The Accidental Product Manager

How Can Product Managers Get Sales To Use Social Media Correctly?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:00:46 +0000

How can Twitter help boost sales of your product?
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By now just about every product manager knows that not only has social media arrived, it has just about taken over the world. The use of social media has made its way into everyone’s product development definition. The problem that a lot of us are having is that we’re not 100% sure about how best to use this new marketing tool. Where things get even trickier is when we try to figure out how to get our sales teams to do a better job of selling our products using social media. What’s the best way to do this?

Guidelines

As a product manager, you need to realize that as your sales teams go out into the real world and start to use social media tools to interact with potential customers, you may be facing a real problem.

There are a lot of different things that your sales people can do that instead of helping your product to be more successful may actually end up hurting it. This list is fairly long but it can include such things as false representation of what your product can do, disclosures of unannounced features or pricing, and even copyright violations as they talk about the competition.

What’s a product manager to do? You’d like to be able to add “knows how to teach sales to use social media” to your product manager resume, but how? The healthcare and the finance industry, because of how tightly they are regulated, have always had strict requirements about how their employees can communicate with the outside world. However, confidentiality and privacy issues can pop up in these or any industry.

What is going to be needed here are some well-crafted guidelines that show your sales teams what is permitted – and what is not. The good news for product managers is that there are companies that have already got this task done correctly: Nordstrom, IBM, and the U.S. Air Force are great examples. If you’d like to be able to have a good starting point for your company’s social media guidelines then check out Chris Boudreaux’s database of organizational policies.

Nuances

Just having your sales teams use social media is not going to be enough to attract more customers to your product. It turns out that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about using social media to sell a product.

There are a lot of examples of the wrong way. For example, in the world of social media your first impression carries a lot of weight and may be very hard to undo. The last thing that you want your sales teams to be doing is using social media like a modern day megaphone and shouting to the world how great your product is.

Instead, what you are going to want to teach them is to personalize their social media messages. Get them to participate in social media discussions often, not just every once in a while. Perhaps most importantly, you are going to have to teach them to provide lots and lots of value to the social media ecosystem so that when it comes time to sell your product, they have a willing and receptive audience.

What All Of This Means For You

There is no doubt that based on their popularity, social media tools are here to stay. That means that as product managers we need to figure out how to use them in order to maximize the sales of our products. If this isn’t already part of your product manager job description, it soon will be. Since we don’t actually sell our products, this means that we’ve got to find out how to teach our sales teams to use social media to sell more.

As with every new marketing tool, there are a host of dangers associated with these new social media tools. Before anyone goes crazy with them, it is you job as product manager to make sure that the company provides its sales teams with guidelines that will teach them what they can and cannot do. Once that’s taken care of, the more delicate task of teaching social media nuances needs to occur if your sales teams are to be successful.

Social media is too important to be ignored by you – it’s where your customers are living and interacting every day. Since it’s your sales teams that will be selling your product, they need to learn how to use social media to sell your product to your customers. Take the time to teach them and you’ll be able to count the new sales as they roll in.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Which of the 9 different major social media platforms do you think would be the best one to use in order to connect with your product’s customers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You’ve just been put in charge of managing the best product ever. Based on the product development definition, you know that this product is going to be a run-away success: it solves a critical problem that a lot of customers are currently facing. There’s just one problem: either the product does not yet exist or it exists, but doesn’t do what it needs to do. You’re going to need some money – what’s it going to take to get your company to fund your product?

Three Letters That Can Help Product Managers Be More Successful: ATM

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 06 May 2013 09:00:28 +0000

Creating a product is a first step, where to put it is the most important step

Wouldn’t it be great if the product that you were managing was used by millions of people every day? Even better, wouldn’t it be cool if it performed some function that generally made them happy after they used it – like gave them money or something like that? Well guess what, product managers who work for banks and who are in charge of the bank’s ATM machines have this kind of job. What can we learn from them?

Location, Location, Location

ATM machines have been with us for just over 20 years now. When ATM machines first showed up, Banks were very excited. By deploying ATM machines Banks were able to reduce bank branches and thereby reduce expensive branch staff. These days, bank ATM product managers struggle to prove that their product is still valuable to the bank.

I may have said that incorrectly. Banks know that ATM machines are valuable; however, most of the bank’s senior management doesn’t see their ATM machines as profit centers. James Lau and Jeffrey Leong over at A.T. Kearney have looked into this and what they’ve discovered is that ATM machines can generate a great deal of money for a bank.

