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Being Able To Customize Your Soda Is Just The First Step...

Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in tow, they start instantly clambering for me to allow them to get a soda. On those occasions that they have worn me down enough that I’ll do almost anything to get them to shut-up, I’ll give in and let them. What they proceed to do next would take the breath away from any sane adult.

They start by grabbing one of those big 32oz cups and then they proceed to dance down the aisle in front of each of the soda fountains pausing only long enough to dump some of that flavor into their cup before hurrying on to the next one. By the time they reach the end, their cups are filled with some sort of monstrous blackish goop that they endearingly refer to as a “suicide drink“. Yes, I have actually sampled this concoction and words can not begin to describe just how bad it tastes…

However, is there a possibility that this approach to building the ultimate soft drink might be showing product mangers the way to create the ultimate product?

Coke’s Freestyle Approach To Creating Suicide Drinks

Coke currently sells 3,000 different flavors of soda, tea, juice, and flavored waters globally but they want to sell even more. The product managers at Coke – the same people who tried to bring us New Coke – have a problem on their hands: not all of their customers have the same tastes. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Every so often, Coke decides that it wants to try to capture even more of our spending on drinks and so they role out a new flavor and keep their fingers crossed. Sometimes the new products work (Cherry Coke), and sometimes they don’t (Vanilla Coke). Clearly they’ve got a problem on their hands…

It sure seems as though now that we live in the 21st Century, we all should be able to pick whatever flavor of drink that we want and not have to hope that another million people also like the same thing as us. Coke is making that possible with a new style of vending machine: the Freestyle.

A single Freestyle self-serve drink dispenser will pour more than 100 varieties of soda, tea, juice, and flavored waters. Each Freestyle unit will contain 30 cartridges of flavorings that can be used to mix up to 100 different drink combinations – can anyone say “ultimate suicide drink“?

What Does Total Choice Mean To Coke Product Mangers?

I personally can not imagine anything worse than standing in line behind someone who has to decide from among 100 different drink combinations. However, I do see the genius in Coke’s product manager’s plans.

Each Freestyle unit has a wireless connection that will allow it to report what people are buying and when they are buying it. This is going to allow Coke to test out a whole bunch of new flavors simply by making them available in the machine. If they start to see a trend appear where people are buying a flavor, then they’ll be able to determine in which region the flavor would be popular and so on.

What Would Total Choice Mean To Your Customers?

They probably never covered this in your product management training but just imagine what you could do if you had the same ability to customize your product? Although you probably aren’t selling drinks, you can probably imagine your customers walking up to a dispenser and having the ability to choose 100 different variations of your product.

Remember, we’re not necessarily talking about different product features here. We could be talking about different configurations of support programs, product appearance, or even payment plans.

If such a machine for your product existed, then what would happen to your sales? Would they go through the roof? If you go back and take a look at the past 12 months of sales for your product (well, the past 12 months have probably sucked, so take a look at the past 24 months) I’m betting that you’ve actually sold a whole lot of different configurations of your product. Maybe you didn’t set out to do that, but I’ll bet that you ended up doing it.

Final Thoughts

In the product manager job description there is a requirement that we all memorize the phrase “Your customer is always right“. It turns out that your customers love to have choices. Or at least they love the option of having choices.

No matter how many product models you think that you sell today, I suspect that the reality is that you are actually selling a lot more than that.

If you sit down and take the time to lay out all of the different choices that you are already offering to your customers, you’ll have a fantastic story to present to your potential customers about your product marketing mix. Even if your product is not the best one out there, just providing your customers with more choices will make your product more attractive and will drive more sales.

How many different variations of your product do you think that you sell today?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Since we’re bright, smart product managers it sure seems as though when we spot an opportunity to change something about our product that will benefit everyone we should just go ahead and do it and not have to wait for our customers to ask us to make the change, right? Well that’s what the product managers over at T-Mobile thought before the lawsuit…

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Product Managers Need To Be Able To Choose Winning Technology For Their Products

Just imagine if you were a movie studio executive back in the early 1980′s: what format should you release your new movie on for the home market – VHS or Beta? Both technologies were battling it out and it was very difficult to try to predict a winner. That was a long time ago (buy the way, VHS won), but product managers today still face the same challenge of trying to make sure that their product uses the correct next generation technology.

The names have changed, C++ vs C#, Java vs .NET, Adobe vs Silverlight, but the dilemma remains the same: how do you make the right decision when you can’t see the future? Well Dr. Gerard Tellis and Dr. Ashish Sood have spent some time looking at how to do this and they’ve come away with some surprising (to me) insights.

