Last Month at ProductCamp, I had the privilege to work with some of the great team from Pragmatic Marketing, like Graham Joyce and John Milburn. They were kind enough to give me an advance copy of the new book from Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott entitled Tuned In. After reading it cover-to-cover, I can recommend it as a great resource and vehicle for the message that Pragmatic Marketing has carried for years.
The whole point of Tuned In is that there is a better way of developing products and services, and better products and services to be developed if only we listen to and understand our customers. This message will sound very familiar to anyone who has been to a Pragmatic Marketing training, or who has read their blogs. It is deceptively simple, and it sounds so easy – why wouldn’t you talk to your customers? Yet, most companies don’t.
Tuned In puts a wrapper around everything that Pragmatic Marketing teaches in their trainings, and David Meerman Scott’s message about how to talk with customers dovetails well with developing products that make sense.
My biggest beef with Pragmatic Marketing has always been that they are too theoretical, and that “the matrix” is academic. That theory means that you leave the training with a head full of good ideas about what you should be doing, but few ideas on how you should be doing it (e.g. connecting with customers, getting buy in from Executives, etc). My favorite part about Tuned In is that they start to break down these walls with some really great examples of putting the process to work “on the ground.”
Tuned In is not a how-to manual, but a good reference for you to refer to when you want to refresh what you learned. I’d also recommend handing it off to a skeptical Executive – my copy was just over 200 pages and I nearly finished it on a round-trip flight from Austin to Vegas, so you may be able to fit it within their attention span.
Some of the greatest ideas are great because they are obvious – or rather, they feel obvious after you’re exposed to them. The ideas presented in Tuned In are obvious and presented in such a “smack your forehead” way that makes you wonder why you didn’t tie them all together yourself. The mantra of know thy customer is real, is powerful, and is true. Reading Tuned In will get you re-energized, and it could be the spark that you need to get more budget, headcount, or political support – or more importantly, what helps you turn your product or company into a market winner.
On a side note, I’m going to try hard to keep Product Beautiful active over the next few months. I just started a new job and we have our first child coming any day now, so time for posting may be reduced. If any of you would like to guest blog on Product Beautiful, please drop me an email at pt.young@gmail.com to let me know – I’d love your help!
This post is part of a three-part series about changing jobs in Product Management. Part one was about doing a self-evaluation and farming your network.
After you’ve done your evaluation and reached far and deep into your network (which you are doing anyway – right?), at some point someone will find you.
The point of any your search is for you to find, but also for you to be found, because hiring managers and companies will make a much more lucrative offer to someone they feel like they’ve vetted. I highly encourage raising your online profile through creative PR. It’s not about putting yourself out there to find a job, it’s about being recognized as a “go-to” Product Management expert in your field/geography/niche. Face-to-face events like ProductCamp are great for showing your depth of expertise, which you can leverage into fun online conversations down the road (aside: every city should have a ProductCamp. Email me if you want help setting it up).
No one gets a formal request to interview right off the bat anymore. You’ll get an email, probably from the HR or recruiter, saying that they saw your profile on LinkedIn and you’re a match for some talent that they are looking for. This is where you critically need to have done your self assessment so that you already know if this company is one of your targets, and why. If you’re interested, ask to have an informal meeting with the hiring manager, which may be face-to-face or a phone screen.
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First, I’d like to thank those of you who keep up with Product Beautiful. Many of you I’ve had a chance to meet through networking, ProductCamp, at tradeshows, or we just ran into one another. Something I try to do with Product Beautiful is give Product Managers some helpful strategic thoughts and tactical tips for situations that you face in your job. This series of posts is about the process of changing jobs in Product Management and Product Marketing.
I am currently in the job change process, leaving NetStreams and moving to much larger company in a different industry. Going through the process has made me reflect and think about what people mean when they say “He left the right way.” To be successful in business and in life you need to build more bridges than you burn, so it is important to know the unspoken rules about entering and leaving jobs, because while people may say “it’s just business;” it is personal, relationships matter, and telling your boss that you’re leaving can be a sensitive conversation.
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Japanese women are bound by cultural norms that by Western standards may seem strict. Over the past 20 years, a trend has developed where as Japanese women enter the workforce, they are delaying having children to have a career, and are becoming more assertive about their wants and needs as consumers. As a Product Manager, this is an interesting test lab for finding new problems to solve, since new groups of potential customers don’t generally appear as quickly or as aggressively as the working Japanese woman.
