolutions foretold) by Clay Shirky in his book “Here Comes Everybody” (Penguin – 2008). To quote the back of the book “The next revolution will not be televised – it will be emailed, texted, blogged, wikied...”

Shirky discusses different case studies - from arrests for mass ice-cream eating in Minsk, to previous unrest in Cairo, to social stunts in Macy's store in New York, to protests against the attempt to hide abuse cases, and to commercial demonstrations against banks and airlines forcing them to reverse unfair commercial decisions. Shirky makes the point that social conversation and interaction follow a power law distribution from small groups with tight conversation, larger groups with loose conversation and then much larger groups that broadcast.

Shirky's message is that groups can organise themselves to collaborate on issues that they believe in or find sufficiently engaging. The critical element is the ability to share information and to coordinate and self organise at very low (negligible) cost – the enablers are social media tools. Speed is also of importance, it is hard to organise a large group of people using meetings, letters in the post etc. – sure it has been done but immediacy makes it so much easier.

The book discusses two almost identical protests a decade apart – the second of which achieved its aims, whilst the first did not. The conclusion reached is that (to a large extent) the availability of social media in the second was the key factor.

So the key advantages of social media are the ability to communicate with a large group of people, for the group to share information and to coordinate and organise very quickly all at almost zero cost. I would add that social media is still considered engaging and cool; and that in itself prompts people to take notice of a message that would be ignored if it were to be delivered by conventional means.

I am not arguing that on any given Wednesday afternoon product marketers or managers can start a worldwide revolution! I am, however, arguing that social media is extremely valuable to us. Consider the characteristics – immediate, low cost, information sharing, collaboration, engagement – these are the holy grails of product communication.

Using social media to interact with our customers we keep them involved, we can communicate messages when we want to without special effort, we engage them and allow them to share information with us that in turn help us to be more responsive to their needs and to better meet their expectations. This applies whether we have a business offering or a consumer offering. In a B2B situation we can help our customers succeed better at their job by sharing information about our product and our industry and it is easy to see how consumer products benefit from this interaction.

One of the apparent risks is that the competition will also join our group. This is true, but, then we have to share information prudently. We accept that every time we update the website, publish a white paper or interact with a customer then we have shared a secret with the public. In the meantime we have built the group chemistry around our product. Customers may share criticism of our product, but, surely they will do so anyway and it is better to hear about it and respond to it quickly (add an update to the next release and tell the world when it will be available.) Feedback is to our advantage, conversation drives our prestige.

The other idea that comes out of Shirky's work is that Social Media provides an easy tool for dissatisfied customers to organise and apply immense pressure on the organisation – it is much better that we also use the tools for our advantage.

Social Media is a low cost (mainly our time) way to regularly engage with our customers, to gain feedback, to help to shape our industry and to share information immediately.

It is hard to build a successful Social Media community – you need to choose the media (Facebook, Twitter, blog, wiki, special community etc.), to get people signed up and to start talking with the customers. Different businesses will use different tactics. By definition when we have a group we have conversation – conversation about our industry but mainly about our product. The conversation makes our entire approach, customer centric and drives our product decisions.

Whatever tactic we employ I believe we can all start our own small product revolutions and engage with our customers in a more meaningful way.

Does the Perfect Product exist?

So we all know that one of the hardest things about being a Product Manager is trying to get the product to the market - preferably with most of the required features and in the same decade as the target launch date.

Product timing is critical - often it is better to be in the market with a less than perfect product, getting customers involved and committed than still be in the labs working and missing the opportunity - although a poor offering can do incalculable damage to our product and our brand.

This inevitably forces us to make tough product decisions and compromises on what is in and what is out. We would all like the perfect product, but, in practice we try and define what is good enough. We need to review the product requirements and categorise (in reality recategorise) them into features that are key to the functionality, for example product differentiation and leadership, competitive positioning, key customer commitments (but see this post on balancing customer influence on a release) and usability. There will be many other features, that make sense for the overall product offering, but will not gain customers nor will they loose customers and so sometimes they will just have to wait for the next release.

These calls can be tough and it can take a brave PM to stare down the boss and the market. When Apple introduced the iPhone it was revolutionary (touch screen etc), but at the time it missed some of the key features of a phone that traditional phones already supported (network technology and speed.) Some poor PM in Apple had to make the call and say those features could wait. In this case it worked.

Sometimes, however, the choice is less successful and worse some minor features get delayed from release to release without a solution. So following on from my analysis of Nike getting some marketing issues wrong - here are some thoughts about a place were Google gets it wrong.

Briefly, when you build a website, two of the key stages in launching it are to submit the site to the major search engines together with its sitemap.

Now when we built this blog we built it on a Google platform, and naturally assumed that submission to Google would be automatic. Not so - a few weeks on and we realise that we seemingly need to submit and that the submission is from a different set of Google tools and not the blog control panel. Even more frustrating, building the site map probably isn't automatic and doesn't always work the way they say. Or maybe it is automatic - depends who you believe - the Google support guy on one of the forums or the official instructions. Worst of all - this saga seems to have a history judging by the support forums and QA pages.

So given that these tools are for the general public - the user experience could have been so much smoother. Maybe there is a very good reason why submission isn't automatic - but it is hard to see why this couldn't have been properly explained and a couple of items included in the blog set up wizard. True in this case they didn't loose me as a customer, but they almost did see me checkout a different blogging platform.

To wrap it up - we need to compromise on our dreams for our products, failure to do so can ruin our chances to get market share, but, we need to make sure that we don't compromise too much. We need to listen to our customers and fix the things that we missed or omitted the first time round, failure to do will also ruin our market share in the longer term.

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.