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During A Recession, Could Your Product Already Be Dead?

Does the recession have you down? How’s your product doing — nobody buying, nobody interested? Cheer up — it turns out that this is actually the best time to be a product manager. Recessions are some of the best times for product managers to create new products that shake up the market and make your existing customers want you even more. The secret is to realize that what you have to do is to challenge convention…

What Does A Product Manager Need To Do To Survive A Recession?

If you decide to hunker down and try to wait out the current recession, then what you are really doing is acting like a blade of grass that doesn’t realize that the lawnmower will eventually come around and get it. All product managers know that ideas are cheap. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to solve problems with your product, instead what you do need to spend is that most precious of all resources: your time.

Dr. Andrew Razeghi is an author, consultant, and teacher at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management who has written about how to prosper in tough times. He has some suggestions for all of us.

He points out that product managers only need three things in order to innovate: ideas, talent, and capital. As we are all probably painfully aware of, your company is probably currently totally focused on capital and what they can do to conserve it.

Just so that we’re all on the same page here, let us agree that the right thing to be doing is to be mindful of capital spending even as we stay in front of our customers so that we can hear what they are telling us. We then need to use this information to make investments in our product that will pay off in the long term.

The Worst Thing That A Product Manager Can Do

Right now the #1 thing that most product managers don’t want to do is go out and be in front of our customers — why bother, nobody’s buying. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. Cutting off communication with your customers is (always) a terrible thing to do.

When your customers and potential customers stop hearing from you this causes them to start to wonder. They start to think to themselves “Are these guys still in business?”, “Should I buy from them — are they stable?”, etc.

The right thing to do now is to find more ways to stay in contact with your customers. Your goal needs to be to do everything that you can to increase your customer’s confidence not only in your product, but also in the company that stands behind that product.

What Should A Product Manager Be Doing?

Saying that you should be challenging convention is one thing and actually doing it is something else. Forget about flashy Superbowl ads, the key thing to remember is that anything that you can do that will save your customers time or make their job easier will always be relevant and interesting to them.

In this age of Internet-everything, one possible way for a product manager to make his / her product more relevant to their customers is to engage in some sensory branding with your customers. This sounds all new-agey, but it’s really a very old concept.

Product marketing that is done over the Internet can only really appeal to one of your customer’s senses: sight. That leaves four others that are not being used. If you can find a way to engage two or more of these senses, then you’ve got a much better chance of making a lasting connection with your customer.

This could be as simple as postal mailing a letter to your customer that is printed on heavy parchment paper. It has been shown that people still trust what they read on paper more than what they read on a screen. The use of heavy paper will appeal to your customer’s sense of touch and will add “weight” to your words.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s all too easy to get yourself down during a recession — your sales are slipping and everyone (including your customers) seems to be in a blue funk. Hold on a minute, since when were you ever taught to do exactly what everyone else is doing?

Since no product manager ever made their product a success by following the herd, this is exactly the time for you to try different things — what’s the risk? One simple and effective technique that any product manager can try is to study how they are currently connecting with their customers. The next step is to build on this and find ways to engage more of your customer’s senses in order to build their interest in and desire for your product.

These are both the best of times and worst of times. As a successful product manager you need to take action to make sure that both you and your product come out of it ahead of the pack.

What’s the simplest thing that a product manager can do to make contact with more of his / her customer’s senses?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So let me guess, the travel budget for your product which was measly to begin with has been slashed to the bone and you’re going to be home for dinner for the foreseeable future. That’s great news if you don’t like to travel, but it sorta sucks if you want to stay in contact with your customer, discover their pain points, and uncover new product requirements. What’s a product manager to do?

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New Tools Make Twitter More Powerful For Product Managers

Sigh, ok – I guess that it’s time that I finally get around to talking about the Internet fad-du-jour: Twitter. The Internet is all abuzz about just what the heck Twitter is (a micro-blogging service), who should be using it (apparently everyone), and just how product mangers should get the most out of it (a tad bit unclear here). I’ve spent some time looking into these questions and I think that I’ve discovered the answers that you need.

Some Background On Twitter

So here’s the thing: Twitter is not the best thing since sliced bread like some people would have you think. Instead, it’s better to view it as being just another communications tool that you have at your disposal. One thing that all product managers need to realize is that not everyone is on/using Twitter. This means that this channel is only suited to reaching certain people.

It’s Not All About You

Right up front product managers need to realize that other Tweets (people who use Twitter) don’t really care about you – instead what they really care about is your product. This means that independent of what you may be doing personally on Twitter, you’ll need to set up a separate Twitter account for your product. Since Twitter accounts are free, this is easy to do.

Tools For Tracking Tweets

One of the key questions that every product manager wants an answer to is “who is talking about my product?”. A great 3rd party tool that let’s you do this is called TweetBeep.