ATM machines make their money in two different ways. One that we’re all familiar with is when someone uses a different bank’s ATM machine to conduct banking with their bank and they get charged a “foreign fee”. When a bank’s customer uses one of the bank’s ATM machines it’s called an “on-us” transaction. The researchers assigned this transaction a nominal value to this type of transaction because it both attracts new customers and keeps existing customers happy. Product managers who can optimize both of these activities will have found something else to add to their product manager resume.

The trick for bank ATM product managers is to get their products to maximize the amount of money that they are bringing in for the bank by optimizing the location of every ATM machine in their network. You could almost say that this is a part of their product development definition. The reason that this is so important is because top performing ATM machines have been shown to bring in between US$30,000 – US$60,000 more per year than the lowest performing machines.

How To Play The ATM Game Better

If location is so important to managing a successful ATM machine product, then just exactly how do bank ATM machine product managers go about determining where to put their ATM machines? It turns out that there is a four-step process that product managers can go through to do this correctly:

ATM Objectives: The first step is for the bank’s ATM machine product managers to make sure that they both define and weigh the objectives for each ATM machine. These can include such things as generating fees, wining market share, improving service, etc.

Identify “Catchment” Locations: Clearly ATM machine product managers are going to want to place their ATM machines where their customers are. They also have to weight this against where they already have ATM machines.

Create A Short List: From the master list of possible ATM machine sites, create a short list of sites using branch manager feedback, focus groups, and location scouts. Actually going out to each site and conducting a site survey will provide even more information.

Pinpoint Sites: Now the product manager can apply assumptions on demographics, adjust their data for location characteristics, and optimize based on other factors. This is where things like game theory can be brought in to help out in order to select the final location.

What All Of This Means For You

Every product manager dreams about having their product bask in the spotlight and be used by many customers every day. Who wouldn’t want this to be a part of their product manager job description? Bank product manager who are responsible for the bank’s ATM machines have such a job. It turns out that this is a very important job for the bank’s overall success.

Bank ATM product managers have to take the time to understand the process that they need to go through in order to select the proper place to put an ATM machine. Even after this there may be low performing ATM machines in their network. This then requires advanced techniques, including game theory, to be used to optimize the ATM machine’s location.

ATM machines are something that most of us don’t spent a lot of time thinking about – they just seem to be where they need to be when we need to use them.

However, it turns out that the bank’s ATM product managers have to invest a great deal of time and effort to make sure that their ATMs are placed in the correct locations and then they have to constantly be optimizing their network. The rest of us can learn from their attention to detail and the fact that they have developed ways to deal with constantly changing customer needs.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think would be the best way to determine that you had deployed enough ATM machines?

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Which Forms Of Social Media Should Product Managers Be Involved In?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:00:18 +0000

So many choices – which part of the social media should a product manager be involved in?
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How many social media ecosystems are out there these days? By my count (if you still include MySpace), there are 9 big ones. As an already overworked product manager working on your product development definition this means that you’ve got an important question that you’re going to have to answer: which ones are you going to use to promote your product and which ones are you going to let fall by the wayside?

Picking The Right Metrics For Your Product

Before you can have any hope of evaluating which of the many different social media ecosystems you are going to want to pursue in order to promote your product, you are first going to have to make a decision regarding which metrics are the ones that you’ll need to use to evaluate each ecosystem. Make the right choice and you’ll have something that you can add to your product manager resume, make the wrong choice and there goes your product.

As you can well imagine, the list of possible metrics is quite lengthy. `However, the folks over at the Harvard Business Review in a recent study of the different social media ecosystems broke it down into 4 primary metrics.

The first of these was, of course, gender. This was followed by age. Both of these may be critical metrics for understanding where your product’s customers are spending their time. Next came education and household income. Taken together these metrics can provide you with a good feel for where the customers that you want to go after are spending their social media time.

The 4 metrics were then applied to 9 of the most popular social media ecosystems. These ecosystems included: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Myspace, Pinterest, Google+, and Digg.

Gender & Age

Where do boys and girls spend their time online when they are using social media? As you can well imagine, most of the social media ecosystems are fairly evenly split down the middle. However, there are a few surprises. Specifically, Pinterest is skewed towards the ladies with about 75% of their users being female. Likewise, both Reddit and Google+ seem to have more male users than female users.

When it comes to age, things get a bit more interesting. Not surprisingly, you are going to find the older users using LinkedIn as their primary social media ecosystem. However, this is followed by both Facebook and YouTube. The youngest users, those 24 and under, are the heaviest users of Google+ and Reddit.

