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.

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.

A New Way to Present

In a recent post I discussed some of the common mistakes that we all make from time to time when presenting. I described the experiences of Jim who spoke at a recent meeting. I recommended that when preparing and delivering presentations we need to focus on some core techniques - clarity of messages, good graphics, effective time management and speaking to your audience.

In this post I want to introduce you to a presentation concept known as Pecha Kucha - here you limit yourself to 20 slides - each slide can only be shown for 20 seconds - & here is the key - you are not in charge of the slides - either you put it on auto pilot or hand the control to somebody else.

I am grateful to my good friend Larry Lester for drawing my attention to this concept. Larry writes in his blog

"I discovered an interesting method for the delivery of presentations, totally different from anything that I have previously encountered. It is called Pecha Kucha - within 400 seconds you must make your point. This is very intriguing stuff. Just think how different it is from the prevailing norms of presentations. And Pecha Kucha has real added value – it is an excellent way to start discussions and business relationships."

I am personally fascinated by this technique & plan to try it out. I think that there is a real challenge here - remember that one of the hardest things to do when speaking is to PAUSE - people need time to absorb what you have to say - so in just over 6 minutes you have to get the audience's attention, develop your ideas and communicate your message and allow the listeners to understand your message.

Write in with your comments on the idea and if you try it out for yourself let us know how you get on.

Larry Lester is a highly-experienced marketing writer who has been involved in the sales support process in Israeli high-tech companies for many years, participating in the development of customer-directed documents and responses to RFPs. You can read the full blog article here