What problem are we trying to solve?
As a product manager, one of my responsibilities is to make sure we’ve correctly defined the problem we’re trying to solve. And then, I need to communicate it loudly and often. I can tell when I’m struggling or when I’ve failed to do this: I get a lot of blank or angry stares from other people. I feel confused when asked the next obvious question and I don’t have an answer. Or when I can’t defend the decision that’s been made.
I’ve felt the pain of this quite recently when I and other leaders in the company failed to do this. It cost us nearly 10 days and burned lots of goodwill, respect and patience. We thrashed around saying to each other the same thing: ”Why are we doing this? This is ridiculous.” And then getting to work at doing the ridiculous thing we didn’t understand. When we stepped back and defined the problem, the answer became obvious and all of a sudden, everyone was in the ‘let’s do this’ or ‘we can make it happen this way’ and the team became a team again and we mapped out a solution and a game plan in a few hours.
I’m sharing this not because I want sympathy for feeling like a dolt (although I do), but because it is so easy to short-change this step in the constantly evolving, face-paced-get-this-to-market now world. The pressure to deliver solutions quickly; to be working on something, anything, is immense. An important customer needs something right now. The market has shifted and we need to catch up, right now. The competition has put out a new version and we think it’s going to take our lunch money.
As we shrink staffs and continue to ‘do more with less’, the strategy and planning role for Product Managers is often sacrificed to the ‘Holy Scrum, Batman, there’ another Sprint tomorrow’ reality of our jobs. Unfortunately, this means we often take short cuts and sometimes there is little patience for the ‘hold on we need to figure this out’ plea from product management.
My recent experience though, reminds me of how utterly ridiculous it is when we miss the basics of product management and frankly, all problem solving tasks: Take as long as it takes to define and understand what problem are we trying to solve. You’ll actually save time and money and deliver a product to market.
Here’s my “Do I know what problem I’m trying to solve” check list:
1. Can I state: The ideal, the reality and the consequences of succeeding or failing. Do I stay on message every time I explain it or am I struggling to be consistent in my communication.
Example: Repeat business is the most profitable for us. 20% of our customers buy our products, don’t fully implement them. We lose ongoing maintenance, support, service and upgrade revenue and cannot expand our presence in their organization with other product lines. Increasing adoption during the implementation phase will provide our customers with a better solution. We’ll reduce our acquisition costs and increase our market share, improving the products overall profit contribution to the company.
2. Do I feel stupid saying it?
This is really a gut check, but we’ve all been there. We know we’ve haven’t nailed it. We see the ‘rolling of the eyes’, the heads go down on the table, the arms folded. We feel stupid saying it and don’t exactly know why.
3. Do we keep coming back to the same questions? If it’s not just hard (because some problems are hard to solve), but frustrating, exhausting and ineffective.
When we keep running into dead-ends or when every conversation raises the same questions about why we’re doing this step back and reexamine the stated goal and the stated problem. If they make sense, push on. If not, revisit.
Even when we have the right statement and have communicated it clearly, reaching that goal will be hard and we will sometimes lose our way. If restating the goal gets us back on track or helps focus us on the problem, we’re that’s great. If not, go back to refining the problem statement.
Getting the right problem defined is a breakthrough, ah ha moment.
Creating Value
Warren Buffet tells us that price is what you pay, value is what you get. As product managers, our job is to create and sustain value in our product and service offerings for both our company and our customers. At first, this sometimes seems like an impossible task.
The puzzle looks something like this: The company needs to sells a certain number of units at a set gross profit within a defined period of time; the market needs to buy at the lowest price possible to still meet their needs and deadlines by buying a product that works, has great customer support and does what it promises to do.
Companies fail when either side of the equation is out of balance. The only way I know to keep this in balance is for product managers to ensure the products deliver value to the consumer and therefore the company.
Let’s take a pair of shoes. You’ve released a cute pair of shoes at a ridiculously low introductory price. 100 new consumers buy your shoes. The shoes are tight and don’t stretch out. The shoes are hard, not flexible, and the construction is shoddy. Those consumers now believe that even the low price they paid was too high. You’ve lost them. The company lowered their new user acquisition cost, but those users won’t come back. So no value has been created to either the company or the consumer. Additionally, customers who have purchased in the past buy 100 pair from catalog and online, using the same size they always have when buying your shoes. They’re so excited about the price, that many buy two! But the size mistakes and the shoddy construction disappoint them, turning them off your brand. A double loss.
