ProductMarketing.com

a little courtesy and subtlety

Subtlety is not a virtue of our culture, but it appeals to me and always has. --Robert Redford

I've forgotten what I was doing! I booted my PC out of sleep mode and waited while it got itself organized. Then I loaded a program and by the time the program was done checking for updates, I have forgotten why I had loaded it.

I opened a file yesterday and the reader program insisted on checking for updates. On finding one, it downloaded the update and required a reboot. Come on! A reboot (in Windows XP) for a file reader? So it took 10 minutes before I could see the small file that I wanted to see.

I switched from a major anti-virus program because it insists on offering me only one option: reboot.

Windows Media Player, Musicmatch, and Real Player all keep trying to take control of my MP3 files, no matter what I want.

I enjoy the widgets in Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widget Engine) but quitting asks "Are you sure?" Of course, I'm sure!

I have basically stopped using my Windows machine because every day seems to bring a new computing environment--each program yelling that it comes first. I know Microsoft XP has lots of problems but at least Microsoft isn't totally obnoxious; it downloads patches in the background and always offers an option to reboot now or reboot later.

Why are so many programs so pushy, so oblivious to a good customer experience? Is it because the developers are self-absorbed? Or because the executives are strident? Do they believe that loyalty comes from forcing their agenda.

In general, the programming rule is "me first; you last."

If I had a gardener who spent as much time fixing her shovel as we spend fooling with our computers, I'd buy a good shovel. At least you can buy a good shovel. --Erasmus Smums

It seems to me that computer programs are like people on cell phones. Some are courteous to others, keeping their conversations to themselves, while others shout their personal business to the crowd. Like Americans abroad, they embarrass themselves without even realizing it.

While their program may be the most important program in a vendor's life, it's not the most important in mine. Let's add a little courtesy and subtlety in the way we deal with our customers, shall we?

Can Google Stay Google?

Everyone's fascinated with Google. This article on Fast Company explores some of its inner workings.

It is the company of the nanosecond -- and a really, really rich one at that. But Silicon Valley often eats its own young. So what are Messrs. Brin and Page planning to keep Google thriving for the long haul?

Reconciling Maintenance And New Releases

One challenge facing a Product Manager is how to balance limited Development resources between the need for maintenance work on the one hand and for new capabilities on the other. Devoting too many resources to one or the other can cause your product to be out of whack and lose ground to competitors who do a better job of mastering that balance.

With limited resources, it is always a struggle to determine what portion to devote to maintenance over new features. It's a little like trying to fight a two-front war: each front draws precious attention and time, and requires careful consideration of priorities. Too much spent on one front may cause you to lose on the other. And as the need for maintenance grows as your customer base grows, your more mature product is probably facing stiffer competition as its market matures and moves towards commoditization. All the while, you can't afford to neglect your base of existing customers.

Read Reconciling Maintenance And New Releases for a discussion of what you need to consider as you continually strike a balance between development on maintenance releases and on new feature releases.

Building remarkable products

Man oh man! Check out this vision of computing. It's kinda long (3:31) but incredible!! I want one.

Culture Crash

Much has been said about the connection between marketing and sales. Sales people see marketing as the source of leads and t-shirts; marketing sees sales people as the people who buy lunch and discount.

In Culture Crash, CMO Magazine comments: "'Some marriages will never work,' Cohen says, 'because the personalities are just too extreme.' Can the marriage between sales and marketing be saved? Most of the time, yes. But like all long-term commitments, the key to success lies in two-way communication. In the case of sales and marketing, the robustness of that communication is aided by technology but deepened by old school, face-to-face interactions. Think you can handle that?"

Perhaps clarity of roles is the issue. Sales people--and many marketing people too--think of marketing as sales support. Demos, collateral, leads, awareness, all with an objective of supporting a single sale.

