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.