So how does a product manager create value? By truly understanding what the consumer wants and then working with engineering and manufacturing to deliver it as efficiently and affordably as possible.
That sounds easy, but it isn’t.
As LEAN and Agile principles take over the manufacturing and engineering processes, the role of Product Manager/Product Owner is more critical than ever. And this is good news. As dev and manufacturing teams become more self-managed and work toward stories, not requirements documents and functional specs the opportunity for a product manager to get out of the documents and into the market is tremendous. (Beware the SCRUM team that wants product managers to be at their beck and call).
Some ways to do this:
1. Commit to being with customers every week. Create a story card for the SCRUM board that requires you, the product manager, to get one question answered in the field by the actual users of the product, not the sales people. Don’t just go on sales calls, shadow a customer while they use your software for a project or an activity. LISTEN.
2. Commit to using the competitors software every month. Again, use a story card and have the deliverable be a demo you conduct to the team. Try to solve the problem it was designed to solve; use it the way it is positioned and see if you can do it.
3. Answer customer support and tech support calls/emails every week. Even if just for one hour. Don’t just read the report. Get online. It’s easier than ever now to interact with your customers when they are trying to use your product.
4. Cut features to ensure your solution is easy to use and hassle free; remove the barriers to use. You need to you know your customer, the market and the task or problem they need solved to do this.
Use this information to constantly check the features, pricing and positioning. Ask yourself for every Story: is this consistent with what I’m hearing from my customer? If they need to pay less for a solution, try to see if you can cut costs, or modularize the solution. Even simple things, like self-printed manuals cut the costs and keep the margins: little amounts can add up.
At the end of the day, we all know we need to create value. My experience over the past 10 years tells me that in many companies, our time as product managers has become less about discovering the need, defining the problem we need to solve and solving it and more about working internally, leading cross-functional teams to deliver the next release. This internal focus is preventing product managers from uncovering opportunities, innovating new products and delivering value to the company and the consumer.
Start working with your customers again. Listen to what they are telling you and what they are not telling you. You’ll hear what they need; you’ll learn what they value. And then you can go about delivering it.
Product Manager’s Job: Manage Speed
In today’s global, 24/7 world, time-to-market is a key strategic factor. 40% of the major American corporations that existed in 1975 do not exist today (source: Winning at New Products, Robert G. Cooper). Windows of opportunity are smaller, and more crowded, than ever before with more companies trying to get to market with new and innovative products. SPEED IS THE PIVOTAL COMPETITIVE WEAPON. Yes, I’m “shouting” this. It’s all about speed. Sort of.
This shouldn’t be translated into speed at all costs. Speed at all costs is deadly.
Adequately managing the product and project process is something exceptional product managers need to drive. Cutting corners and skipping vital steps, like vetting requirements with real customers, usability studies, business case validation are high-risk decisions. The goal and the challenge for today’s product management and product development teams is to accelerate the process and bring products to market that win, not just bring something to market.
Why is speed so important?
1. Speed in itself generates competitive advantage, so long as the product meets customer needs. Ill conceived products give no competitive advantage. Speed enables companies and products to: react to changing market conditions, quickly meet customer needs to give them a competitive advantage, and establish a beachhead for your product ahead of the competitors.
2. Speed means profits. Products have fixed lifetimes; fixed windows of opportunity. The earlier your product is in the market, the more time you have to reap revenue and profits. Once you are in the market, your marketing budget gets spent acquiring market share. If you’re there first, you can more easily get it for less cost. Then your job is to hang on to your customers and your competitors have to spend to steal them from you (unless you stop managing your product).
3. Speed better ensures you hit the target. Market conditions change quickly. New technologies, new products, new competitors change more during a long development cycle. Shortening time to market reduces the risk that your product will not meet customer needs. And having a process that optimizes for speed means when the market does change, you have the tools to react.
New product development is expensive, risky and exciting. Product Managers need to push their companies to retool to optimize for ‘Smart Speed’: repeatable rapid execution process using product management and product development best practices.
Getting Out of Your Own Way: Lateral Thinking To Solve Product Problems
In 1967 Edward de Bono coined the term “Lateral Thinking”. Where critical, or vertical, thinking is designed to judge the truth or value of statements and assumptions, lateral thinking is concerned with the generation of new ideas, of new thoughts, new insights. Vertical thinking is about developing the ideas generated through brainstorming or lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is the way out of the constricting prisons of our current thinking and the way in to innovation and creative solutions to our problems.