One of their biggest discoveries is that we seem to do a lousy job of trying to distinguish between the different levels associated with a given technology. What this means is that we’ll spend too much time looking at one level of a technology and then we’ll get whacked in the back of the head when something changes on a different level.

The Dr’s believe that each technology actually has three separate levels of what they call “technological innovation”: platform, design, and component. The platform level is the underlying technology. An example is the LCD platform used in TVs.

The design and component levels of a technology is what we often spend our time looking at. This is because it is where the rapid innovation is occurring as companies try to leap past each other.

Finally, the platform level sees very little change normally, but when things do change, it can turn the world upside down. The arrival of thin & light LCD displays was a platform change that put the CRT manufactures out of business almost overnight.

We’ll talk about what product managers need to do in order to pick a wining horse in a future post.

Have you had to choose an emerging technology for your product? How did you go about doing it? Did you choose the right one? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Product Managers Often Have To Learn To Deal With Product Suggestions From Senior Management

Oh man , do I have a story for you. How many times have we been in charge of a product when “higher powers” have come along with suggestions on how to make the product better? Or perhaps they suggest features that the product just must have before it goes out the door?

These types of suggestions can kill a product no matter how carefully you have nurtured it up to this point. The impacts can range from timelines, expenses, all the way to final product price. So much for your best laid plans.

George Neville-Neil over at the Communications of the ACM is well aware of events like this. He tells the story of the the good ship Vasa and this tale has a lot of warnings for us Product Managers.

This is a story that starts back in 1626 when the king of Sweden, King Gustavus Adolphus, ordered the building of the Vasa. It took two years to create this ship. King Adolphus was keen to have it because at the time he was trying very hard to rule the Baltic Sea.

Just to prove to you that things really don’t change, you need to understand that King Adolphus was deeply involved in the design of all of the ships in his naval fleet. Can you say “too much senior management involvement”?

Back in the 1600′s, warships had one deck of cannons on both the left and the right side of the ship. The commission orders for the Vasa ordered that she be created with this design.

Now at just about this time, good King Adolphus discovered that the Poles had somehow created ships with two decks of guns on them (for a total of four decks of guns). Needless to say the King developed a serious case of cannon envy.

Since he was king and could basically do anything that he wanted, King Adolphus modified the design of the Vasa to now include two decks of guns. To the king’s credit, on paper the Vasa was now the most powerful ship of its day and had a great deal of firepower.

As with all great senior management plans, this one had just one little flaw. The designers of the ship realized that there was now a problem and attempted to explain that to the king. What they had discovered was that the ship’s design called for it to have too little ballast in order to support two heavy gun decks. They believed that building the ship that the king had designed would result in a ship that would be unsafe to sail.

You know how this story goes – it’s good to be king. The king wanted his ship and he wanted it the way that he had designed it. The building of the ship continued.

(This is my favorite part of the story that George tells) In 1628 the ship was done and ready for initial testing. One of the tests that they did was a stability test. In this test, 30 sailors were selected and asked to run back and forth from side-to-side on the ship’s deck. If the ship didn’t tip over and sink then it was basically good to go. During this testing of the Vasa, the ship started to tilt widely and they ended up cancelling the test.

You would think that this was the end of the story. But it isn’t.

On August 10th, 1628, the king’s mighty ship the Vasa set sail for the first time. The ship got about a mile away from the dock when a good stiff breeze came along and knocked the ship sideways, she took on too much water, and then she promptly sunk.

Of course there was an investigation in order to find out what had gone wrong. Since the king, of course, could not have been the problem, the question was who was to blame. In the end, the sinking was chalked up to an “Act of God” and forgotten.

However, in the 1960′s the Vasa was raised from the sea and was placed in a museum in Stockholm. If you ever get there, make sure that you drop in and see it – a shrine to all product mangers who’ve had to deal with meddling senior management.

Have you ever been given “suggestions” from senior management for your product? Where they any good? What did you do with them? Was the product made better by them? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Building A Complete Job Map For Your Product Will Reveal Customer Needs

Keep in mind that job mapping is a process by which Product Managers can discover what product features your customers are really looking for. Job mapping is a process by which you break down into a series of smaller steps the task that your customer is trying to accomplish while using your product. By doing this, you will be able to get a complete end-to-end view of all of the individual points at which your customer will be open to having your product either do more or do things differently in order to provide them with more help.