Education & Household Income

When we dive just a bit deeper into the lives of our customers, we start to uncover more interesting things. The most highly educated users are using LinkedIn the most. The least educated users can be found on YouTube and Twitter. Across all of the various social media ecosystems, the majority of the users fall into the “some college” camp.

When we take a look at the role that household income plays in who uses what social media, once again LinkedIn attracts the wealthiest users. What’s more interesting is that Digg is the site that attracts the users with the lowest income and this is followed by Pinterest.

What All Of This Means For You

The explosion of new social media ecosystems seems to be nonstop. Right now there are 9 separate popular social media systems that some or all of your customers are probably using. Although social media was probably not a part of your original product manager job description, it’s there now. There simply is not enough time in the day to stay on top of all of these different social media outlets so what’s a product manager to do?

In order to sort through the various social media ecosystems, a product manager first needs to prioritize which metrics are the most important for his or her product. After that, analysis can be made based on gender, age, education, and household income.

The one thing that I think that we can all agree on is that the world of social media is still rapidly changing. Although we may never be able to be able to say that we are on top of it, with a little analysis we probably can say that we are spending our limited time in the right places.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it is worth any of your time to manage your product’s identity on MySpace anymore?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

p>Wouldn’t it be great if the product that you were managing was used by millions of people every day? Even better, wouldn’t it be cool if it performed some function that generally made them happy after they used it – like gave them money or something like that? Well guess what, product managers who work for banks and who are in charge of the bank’s ATM machines have this kind of job. What can we learn from them?

What Every Product Manager Needs To Know About The Hadoop Database Solution

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:00:54 +0000

Hadoop is a database that solves the problem of how to handle big data
Image Credit

Just in case you’ve been living with your head underneath a rock, the world appears to have gone “big data” crazy lately. Your customers, your company, and probably your competition have all started to talk about the problem of big data and just exactly what can be done about it. Somehow you are going to have to find a way to work “big data” into your product development definition. No matter what type of product you manage, it sure seems like you need to understand what this problem is – and how it can be solved.

What’s Wrong With How We Handle Data Today?

Before we go running off trying to solve a problem, let’s first make sure that we really have a problem that needs to be solved. If you and I were going to create a database today, how would we go about doing it?

Let’s say that we wanted to create a database to hold name and address information. The simplest way to think about a database is to picture a table. This table has both rows and columns. In our name and address database, we’ll create a new row to hold your address information and we’ll start out by creating a new column to hold your name. We’ll then create 5 more columns and use each one to store one component of your home address: street, apartment number, city, state, and zip code (assuming that you live in the United States).

That’s it! Now we have a very small database: it contains one record (yours) and that record holds 6 pieces of data: your name and your address. Now if we went one step further and added the names and addresses of everyone who lives in your town to this database it would grow from one record to now contain thousands of records, perhaps even millions of records depending on where you live.

Now imagine that you owned a flower shop in your town. One day you discover that you have too many roses. You’d like to send a postal letter to everyone who lives in the area around your store and remind them that a great way to say “I love you” is by giving someone roses. You don’t want to send this email to everyone in town because if they live too far away they won’t make the drive to your store and you’d just be wasting the money to send them the letter.

You can now go to our new database and ask it a question: please provide me with a list of all of the names and addresses for people whose address has the same area code as my store (this means that they live nearby). Once the database provides you with this list, you can go address all of your letters and sell your roses.

Say Hello To The Hadoop Distributed File System

The type of database system that we just described has worked very well for the past 40 years. However, in the past 15 years problems have started to show up because of big data. A little company called Google was one of the first to run into this problem. Back in 2002, Google wanted to index the world wide web every day – talk about a lot data!

Let’s think about a challenging problem. How about if we wanted to create a database that contained all of the data that was collected as a part of the last U.S. census. There are roughly 360M people living in the United States. If each answered 100 census questions, than that is a database with 360M rows and 100 columns – one big database!

Even if we were able to fit it onto a storage system that our little database engine from the last example could use, it would take a week or more to generate an answer to a question that we asked it. Don’t even think about having multiple people use it at the same time. If you could figure out a way to solve this problem, then that would be something that you could add to your product manager resume.

A better way to handle big data was needed. A researcher named Doug Cutting stumbled across a couple of papers that Google had published that talked about how they had solved the problem of indexing an ever growing word wide web in a reasonable amount of time. Doug realized that with some work, he might be able to use these ideas to create a database that could handle very large data sets. With this idea, the Hadoop database system was born.