Any one in the product development life cycle inevitably gets stuck. We work day in and day out focused on delivering products that solve a defined problem in the market. We work to understand our market and make assumptions about it so that we can all ‘get on the same page’ and deliver our solution.
And then something happens: the market changes. Maybe a new technology appears, or a new competitor emerges, margins slip, sales cycles lengthen, or production levels fall off. The team is ready to rally and tackle the new challenge. The only problem is that they are tackling new problems with old thinking and old understandings. Solutions often look like doing more of what we’ve always been doing. We begin at the beginning with vertical thinking and make logical conclusions based on information and data we have. We propose a plan and go off and do it. And likely, we will fail.
With vertical thinking, one has to be correct at every step. We think critically, discard that which doesn’t fit, and pare away everything except the true next step. Logic demands it. Mathematics would not function if this wasn’t true. Lateral thinking though doesn’t work this way.
When brainstorming (a lateral thinking process) solutions for product and market problems try using a lateral thinking techniques to burst open the prison doors and generate innovative, creative solutions. Two of my favorites:
1. Provocation
Provocation is designed to shock the mind into thinking differently. Make deliberately stupid statements in which something we take for granted about the situation is not true. Let’s explore this statement: Photographs don’t have to be printed. Wow. In 1925 this statement would have seemed stupid, outrageous, and heretical. And yet…. So make them stupid. Make them outrageous. Once a provocative statement has been made, explore the ‘what if it were true’ aspects of that outrageous statement. Explore consequences, benefits, special circumstances that would make it sensible, what else would be different.
Select a random noun from a dictionary or a prepared list of nouns. Make them concrete (box) rather than fuzzy (intuition) and from a field other than your own. Consider the problem of providing affordable clean water to people in the developing world. With the word box, someone trying to solve this problem make come up with the Solar Box Cooker. For about $5 in supplies (a cardboard box , aluminum foil and a piece of glass), families can build a Solar Box Cooker. It will boil water without burning trees, without using toxins or chemicals. It’s affordable, reliable and non-harmful.
Problems are hard to solve when we keep looking at them the same way. Try implementing some lateral thinking into your next product brainstorming session and see if you can’t provoke an ‘ah ha’ moment that unleashes the creative energy of your team.
To learn more:
Twittermaven: Twitter helps Alaska Airlines to go North of Expected
Twittermaven: Twitter helps Alaska Airlines to go North of Expected
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Getting good at saying “no”.
The quarter is over. And last week, this conversation happened in many companies, many times a day: “Hey Product Manager. We can get this great contract if we only did [fill in the blank].” “Why would we do that?” “Didn’t you hear me? We can get a deal!”
It happens all the time. Whether you’re in a start up or an established business, sales, business development and execs are relentless at discovering new opportunities for the company.
As product managers, we like to say “yes” to our customers and partners. We like to accommodate, to find solutions to problems, to win business. Our responsibility, though, is to get good at saying “no” when the opportunities move the company or product line away from its mission.
Getting To No
As ideas and opportunities are presented, ask yourself and the team these questions. If the answer to any of these is no, you most likely need to walk away from the opportunity. A lot of times, the answer is ‘maybe’ and then the real conversations about how you extend and support your products can happen. This moves the conversation from a single request, idea, concept into moving the company and its position in the market.
1. Does this serve a customer in our target market? If you serve small and mid-size e-commerce retailers, would you want to build features to serve a regional brick and mortar retailer? The answer here might be “maybe” if you determine there is an opportunity to extend your product offering into the offline market. But to do features for one customer? The answer needs to be no. The opportunity costs are too great; you will be building features for one client when you could build features for your entire target market. Support, maintenance, sales and training will also need to tool-up for just one customer. The business is too expensive in the long run.
2. Does this customer meet our customer criteria/definition? Take our software company providing ecommerce solutions for small and midsize online retailers. We’ve determined that to be successful, our customers need to have adequate IT resources that can implement, manage and maintain our software. Mom and Pop e-merchants with no IT investment simply won’t be able to run our software and will fail to renew or implement. The sales teams need to qualify these opportunities and stop selling to this type of customer. Selling one at the end of the quarter to make goal, doesn’t serve the company or the customer.
