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.

Importance of Social Media in Business

Here is an interesting piece on the importance of social media and the probable disconnect at senior levels in Fortune companies, with almost no CEO's being active in social media. This cuts them off from their customers but also the way their customers are thinking.

It has lessons for all PMM - we need to be engaging with our customers effectively and in many markets this means being active in the social networks. This will drive our brand recognition and our competitive positioning.

A 2009 study found that the CEO’s of top U.S. companies tend to avoid social media, according to UberCEO.com. The study found that most of the Fortune top 100 CEO’s were markedly absent from the social media community, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia.

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.

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.