CNN is running a short video clip about a fascinating new business catering to this demographic in Japan: overworked, under appreciated Japanese women who feel constrained by the rules and traditions of Japanese society and appreciate the freedom and empowerment of their Western peers.
In this restaurant, hosted exclusively by Western males, the servers dote on their Japanese clients, almost in a reversal of the old geisha tradition. The best part of the video is that the owner went out and interviewed 200+ women about what they wanted before investing in the concept. There is nothing special about the food or tiara offered to each patron – these women are buying on the service and experience that they can’t get elsewhere. This is a great way to keep costs in line while differentiating your product. Ikea is another example in a different industry.
How do you listen to customers to differentiate your business?
Sales people hate looking stupid. Unfortunately, we often put them in positions where they look very stupid by changing plans and roadmaps, which is our own fault. How do you keep the trust of your team when your business, roadmap, and customers are shifting in the sands around you?
There are lots of reasons that plans change, some good and some bad: the Market shifts, the competition makes a play, or the company dosen’t hit its goals and has to layoff developers, which pinch your resources. All of these create a refactor in your roadmap.
There are several tactics you can use to lessen the impact of changes to The Plan. I’ve written in the past about the importance of separating your Roadmap from your Release Plan. This simple change, and the cultural impact at the Executive level down to the developer level of thinking that “a product/feature on the Release Plan is locked in and cannot be changed” is huge. Remember that Release Plan’s mean that the product or feature’s release is imminent and committed – your Release Plan should never cover >6 months.
Also, realize that you don’t really own your roadmap. The best you can do with the roadmap is plot a general direction for a product or service, but when it comes down to it, the Market and the Business own the roadmap. The Roadmap is not yours; you are the steward of the Roadmap. I see products and companies fail all the time because they set their roadmap and expected the Market to bend to them; it doesn’t work that way.
One-off deals can also derail the roadmap. In a smaller company where there is immediate revenue pressure, the allure of a special deal that “just needs this one feature” is huge. Are you ready to turn down a million dollars in revenue? Most Executive teams are not. Be able to illustrate how any proposed feature or product changes to your roadmap delay or eliminate your entrance into new markets or buying personas. That changes the special deal conversation from emotion-based to data-based.
New Development VP’s also have a tendency to take roadmaps off course. The reason: they love changing technology architectures. I carry a cross on this one since I’ve been burned before, from a CTO who changed the team from Java to .NET…which meant retraining some developers, dumping other developers, and hiring new developers. We lost 12-18 months just spinning – it was stupid!
When you see the VP of Development pushing for a change in development platform or underlying technology, drill closely into the details of why. Most Dev VP’s aren’t dumb enough to say “it’s because it’s a fad” or “because I want to get quoted in CTO magazine!,” and they will come up with legitimate sounding reasons why the old platform sucks and we really, really need this new one. You need to provide the voice of reason – with today’s technology, you can build an adapter to and from almost any technology without having to rip up your entire platform. If it’s that strategic to change your platform, the company should be able to justify the expense of building a parallel platform next to the existing one without disrupting current development.
One type of project that can be completely immune to external forces taking them off roadmap is the open source project. Since developers in this model often develop for themselves and not for the Market, oftentimes they don’t care what their users are asking for. Other open source projects are more flexible to the wants of their Market and do adjust their plans.
What other reasons pop up for taking you off roadmap, and how do you combat them?
ProductCamp was this past Saturday, June 14th, and I’m happy to call it a complete success. In almost every way, it exceeded our goals for participation (130+ signed up, 80-90 showed up), sessions (over 20 presentations and roundtables), sponsors (11 great sponsors), volunteers, and feedback. Nearly everyone I talked to was extremely positive about the event, and was looking forward to the next PCA. The consensus of the group was that they would like to do ProductCamp twice yearly, so we’re going to do just that.
If you missed ProductCamp, first I’m sorry because you really missed out on a great day of teaching, learning, and networking. Second, we’ve capture many of the presentations and session notes on the ProductCamp page for you to review. Here are some highlights:
- Charlie Ray won Best Overall Session for his presentation on “Navigating the Poltical Minefields of Product Management.” It was a really raucous and entertaining session, some choice quotes included:
- “Product Management is the most visible position in the company. People see you hanging out with the CEO and glad handing the VP of Marketing, and they want you to fail!”
- “You should be aware of which people are setting you up to fail so you can get them first. Always listen, and never give information, only take it.”
- “The hardest thing I do in my job is fake sincerity and pretend like I’m interested in going to your meetings.”
