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Sometimes The Pen Is Mightier Than The Plane Ticket

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?

Maybe Email Isn’t So Bad After All

I almost hesitate to say this, but have you thought about using more email to stay in touch with both your existing customers and your prospects? Yeah, yeah I know that we all shudder at the though of bombarding our customers with even more email than they are already getting, but in these difficult times perhaps this is what we need to be doing.

What innovative product managers are discovering is that some well-done emails are turning out to be quite effective and even, dare I say it, personal. It turns out that email is apparently a tool that we use with abandon internally, but it can also be an effective external tool with which to make strong customer connections.

The reason that email seems to work so well has to do with the simple fact that your customers view it as being non-threatening. Instead of having to deal with finding the time to have a face-to-face meeting with you and potentially getting bombarded with lots of product questions that they may not have the answers to, they are in the driver’s seat. After all, they can always delete your email if they want to…

Product Manager Secrets To Successful Emails

So if email is this secret path to your customer’s heart, then why don’t we do a better job of using it? I mean we must write like a million of these things every week so shouldn’t we be pretty good at it by now?

Well, no actually, we’re not all that good at it.

The first thing that we often overlook is the most important part of any email, its subject line. Look, this is the $1,000,000 waterfront property part of your email, why would you waste it? I can’t tell you how many emails I get that have either a blank subject line or a single word like “Issue” or “Problem”. What a waste!

The purpose of an email’s subject is to motivate me to open it up. I get so much email everyday that if your email looks like its going to be boring, there is a very good chance that I won’t open it and that it will end up getting deleted later on when I’m on one of my “clean out the email inbox” rages.

The next mistake that product managers make is that they make their emails too long. In other words, they type like they talk. Since you are writing to your customer, you have the ability to go back after you’ve written the email and edit it long before your customer ever sees it. All too often, we skip this critical step and create these lengthy “War and Peace” length novels that nobody takes the time to actually read.

Finally, all too often our emails are basically junk. We write the email with no real purpose in mind and the resulting email is basically empty blather. What we should be doing is finding value-adding content and then using emails to get this critical information into our customer’s hands.

What All Of This Means For You

When times get tough, one of the first things that companies often cut back on is the travel budgets that product managers use to get in front of our customers. When this happens, the very worst thing that we can do is sit back and passively start to lose contact with our customers.

Instead, what we need to be doing is finding creative new ways to stay in our customer’s minds even if we can’t be physically present. The old standby email is one tool that often gets overlooked.

This can be a dangerous tool — in the wrong hands, email can end up doing more damage to your relationship with your customer than good. However, if you take the time to think out what you want to communicate to your customer and then do it creatively in a brief way then you will have found a way to connect with your most valuable asset — your customers.

Do you think that you can overuse email as a way to get in touch with your customers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers, we have somehow convinced ourselves that our customers both want and need more choices when it comes to our products. This thinking has allowed us to heap on more and more choices for our customers to make: colors, pricing plans, features, etc. However, it just may be the case that the one thing that our customers really don’t want is to have to make more decisions in order to buy our products…

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Product Mangers Need To Find A Way To Deal With Lots Of Email

So here we stand together at the start of a new year filled with hopes and dreams that this year will be better than last. Now if we could just do something about that email problem that we’ve all been dealing with…

I don’t know about you, but depending on what part of the product development / release cycle I’m currently at, I can get up to about 300 emails a day. Talk about a Tsunami! You may have already guessed that not all of those emails are all that important; however, I still need to work my way through the pile in order to find the ones that are important!

In the past I was just overwhelmed by this amount of email. I’d sit down and try to work my way through the pile, but by the time I got a few answered, more would have arrived! There seemed to be no way to climb this mountain.

Desperate for some sort of solution, I looked around for a solution. Based on some blogs that I had read, I discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. I read his book and spent some time thinking about what he had to say.

I must confess that there were a lot of things that David suggested doing that I was just unable to put into practice in my life for one reason or another. However, he made some really good points about email that struck home with me.

David basically said that too many of us (me included) tend to use our “inbox” as a storage place for emails. His suggestion was that we clean out our inboxes and keep them clean. Hmm, this sure seemed like just the thing that I needed to do.

At work I use the corporate Microsoft Exchange email system. After reading David’s book, I went ahead and created two new folders to store email in. I called these folders “@Action” and “@Waiting For”. The “@” symbol is used to make both of these folders easy to find by having them show up at the top of my list of Outlook folders.

The “@Action” folder is used to temporarily store emails that I need to look at further. This allows me to quickly step through my new emails and throw away the junk, reply to the quick answers, and file everything else in @Action.

This allows me to process immense amounts of email very quickly. Yes, I realize that this means that I’ve got more work to do, but it’s still a step in the right direction. Words cannot describe the incredible feeling of satisfaction that one feels when you see an empty email inbox!

The “@Waiting For” file is used slightly differently. Whenever I send an email to someone asking for information or requesting something, the challenge is to remember that I’ve asked for something (and what I’ve asked for). I “BCC” myself on these emails and when I get a copy of the email that I’ve sent, then I go ahead and file it in my “@Waiting For” file.

Now dear reader, you may have already spotted the one flaw in my clever system: I need to remember to review the “@Action” in order to work through those emails that require some study. I also have to remember to go through the “@Waiting For” file in order to go back and remind people that they owe me information.

No system is perfect, but this way of dealing with email has served me well for about 5 years now. I may find a better way in the future, but for now this one takes care of me.

What do you think? Do you have an email system that works for you? Do you think that my system would work for you? Can you think of anything that I should be doing to make my system better? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How many of you have seen this: you’ve called a technical face to face meeting to resolve some key product issues. You’ve carefully coordinated the meeting time with everyone’s schedules and you’ve been sure to make sure that you’ve included folks from all impacted departments. Imagine your joy when you see that just about everyone has actually shown up for your meeting. Imagine your disappointment when everyone whips out their laptops, powers up. gets a wired/wireless connection, and *poof* they mentally vanish.

So why are we having this meeting? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in one of these meetings when someone gets asked a question, looks up from their laptop and says “I’m sorry, I was working on my email. Can you repeat the question?” I generally don’t really like meetings all that much and it’s events like this that cause them to take way too long. If you introduce IM into the equation, then you have folks in your meeting merrily typing away in one or more active conversations even while your meeting is going on. Arrgh! Why did they even bother to come?

So what’s a product manger to do? Stomping your feet, rolling around on the floor, and shaking your finger at offenders are all possibilities; however, I’m not thinking that they will really accomplish the goal. What is the goal? To have a face-to-face meeting with all parties attending participating and engaged in the conversation and problem solving. This is a huge problem and we have yet to really work out the social issues that it brings up. For example, if your boss attends and opens his/her laptop, then what are you going to say to him/her?

I don’t have any magic solutions, but one powerful force that you can bring to bear is peer pressure. If before the meeting occurs you loudly and clearly tell everyone that the use of laptops and Blackberrys will be banned during the meeting, then nobody can really object. If you hold the line and actually kick out active Blackberry users that will also send a clear message. Careful though — if they don’t leave, then you will have lost face with the rest of the attendees. Finally, make you meetings exciting and engaging. People do other tasks because they are bored. If you remove the boredom, they may even forget about their laptops/Blackberrys/iPhones for at least awhile.

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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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