3. Does this opportunity support our mission and philosophy? Or does it divert us from our objectives? Take a company producing an expensive software application for sales teams. A software vendor has approached us with a partnership idea. They have a great new application that will reduce our costs to communicate with our customers. It’s amazing and cool, with 2.0 features galore: chat, forums, polls, wikis and ability for user-generated content to be uploaded cataloged. IT really wants it. Support really wants it. Users will be able to self-help themselves. Do we do it? Does this support our support philosophy of providing personal, professional, exceptional customer service for our complicated applications? Maybe. Maybe not.
4. Will this feature make us more competitive against our top competitors? This is trickier because often features can be spun as giving a competitive advantage. But check against which competitors it will help you win business. Is it enough to move the needle? Or are you still going to be crushed by pricing, service, company reputation, etc. Say yes only when the competitive feature really helps you to be more competitive.
5. Will customers pay more money? Or will this make us more profitable through increased efficiencies? Validate this by talking to customers and field operations.
6. Can we get it to market in time? If it takes 6 months to bring this feature/partnership to market, will the market and opportunity still be there?
7. Are we willing to give up ‘x’ to do this?
Get good at saying “no”. Know your target market. Know the problem you solve and the value you bring. Know the profile of a profitable customer. Know the capabilities and expertise of your organization.
I have a business mentor who counsels me with sage advice: “You don’t have to go through every open window.” Asking some questions and knowing your goals will help steer your organization to say “yes” to the right opportunities.
Want to read more:
Case Study from Harvard Business Review
Using strategic vision statements to set priorities
Sorting through the cacophony of feature requests to determine which one(s) come next, which come after that and which ones never get done is one of the most challenging aspects of product management. Product Managers are lobbied, bribed, bullied and threatened to include this sales manager’s pet feature or this developers bright idea. Big, valuable customers demand changes. Market leaders bring out new versions and you immediately want to hit back.
After the dust settles and the lobbying and heated discussion are done, how do product managers call the plays?
Product Management solutions, like Ryma’s FeaturePlan or Accept’s Innovation Management Solutions are great for providing the analysis and data behind feature and function decisions. As the foundation for all decisions though, Product Managers need to go back to the fundamental questions:
- “What do we do?”
- “For whom do we do it?”
- “How do we excel?”
Knowing the answers to these strategic questions is critical and the team, at every level, needs to know the answers, too. I don’t know what Flickr’s strategic plan says but I bet it’s something like:
We provide online tools for photographers of every level to show, edit and share their photos with others. We excel by offering affordable, simple to use, reliable and fun solutions.
When everyone in the company knows the strategic vision, prioritizing features get easier. Would Flickr partner with a company that provides super expensive digital storage systems that require encrypted devices? Probably not. Will Flickr build or partner for features that require users to have expert HTML skills? Probably not. Did they add one-click functionality so users can publish photos to blogs? Yup. They did.
So often the strategic vision statements are created, laminated, presented at a company meeting and then left in a drawer or fading on a wall. Product Managers who resurrect them, dust them off and use them as drivers through the organization can align every member of the team, streamlining feature selection and reducing conflict so you can deliver products that people use and value for your company.
Reinventing your products
I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing articles, webinars and blog postings touting the need to ‘reinvent ourselves’ during these challenging economic times. Maybe we don’t really need to reinvent so much as simply do what good product managers do and take stock of our products, our markets, our customers and our resources and build a growth plan that works for today’s reality. Or maybe reinvention is called for and we as product managers and product marketers have to lead the way.
The idea of reinventing is energizing, at least to me and the other change agents I know and I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept and about how one goes about creating the mental tabula rosa that’s required to see new ways of solving problems. I’ve been doing some consulting work with a very early stage start up to build their product strategy and roadmap. I am reminded how hard it is to let my brain go where ever it wants without jumping to preconceived outcomes or claiming too early in the process that an idea I like is the right one.
If it is so hard to do this when there is no existing product, no existing revenue and no customer base, how can we possibly do this when we already have well worn paths in our brains for what we build and market today?
Here’s what I’ve come up with and will be applying over the next three months to my career and my product line. This all seems pretty common sense, but just writing it down has helped me commit to exploring the need to reinvent (or just refurbish) myself, my products and my team.
