ProductMarketing.com

Product Manager: Hawk of the Market

My friend and colleague Stacey shared this with me. She writes,

This morning, I took my morning coffee to the front deck. It's finally spring here (Wisconsin), and winter was so long that it actually feels strange not to cringe when you step outside. Well, the winter is finally really gone, despite holding on as long as possible. The last of the snow melted from the northern hillsides last week, and the grass will soon be calling to be mowed.

So I was outside, enjoying some fresh ground, extra-strong-just-the-way-I-like-it Kona coffee, and I spotted a huge Red-Tailed Hawk. She was perched in a large White Oak at the edge of the lawn, very still. The only reason I saw her is because the sun was shining from behind, and her body was bulkier than the surrounding branches.

I was almost finished with my first cup when she dove. With a powerful swing of the wings, the hawk swooped down, pursuing some prey that I couldn't see from my vantage point.

She reached the ground, and was pretty obscured from my vision by the tall grass around her. After a few moments of getting situated, she took off with what appeared to be a mouse. Coffee for me, mouse tar tare for my red-tailed friend.

When a hawk is perching, one could believe that it's at rest. If you watched long enough, you might even begin to think it's lazy, just resting there surveying its surroundings.

It's neither resting nor lazy. The hawk seeks just the right location, with the best perspective on the land. If she was looking sideways, she'd never see that small mouse or rabbit because they'd be hidden by vegetation. She's got to get out of the fray, up to an elevation where she can see the whole landscape of possibility. The vantage point is crucial to the hawk's hunt.

Product Managers have to get out of the fray, too. All that stuff that happens in the office is the ground vegetation, obstructing our view of the market at large. No matter how your development team functions, which methods or processes or tools they employ, the most important thing you can do is to get OUT of the office. Rise up out of the tall grass, and find a good perspective from a vantage point IN the market, not IN the office!

Be the hawk of the market, and remember that you can't spot the next big opportunity if you're bogged down in the tall grass inside your company's four walls!

Internet stats

Technical people think all numbers should be knowable. How many guitar players are there? How many CDs will The Alternate Routes sell in 2009? What percentage of the U.S. has more than one mobile phone? Sometimes we can get the number we need from an analyst service; sometimes we'll have to make an educated guess.

If you need 'em, here are some amazing stats on the internet. Some of my favorites:

• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam).

• 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
• 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.
• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).

Read Internet 2008 in Numbers for more stats.

As for www.pragmaticmarketing.com and www.productmarketing.com, we have some good stats too:

• We had visitors from 308,000 different IP addresses
• 21,000 downloads of our magazines (all issues)
• 13,000 downloads of my e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management
• 12,000 attendees to webinars

For our customers, 25% use IE7; 20% use Firefox. So I guess we better make sure we support both browsers. But Windows 95 users are 0.03% of our customers so we don't have to worry too much about that operating system. Win95 machines probably work on our websites but we're not going to test it or work to ensure it.

Numbers are often difficult to acquire. Look for secondary research like this to help you make product decisions. Or check the stats of your own website.

on market research

Just a quick post. A key element of product management is researching and analyzing the market. Julie Anne Reda, Sr. Product Manager Yesmail, offers this helpful guide to doing market analysis.

market research on a limited travel budget

"Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is no travel money to visit customers. Oh no, the sky is falling, how am I as a product manager going to listen to the market or get customer input on some of our ideas?"

Gopal Shenoy offers some effective tips in Listening to the market without a travel budget.

on win/loss analysis

Win/Loss analysis is an extremely important activity yet is performed by fewer than 20% of product managers. Sales people either don't do win/loss or don't do it well. Companies who invest in win/loss find more process problems than product problems. Which is easier to fix? And who better to tell what we do right and wrong than someone who recently tried to buy?

Barbara Nelson explores win/loss analysis in her free webinar Why Are We Winning? Why Are We Losing? this Friday, February 8, 2008 at 10:00a PST.

on qualitative and quantitative

I wrote about the value of data and stories in my post on survey research. Jeff Lash has some additional insights in Understand qualitative vs. quantitative research.

Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits

You are busy at the office — there are too many meetings and projects and can’t miss any of them. Your customers are located far away and travel budgets are tight. Your customers are too busy to talk to you. You don’t have any customers yet. Your sales staff doesn’t want you visiting customers. Sure, it would be nice to visit customers, but with all these impediments, it’s just not worth the effort. And besides, visiting customers isn’t that important anyways, right?