When it comes to big data, the first problem that has to be solved is how to store all of that data. No matter how you slice it, it’s going to take a lot of hard drives. The Hadoop distributed file system tackles the problem in the following way.

The fundamental unit that makes up a Hadoop computer consists of a “node”. A node is a cheap processor, some memory, and one or more disk drives (generally hundreds of disk drives). Put a bunch of nodes together and you’ve got a “rack”. Put a bunch of racks together and now you’ve got a “cluster”.

First the data is broken up into 512k “storage units”. Next these storage units are grouped together into 64k “file units”. The file units are then stored on disks associated with a cluster. Since any disk in the cluster might fail at any time, multiple copies of each file unit (generally 3 copies) are stored on different disk drives at the same time. Although you are going to need to have a lot of disk drives, you have now solved your storage problem for your big data.

Did Somebody Say MapReduce?

Having all of that data stored will do you no good if you can’t ask the Hadoop database questions and get answers quickly. That’s where the Hadoop MapReduce function comes in.

This function is responsible for taking your question, splitting it up and sending it to all of the clusters. There an answer is created for the cluster. MapReduce then collects all of the answers and reduces these answers down into a single answer which is then returned to you.

What this means is that the problem of searching a very large database has been transformed from a single big problem into a set of distributed smaller problems. Since each of the file units are exactly the same size, the operation will take the same amount of time in each cluster and you’ll have your answer very quickly.

What All Of This Means For You

Whew! That’s a lot of database talk – what does a product manager care about all of this? No matter if your product can make use of a Hadoop database or if you are the one who is going to need to use a Hadoop database in order to process all of the product data that you collect and store, Hadoop is eventually going to be part of your life.

You might not be programming your product’s Hadoop database, but you will be interacting with the people who are. You need to understand how the system works so that you’ll be able to interpret what your database support team is telling you. Consider having a working knowledge of Hadoop to have been added to your product manager job description.

Take the time to do some studying and find out what situations the Hadoop database is well suited for. Work with your support team to make sure that they design a solution that is going to support your product’s needs for both today as well as for tomorrow.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should build your own Hadoop computer or use someone else’s in the cloud?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

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Product Managers Need To Learn How To Offer Customers A Next Best Offer

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:42 +0000

The better you know your customer, the better you’ll know what to offer them…

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If there was a perfect world for us product managers to live in, what would it look like? Sure there would be white unicorns everywhere but what would our jobs be like? I’d guess that we’d know our customers much better than we know them today. In a perfect world, starting with the product development definition, product managers would be able to target their customers with the perfectly customized offer at exactly the right time across the right set of channels. Does this perfect world exist?

Just Exactly What Is A “Next Best Offer”?

Product managers have always wanted to be able to read their customer’s mind. Here in the 21st Century it’s starting to look like we just might be able to do this. The arrival of analytics is providing product managers with mountains of data about their customer’s preferences and how they go about the process of shopping. However studies show that most of us are not making good use of all of this data.

Back in the old days, if they indeed ever existed, your customers would form a healthy relationship with your product’s sales team. They would have discussions about what the customer was trying to accomplish with their business and your skilled and knowledgeable sales team could guide the customer to the product or configuration that would best meet their needs.

Sadly, this situation rarely exists these days. Instead, your customers have too little time to develop these types of relationships and you have too many and too complex products for your sales teams to have a good understanding of all of them.

What all of this means is that all too often, your customers are going to find themselves on their own when they are trying to find a way to solve the problem that they are facing. This is where product managers need to step in and start to offer Next Best Offers (NBO). Do this right and you’ll have something that you can add to your product manager resume.

A Next Best Offer is based on all of that demographic and psychographic information that you are probably already collecting on your customers. You use this to create a highly customized offer that will steer your customers to the right configuration of your product. This is what we call a Next Best Offer.

In the brave new world that product managers are living in, we may be tempted to go after a bunch of goals using all of the new consumer analytics data that we now have. However, a Next Best Offer program offers us the best value in terms of both potential ROI and enhanced competitiveness.

How Can Product Managers Define Our Objectives?

If we are going to get the most out of our NBO efforts, we’re going to have to start in the right place. The experts agree that before we do anything else, we first have to create clear objectives for our NBO program.

If you want to have any hope of coming up with clear objectives for an NBO program, then you are going to have to be able to answer the simple question “What do you want to achieve?” The good news is that there is no one right answer to this question.

Depending on what your company’s current goals are, you may have to choose between many different answers to this question. You may be trying to increase the revenues that your product brings in. You may trying to boost the loyalty of the customers that you already have. You may want to get more money from the customers that you already have. Perhaps you simply want more new customers.

