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Would You Really Want To Shop At A Microsoft Store?

Put yourself in the shoes of a Microsoft product manger for just a moment. You’ve got a bit of a challenge: you work for a very large and a very powerful company that has lost its cool. In every category where once you ruled supreme, you now have pesky competitors showing up who product are seen as being much more sexy than yours are. In order to get back in touch with your customers, what would you do? Maybe opening a store would be the answer…

Microsoft’s Next Big Idea (Please Return All Carts To The Store)

It would appear as though Apple’s run away success with their ultra-cool Apple stores has not been lost on the Microsoft folks up in Redmond. Taking a page out of the Apple playbook, they have decided to go ahead and open their very first retail store in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Microsoft makes a lot of products and so they’ve got a lot of stuff to fill a store with. Operating systems, Office applications, mobile phone operating systems, computer hardware, MP3 players, etc. — that’s going to be one full store.

Microsoft has stated that their reason for opening the store is that they want to get back in touch with their customers. David Porter, Microsoft’s VP of retail stores (really just one store right now) said “Our customers have told us they want more choice, more value, and better service, and that’s what we’ll deliver through our Microsoft stores.”

Why Microsoft Is Making A Huge Mistake

Sadly, I think that Microsoft’s product managers are making a huge mistake. I’m willing to bet you that this ill-fated attempt to compete with Apple long after Apple has figured out how to do this retail thing and do it well is going to go down in flames.

First off, before you start a project like this you need to have a very clear reason for doing it — getting closer to your customer is not a problem that they are having, it’s a problem that you are having. So exactly what problem is this store solving?

Think about this for a moment, why would you make the effort to go to drop by a Microsoft store? I don’t actually ever think that I’d need a “Microsoft” product, instead I think that I need a cool new gadget. I know where to go find those — Best Buy. I know that at Best Buy I can compare different vendor’s products and decide which one I want. Why would I only want to see Microsoft products?

Along the same lines, I would want to go to an Apple store. The reason is that I know that Apple has cool stuff. I’d want to see the latest iPod, Nano, iPhone, iTouch, etc. I can’t name a single cool Microsoft product that I’d want to drop by and see. Microsoft Office 2010? Nah…

Oh, and one more thing. Micosoft has hired a former Walmart store executive, David Porter to lead the rollout. Walmart? I don’t know about you, but Walmart is just about as far from cool as you can possibly get. Look, there are never going to be a lot of these Microsoft stores so why would you hire somebody who specialized in high volume, low price operations?

How Microsoft Could Do A Store Right

So it’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft’s product manger’s ideas. But that’s not what we’re all about here at The Accidental Product Manager. How about if we take a few moments and see if we can provide them with some useful product management suggestions?

The first thing that they need to do is to identify what customer problem the retail store is going to solve. Since Microsoft products are pretty much ubiquitous, actually selling more products seems like it would be a waste of time. I’d suggest that they instead focus on showing customers how easy to use and how powerful Microsoft products are. This means that the Microsoft store really exists to allow people to come in, touch a product and ask detailed questions about the products to very well trained staff. Now that would be valuable the next time you get stuck trying to create an Excel macro.

The next thing that they need to do is to come up with a real image for the stores. Having that guy from Walmart running the stores scares me — I think that it’s all wrong. Instead, Microsoft needs to create a “vibe” for their store. Maybe the right setup would be to create a store that is like a house: bedroom, living room, office, etc. They’d place the appropriate products in the correct “rooms”. Then each “room” could have its own feel — a business atmosphere for the office, relaxing for the family room, etc. Sure would be better than feeling like you are visiting a Walmart…

What All Of This Means For You

Competition can make product managers do the strangest things. All too often we see our competition make a move and if it seems to be working for them, then we start to dream about doing the same thing ourselves.

Microsoft’s product mangers have apparently become envious of Apple’s success with their retail stores and so they are planning on trying to copy them. However, with no clear business reason for doing this they appear to be headed off to nowhere.

A much better strategy for product managers would be to observe what your competition is doing and then learn from it. Never do the exact same thing because then it looks like you are just following their lead. Instead, take the best elements of their idea and use them to build an even better idea.

What one thing do you think Microsoft could do to make their retail stores a success?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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…

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Product Mangers Don't Have To Be Good Looking, Just Good Lookers

No, no, we’re not talking about being physically attractive here – although… What I’m really getting ready to talk about is the secret to how product manager who work in the rough-and-tumble economies of emerging markets survive in the long term. What’s their secret and how can we use it to survive the current recession?

Martin Roth and Richard Ettenson over at the Wall Street Journal have been doing some digging in order to find out how product managers can make the best of tumultuous times. What they’ve found is that the ultimate secret to product manger success is to learn to look at the market differently.

