ProductMarketing.com

The Dilbert Blog: I love Technology

I guess I'm not the only one who has trouble traveling. Scott Adams writes in The Dilbert Blog: I love Technology:

"Today (the day I wrote this) I woke up early because I have a cross-country flight. I fired up my computer and used the airline's web site to change my seat assignment and print out my boarding pass. Well, technically, I spent an hour trying to do that, but the web site kept melting down at different points until I finally gave up and called their 800 number and handled my transaction in an efficient manner using their speech recognition system.

Read more about the typical customer experience, told in a humorous way. And then reflect what it's like for your buyers trying to contact your company.

IDEO and the Art of Innovation

How does the process of designing a better product work? IDEO is the poster-child of innovation. This Nightline broadcast, originally aired in February, 1999, shows how the team works and how they redefined a commonplace item: the shopping cart. You can buy a DVD of the "Deep Dive" broadcast online at the ABC NEWS STORE. Unfortunately, the store itself needs some redesign work; the DVD is hard to find and hard to buy!

Excellent Customer Service

I spend a lot of time with tech support for the various gadgets I use. Most experiences are not pleasant at all (long wait times, automated voice systems that can't understand my voice commands, rude operators, ignorant level 1 support, shipping products back and forth for refurbishing) - need I go on? You all know exactly what I'm talking about.

But I had an experience last week that was TERRIFIC! I had purchased portable speakers for my iPod (On Tour by JBL). I've had them for 5 or 6 months (love them - perfect size for travel), but when I put a new set of batteries in, the speakers wouldn't turn on. I tried another set thinking I had stale batteries. Still didn't work. So I tried the power cable which did work. So I went to JBL's website to see if this was a reported flaw with the speakers. I couldn't find anything in their FAQ, but was able to write an email to support. The next day I got an email back saying that they couldn't figure out why I was having a problem. So, rather than making me mail my receipt or talk to someone in support, or go back and forth with several emails, they did something cool. They sent a return authorization number, told me where to ship the speakers, and sent me a BRAND NEW unit within a few days. NO questions asked.

You can buy the speakers on the Apple website if you can't find them in a retail store. Great job, JBL!

Effective Meetings

One of my students showed me a meeting cost counter (free download at EffectiveMeetings.com). It can be displayed during your meeting and it shows the cost of the meeting as it progresses (based on the number of people in the meeting, the average hourly wage, and the length of the meeting). This might help you and your colleagues conduct more effective meetings.

By the way, the website is a treasure trove of tips and articles to help you conduct better meetings.

Role of Technical Sales Engineers

I rec'd this in email:

> we are now trying to understand the sales engineer position.

Have you read my article on SEs? Basically, SEs are in the field sales organization but have deep technical experience rather than sales abilities. I find that most SEs come from the customer base with lots of experience with the product in a production environment. They typically stay in the job a few years until they get burned out on the travel and then move either into sales or into product management.

SEs are paid well: typically $100-120K plus a revenue-based bonus program. They are also eligible for the sales award trip if their region does well in achieving its targets. I don't have stats for this role as our survey is focused only on product management. One company that focuses exclusively on SEs is TechSellEnts.com (ugh, terrible name) but they do not have any info on their site about compensation.

If your company hasn't invested in sales engineers, then product managers will spend a disproportionate amount of time doing demos and other SE work.

Marketing Profiler

Is your marketing group a "growth champion" or merely a "service provider"? The Marketing Profiler asks, "Do you want to create a marketing organization with greater impact on your company's overall results? Are you curious about where you stand in achieving this goal? Do you want to know what steps would help move you further along this path?" A five-minute survey helps identify your marketing profile with recommended tools and reading.

The key to making happy users: Make the right thing easy

'Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.' If designers followed that one clear principle, there'd be a lot more happy users. I'd get a lot more work done instead of struggling with a counterintuitive interface. Writing software would be easier because APIs would simply make sense, with less chance of blowing up at runtime. I could use my car stereo. Read more in Making happy users from Creating Passionate Users.

Product & Process Innovation

In the Thunderbird Innovation Challenge, over 300 teams from over 100 of the top MBA programs in over 20 countries compete for the right to travel to Thunderbird in sunny Arizona for the face-to-face final round. Having judged 15 proposals, I must say... I'm not impressed. Is this the best the business schools around the world can do? These are old-fashioned awareness and branding campaigns. I fear it shows that the MBA teaches one to think IN the box. The ideas were boring! Where is the innovation?