In Don't Confuse Sales Support with Marketing, Adele Revella writes, "Technology marketers spend more than half of their time on sales support, a statistic that reflects an alarming state of confusion about the role of marketing in our industry. Yet the functions of Sales and Marketing are easily distinguished; Marketing focuses on a market full of opportunities, while Sales focuses on individual opportunities."

What is the true role of marketing? Marketing moves all buyers forward one or more steps through the sales cycle. Marketing should strategically define the key steps of the sales cycle, and the tools that support each step, giving sales people a roadmap to move clients from leads to close and beyond. Working closely with sales management, we can identify the necessary tools and techniques. Then sales people and their sales engineers can customize these materials for each deal, if it's even necessary; marketing should never create one-time use materials for a single client.

In fact, helping a single sales person is actually hurting the company. When a product manager or marketer helps one person, she isn't helping all the others. Wouldn't it be better if we created a better sales tool or a better set of leads? Or best of all, let's create a better product that solves a market problem. Let's create a product that sells itself.

Is your marketing function focused on one deal at a time or on all deals? Are we helping one sales person or a sales channel full of people?

nts 2.0 - A new type of patent is needed

There are big problems with patents, especially software patents. It takes too long to get patent protection, particularly for fast-moving high-tech industries.

Lee A. Hollaar writes about IEEE-USA's proposal for a new type of intellectual property protection that is more limited (four years), but less costly. The protection would begin the first time the invention is introduced in commerce which should give the inventor time to establish a market and to apply for a conventional patent.

Read the full article (free registration required).

Mergers: Back to "Happily Ever After"

Most mergers fail. It's an assumption repeated so often that few would dare question it. But is it true?

During the 1990s, it was indeed true--confirmed by a 2001 Booz Allen Hamilton study that found that two-thirds of all mergers fell short of expectations. In the intervening years, however, much has changed. The Internet boom and bust made their mark. New regulations brought far greater scrutiny - and accountability - to senior management and boards of directors. Merger activity has come and gone and come once again.

Today, in an altered business landscape, a close look at current merger activity suggests a different point of view. Companies no longer should expect or accept the probability of merger failure.

Read this report on Mergers.

And the controversy continues...

Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame finds it annoying when customers of his new company, Ning, drop into the office without an appointment. So on Wednesday, a bunch of bloggers are planning to drop in unannounced. Read the details at Furthermore.

Requirements vs design

Tyner Blain is writing about a subject of intense interest to product teams:

A classic debate. It comes up often. Unfortunately, it's a source of confusion that causes many teams to shy away from staffing, creating, or managing any formal requirements processes. There's a discussion on Seilevel's forum where this has been brought up again, and it's shaping up to be a fine grudge match here in Austin. Thanks to Cauvin for calling it to our attention. We can't let the other folks have all the fun, so we'll chime in too.

We've described the software development process before as being like an onion-- having multiple layers of abstraction within which you describe the problem and solution. In this post we will translate that perspective into "what is a requirement" and "what is design".

Read the details in Requirements vs design.

"Ideally we'll never meet any of our customers"

My friend Len wrote me: I just saw something that completely floored me and it make me think about you and Pragmatic Marketing. Apparently Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame was at a conference speaking about one of his new companies and he actually said - "Ideally we'll never meet any of our customers." He goes on to tell a horror story about when a customer came to the company office, apparently on a whim, to tell them how much he loved their stuff. Consequently they took down the sign to the office to keep something like that from happening again. You can see the video here; the clip is about 2 minutes in.

Certainly the whole "ideally we'll never meet our customers" is astounding but moreover, I think it explains the appeal of social networks to technical people. I'm barraged daily by requests via LinkedIn--and now Andreessen's new service--to be friends with strangers. It seems to me that social networks are the technical person's way of interacting without interaction; it's "let's be friends without being friendly." I just don't like the idea of automating friendship. And because it's automated, it's highly scalable. You can be friends with a million people that you don't know. But is that friendship?