- John Milburn of Pragmatic Marketing and I hosted a standing-room only session on Startup Product Management, based on the webinar we did several weeks ago (based on the article we wrote for the Pragmatic Marketer). This fostered a really good discussion of the differences between PM in a BigCo and Startups. My favorite quote from the audience:
- “Startups in the Valley are hipster-based. Startups in Austin are geek-based.” The commenter was making a point in reaction to John saying that if you asked VC’s they would say that the startups in Austin are less focused and driven than in the Valley.
- Ben Phenix gave a User Experience session that people raved about on Twitter. Twitter was the surprise hit of the day to me – everyone was using it, and you could monitor the tweets as a backchannel discussion to gauge how the day was going. We set up a PCA twitter account that everyone could reply to.
- Tal Boyd of Seilevel and Paul Sizemore went around a took lots of pictures, which are now on Flikr.
- Graham Joyce of Pragmatic Marketing handed out their upcoming book entitled “Tuned In” (which I am almost done reading…topic of an upcoming post) during lunch to the person that had been in Product Management the longest (28 years, sorry Don), the shortest (1 week), and who traveled the furthest to get to PCA: Plano – we actually had several Dallas people make the trip, which was great.
I had lots of interest from PCA participants to help plan the next ProductCamp. If you’re interested in planning, please join the Google Group PCA-Planning. If you’re interested in participating in a future PCA and would like to be kept up-to-date, please join the general ProductCamp Austin Google Group.
My favorite memento was I had the PCA participants who lasted until the evening all sign one of the ProductCamp Austin sponsor boards that we had made. That will live in my office as a memory of a great day, and more great days to come.
Some final notes, in the post-PCA survey we sent out, we asked “Would you recommend ProductCamp to your peers?” 100% said yes (n=26). That says enough for me!
Thanks to everyone who made ProductCamp Austin a reality, and let’s get started on the next one!
I am writing this from the “Dealing with Sales” discussion session at ProductCamp. It’s been an exciting day; lots of good sessions and very smart people. I will be updating the PCA wiki with all the session presentations and notes over the next few days. If you’re not here – you’re missing out!
“You should be more strategic.” “Product Management needs to focus on the strategic.” “I’d love to be more strategic, if only I wasn’t stuck doing all of these tactical things!”
Do any of the above sound familiar to you? Being asked to be more strategic, or wishing to become more strategic has been around as long as someone called themselves a Product Manager, but what does it really mean? How can you become more strategic when everyone is vying for your time – all the time?
Strategic is a term that has lost meaning since it became part of the Executive lexicon. Everyone wants to “be strategic,” because in the information economy we associate the most value with the people who come up with the best thoughts. Being tactical is, amazingly, viewed as a negative. You can hear the connotation drip from people’s mouths when they say it: “Oh, he’s a good candidate, but I think he’s too tactical.” Everyone wants to be the chef, no one the waiter…as if the food will cook itself and walk out to our customer’s tables.
Wikipedia defines strategy as:
“…a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning.” Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.”
You can boil that down to strategy is about having the best plan. Whenever I hear people talk about not being strategic enough (or I catch myself doing it), three thoughts immediately pop into my head:
- Being strategic is not binary; you don’t wake up one day and say “today I am strategic!” It is a journey and a destination.
- If your goal for being strategic is to be well regarded, to be a leader, and to “win,” remember that people follow leaders that inspire not only by their words but by their actions. Even great strategic thinkers have to get into the tactical muck and implement their grand plans.
- You can control how strategic you are by your own actions. If being strategic is about having the best plan, and by extension the best/smartest/most agile thoughts, you can train your brain to be a step ahead of your competition and your peers. Here are some thoughts on how.
I’ve been fortunate to work with some really bright thinkers so far in my career and picked up a few tips on how to be a more agile thinker. Everyone has their own processing style, for instance I like to digest and think on a topic for awhile before coming up with a plan of action, but you might be a snap thinker who can do all of this on the fly – if so you’re ahead of me! Note that some of these questions overlap in scope.
Ways to be a Strategic Thinker
- If we take the current action, what will be the downstream results to X, Y, Z? How will they likely react? How will we counter-react? You can’t get through a strategy discussion without a chess analogy, so here you go. These questions help you anticipate the moves of your competition, channel, etc, and decide beforehand how you want to react, so you’re not caught flat footed.
