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.

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.

Spotting Disruptive Technology - Timing is Everything!

In the first post in this mini series on Disruptive Technology I discussed why we need to expect the unexpected - in a nutshell most of us spend our working days involved in our daily routine trying to plan develop and market our product. Meanwhile, whilst we aren't looking or dreaming in other directions there are groups of people who have dedicated themselves to doing something completely different and destroying our product and our market. It's nothing personal - its just (to paraphrase) - all is fair in love, war and technology development. Its been happening for a long time - think of the canal owners who suddenly had a new competitor with a new bigger faster technology called the railway. Or carriage makers just before Mercedes, Benz and friends came along.

In this second post we will discuss the timing impact and various key questions that are really just questions of timing and product timing decisions.

So we have made firm resolutions and have spotted some disruptive technology lurking somewhere away on the horizon - what's next?

Unfortunately, spotting these potential disruptions is only the tip of the iceberg, it is all to easy to be drawn in by the hype and buzz around these new areas. Firstly, curiosity is a strong human trait (and it is generally well developed in Product Team Members), the buzz can be more exciting than our regular work and in big organisations it can seem to be a way to stand out from the crowd (guru).

On the other hand, it seems that everybody is doing this. Remember, there are people out there who earn their salary creating this impression. Without being too cynical, the technology hype pays their bills.

For those of us who played team sports as kids remember how everybody used to chase the ball - didn't matter if you were defence or attack you ran after the ball. Later on we developed more discipline and strategy and stopped chasing the ball and started to play the game. That is one of the challenges of disruptive technology - to figure out when to chase and how to play the game.

So in analysing Disruptive Technology we must then exercise our judgement on the probability that the technologies will mature, that they will impact our area, and finally the hardest question of all - when? What is the relevant time frame?

Getting these factors wrong can ruin a perfectly good business or product strategy no less than ignoring or not spotting the technology. By way of example in the Telecom space around 2005 everybody was buzzing about IMS and how it was going to change the Telecom industry as we knew it. There were almost daily announcements of new products, initiatives and commitments. It seemed that overnight all our calls would be IMS based.

Looking back the objectives of were valid, the overall impact of IMS and IMS like technologies has been profound and are on going - but from a telecom's industry perspective "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" (Mark Twain). In summation without getting into a theological argument (IMS believers vs. IMS non believers) by 2011 we can say that IMS is not yet main stream and whilst it has impacted many businesses it has not (yet) fulfilled its hype of 2005.

Clearly, companies that assumed that IMS was the next best and greatest thing made the wrong call. Whether this was to develop new technology products based on IMS or to build consumer and business services over IMS they are probably somewhat disappointed. Equally so you could have made the decision to stop investing in current development (to favour IMS) and missed out on a lot of opportunities in the last 5 years or so.

The point of this post is not to analyse IMS in depth, but to use it as an example (from our own industry) of the dangers of incorrectly analysing the impact and the timing of the impact on a product space. Many companies made the wrong judgement call.

Looking back the single most important error was probably the lack of business case to justify such a large risk and technology change. (A reminder to always use business fundamentals.) There was huge hype and like the example of team sports earlier, everybody was chasing the IMS ball. There were only a few brave solitary voices in the wilderness calling out with a different message.

Overall IMS is a good example of a disruptive technology that many spotted, but very few managed to answer the key questions of the probability that the technology would mature, its impact on their industry and most critically on when it would impact. Ultimately, all these questions become a question of timing - when will it happen?

The product teams involved had to set their product requirements, make their product decisions and position their product based on their assumptions about the impact of this disruptive technology. Many errors were made.

Clearly it is key to our product and business strategy that we actively seek and successfully spot disruptive technologies. However, we also need to be able to stand back from the hype and think strategically and coldly analyse the likely impact and timing of the new technology.

The final posts of this series will discuss some practical ideas for systematically discovering and analysing new technologies.

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.

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.

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.

Creating a Product Road Map

“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:

• Market trends
• Regulatory trends
• Technology directions
• Competitive analysis
• Customer requirements and suggestions

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 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.