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06011 ROI and ROR: Return on Requirements (03039)

This article is a reprint of an oldie but goodie about Requirements. It will help you measure the expected return from Requirements so that you can reconcile competing needs and prioritize new capabilities for your product.

Read 03039 ROI and ROR: Return on Requirements for ideas on how to prioritize requirements.

06010 Make Your Product Succeed: What Will It Take?

As a Product Manager, your scope of responsibilities calls upon you to get involved across the board in all aspects of the product. There’s plenty of work to be done for product requirements, Marketing, Sales, Development, and Professional Services.

In order to be effective as a Product Manager, you need to identify those areas in your organization where there are weaknesses or gaps, and bring your talents and efforts to bear to fill in those gaps. In fact, that idea of “filling in the gaps” might be one of the best ways to define a Product Manager and to provide the answer to the question you get from nearly everyone you meet: “What exactly does a Product Manager do?”

But pursuing a strategy of filling in the gaps can be a recipe for working harder, not smarter, if there are too many gaps to fill. And usually there is no shortage of these. As with all endeavors where there’s too little of you to go around, you need to prioritize your efforts and choose the top priorities.

For those of us who do not have the good fortune or luxury of getting to prioritize based on what we like to do most, it becomes necessary to prioritize based on where we can be most effective in making our product more successful. This takes some thoughtful analysis of your product’s – and your organization’s – situation to determine what factors are most important to its success right now. Then focus your efforts on those factors.

Because there was always something I could contribute to virtually every aspect of the product, I struggled for years to try to determine what I should contribute. It’s hard to see through the details and the noise to figure out what will make the biggest difference, what will give you the biggest boost. It’s easy to see why everything could be done, but your challenge is to determine what should be done, and done now before you bother with the finer points.

Read on below for some examples of different products at different organizations and in different phases of their life cycle to understand how you can apply careful analysis to figure out what it will take to make your product succeed.
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06009 Holding a Successful Customer Conference

Note: It has been a month since my last article. Those of you who know me would know that it was hard for me to be silent for such a length of time! But don’t worry, today’s issue is probably one of my longest yet, about an effort that is both hard to pull off and vital to your product’s success.

Few things have more power to build customer loyalty than holding a customer conference. Just as true, few things require as much preparation, on-site work, and expense. The customer conferences your company holds can be critical to the long term health of your product and your company.

The headaches, expense, and staff time required for a conference are guaranteed. But the payoff is not, and that’s why it’s so important to assess your product – and your organization’s – situation and goals and determine what your aim is for a customer conference, then make strategic and tactical decisions accordingly.

Product Managers can provide good input on customer needs and preferences, as well as what your company needs from its customer base, to ensure that important decisions are made to create a successful customer experience.

Read on below for ideas about holding a successful customer conference that enhances the reputation and success of your product.

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06008 The Value of AIPMM’s PMEC Conference

I have just returned from the Product Management conference provided by the Association for International Product Marketing and Management. The 2006 west coast conference, called the PMEC, or Product Management Educational Conference, was held in Indian Wells, California (near Palm Springs) for two days on April 20 and 21, with an optional day of pre-conference workshops.

The conference theme was “The Way of the Product Manager” and the conference was organized around four tracks: Plan, Build, Launch, and Sustain. It was as inspirational, forward-looking, all-encompassing, and fluid as the profession of Product Management itself.

I was nominated for the 2006 Product Management Excellence Award for Thought Leadership. The award went to Linda Gorchels, author of The Product Manager’s Handbook, and I am honored and humbled to have found myself in such company through my work on this newsletter.

Read on for more information about what it was like to be at the conference and for a list of great resources for Product Managers.

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06007 Software Development Pitfalls: Planning

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there.

When Product Managers push to accomplish their goals for a product – more sales, more customers, more profit – they must struggle to identify and overcome the obstacles and limitations of their individual product, team, and company. Each company’s weaknesses are unique, and require careful focus and willpower to overcome them with a solution whose uniqueness matches the problem.