I was thinking about "out of the box thinking" while stuck in the TSA line at Dulles this week. What if TSA cared about the customer? What could they do to make it a more satisfying experience? We in the USA are quite willing to be searched and scanned but does it have to be so annoying? My personal peccadillo is the incredible number of people who don't seem to know what metal is. "Oh, this huge belt buckle? How about this handful of change? What? My cell phone is metal?" Yeesh.

Many airports offer a frequent flyer line which alleviates some of the problem people (Thank you, Denver, Chicago, and Atlanta!) but Dulles, serving politically-correct DC, doesn't offer such a line. How could the TSA move people through security without being annoying? My ideas are: 1) speed it up for frequent flyers and 2) assist the infrequent flyers. In addition to a frequent flyer line for those who know the ropes, how about guides--sherpas, if you will--for infrequent flyers? A nice lady asks, "Do you fly frequently?" If the passenger doesn't, she walks with him and describes what's happening, what he needs to remove from his bag and his person, reminds him to hold on to his boarding pass, and just generally expedites the flow of people.

Like most businesses, TSA just posts a sign and relies on the employees to scream out instructions to the people in line. Instead of posting signs and yelling, "hold on to your boarding pass!" they need to focus on solving the customer problem in innovative ways.

What about you? Have you looked at your product and company operations from the customers' view? What process innovations would ensure a better customer experience?

Marketing communications forever changed

"Agencies say advertising is part of the solution because that's their output."
Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked Communications. Marketing communications is fundamentally and forever changed. Read the full article.

When TV Surrenders to Web

from When TV Surrenders to Web: "As long as the flow of information shifts from the old model of 'from one to many' to 'from many to one,' the current TV and print model will crumble. And it will keep on sliding, fast. It is happening right now. Media executives, mostly in denial, are shunning the subject. Smart ones are coming up with well-branded 24/7 Web-based news sites and general broadcasts. This is a brand-new revolution, and the entire model is about to be changed."

The Host With The Most: Hosting Software

Many companies today want to package their software product as an Application Service Provider (ASP), or hosted, offering. Hosting your software brings a number of advantages to your business. But hosting software is not for the faint of heart. Read The Host With The Most to understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software.

The Winners and Losers of the Internet Break-Up

Naseem Javed writes, "Why should Internet break and how ridiculous is this issue? Imagine if a few printers around the globe got together and jointly decided to replace all our current currencies and their value and choose brand new colors, designs and new values all own their own. Economy? What economy?" Read more in The Winners and Losers of the Internet Break-Up.

Content-Type.com free file hosting

Ever need to send a big file? With Content-Type.com free file hosting, you are allowed to distribute uploaded files to as many people as you need and have unlimited bandwidth.

Nifty Tool for Affinity Mapping

We were doing some positioning for one of our courses at Pragmatic Marketing (yes, we use our own tools), and I learned a new trick with Excel.

In positioning, we start with a list of problems. Then we aggregate problems into a marketecture of problem-oriented features. The Auto Filter feature in Excel allows you to see what marketecture items you've mapped the features to. To use Excel for this affinity mapping process, first list the problems in column 1. Then, begin mapping them into groups of items that are alike by creating a second column. The second column has the group name. Select the spreadsheet, go to the Data menu, select Filter, and Auto Filter. Voila! There is now a drop-down list of all of the group names. You can select a specific one to see all items with that group name.

Setting priorities

Joel Spolsky writes in Set Your Priorities: "If you ever find yourself implementing a feature simply because it has been promised to a customer, you're drifting over to the land of consultingware and custom development, which is a fine world to operate in if that's what you like, but it just doesn't have the profit potential of off-the-shelf commercial software."

What did we learn from Star Trek II? "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." And given that development is typically 20-30% of the corporate expenditure, it follows that custom work should be billed at 400-500% of its cost, not offered at a discount to win a deal.

Read Joel's full article for some easy tips on prioritizing a product or a release.

Keep the sharp edges!

Creating Passionate Users has some interesting thoughts on teams and greatness.

'Great software isn't created by committee.' That quote came from James Gosling, at the developer 'fireside chat' at the last JavaOne. And from Applied Minds tech wizard Bran Ferren, 'Art isn't the product of a team.' Is this true?

First, I don't believe James was necessarily talking about the functionality and code when he said 'great software'. Clearly, teams of great programmers can produce great code. I think he means the kind of breakthrough apps that people can become passionate about, and I also think it's less about the programming and more about the design and spec.

Read more in Keep the sharp edges.

and speaking of being passionate

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