My other observation is the danger of having two audiences. A live interview is focused on the people in the room and I wonder if Andreessen would have said the same things in the same ways if he'd been talking to only the web audience. A rule of giving presentations is to speak to the most easily offended person in the room. But who is in the room in a webcast? When giving a live presentation, you get clues from the audience--laughter or whatever form of audible or visual feedback-- which you don't get during a recorded session. In a recorded session, you'll use different presentation techniques, probably be less funny and colloquial, and stay more focused on the topic. Speaking to both a visible and invisible audience is hard! Who should you focus on?

Some technical people and companies seem to be saying, "This business would be so much easier if we didn't have to meet those darn customers." Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Sam offers another interpretation:

Some of the greatest software businesses of our day are businesses with no sales force, no support team, and barely no marketing department. Some companies have built products that are so in tune with their users, so in line with their markets, that mass adoption (and riches) occur by the brilliance of the solution to the problem their products address. I can agree with that. I want that for my product.

Much of traditional software product management has taught us to rely on internal channels like the sales team and the support team to get feedback about the market. We have learnt to rely on them to make sales possible. And so, we "copout" of our responsibilities as product managers to built truly great products that need little selling, little marketing and little support to succeed. Trust me, although the creators of Gmail have had no face to face contact with customers, it doesn't mean that they haven't been closely engaged with customers. That it happens online with all the barriers that that creates speaks more of their product management skills than of an attitude problem.

I see Marc Andreesen's statement as a reaffirmation of discipline and not taking the easy road, than of snubbing real users.

Owning the Gap

Rich Mironov writes,

Product managers are usually the people who "own the gap" for their specific products: identifying all of the missing or incomplete features and services and supporting processes that customers need for a successfully experience.

Read Owning the Gap for a discussion on looking for systemic problems in the company's end-to-end production cycle.

Sales Training: Revving Up The Troops

One of the duties that frequently falls to Product Managers is to train the sales force, getting it prepared to sell the product. As the person who has scrutinized and measured the market opportunity, as the person who has heard the needs of customers and prospects, as the person who has prioritized the benefits required and the associated capabilities that go into the product, the Product Manager has plenty of vital knowledge to pass along to the sales force to help it sell.

However, one of the challenges of having a Product Manager deliver training is that seldom does a Product Manager have experience selling. Most Product Managers seem to have traveled a career path that has come out of a Marketing or Development role. So it's easy for a Product Manager to deliver a training session that doesn't do much good.

Read more in Sales Training: Revving Up The Troops.

A Marketer's Guide to Blogging

CMO Magazine notes:

Blogs can be a CMO's best friend - or worst nightmare. The key to success is joining the conversation, not controlling it.

Blogs are marketing's doomsday machine. The ability to instantly expose every one of your company's products, marketing programs and customer interactions--especially the bad ones--to public examination portends the end of marketing as we know it. In the new online world of consumer-generated media, there's nowhere left to hide mistakes, gloss over unfulfilled promises or shrug off customer-service problems. You no longer control your company's message.

Wait a minute: The blog is marketing's salvation. What could be better than free, real-time customer feedback? No more giving gobs of money to consultants to find out why your product isn't selling. No more guessing how your message is playing in Peoria. Blogs give you the pure, unfiltered voice of the customer, delivered to your virtual doorstep.

Welcome to the crazy, mixed-up world of blogs.

Read more in A Marketer's Guide to Blogging.

the value-add of product management

Bob C writes,

As I've grown up/older, I've come to acknowledge where my skills and passions lay, and one area of endeavor that just plain doesn't grab me is the deep-dive technical voodoo discussion.

I swear I can't be alone when I say that after a few minutes, all I hear is barking noises. I know they're saying important things that matter, but for the life of me, it comes across as an impenetrable fog of jargon and logic.

Realizing this, and realizing that I wasn't going to bring world-class C and Java coding skills to the table, I came to understand I needed to bring something else that would add value to the endeavor of creating software products & solutions.