Look at the market? Isn’t that what you are currently doing each and every day? Probably not. What I’m talking about here is learning to take a very broad view of the market that your product(s) are competing in.

I’m sure that you are keeping an eye on the status of your competitors. However, are you monitoring the market’s overall economic data? The reason that you should be doing this is because it will allow you to figure out where your overall market is headed.

If you can learn to better predict where your market is going, then this will give you an opportunity to decide when it is the best time to switch from one product strategy to another. If you can guess this correctly, then you’ll be able to use the changes in the market to outflank your competitors.

Roth and Ettenson point out the case of a telephone company in the Dominican Republic that survived economic turmoil back in 2004. They started tracking inflation, unemployment, the exchange rate, etc. in order to better predict where the local economy was going. When the prediction was was down, they cut product prices and focused on customer retention. When the prediction was up, they raised prices and went after new customers.

Do you currently track any major economic indicators as part of your product strategy? When the economy changes, do you change how you price or promote your product? Do you think that this strategy would allow you to outflank your competition? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Sometimes Products Need A Vision Also

I was working with a client the other day who had a unique problem: they needed a vision for their product. Now, I’m pretty familiar with the whole “vision” thing as it applies to a company – it’s that thing that you put on the wall that nobody ever reads. However, this was the first time that I had had someone ask me for one for a product.

My client had been supplying products to different firms that were operating in a market for years. However, they now saw the opportunity to start supplying bundles of their products (can you say “solutions”?) to their customers. However, they were going to be hard pressed to explain why they were all of a sudden showing up in the this market with these new solutions. What was there motivation?

Now we all know that the motivation was to make more money – all business operate this way. However, you can’t really make that the basis of an advertising campaign. Instead, my client needed a solid story that would provide a justification for what they were doing today as well as any future products they might roll out farther down the line.

I must confess that right off the bat I was stumped. I mean, a vision just for a line of products? I did a bit of poking around and I discovered that the firm’s CEO had been doing some talking at trade shows. His basic message had been that the market was broken and that it was going to take some fundamental changes in order to set things strengths.

Hey – this was something that I could use! With a bit of wordsmithing, I took the CEO’s words and turned them into a simple vision statement for the product line – we’re introducing these products to help fix what’s wrong in the marketplace. It had the right time frame for a vision (very long) and it pointed towards a goal that everyone in the market really wanted to move towards. It turns out that this was just about perfect – a feel good vision that could be used for  a very long time.

The client was happy, I got paid, and last I heard when the vision was revealed to customers they “got it” and accepted my client’s role in the market. Job well done!

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Warren Bennis is a smart guy (professor of business administration and chairman of the leadership Institute at the University of Southern California). He’s cranked out a book called Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls and it has a few ideas that really relate to how IT Product Managers can make better decisions.

It turns out that the ability to make good judgment calls when you are a Product Manager is very important (surprise!) because of the impact on others that all of your decisions make. When do these Product Managers get called on to make judgment calls? Warrne identified of the most common three areas: people, strategy, and what to do in a crises. We see the impacts of people judgments around us at work every day. Technically gifted folks who get put into a product team management role for which they are poorly suited, great team leaders who get bumped up and become paper-pushers, etc. The successes in choosing the right people for the right job gets reflected in how successful the product will be. The mistakes can cause lots of damage and are expensive to replace and to repair.

Strategy judgments are the big ones that can make or break a career. In today’s hyperactive IT product development environment speed is often prized over accuracy. Warren brings up a great IT product example in his book: Intel. Many folks don’t realize this, but Intel got its start in manufacturing and selling memory chips. When the prices in this market started eroding and the Japanese manufacturers started coming on strong, Intel had to make a product judgment call: stay in the memory chip business or move on to something else? Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the decision to move on (to CPUs) and the rest, as they say, is history. Good judgment call.

Finally, the ability to make good judgment calls in in middle of a crisis. Once again Intel serves as a good IT product example. Back in 1994, as Intel was releasing the latest version of their x86 chip line it was discovered that under certain circumstances it would return the incorrect answer from a math operation. Initially Intel took the IT road in its response: it did some math and stated that the average user would only see an error once every 27,000 years. However, that didn’t sit well with most of their customers and eventually Intel had to offer to refund/replace the defective chips. This initial response was a very, very poor judgment call on Intel’s part.

So what can product managers do to make better judgment calls? Warren suggests that we work on improving four areas of our knowledge that are critical to making good judgment calls: self-knowledge, social-network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and stakeholder knowledge. Hmm, sure sounds like aligning the product management organization with the rest of the business would go a long way to making this a reality!

Tags: crises, Intel, IT Product Manager, judgment, people, strategy

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