With TweetBeep, you sign up for a free account and then you enter the words or phrases that you would like to keep track of. TweetBeep will send you an update every hour telling you who has tweeted using the phrase that you are interested in (your product name for example).

Track Re-Tweets

In the world of Twitter, as in the real world, there is very little new. What this means for product managers is that tweets that contain a link often get re-tweeted multiple times. In order to find out just how many people are clicking on a link that you tweet about, the company bit.ly offers a service to do this.

Sharp-eyed readers may recognize bit.ly as an online service that you can use to create shorter versions of long URLs. It turns out that bit.ly offers another free service that allows you to attach a brief code to your shortened links which will then allow you to track how many people click on the link and gather information on them such as where they are located.

Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen

Often when a product manager sets up a single Twitter account for his / her product, there will be multiple people within the company who will be responsible for using it and replying to other Tweets. This can quickly become confusing.

A service called CoTweet allows you to set up multiple queues for different users. When Tweets about your product are seen, then these tweets can be assigned to different queues so that different users can respond to them. This will help in preventing multiple overlapping responses.

Final Thoughts

Only time will tell if Twitter is here to stay or if it is just a flash-in-the-pan. No matter which way things end up going, product managers have a unique opportunity to use this new communications channel to reach out to others and talk about their products.

The basic Twitter service is ok. The arrival of additional 3rd party Twitter tools has the ability to make Twitter an even more powerful tool for product mangers. If you learn how to use Twitter effectively, then you will have once again have found out how great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

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

I fly all the time and I pretty much hate it – the hassles, the delays, etc. Sure seems like a great opportunity for a product manger to step in and do something to make flying a better experience…

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Product Managers Need A Dictionary To Improve Communications And Make More Money

One of my favorite lines from Steve Martin’s stand-up act goes like this “What’s up with those French? It seems like they have a different word for everything…”

Perhaps many of us Product Managers have some French blood in us because it sure seems like we often get accused of willy-nilly making up new acronyms on the fly. In all honesty, yes we do do this sometimes. However, there is a more subtle word problem that has been creeping around the edges of the product management world for a long time that nobody’s been brave enough to bring up: we have no idea what we are saying.

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. Specifically, they’ve discovered that we all seem to THINK that we are talking about the same thing when in many cases we really aren’t.

As product mangers we have to interact with many different departments. In order to meet the needs of all of these internal customers, product managers are always creating new and different ways to present the product information that we have . However, since nobody talks to anyone else in the company, we’ve been creating a million different ways to present (and talk about) the same product data.

What’s been missing from the product manger’s bag of communication tricks is some sort of dictionary. We need to standardize how we talk about our product’s data and how we describe the results of the processing that we do on that data.

Over at Best Buy, Robert Willett who is their CIO said that when he first showed up they 400 to 500 different ways to measure things. What this meant is that measurements done for one customer could not be interpreted by another customer so they had to do the processing all over again.

Robert spent over 10 months and drove to a point where they had single definitions for everything. It was only after this type of process dictionary had been created that Best Buy started to get some value for all of its efforts. Getting value is how product managers can make more money and that will benefit us all.

Do you have a single set of definitions for the product information that you collect and the results that you produce? Have you ever had a situation where two individuals or departments were trying to compare two things about products but couldn’t because they didn’t use the same words? How have you tried to solve this problem? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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By Dr. Jim Anderson

Here in the comfortable 21st Century, IT product managers have many different ways to communicate with their boss/team/etc. However, just because you have a lot of ways to say something, does not mean that you are using the correct way to say it.

Email is all of our favorite (ok, how about most used?) communication tool. We get emails, we read emails, we send emails. The problem is that it is all to easy to view email as our only communication channel. We’ve got others:

1. Email
2. Instant Messaging
3. Phone
4. Written Note
5. Physical Visit

Both emails and IM messages suffer from a key failure: they lack any way to communicate emotion. “Come to my office” is a message that, depending on the emotion with which it is delivered, can have many different meetings.

Let me wrap this discussion up with a true story that will help me make my point. One Friday afternoon (these things always happen on Fridays) I got a call from my product’s development team leader. He told me that the feature that a VP had requested be added to the next release of the product would not be making it into the product because his team did not have any requirements. I thanked him for the head’s up. Hung up the phone and briefly considered how short my career was going to be once the VP discovered that we had apparently ignored his request. I then called the requirements team and asked if they had requirements for this feature. Their team lead told me that they couldn’t start working on those requirements until they got funding to do so. I then called the folks in finance and asked if funding was available. They said “sure, just tell us where it needs to go.” A quick call back to requirements confirmed that they could have the requirements done by the end of the day once funding was confirmed. A final call to development secured me an assurance that the coding would be done by the end of the weekend if the requirements were available by the end of the day. Whew — problem solved.

The take-away here is that the phone calls were the key. Everyone had already been sending emails about this issue, but that had not solved the problem. It’s the small things that make an effective IT product manager.

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