Last time we looked at the first four steps that a product managers needs to go through in order to create a job map for his / her product. These steps were consisted of studying the customer while they did the following:

1. Define
2. Locate
3. Prepare
4. Confirm

There are four additional steps that need to be performed by a product manger in order to create a complete job map. These steps are as follows:

1. Having completed the steps that are required in order to prepare to perform the job, the next customer step is to successfully execute the job. It goes almost without saying that from a customer’s point-of-view, the execution step is the most important part of performing the job. This means that achieving the results that they are looking for is critical as well as avoiding any problems or delays that could slow things down.  This opens the door for product managers to study ways that their products can provide feedback to the customer in real-time or perhaps even go so far as to automatically fix problems that occur during execution of the job.
2. During or after the customer executes to job, there will be things that they need to monitor in order to make sure that the job is or has been successfully executed. What the customer is trying to determine during the execution of the job is if they need to make any changes or adjustments in order to make sure that the job completes successfully. Note that monitoring tasks can be either passive and not take up much of the customer’s time or active and require potentially a great deal of the customer’s time. Product managers can learn a great deal from this step. If the execution of the job results in costly or critical outputs, improving monitoring functions can notify the customer of problems as soon as they start to occur and before they have a significant impact.
3. All of this monitoring brings up the good point: what possibly could the customer modify during the execution of a job in order to ensure that the job was completed successfully? The key questions that need to be answered here are: where should changes be made, what needs to be changed, and how should the changes be made? Coming up with answers to these questions can potentially be quite time consuming. Product managers have an opportunity to create product features that would tell the customer how to get job execution back on track if problems occur. Additionally, cutting down on the time that is required to make the modifications can be a significant benefit to the customer.
4. Having started the job, now what does your customer have to do in order to conclude the execution of the job? The conclusion of the job may have one or more steps dedicated just to wrapping things up. It’s important to realize that the process of concluding a job will often seem as extra work to your customer – they believe that the job is already done! If completing this job leads to the next, then customers will be impatient to start the next one. Product managers have an opportunity to add features to their product that will allow the conclusion of the job to happen as quickly as possible.

The process of creating a job map for your product will allow you to take those job maps apart and discover what features your customers are really looking for!

Do you believe that your customers view executing the most important part of using your product? Do they monitor things during the execution or do they wait until the end? Do you allow them to modify anything in order to prevent problems from occurring? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Product Managers Need A Job Map To Understand Their Products

A job map identifies what your customers are TRYING to get done at every step of a task while they are using your product. This differs from process mapping which simply defines only what the customer is actually doing at each step – a subtle, but important distinction.

Product managers who take the time to map out every step of the job that their customers are performing while using their products can create job maps for their products. These maps can then help them to discover what features their customers really want and thus provide a way to truly differentiate their product.

If you want to create a job map for your product, you need to keep in mind that you are not interested in finding out HOW a customer performs a particular job. Doing so would only provide you with a map of their existing solutions and activities.

Instead, your goal should be to find out what your customer is trying to use your product to get done while executing a job. What is really important is understanding what must happen at each point in the job in order for your customer to feel that the job has been successfully completed.

Here are the first four steps of creating a job map for your product:

1. The first thing that you need to determine is what aspects of completing the job does your customer have to define before starting the job in order to move forward? This step will include the following sub-steps: determine their objectives, plan what approach they want to take, determining what needed resources are both necessary and available in order to get the job done, and finally selecting those needed resources. A product manager can use this step of creating a job map to look for new ways to help your customers better understand what their objectives are, making the planning of resources less complex, and just reducing the amount of planning effort and time that is required.
2. The next step in building a job map is to clearly identify what inputs or items that your customer must locate in order to perform the job? Don’t overlook anything here: inputs can be both tangible (a physical computer) or intangible (the requirements that define what software does). A product manager can can investigate how intangible inputs can be simplified by making the required inputs easier to get, more available, or even better, just getting rid of the need for them altogether. Intangible inputs can also be streamlined by automating the retrieval of requirements, or providing tools to check inputs for correctness.
3. Documenting how your customer must prepare all of the required inputs (and any required environments) for the job is also an important part of the job map. This is basically how the customer sets up and organizing required materials for the job. A product manager must look very carefully at these tasks. Creating ways to make setup less difficult may very well have a dramatic positive impact on how your customer views your product. Technical products that require information to be fed to them, can be improved by having the product support more ways to organize, integrate, and format the information.
4. Each step in a job map may consume valuable resources or cost money or time. That is why the next step is to understand what a customer needs to confirm is correct before they proceed with a job in order to ensure that they will have a successful outcome. This can include such activities as making sure that inputs have been properly prepared, making sure that they have enough of everything that they will need, making sure that they have the proper priorities for how they want to execute the job. Product mangers need to realize that this part of completing the job is especially important. Delay can creep into the customer’s life here and often time delay results in additional expense or risk. New features that permit a customer to more easily determine that they are ready to move to the next step would be considered valuable by the customer. If this type of confirmation was actually made a part of a previous step, then that would save your customer even more time and effort.