- Who and what else are connected to this decision? How will this affect them? I like this question because it forces you to think through the implications of your decisions early. It’s easy to sit back and say “let’s change our distribution model” or “let’s move to SaaS!,” but being able to accurately predict and describe the challenges of plan of action will help guide you to the best choice.
- Ask the Five Why’s; This sounds like a something out of a kung fu movie, but the Five Why’s are real. Five Why’s is a B-school/consulting method that says if you ask “why” at least 5 times you can get to the root of the problem. It’s all about digging deeper. Observe:
“I hate your company.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to wait for tech support for 3 hours to get someone on the phone!”
“Why?”
“Because your product didn’t work right when I plugged it in!”
“Why?”
“Because when I went to training they didn’t tell me I needed to hold the reset button while I plugged it in to load the factory settings!”
“Why?”
“Because your training is a joke, it’s all sales and no technical!”
“Why?”
“I only went because I couldn’t get a sales guy to call me back!”
In this example what appeared to be a product problem may actually be a sales, training, and support problem..
- What external influences will affect me in the future? If your competition introduced a product tomorrow with the same features as yours at half the price, how would you react?
- What internal influences will affect me in the future? If your company downsized and you lost half of your development staff, how would you react? What if you faced mega sales and had to quickly scale up?
- Where is “good enough” okay, and where do we really need to invest to provide an out-of-this world experience? You can’t do everything perfect all of the time.
- If I had unlimited funds, what one product development would move the revenue/profit/customer satisfaction needle more than all others? Which needle is more important to move?
- If I had only one development dollar, where would I put it and why? This is closely related to the question above it.
- Why are we winning today? Why are we losing? You need to understand your current stance if you want to build a solid future plan.
- What do we do better than everyone else? Do you understand your core competency?
- What problem do we need to solve for the customer? If you don’t know this…find out fast because it’s probably different than your assumption.
- What barriers exist to prevent us from winning? Is it better to smash through those barriers, or route around them? Sometimes the only road to winning is to go through a competitor. But it’s 3-5x more difficult/expensive to gain a new customer than to recruit business from existing customers. Is there a way to win business without a head on confrontation?
- What can we do that’s never been done before? I love this question because it’s challenging. It doesn’t just apply to engineering either, you can apply it to Marketing and Sales as well.
What other ways do you use to be a better strategic thinker?
I’m happy to announce that ZIGZAG Marketing, Accept Software, and Ryma Technologies have stepped up to sponsor ProductCamp Austin! The response to our little event has been nothing short of overwhelming. At last count we have over 115 participants registered, 10 sponsors, and over a dozen interesting and relevant sessions being offered by our participants.
Some of the sessions you’ll see at ProductCamp include:
- Startup Product Management: How to Build a Successful PM Practice at a Startup (Paul Young)
- Roundtable Discussion – Global Product Management: Working with Offshore Development and Manufacturing (Paul Young)
- Followup Roundtable – Global Product Management: Can Requirements Be Done Offshore? (Scott Sehlhorst)
- Technology Assessment: Where to put your Development Dollars (John Milburn)
- Feature Prioritization: How do YOU do it? Learn from other’s experiences!(Bjorn Aannestad)
- Priorities and Roadmaps: Guiding the Successful Business (Pat Scherer)
- Navigating the political minefields of product management (Charlie Ray)
- Time management for PMs: Completing projects on time and on budget while staying sane (Charlie Ray)
- What does a Product Manager need to know about intellectual property – BEFORE spending $500/hr with a patent attorney (Don Jarrell)
- Public Relations 101: What It Will Do, What It Won’t Do, and How to Use It to Develop Key Messaging and Build Your Brand (Deborah Maggart/Phil West)
- Career management for product managers – transitioning into and out of product management (Colleen Heubaum)
- UX 101. Creating a framework for delivering consistent – and delightful – user experience. (Ben Phenix)
- Developing a Successful Product Launch Plan (Cathy Liggett)
I’m looking forward to a great day of teaching, learning, and networking. We’ve got more out-of-town guests coming that we had expected, so check the wiki site for hotel information.
Also, that evening, ProductCamp and the AustinPMMForum are co-hosting a happy hour sponsored by Ryma Technologies at Iron Cactus North in the Agave Room. If I know Product Managers, we’re not going to turn down a free drink. That may end up being our most highly attended “session.”
After you have gone through the entire process of self-evaluation, farming, interviewing, offer evaluation, and acceptance, you will probably be mentally exhausted. There are still important steps to take before you can close the chapter on your current company, which must be done with grace.
