ProductMarketing.com

Setting prioritites grounded in the market

If you've ever had to review a long list of requirements, you'll appreciate this. I was recently asked:

I wonder if you have insights on good feature/function/backlog prioritization – especially when there are a ton of them (700+).  Specifically, best practices for how to store and retrieve the important ideas, while being able to ignore the ones that will never matter.  Some think we need to store any and all ideas so that we don’t forget them, but the noise is overwhelming and the organization of the content is impossible.

A fast way is to rate all 700 with +1 or -1. Give it a +1 if it'll help many of our customers; a -1 if it'll hurt some of our customers. You can use a 0 for neither good nor bad. Then set aside all those with a -1 and  just look at the +1 items.

Now rate them using a five point scale. I use:
5     Evaluators: Minimum purchase criteria
4     Potentials: Lose time or money due to problem
3     Customers: Difficult to achieve primary goal
2     Customers: Difficult to achieve non-primary goal
1     Other: Not in target market segment

or you might use:
50: solving the problem will make money for customers
40: solving the problem will save money for customers
30: they think it will make/save money
20: an existing customer wants the problem solved
10: a cool feature idea

Ideally, I'd like to have some assessment of how many customers are affected. You can count the number of requests or you can survey a set of customers. I've also been impressed with the choice model approach found at www.uservoice.com

You'll find it's easier to get valid ratings when you're talking about problems than features. People always seem to want more features, even the dumb ones. But asking "do you have this problem" seems to get better results. And yes, you want to write down all the problems and feature ideas, even the dumb ones. (After all, how many of those dumb ones came from your executive team?)

The most important thing is to figure some way to include the market in your decision making. Employee voting is rarely a good idea.

We discuss prioritization methods in our popular Requirements That Work seminar. More details at www.pragmaticmarketing.com/seminars

Friday fun: The Reality of Meetings

Saeed at OnProductManagement has another great slideshare in his series on product management in pictures:

What People Do In Meetings

View more presentations from Saeed Khan.

Leaders and losers and competitive checklists

Robin the product manager has yet another request from Kevin, the world's worst sales person:

"I can't sell your product without a competitive checklist showing how we're better than bigsoftware.com"

He attached something that he's been using:

• More developers than Oracle
• More marketing spend than Microsoft
• Better implementation assistance than SAP
• SaaS-ier than Salesforce.com
• More carpeted areas than our leading competitor

Poor Robin. How does she deal with this request? She knows that checklists are the sales tool for followers and losers. Only the leader can win at the checklist game, and the smart leaders don't even play. Nobody wants to see the leader thump their chests and no buyers believe the followers' claims that they're better than the leader. Great competitive strategy lies in positioning, not in feature lists.

What's a product manager to do?

Robin should do a competitive assessment of her product compared to each major competitor. Then analyze the key strengths of her product and the distinctive competence of her company. Finally, she should position her product around the established positions of her competitors.

Competitor A is great--if you want your data hosted and managed by a vendor

Competitor B is great--if you have a small installation

Competitor C is great--if you're always connected to the internet

Don't play the leaders game; play your own game. What strengths do you bring to the equation? What do you offer that is truly unique? And are those strengths valued by your potential clients?

Unique is how you start a sales cycle; better is how you win. You can't just claim to be better in every area than the leader. (Well, you can claim it but you won't be believed.)

Play to your strengths; don't play the leader's game.

Setting prioritites grounded in the market

A common sight in agile shops is the product owner shuffling his user stories.

"This before that. Oh this is a good one. Ooh, move that one to later."

It sure seems that many people use a prioritization scheme based in opinion, deal-of-the-day, and "whoever I talked to last."

In Requirements That Work we recommend a prioritizing formula grounded in market problems: how many people experience it and how bad is it?

In a recent session, Adrian shared this scale representing the impact of the problem on customers:

50: solving the problem will make money for customers
40: solving the problem will save money for customers
30: they think it will make/save money
20: an existing customer wants the problem solved
10: a cool feature idea

The challenge of prioritizing is that we have more ideas than we have resources. Don't you? So we must learn to prioritize.

And what did we learn from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan?

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few… or the one."

When prioritizing, choose a scheme that is simple and objective, which aligns the product strategy with the market and its problems. Try to use a formula to represent the product strategy so that your team makes changes to the formula and doesn't just move around individual items.

What is the impact of the problem on the persona? Let's get that right.

What scale do you use?

Setting priorities...

...is a challenge. If everything is "must have", how can you choose?

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/01/priorities.html

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The iPad's future shock

I'm often saddened by the infantilizing effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, medieval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

via macworld.com

Seems that loads of people have scorn for the new iPad but... are you the target persona? This article suggests that the iPad is for people who struggle with computers... and that's not you. The iPad is for all the people in your life that don't understand folders. It's for people who have all their files on the desktop. And why do we need files anyway? or Folders?

What have you done to understand personas and their goals? Are you programming to yourself and your developers and your sales people? Or are you programming to the personas?

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

ProductCamp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ProductCamp is a free collaborative, user-organized conference, focused on product management topics including, but not confined to, product marketing, development and management.

via en.wikipedia.org

I'm headed to pCamp in Minneapolis. www.pcampmn.org
c u there?

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Friday fun: construction safety

I don't quite know how to respond to this email. What's my action item?

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

2009-2010 Survey results published

The new magazine is out and the latest survey results are in. We ran loads of analyses on the data and I think you're gonna find some neat stuff inside.

Are you technical? It seems that our customers are!

And it matters. People who are more technical make more money!

Thanks to all of you who shared your information and your candor with us. The results are fascinating. 

Social media adoption

Neilsen shares these amazing stats on social media adoption. 

Yet our 2010 survey results show that 43% of vendors place NO importance on social media. Yikes!

More stats from Pragmatic Marketing's 2009-2010 product management survey coming next week.