But problems that are unique to a company are relatively easy to spot and solve compared with weaknesses that are common to an entire industry, such as the software industry. Industry-wide problems create a situation where there are few people to turn to who even see beyond the blind spots, let alone can point to models for a solution.

In the previous issue, I wrote about what I consider the software industry’s greatest weak spot, namely creating product requirements for software development. In this issue, I’ll tackle another major shortcoming, which is none other than planning software development.

As a Product Manager, chances are you find yourself working with a software development function that is challenged when it comes to planning. And so much of the success of reliable development of competitive capabilities depends upon good planning.

Read on below for a discussion of how to better understand the planning of software development — and how to overcome some common hurdles.

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06006 Software Development Pitfalls: Requirements

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there.

Every culture has its blind spots and weak points that can trip it up despite its strengths and clear-sightedness. So, too, every industry struggles with common shortcomings that seem to grow out of misperceptions and failings learned at many companies and steadily spread across the industry.

For a Product Manager, who is usually deeply involved in all the major workings of a company, from sales and marketing to product development and the business model, it can be a sobering experience to try to overcome widespread weaknesses with few positive examples for guidance. Like personal failings, a company’s flaws, especially when typical of the whole industry, can prove fiercely resistant to improvement.

Today’s issue is an ambitious – perhaps overly ambitious? – discussion of common pitfalls that I have seen in the software industry when it came to attitudes towards and understanding of product requirements.

Read on below for a discussion of how to better understand software requirements - and how to misunderstand them a little less.

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06005 Creating a Great Trade Show Playbook

Exhibiting at trade shows is a staple of marketing a software product. As part of a mix of marketing activities to reach your target market, trade shows provide visibility for your product, build familiarity, and bring in sales leads.

Trade shows are also costly, not only in terms of sheer dollars but also in terms of time spent by skilled employees to plan for the show, prepare for it, and man the booth. Because of the cost, your company has to limit the number of shows where it exhibits, so it has to make the most of each show.

One tactic that I have used to get the biggest payout from a trade show is to create a Playbook. Like a playbook for a football team, this document succinctly provides all the information your trade show team needs to act effectively. While having a written guide seems like a no-brainer, I have only seen a small number of the most organized and focused trade show planners who took the trouble to create one, much to everyone’s benefit.

Read on below for advice on what to include when you create a Playbook for your trade show team in order to maximize your company’s return on a trade show.

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06004 Push-Me-Pull-You: 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 on below 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.

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06003 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 on for a discussion of what to include in your training to the sales force so that they are best positioned to make your product succeed through strong sales.

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06002 Customer Loyalty: Mind and Body, Heart and Soul

Volumes have been written about the concept of customer loyalty and how essential it is to a company’s profitability and growth. There’s no denying that when a company has loyal customers who keep coming back year after year to buy its product and recommend it to others, then that company sells more products at lower cost than it otherwise would. In other words, they get more revenue at a higher profit.

A whole lot has also been written about how to build customer loyalty. These stories cover companies that advocate vastly different ways of creating loyal customers. Many of them talk about providing stellar customer service. Still others say that you need to create a product that delights customers and is such high quality that it needs no service. Others say you need a product that sells itself through word of mouth. Others swear by organizing their entire company structure around customer facing processes. Some companies rely on events like parties or sponsored sports and games.

None of these ideas is a bad one. But it strikes me that with all the companies out there with dramatically different products, some complex and some simple, some intangible and some very concrete, that there’s such a variety between organizations that not every company can win with service, or product quality, or what-have-you, as its key ingredient for customer loyalty.

Instead, each company is called upon to understand the hand it has been dealt in terms of product complexity, quality, ease of use, and type of customer. Customer loyalty through business-to-business channel sales will be very different from loyalty direct from consumers.

I believe that each company must craft its own slightly customized, perhaps even quirky, recipe for creating customer loyalty. And that recipe consists of a mix of four ingredients: mind & body, heart & soul.

Read on below for some ideas on how to connect with your customers on the level of mind, body, heart, and soul.

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