Sound familiar? Read more in Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits on Jeff Lash's blog.

on choice models

As discussed in Practical Product Management, there are six methods of research: three are best for finding problems; three are best for evaluating solutions. An experiment is the best tool for evaluating usability—or is it? Check out www.interface-research.com. This site compares 10 different aspects of usability for a web site and asks which you prefer. At the end, they show you their results so far. Pretty clever. This form of research is called a choice model because it forces the respondent to choose. After all, you cannot choose both answers.

But here’s the question: is the survey telling us which is better or telling us which is popular? And is popular better? Britney Spears is popular. (For better, check out The Alternate Routes.) I’m not convinced that the popular choice is indeed better or if it is just what we’re used to.

If you have a new user interface or new web site design, why not use a method like this to test before you poke it out online? For that matter, you should test positioning, product names, your marketing collateral templates look-and-feel, and so on. Do you?

on data mining

UGH! I'm working on the annual survey data with poor tools. In some cases, the Vovici software is all I need. For anything more I have to suffer pivot tables in Excel. I guess I really need someone to give me a copy of SPSS. Meanwhile, I've never used any data mining tools that truly present information clearly.

Check out the data visualization of the fund-raising for our upcoming presidential elections. And if you haven't played with Hans Rosling's census data visualization, you really should; he conveys really rich data in a simple format with Gapminder.

Wouldn't it be great to have a dashboard for business information?

on survey research

We at Pragmatic Marketing like to balance qualitative research from interviews with quantitative research from surveys. Every week we meet hundreds of product managers and technology executives; we hear their stories; we observe the magazines they read (such as our own Pragmatic Marketer) and what web sites they visit (such as my blog at productmarketing.com). We supplement this info with quantitative research from our annual product management survey.

Are all surveys created equal? Not according to Wharton. Read more in Polling the Polling Experts: How Accurate and Useful Are Polls These Days?

Product managers tell me that their execs don't value research. Actually I find that executives do indeed value research--it's just that they tend to value the qualitative over the quantitative. They want product managers to call face-to-face on customers while many product managers prefer to hire the work out to a third-party.

Of course, you need both. You need both stories and data. So go visit three customers and then survey a hundred. Deliver market facts to your executives in their preferred format.

survey for smartphone users

What's the trick to product success? Visit a few people to see their problems and then do a survey to find out if what you've seen is statistically relevant.

Do you use a smartphone? Ever have problems finding enough power to make it through the day? A product manager may have an answer so give her your feedback via this survey.

After visiting three people, you've probably found more features than your developers can do this year. A survey helps to determine the most important features.

How do your customers make decisions?

Looking on a typical vendor web site, one finds varying levels of product information. Ideally, your potential customers will find the information they need to make a decision—or at least start making a decision. The best web sites combine business results with supporting technical detail to meet the learning needs of different buyer personas. Often those sites also include customer testimonials and quotes but of course, everyone realizes that only the best quotes have been picked. I mean, really, what vendor would include lousy quotes in their web site?

However, those negative impressions generally exist somewhere on the web. Contrast the typical enterprise technology vendor with those for consumer products. A primary difference is that consumer products are more often sold through distribution—and not exclusively. Therefore the seller is more inclined to encourage unbiased commentary than the product vendor. Check out the product information on Amazon or Musicians Friend. These sites are for product distributors rather than product developers. They offer third-party comments from respectable sources and from regular people. I generally find the recommendations helpful—if 9 out of 10 are favorable, I’m inclined to buy. I can quickly dismiss the statistically irrelevant, either pro or con.

On Amazon, you’ll find book blurbs from the publisher followed by commentary and recommendations from customers. Check out the discussion on David Meerman Scott’s book The New Rules of Marketing including my favorable review plus a few others.

On Musicians Friend, hundreds of people report that they have bought and loved the Shure SM58 vocal microphone. Hmm, maybe I’ll get that one since people seem to like it.

Since it’s unlikely you’ll have this unbiased information on your website, where will your customers go to find it? Where are your products being discussed online. And what are they saying about your company and your product? Do a web search for your company and product name and you’ll find out.

Have you ever watched someone use your product?

Have you ever watched someone use your product? What you observe is rarely what you expected. What you see is not the same as what you heard. Your customers love the silly features and don’t use the cool ones. And in watching, you’ll see uses of your product that you never imagined.

Speaking of cool features, I’m always amazed how few people use Smart Playlists in iTunes. Instead of a literal list of songs, a smart playlist creates a list of songs from the metadata using variables. I have a song list of “25 songs I’ve never heard” which contains 25 songs that have never been played (playcount=0). And “The Beatles” with artist = John or Paul or George or Ringo or The Beatles or Album = ‘Concert for George.’