No matter which objective best meets your needs, you need to choose one that you can use when you are trying to figure out how to use your customer data in order to make the perfect offer to your customers. However, there is one more thing that you need to understand.

As with all things in marketing, the objective that you select that you’ll be using to achieve product success with is not set in concrete. This means that there is a good chance that your market conditions will change on you at some point in time. When this happens, you need to make sure that you’ve remained flexible enough to modify what your objective is.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

In a perfect world, a part of every product manager job description would state we were to instinctively know what kind of solution our customers were searching for in order to solve their problems. We don’t live in a perfect world so we need to collect as much data about our customers as we can and then use analytics to determine how we can best serve them.

However, all too often we don’t do a good job of accomplishing this. What we would like to be able to do is to present our customers with the correct Next Best Offer which we defined as being the right offer at the right time across the right channels. However, this won’t be possible for us to do if we haven’t taken the time to choose the correct objectives.

Having a great deal of customer data is a great feeling. However, all of that data is not going to do us any good unless we are able to find a way to transform it into actionable customer knowledge. Creating Next Best Offers is the best way to go about doing this.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should limit yourself to just one objective for your NBO program?

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What Can A Tax Software Company Teach Product Managers About Customer Information Overload?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:00:37 +0000

Product managers need to make sure that product selection is not taxing on customers…
Image Credit

Ugg, taxes! I don’t like them, you don’t like them, nobody likes them. One of the reasons that nobody likes taxes is that they are so very complicated – what counts as taxable income and what doesn’t? It turns out that the company Intuit realized that we don’t like taxes and they’ve made a lot of money with their TurboTax software that many of us in the USA use to prepare our taxes. There’s a lesson for us product managers to learn from the world of tax preparation software – make it easy to select your product and you’ll be very successful.

Finding Your Way

The more difficult the problem that your product addresses, the more complex it is going to be for your potential customers to determine if they want to buy it. This is almost a part of the standard product development definition. That’s why you need to create product information navigation tools that they can use to make their decision making process simpler.

Over at Intuit they accomplished this for their TurboTax product by creating the “TurboTax Live Community” where people who have either bought the software or who are considering buying it can come to get answer to their questions. This allows Intuit to provide their customers with the right information at exactly the right time.

Building Trust

Nobody is going to buy your product until they trust that it will solve their problems and they trust that you’ll stand behind your product if they have any problems with it. In order to have any chance of being successful and boosting your product manager resume you are going to have to get your customers to believe what you are telling them. This means that your potential customers really need to hear from other customers.

Intuit helps this to happen by hosting over 160,000 user generated reviews of their TurboTax product on its website. Not all of these reviews are positive – there are number of one star reviews. However, because these low rating reviews exist, a customer visiting the site will believe the other reviews. The more that potential customers see that people just like them are buying and using the product, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Making A Decision

When all of the available information has been collected, it is time for your potential customers to weigh it and then make a decision. This can be the toughest part of the buying process. The more products, configurations, and options that you have, the more difficult it is for your customers to make a decision to buy.

Intuit attempts to solve this problem by providing a comparison chart of their products presented in a side-by-side fashion. This simplifies the process of making a comparison. They also allow customers to select boxes that indicate what features are important to them and it then helps them to make a decision about what product to buy.

What All Of This Means For You

Complex products create complex decisions for our customers. As product managers it is part of our product manager job description to take steps to simplify the process of evaluating and selecting our product as much as possible.

Intuit, the company that makes the TurboTax software, has done this very well. They’ve help their customers to navigate through all of the available product information. They’ve taken steps to allow other customer’s review of their product to act as social proof for potential customers. Finally, they’ve helped their customers to make decision by presenting their products in a way that makes side-by-side comparisons easy to do.

Complex products solve complex problems and so our customers truly do need our products. However, they are not going to buy them if they can’t figure out if our product is going to solve their problem. Take the time to understand how your customer is going to go about making their buying decision and then take steps to simplify this process for them.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think that you should do if someone posts a very bad review of your product on your web site?

Click here to get automatic updates when
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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

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How Product Managers Can Help Their Customers Weigh Their Options

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:00:37 +0000

Customers have to weigh their options when deciding between products
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Have you ever had to make a decision between two products that you were considering buying? How did you go about doing this? If you are like most of us, you collected what data you could on both products and then you weighed the data in order to try to see which product would best meet your needs. Just exactly how do your customers go about weighing your product against other products?