This is not all that there is to creating a job map for your product! There are four more steps, but we’ll cover them next time.

Do you know what your customers’ objectives are when they start a job using your product? Do you keep a list of the inputs that they need to use your product to complete a job? Does your product make it easy for a customer to prepare the inputs that it will need? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: confirm, customer, customers, define, features, job map, locate, new product, prepare, product design, product management, product manager

Product Mangers Need To Understand The 3 Fundamental Features Of Job Steps

Last time we talked about “job mapping” how a customer “hires” your product to perform some task. If you can do this well, then you will be able to create an understanding of what aspects of your product the customer likes and is using as well as which ones he/she does not like and is not making use of. All of this understanding can go a long way in helping you to understand what features you need to add to your product in its next release.

The researchers who have come up with the idea of mapping how a customer uses your product spent over 10 years mapping lots of different types of products. As a result of this work, they discovered that there are three principles that all jobs have in common:

All Jobs Can Be Thought Of As A Process: This is actually an important insight – there is no job that can not be broken down into a set of steps. In order for a product manager to start to get some insights into innovative features that could be added to his / her product, the first step is to look at the product through the customer’s eyes and then map out how the product would be used by the customer to complete a specific job.

Once you have a clear understanding of the individual steps that your product is used by your customer for, then you can start to investigate how adding new features would allow you to improve how a given step is performed, or get rid of the need for a given input or output, or just cut out the step altogether.

One area that most products can be improved in is the area of step re-sequencing. If there is a step that occurs towards the end of the process in order to check that something has occurred, then adding a feature that will allow this step to be moved to the front of the process can make your product even more useful to your customer.

There Is A Universal Structure To All Jobs: No matter what product you manage, nor what types of customers use your product, all customers use your product to perform a job that has the following universal structure:

1. Defining what resources the job needs.
2. Getting any inputs that are needed by the job.
3. Getting the inputs ready.
4. Confirming that everything is ready to perform the job.
5. Executing the steps that make up the job.
6. Monitoring the results of executing the job steps.
7. Making modifications to what you’ve done and re-doing steps.
8. Concluding the job steps.

It’s important to keep in mind that for each product, some steps will be more important than others. This being said, keep in mind that each step is required in order to successfully complete the customer’s job. The product manager needs to realize that opportunities for new product features lurk within each job step.

Jobs Are NOT Solutions: Just because you love your product, does not mean that your customers do. You customers probably solve the problem that they use your product for in a number of different ways (not all of which involve the use of your product). When looking at the job steps that a customer is doing, the product manger needs to think in broader terms than just his / her product. It is entirely possible that the need for a new product may present itself.

These three guiding principles provide product managers with a foundation that they can use when they begin the search for what new features can be added to their products in order to increase the value of their product to their customers.

Next time we’ll dive into just how a product manager can go about creating a job map for his / her product…

Have you ever tried to break down how your customer uses your product into job steps? What parts of the universal job structure are most important to your product? Have you ever discovered the need for a different product as you studied how customers used your product? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brand management, job, marketing management, marketing research, new features, product design, product features, product manager, requirements management

Product Managers Need To Know Where To Dig To Discover Breakthrough Features

As a product manager, you are ultimately responsible for your product’s features. If you’ve guessed well, then you should have a successful product. If you’ve guessed badly, then you may be sitting on a stinker of a product right now. No matter which situation you find yourself in, you are facing one of the greatest challenges that a product manager ever faces – what next?

So just how do we go about picking features to work into the next version(s) of our product? Pick correctly and your career could take off like a rocket. Pick poorly, and your career won’t even get off the launch pad. Dang, why are there no classes for doing this type of thing?

I can only speak from my experience, but I generally kept a “pool” of features (“list” if  you must) and when it came time to start to plan out the next version of the product, we would revisit the list and re-prioritize what was on it. Important customer complaints, features that competing products already had, things that the development team wanted to add, and features that were not too expensive to add all sorta got jumbled together and that’s what made it into the next release. Not the best process.

