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Customer support?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-04-30/

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

How to Deliver an Experience :: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

For a lot of businesses, taking the order is where marketing ends. For smart marketers, it’s the starting point for the next order and the referral. If you stop your marketing thinking at the transaction, you’ll find it harder and harder to build real marketing momentum.

via ducttapemarketing.com

There's "just enough", "good enough", and "beyond good enough". For me, Amazon gets it right by getting it delivered fast. John shows us that you can also go "beyond good enough" with packaging. And now I want to buy the book.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Product manager = parent

Rich Mironov introduced me to perhaps the best metaphor of all: the product manager is a parent of the product.

One acquaintance heard this story and completely screwed it up. She said, “Wow! That’s great! As a mom, I make their meals and wash the dishes. I make sure they do their homework and that I have extra poster board in the house in case they forget to plan for a project. I make their beds and do their laundry.” 

And on she continued while I listened in horror. “That’s not a mother,” I thought. “That’s a maid!”

Let’s talk about parenting. Good parents provide discipline and focus. They save for college and advise their kids on which fields seem to be best for their temperament. Our job as parents is to turn undisciplined kids into self-reliant adults. We teach them our values, how to manage their schedules and their finances. We teach them how to make a bed and then we expect them to make it themselves, every time. We teach them how to make a meal, sew a button, hem a pair of slacks—so that when they’re in college or in their own apartments, they have these skills and don’t have to come back home every weekend.

Isn’t this the definition of a good product manager? Like a parent, the product manager provides focus, vision, explanations of what is expected. A good product manager helps create a functioning product that can enter the real world and not have to come back.

And if you choose to extend the metaphor, the same is true of product managers and our counterparts in other departments. We don’t want to do demos for sales people; we want sales people to do their own demos. We can make sure they have the education they need to do their own. Same for marketing, and support. And development.

Teach a man to fish. Give these groups explanations of the market, its problems, the positioning (vision) for the product, and then trust that these teams can take it from there.

Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Why customer needs don’t always matter — On Product Management

Product Management is not about satisfying customer needs and wants. Product Management is about ensuring business goals are met and business success delivered.

Now don’t get me wrong. I certainly believe in addressing market needs and driving customer satisfaction. That is definitely a great way to achieve business goals. But keep in mind that addressing customer needs etc. are a MEANS of achieving an END, not an END unto themselves.

via onproductmanagement.net

We don't want customers to define our products; we want customers to inspire our products. And why? Read Saeed's article for more.

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

As a Product Manager, I struggle with the following question all the time:

“Where do great ideas come from?”

The question is born out a basic need that all Product Managers have…how to build a killer product roadmap that wows customers, creates new revenue channels and renders the competition obsolete. However, knowing where to go to find inspiration and what tools you can use to help glean insight can be challenging. Recently, Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing and I hosted a webinar on The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation to address this question.

via blog.vovici.com

Scott expands on our recent webinar by exploring where product ideas originate. And what techniques are best for gathering those ideas.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Product manager != my SME

Many product managers participate in design because, as they put it, “I’m less terrible at it than my developers.”

“I’m less terrible at it” applies to marketing and sales too.

Many teams consider product management the single source of subject matter expertise. “Just call product management if you have any questions on the product.”

Yes, inherent in the job of product management is exposure to deep product and market information. They know the features of the current release plus the features planned for the next release; they know the long-term roadmap for the product. They know the messaging and positioning, and can often do a killer demo and presentation.

But that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who should.

Many product managers are expected to deliver product screen shots to marketing communications since, after all, marketing can’t be expected to know the product.

Really?

Perhaps that’s why so many organizations are now hiring product marketing managers—people who know the product and the market who define all the go-to-market deliverables so that the marketing folks can specialize on execution.

A marketing team that doesn’t know the market, persona, problem, and product is just an agency. Don’t get me started on domain knowledge and marketing.

Oh wait. Domain knowledge is necessary in sales too. Many product managers are tasked with providing basic product knowledge to the sales team, as the sales people can’t be bothered to learn the product.

Really?

A friend in sales explained to me that he learns about deals before any of his competitors because his clients call him directly. Why? Because he understands their business. He has built a relationship with them by knowing the domain. Relationships are not about the superficial personal stuff, like “I know where your kids go to school”; strong business relationships occur when clients believe that the sales team adds value to their search.

Yet more than one product manager has told me a variant on this story. The client explains their environment and the sales guy keeps asking them to explain the basics. “You mentioned Windows. Is that something that we sell?” And the client looks with exasperation at the product manager: “See what I deal with?” he asks.

Many sales teams are in fact understaffed with subject matter experts. Call them sales engineers, pre-sales consultants, application specialists, or something else. If the sales team won’t hire them, then product managers are pulled into every deal.

The same is often true in support. If we hire people in customer support who only use the support scripts, product managers (and developers) get called into many customer problems because the support personnel don’t know the product well enough.

Every customer-facing department in the company needs to know the product. We need to put product skills where they’re needed. That means that product managers can’t be the only ones who know the product.

Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

» 5 Reasons Why You Have No Credibility with Engineering | The Experience is the Product

Some of these product managers may have been legitimately frustrated with problems caused above their pay grade (such as VPs who overschedule engineering and make threats if deadlines aren’t met; this leads to bugs, incidentals, and new priorities being ignored and it destroys morale).  But product managers, at least some of you are the problem.

via cindyalvarez.com

5 reasons that product managers might be the bad guys. Be sure that you're doing product management before you start doing somebody else's job.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The 2 Most Important Words for a Product Manager « Fulton's Ventures

I propose the 2 most important words for a product manager to live by — “Why” and “No”.

via fultonsventures.com

Good questions indeed.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Open Question: What is stopping you from visiting customers? — On Product Management

Travel budgets are tight, we know that. And many of us are tied up with firefighting in the office. But if we’re not getting out of the office to develop market understanding and bringing it back into the company, then who is? And ultimately, what value are we as Product Management professionals delivering to our companies?

via onproductmanagement.net

Have you talked to a client in the last year... without a sales objective? Why not?

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management