More Product Data Does Not Make Product Selection Easier

Just exactly how do your customers go about determining if they want to buy your product? Studies have shown that for products that cost US$50 or more, 25% of customers say that they spend most of their effort on product research. Of this 25%, 20% say that most of their effort is spent doing comparison shopping. How are you helping your customers to do this?

As product managers, all too often we think that we are helping our customers make a decision about our product when we really are not. What we tend to do is to create buying guides for our customers that list product features so that our customers can choose between our small, medium, and large products.

It turns out that this really does nothing to help our customers. More information is not what our customers are looking for. Rather what they want product managers to do is to help them to feel confident about the choice that they are trying to make. What this means is that we need to provide our customers with a way to both identify and then weigh the product features that are the most important to them.

How To Help Your Customer Weigh Your Product

When it comes to helping your customer feel confident that they are making the right decision, one company that has got it right is the diamond company, De Beers. They are the ones who came up with the “4Cs” system of evaluating and comparing diamonds (cut, color, clarity, and caret). This approach took a process that most people know nothing about and provided them with confidence that they were weighing the essential features needed to make the right decision.

As product managers we need to help our customers control the number of features that enter into their weighting process. Sometimes there may be many, many different features associated with our products and as product managers we need to create ways that will help our customers sort through all of these features in order to identify the ones that really matter to them.

One way to go about doing this is by adding logic to your product’s web site. You can have the customer provide some basic information about themselves and then use that information to narrow the product configurations that they should be considering. By doing this you will have made it easier for them to weigh their options when making the buying decision.

What All Of This Means For You

Making decisions is hard work and your customers have to make decisions when they are considering whether or not to buy your product. As a product manager, you need to help them with the product weighing process.

One thing that too many product managers don’t realize is that simply by providing your customers with even more information about your product you won’t make the decision making process any easier for them. Instead what you need to do is to provide them with tools that will allow them to filter the available information down to just the elements that matter to them.

The easier that you make it for your customers to weigh what your product has to offer against what other products offer, the easier it will be for them to reach a buying decision. If they see how simple it is to interact with your product, then it will be cast in a favorable light. When that happens, you’ll have more customers selecting your product and that is what it takes to make a product manager happy!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How many different product characteristics do you think a customer can comfortable weigh?

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Product Managers Need To Make The Product Purchase Process Perfect

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:00:26 +0000

Sometimes your customers just want to know which direction to go…

Image Credit
Image Credit

As product managers, we have a responsibility to our potential customers to make the product identification, selection, and purchasing process as easy as possible. However, all too often we seem to get caught up in trying to use the latest wiz-bang marketing tools that we’ve just read about and we can lose sight of just exactly how our customers go about the process of purchasing our product…

Where Is Your Customer At?

Back in product management school (we all went to that didn’t we?), right after we learned what the product development definition was we were taught that the buying process is not an instantaneous decision but rather it is a process that each customer goes through. In order to understand why potential customers are (or are not) buying your product, you need to have a good understanding of just exactly where they are in this buying process at all times.

In our desire to win over more customers it can be very easy for product managers to make the purchasing path too confusing for our customers. If we want to make the purchasing path more efficient, then what we don’t have to do is to create the fanciest web site. Rather what we need to find is a way to do is to minimize the number of different information sources that our potential customers will have to come into contact with as they move through the purchasing process for our product.

What you need to do is to collect information. Lots of information. What you are going to be looking for is data from four modern marketing sources: ad-effectiveness, monitoring of social media channels, web site clickstream analysis, and campaign-tracking information. Your goal, once you have all of this information, will be to get a feel for the common purchase paths that your customers take when they are looking for a solution to their problem. Get this right and you’ll have something to add to your product manager resume.

Once you understand how your customers are going about trying to solve their problem, you can determine how many of your customers are taking what path. You can also determine which of the paths instill the greatest amount of confidence in your customers.

Your goal here will be to determine at which point in the process you can provide your customers with what type of product information in order to move them closer to making a buying decision. You’ll also be able to determine where in the process your potential customers may be losing confidence in your product and may end up giving up or selecting another firm’s product.

If you are looking for a magic bullet here, I’ve got some bad news for you – one does not exist. However, the product managers who do a good job of making it easy for their customers to select and purchase their product do it by making the purchasing process more personal.

What Information Does Your Customer Want?

Knowing what information your customers don’t want is important; however, is not really all that valuable. What you really need to know is what information your customers would like to have.

The key thing to understand when trying to answer this question is that there really are multiple answers. Depending on what stage in the purchasing process your customers is at, they’ll have a need for a different type of information.