Some companies do extensive interviews with their customers in order to determine what they would like to see added to the product. I’ve participated in more focus groups than I care to remember and I fully admit that it takes a very special type of person to run such a meeting – this is not my calling in life. However, even with this scientific approach, all too often companies really don’t end up getting any good product direction from their customers – they are still guessing what features to add to their products.

Lance Bettencourt and Tony Ulwick have spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and they’ve come up with a different approach to uncovering breakthrough product features that they call “job mapping”. Job Mapping breaks down a customer’s task into a series of steps that together make up the entire process. By looking at the process that a customer goes though from start to finish, a company can discover all of the points at which a customer would be interested in having the product or service provide them with additional help.

Additionally, once you have a job map for your product, you can also identify where the biggest hangups and drawbacks to using your product is for your customers. Sometimes the best new feature is not something that your product does, but rather something that it no longer does!

Job mapping requires you to look at your product differently than you do today. As product managers we generally like to think about our products as being “tools” that our customers buy and use to solve problems and become more successful. Throw that thinking out the window.

Instead, you need to start to think about your product / service as something that your customer “hires” to get something done. Yeah, yeah, I realize that you’d like to think that your customer has a closer relationship with your baby than that, but they probably don’t.

One key advantage that job mapping brings to the table is that by mapping the entire customer process, you will also be able to identify the metrics that your customers use to measure their own success as they complete each task in the process.

For all of you engineers out there, take off your engineering hat right now. Something that everyone needs to clearly understand is that job mapping IS NOT the same thing as process mapping. The ultimate goal of creating a job map is to determine what your customers are TRYING to accomplish at each and every step of their process. This differs from process mapping that merely documents WHAT they are doing at every step of the process.

Lance & Tony believe that by taking the time to map out each and every step of your customer’s job, a prouduct manager can find breakthrough product features that will allow your products to become even more successful.

Hopefully I’ve got your attention by now. If so, then you’ll want to stay tuned for my next posting in which we’ll dive into just what a customer job is and how we can start building a job map…

How do you determine what features will go into the next version of your product? Who drives this process – your customers or internal forces? How has it been working out – are your customers happy with what features they have been getting? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: benefits, features, focus group, job map, metrics, new products, product, product manger, release, Sales, tool, version

By Dr. Jim Anderson

So what makes one IT product manger any better than another? I’ve spent a lot of time both working as a product manager and working with other product mangers and I think that I’ve got this figured out. I think that we can all agree what a good product manger looks like: they have successful products that customers want and internally everyone wants to work on their product because it is recognized as a “good place to be” from a career point-of-view. On the other hand, a bad product manage is also recognizable because their products are struggling, nobody really understands what they do or why they are any better than anyone else’s products and internally nobody is excited about working on anything that touches this product.

So how do good product managers get that way? The key is that really good product managers know their product and the environment in which it operates inside and out. This is the one thing above all others that sets them apart. All too often, program managers get placed into product manager positions (I mean after all, aren’t they really the same thing?) and don’t make the transition that is required to fully become a product manager.

Program managers (and bad product managers) tend to focus on just the day-to-day parts of creating and launching a product. Good product managers do the same; however, this doesn’t take up all of their time. Instead, good product managers spend a considerable amount of time trying to prepare customers for the new product / features and making sure that end user feedback gets back to the product developers even as the product is being created.

You would think that at least bad product managers would have projects that run more smoothly because of the extra time that they invest in program management activities. However, this is generally not the case. I believe that the extra level of motivation that the rest of the team brings to a good product manager’s product development program allows him/her to spend less time managing the process and more time making sure that the product will be well received.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Good question,eh? I define an IT product as being a piece of code or a service that a firm’s IT department delivers to a customer. The customer can be internal (ex: email or expense reporting tools) or external (ex: CRM, ERP, virus detection, anything that MicroSoft makes, etc.) You’re IT department probably delivers a long list of products and services. This leads to the question…

Are you creating the right IT products? Does your staff have a polished and efficient product management framework with which to capture IT product requirements, develop the product, and then roll it out to your eager and waiting customers? Or is your IT product development process a mess: wrong products, missed schedules, and unhappy or (even worse) disinterested customers?

Hey, who ever took classes on this stuff? We all focused on programming languages, databases, and the odd English Lit. class. Well, they say that it’s never too late to learn and it turns out that Product Management for IT products and services can be fairly easy and straightforward if you understand what you are doing. In this blog we’ll share with you the good, the bad, and the really ugly things that you should both be doing and not doing.

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