I found a clever use (or perhaps it’s silly) for the ipod this weekend: an ipod-based phrasebook called iSpeak. It’s a CD of roughly 1500 phrases that you load into your ipod. The phrases are organized into “books” with categories like conversation, travel, food, entertainment, and so on; each book has “chapters” (like introductions, occupations, and weather). Each “song” is a short audio of phrases like “Hola!” “Como estas?” and “Muy bien, gracias.” It’s remarkably easy to navigate to just the phrase you need. You can use iSpeak to learning tool or as a phrase book. Heck, you could just show the ipod to the person you’re talking to and let them read the phrase from the screen. I bought the Spanish and it’s also available for Italian, French, German, and (coming soon) Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. 

I can’t imagine that anyone at Apple considered the ipod would be used as a language phrasebook (or any of the thousands of other clever uses) but I bet they’re surprised at how few of their customers use Smart playlists.

I had a similar epiphany years ago watching how people used my network management product. The customers thought displaying the network on a geographic map was cool (we, the vendor, thought it rather silly). It was sizzle but they loved it. The core capability of the system was its ability to assign network outages to an operator yet this feature was rarely used.

Next time you’re on the road, schedule a trip to a customer. Ask to see the people who use the product—not just the ones who buy it. Try to keep your mouth closed and your eyes open. And you’ll see what’s hot and what’s not.

Real People Doing Real Work

From Real People Doing Real Work:

For eight months, we followed the progress of a group of twelve people in a Fortune 500 company here in the Pacific Northwest who used Office 2007 to perform their daily work. These people graciously agreed to install Office 2007 Beta 1 on their main work computers and to let us track their feedback and thoughts over a long period of time using the software. The participants in the study were not software engineers or in any way associated with high-tech; they were just normal people who use Office to help get their jobs done.

Yes, the sample size for this specific study was small. And yes, the study only included people in one company in the Pacific Northwest. It is true that for these reasons the results of this study aren't statistically significant.

But the purpose of this study wasn't to provide quantitative results. Rather, the goal was to employ ethnographic research strategies to allow us to understand qualitatively how the new Office 2007 user interface fit into daily work lives of typical Office customers.

Marketers and developers are usually anxious to do quantitative research but you don't know what you don't know. Before you can do quantitative, you must do qualitative.

Online Surveys and Conjoint Analysis

Sawtooth Software offers an series of papers on Online Surveys and Conjoint Analysis.

Tell Us What You Think

The Office 2007 team wants to know what you think about the features of the beta version. They write, "The best tool to use to give us feedback on Office 2007 Beta 2 is called Send a Smile. Install the Send a Smile tool and two icons are added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a happy face to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a sad face to click when there's something you don't like." Read more in Tell Us What You Think About Office 2007 Beta 2.

The tool provides an easy way to send feedback--positive or negative--and sends a screen shot of what you were attempting to do when you clicked the smiley. Pretty clever. (Unfortunately the installation requires a somewhat arduous sign-up/sign-in process.)

And remember, Microsoft is not selling direct but through distribution; couldn't you do something similar in your products?

What are you doing to solicit feedback?

Don't mindlessly copy features

Michael writes, "Don't mindlessly copy features that competitive products have. Focus instead on features that competitive products don't have but customers need." Read his excellent story on the typical 'listening to competitors instead of customers' in Sun Tzu on Product Strategy - Part 1.

Creating Googles, Apples and a process of innovation.

from Creating Googles, Apples and a process of innovation:

Larry Keeley, co-founder and president of the Doblin Group in Chicago, said that today, companies can increase their innovation effectiveness by 35% to 70% or 9 to 17 times the norm. The norm, of course is the incredibly low 4.5% 'hit' rate of successful innovation that companies generally have. Keeley said that 'if you just use anthropologists, you can triple your innovation effectiveness by three times.' Think of that for a moment. That's probably why corporations are hiring so many cultural anthropologists.

Customers Don't Know What They Want

Spalding found out that simply getting focus groups together to talk about problems isn't what leads to break-through products. The innovation came from a problem they knew about for a long time and a technology from a completely different industry - turkeys.

The problem they were trying to solve was inflation (for basketballs). The solution idea came on Thanksgiving when Dan Touhey, manager of basketball products, noticed the turkey's pop-up thermometer. Read more...

Top Ten Problems--STC Usability SIG

Did you ever wonder why some products are well designed and easy to use and others are not? The answer is simple--decision makers and budget holders make decisions with little thought of how they reduce usability. Read Top Ten Problems--STC Usability SIG.