1. Change up the team.
We recently did this at my company reassigning product, dev and business owners from products they had worked on for years to ones they had never touched. It was a painful and tumultuous move, but the ideas and energy that came out of it was well worth it. Assumptions were challenged and we improved our customer’s experience and revenue, while reducing technical complexity. And product managers were able to leverage tools and technology from the products they had been working on and bring it to their new product lines.
2. Take inventory.
I’m working on this right now and have created a massive spreadsheet that simply lists all the resources we have – not the products, but the asset that enables us to deliver the product. For example we have an internal tool we call the MMM (Mean Marketing Machine). When I break it down to the basic asset component, it’s a system that lets us easily track the success, cost and return on our marketing investments. Each creative is assigned a code and that code is tracked all the way through to the installation. So is it an MMM or is it a piece of a platform that can be used by our clients to improve their marketing campaigns with us? I don’t know yet. But the spreadsheet doesn’t assume it is used for what we use today. It simply reads: ability to accurately track gross profit from each creative and each marketing campaign. I think we can do something with that! We’re adding inventory lines for our teams, too, uncovering interests and talents we didn’t think about. When we’re done, we’ll start adding market information and problems we could solve with the assets we have. We may not find anything new, but we might! And it’ll be fun.
3. Find new competitors.
We all have our list of our top three or four competitors. And we likely review them every few months, perhaps read their blogs, have a Google Alert set up and maybe even use their products ourselves. But there are other competitors out there and the new companies entering our market, or those we have never gotten around to tracking, have something to offer us too. I’m also looking for competitors outside our core markets. For instance, we have a casual gaming website. So we’ve been focusing on other casual gaming sites. But now we’re adding other websites to our competitive analysis if they compete with our users time for entertainment online: videos, social media, photo and personal information management, shopping, etc. Our question? What can we learn from these other sites and how do we get mind and market share from them to our casual gaming site?
So that’s what we’re trying. It’s not new or novel, just a commitment to think outside the box.
Building Sustainable Products
Every day we hear about sustainability. Mostly the discussions revolve around energy, the environment, agriculture and building green. The principles of sustainability though are equally applicable to products, product lines and companies.
Whether you consider the Hannover Principles, established for the 2000 World’s Fair in Hannover, or the Economic Principles of Ecolab, the fundamentals are the same: build products in a way that respects the environment, the community and the future, while delivering real value in a lasting way. In other words – build for long-term value not short-term gain.
Some Product Management Sustainability Principles might be:
1. Build products and service offerings that fulfill a real need for the customer. Focus on win-win scenarios.
2. Build the minimum feature set to get the job done efficiently. Resist the temptation to add extra features or complex, but cool, technology components. Extra features introduce waste and raise maintenance costs, decreasing sustainability and innovation.
3. Partner with complimentary products and offerings; opt to buy rather than build another ‘me to’ application.
4. Build flexible solutions rather than one-offs to close a deal. Resist the pressure to make a change for one customer; this undermines the entire ecosystem and introduces expensive and unsustainable complexity and maintenance requirements.
5. Leverage learnings across the organization and the industry. Information breeds confidence and confidence sparks innovation. Throw open the curtains and let others know what you’re doing. Include others in your company, your customer base, your industry peers and even your competitors. Build a wiki, publish papers, post in forums, write blogs, Twitter. Sharing enables us to reuse and extend our technologies.
6. Just say no. Practice restraint when the next new idea or bright shiny object comes along. Evaluate it, test it, push on it. Be prepared to walk away rather than squander resources on something that isn’t core to your business, your product line or your customers.
7. Just say YES! Look at what others are doing and what your teams are thinking about. Leverage wherever possible if it supports your core offerings or solves a clear problem for your customers. Invest where it makes long-term financial sense to do it.
8. Learn. Talk to you customers, analysts, other people in your company. Attend conferences, read books, blogs, papers. Listen to Podcasts, Vblogs, Webinars. Keep expanding your knowledge and expertise.
9. Recycle!. Retire products that consume more resources than the return justifies. Reuse what you can to build a new product or offering, but get out from under the burden of products that are sucking resources to maintain or stabilize them but not offering new profits.
10. Life-cycle-Analysis When preparing to build a product or a new version, look at the design from the whole life cycle of creation to retirement. Streamline and reduce waste right up front. Thinking about how the product might be retired will inform design decisions that will stand the test of time.
Many of these principles are incorporated in Agile/Lean development processes. As product managers we can influence and steer our products and portfolios toward sustainability for our customers and our shareholders.