You can expect a customer who is at the start of their search to have a need for more basic, high-level information. This can be determined, for example, by the type of web searches that they are doing. An example of this would be a search for “4G LTE mobile phones”. Later searches may show that the customer is getting ready to make a decision about their purchase. An example of this kind of search would be “Apple 4 vs Samsung Galaxy S III”.

The customers who are looking for general information can be directed by the product manager to product overview documents. However, when the customer is getting close to making a decision, you are going to want to personalize the process. You can do this by directing them to a web site where they could get social proof that selecting your product would be the right decision.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Our customers do not just wake up one day and decide that they are going to purchase our product. Instead, they go through a process in which they collect information, talk to other people who have solved the same problem, and finally make a buying decision.

As product managers, we need to be careful to not make the purchase process too complex for our customers. Instead, we want to make sure that they are only presented with the information that they need, when they need it. This means that we need to collect information to understand the purchase process and then we need to provide the right information at the right time. This should really be a part of every product manager job description.

Understanding how our customers come to the conclusion to purchase our products is the key to long term product success. We need to take the time to study the purchase process for our product and then make sure that we’re spending our product management time in the best way possible in order to ensure that we’ll have the greatest success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: When we understand the purchase process, who inside the company should we share this information with?

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More Product Data Does Not Make Product Selection Easier

How Roadmaps Can Prevent Product Managers From Getting Lost

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:00:33 +0000

A product roadmap is only valuable if a product manager knows how to use it
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Where is your product going to be in 6 months? What features will it have in a year? What is going to make your product different than everyone else’s in 5 years? If you can’t answer these questions, then perhaps you either don’t have a product roadmap or the one that you have isn’t doing its job. In either case, it looks like we need to do something about that…

What Is A Product Roadmap?

Although I suspect that we all have the same reaction when somebody asks us “do you know what a product roadmap is?” I think that we might be speaking too quickly if we just automatically say “yes”. Product managers believe that creating a product roadmap is part of the product development definition. On one level, we all know that a product roadmap is a document, either on paper or electronic, that shows the evolution of our product. After that, things tend to get just a bit fuzzy.

Let’s all take a step back for just a moment and give this some thought. Why bother to create a roadmap for your product? At its heart, a roadmap is simply a communication tool. It’s not intended to go into a lot of detail, but rather to provide a higher level view of where the product is at and where you want it to go over time. If you can get good at doing this, then this is something that you’ll be able to add to your product manager resume.

There are three critical pieces of information that are part of every product roadmap: milestones, features, and duration. The milestones are the points in time that there will be a significant change made to your product. Generally speaking, this is when a new release of your product will become available.

For each milestone, you’ll want to provide a list of the new or changed features that will now be available. What’s going to be very important here is that if you have a given feature that will be evolving over several milestones, you are going to have to very clearly call this out and make it obvious on your roadmap.

Finally, every roadmap has a duration. What this means is that your product roadmap needs to cover a specific period of time. The trick here is to make sure that it’s not too short (a one month roadmap may not be of any use for anyone) and not too long (a 20-year roadmap would only suit a small set of products).

How Should A Product Manager Use A Product Roadmap?

Having a roadmap for your product is a great start; however, the true value of your roadmap will come from how you choose to use it. All too often we product managers will go to the effort of creating a very nice roadmap and then we’ll just assume that it will work its magic and everyone will automatically know what it contains.

The product roadmap is a communications tool with the key word being “tool”. It is the responsibility of the product manager to use this tool in order to get all of the various parties that are involved with the product to be on the same page.

The product development team needs to be very aware of what is in the product roadmap. The reason that this is so important is because all too often a development team’s focus is on the next milestone – the next release of the product. What this means is that they may be making design decisions that will have to be changed in order to support future features. By taking the time to make sure that they fully understand where the product is headed, you will be impacting the design decisions that are being made today.

The sales and marketing communication teams also have to be briefed on the product roadmap. This is a tricky issue: you don’t want your sales teams selling things that don’t yet exist; however, so much of their interaction with the customer occurs informally that if you can make them aware of what is coming, they’ll pass the information along. The marketing communication team needs to know what the product roadmap is so that they can plan what they’ll be doing at future industry events and in terms of getting press coverage.

The final audience for your product roadmap is your end customer. Every customer who purchases your product is going to want to know that the product is still growing and evolving. Your roadmap can serve as the notification that your company is still investing in the product and then the delivery of those new features will confirm that the product is alive and doing well. For new customers, when they are trying to evaluate your product against other products, a product roadmap will show them that even if your product does not have as much functionality as another product, they can still select you because you’ll soon have everything that they need.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Product roadmaps are not easy things to make. They can take a considerable amount of time to collect all of the required information and then to get agreement from all involved parties. However, roadmaps are a powerful communication tool and the effort is well worth it. Creating a product roadmap should really be a part of every product manager’s product manager job description.