So what I do is I try to complement the technical smarts of my resident geniuses with an alternative world-view that employs equal parts lateral thinking and heuristics to get them to think about not just the technology, but the impact of the technology on real people (that is to say, customers). I try to be an advocate for the user, for the market, and to bring that perspective in-house. Since customers think differently than developers, this is a worthy skill, and a valuable one.

Read the rest of his post on working with smart technical people.

The Man Who Said 'No' to Wal-Mart

What does it mean to say 'no' to a huge client? When does it make sense to "fire" a customer? Fast Company notes:

Tens of thousands of executives make the pilgrimage to northwest Arkansas every year to woo Wal-Mart, marshaling whatever arguments, data, samples, and pure persuasive power they have in the hope of an order for their products, or an increase in their current order. Almost no matter what you're selling, the gravitational force of Wal-Mart's 3,811 U.S. 'doorways' is irresistible. Very few people fly into Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport thinking about telling Wal-Mart no, or no more.

In 2002, Jim Wier concluded that continuing to sell Snapper mowers through Wal-Mart stores was, as he put it, 'incompatible with our strategy. And I felt I owed them a visit to tell them why we weren't going to continue to sell to them.'

Distinctive competence meets huge revenue temptation in The Man Who Said 'No' to Wal-Mart.

Ford: "If they will buy it, we will build it"

Here are some great excerpts from a speech by Bill Ford, Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company, at the Ford Motor Company Business Review on January 23, 2006. Ford (the person) is saying the right things; it remains to be seen whether Ford (the company) can execute on this vision.

You can't cut your way to success.

The full story is about what Ford stands for - and what we will no longer stand for. Ford Motor Company stands for a far-sighted commitment to growth. We stand for a renewed focus on the customer. We stand for boundless innovation in every aspect of our business - from design, to safety, to fuel-efficiency, to efficiency on the factory floor. We stand for the distinctive look, feel, quality, toughness, boldness and fun of automobiles that are unmistakably Ford. And we stand for the hard-working men and women of Ford Motor Company and their families. Business plans change as the world changes - but these principles will never change.

Here is what we will not stand for: incremental change, avoiding risk, thinking short-term, blocking innovation, tying our people's hands, defending procedures that don't make sense, and selling what we have instead of what the customer wants. In short, we will not stand for business as usual.

And later...

True customer-focus means that our business decisions originate from our knowledge of what the customer wants, both today and tomorrow. "If you build it, they will buy it" - that's business as usual, and that's wrong. "If they will buy it, we will build it" is right - and we're going back to it.

And later...

My great-grandfather once said of the first car he ever built: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

At Ford, we're going to figure out what people want before they even know it - and then we're going to give it to them. It's where we began and it's where we must go.

Getting scientists and engineers together doesn't sound so complicated. Getting management off their backs doesn't sound so revolutionary. Why didn't we do this before? Because we didn't have to. The system in place was good enough for getting other products out at that time.

Now the question is: what other bureaucratic walls have we built that are holding us back?

I like to tell school kids about a time a hundred years ago when my great-grandfather Henry Ford built his first car in a shed behind his house.

At the end, after he was finished, he realized there was one thing he hadn't anticipated. The car was too big to go out the door. He actually had to knock down a wall to drive it out.

We intend to remind people every day that if you want to build something that's never been built before, you may have to knock down a wall or two.

This speech is not on the Ford website (at least I couldn't find it) but the full text is available here.

On software testing

Testing can be automated. If your testing people need some resources, LogiGear offers these software testing templates, articles, white papers. Software testing templates, articles, white papers and more.

Why Features Don't Matter Any More

In Why Features Don't Matter Any More, Andreas Pfeiffer offers these 10 fundamental rules for technology based on user experience.

Posted: Issue 1| Pragmatic Marketing's Annual Product Management Salary Survey 2005

The new issue of the productmarketing.com print journal is now posted online. Go to Volume 4, Issue 1 for articles on our annual salary survey, corporate blogging, managing product requirements, and more.