When you are creating a roadmap, you need to make sure that all three of the critical components are included: milestones, features, and duration. For each milestone of the product the features associated with that release need to be clearly identified. Every roadmap needs to cover a specific duration of time that is not too short and not too long.

A product manager spends his or her time working with a wide variety of people in order to create the next, better version of their product. Just creating the product is not enough, you need to tell the world what your plans are and generate some excitement about what’s coming. Your product roadmap is the best way to go about doing this.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How often do you think that you should update your product roadmap?

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Why Product Management Is Broken And What To Do About It

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:00:10 +0000

Product Management is broken
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Excuse me for just a moment while I look around for my soapbox – oh, here it is. Now I’m ready to share a shocking piece of information with you. Please make sure that you are sitting down. Product Management is broken. It really does not work. Yes, some products are successful, but it’s not because of the actions of the product managers – it’s good luck, it’s market conditions, it’s the missteps of their competitors. What’s gone wrong here?

How Product Management Broke

How did we get into this situation? I think that a lot of it comes from the very name of the task that so many of us have signed up to perform: “product management”. What does that mean anyway?

Look, if I asked you to manage a group of people, how would you go about doing that? You’d probably sit down, figure out what needed to be done, and then you’d tell the people that you were managing what they needed to do. With a little luck, they’d do it and you’d be considered to be a successful manager.

Now let’s take a look at what it means to be a product manager. You are given a product or a service to manage and a product development definition. You sit down, determine what the market really needs, and then you tell your product what to do. That’s when nothing happens. The reason that nothing happens is because you really can’t manage a product – it does not have the ability to listen to you or to do what you want. There really is no such thing as true “product manager”.

Instead, what we do is to spend our time trying to get various people in the company who don’t actually work for us to do things that will improve the chances of our product becoming a success. Hmm, that sure seems a lot different than “managing a product”. However, if you take a look at the various product management frameworks and task lists out there, they all seem to think that we’re actually controlling a product. The truth is that we’re not. Unfortunately, that’s not something that any of us really want to put on our product manager resume

How To Fix Product Management

So how are we going to fix the product management profession? It’s pretty clear that the idea of actually managing a product doesn’t really line up with the reality. It’s pretty clear that we need a new paradigm here.

I’d like you to take just a moment and think back to the last time that you watched the Winter Olympics on TV. Remember all of those strange sports that you only see during the Olympics? One of the ones that has always caught my attention has been Curling.

In Curling, a large, heavy stone is slid along a sheet of ice and two people with brooms attempt to make its path a smooth as possible without actually touching the stone. The goal is to make the stone end up in the correct final resting place.

In all honesty, this sport reminds me very much of what we product managers are trying to do. Often we’ve not actually launched the big, heavy product that we are responsible for. However, just like the Curlers with the brooms, it is our job to clear a path for our product in order to get it to end up being as successful as possible.

What this means is that our focus as product managers has to be less on controlling the path that our product is going to take simply because there’s not a lot that we can do about that. Where we should be spending our time and energy instead is clearing a path for our products so that they will be successful.

Right now there are no frameworks or product management books that take this approach. Instead, they spend a lot of time talking about how you can get the stone to move in a different direction. I believe that your market and your customers have control over that. Don’t waste your time trying to change your product’s direction. Instead you need to grab a broom and get to work!

What All Of This Means For You

The idea behind just exactly what a product manager is appears to be flawed. In reality, product managers really don’t spend any time managing their products. The reason for this is that products can’t be managed – they can’t hear what you tell them and they can’t respond to your wishes. You’ll never find this on any product manager job description.

Instead, what product managers need to understand is that just like in the Winter Olympic sport of Curling, the trajectory that our product is going to take is pretty much out of our hands. Instead of futile efforts to change its direction, product managers need to understand where their efforts can have an effect. This comes down to clearing a path for their product to take.

I fully understand that not everyone is going to agree with my point-of-view. Many product managers have a lot invested in the old school product management frameworks that exist today. However, give my ideas some thoughts, think about what you’ve been able to accomplish (or not!), and see if this new way of looking at product management might solve some of the problems that you are looking at today…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you can’t change your product’s direction, then what’s the best way to get your target customers to stand where it’s going to end up?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!