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Can you see where your product will be 5 years into the future?

Being a product manager is a hard job. It seems like there is always too much to do every single day. Keeping yourself focused on what needs to be done today or maybe even tomorrow is enough to keep you fully booked. Oh wait, there is one other thing that you need to be doing – visioning.

What Is This Visioning Thing?

I’m pretty sure that we’re all familiar with the concept of a business case – creating one is a basic part of every product manager job description. It’s the written document that product managers put together once a year in order to request that the company fund their product. Part of this effort involves telling the rest of the company how great the future is going to be if they give you the money that you are asking for.

Visioning is a little bit like that part of a business case. However, it also has its differences. The first of these is that a visioning exercise is solely focused on creating a clearly defined picture of what the future is going to look like for your product. You don’t have to worry about how much money you’re going to need or in what order you are going to roll out new features. The vision document should be something that you can hand off to an account manager or business development manager in order to show them where the product is going.

The output of a visioning exercise is a vision for your product. This vision will clearly describe the world as you see it 3, 5, 10 or however many years you want to go into the future. The vision that you create has to answer a bunch of questions: what will your product look like? How will it stack up against the competition? How does your company feel about your product?

Note that a product vision is not the same thing as a strategic plan for your product. The difference is that a product vision very clearly describes where you are going with the product. A strategic plan lays out how you are going to get there.

How Do You Do Visioning Correctly?

The expert in how to do visioning correctly is Ari Weinzweig. He points out that visioning isn’t necessarily something that you just sit down and do in order to crank out a vision for your product. Rather, you need to view visioning as being a process that keeps getting executed. Learn to do this well and it’s something that you’ll be able to add to your product manager resume.

In order to make this happen, you are going to have to secure some quiet time for yourself to sit down and do some writing. Here are the steps that Ari suggests that product managers take in order to create a vision for their product:

1. Pick Your Product: a vision can be created for just about anything. Be very clear what you are going to create a vision for: is it your product, is it your product team, or is it for a brand?
2. What Time Is It?: How far out into the future do you want to position your vision at? Ari suggests that you go far enough out that you can get beyond all of the issues and challenges that you are facing today, but not too far where everything may have changed.
3. Create Positive Energy: spend 10 minutes coming up with a list of past accomplishments for your product. What are you the most proud of – key sales, great new features, etc. This is designed to get you in the mood for what comes next.
4. Write It: Now just sit down and do it. Just crank it out – don’t waste too much time on it, just get your words on a piece of paper. Make sure that you paint a great future for your product. Make it something that everyone would be proud to be part of.
5. Review: Spend some time reading what you wrote the first time and then start to rewrite it. Don’t be surprised if you end up changing most or all of what you wrote originally.
6. Review Again: You’d be amazed at how many changes you make the next time that you come back and take another look at what you wrote.
7. Get Input From Peers: Now is the time to shop your vision around. Collect everyone’s inputs and consider them. Add the ideas that you like.
8. Advertise the vision: now that you have a compelling vision for your product, make sure that you get it into everyone’s hands. Promote it far and wide both inside and outside of the company.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

As a product manager you are the chief evangelist for your product. What that means is that it’s part of the strategic management portion of your job to keep everyone excited about making your product a success. In order to do that, you’ve got some visioning to be doing.

Visioning is the process by which a product manager takes the time to picture what the future is for your product is going to look like. There is no wrong way to do this. However, you need to make some decisions about how far out into the future you want to look and how much detail you want to add.

Once you’ve created a compelling vision of the future you need to share it with everyone. Only by doing this will you be able to get their support and generate excitement about what lies ahead. As experienced product managers know, working with an excited and motivated bunch of people makes everything a lot easier to do!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How often do you think that a product manager should perform visioning for his/her product?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there you are, a happy product manager creating and delivering products that meet your customer’s needs. All of a sudden (but you should have seen it coming) a big box competitor with tons of selection and low, low prices shows up in your backyard. Oh, oh – what’s a product manager to do now? It turns out that we can learn some lessons from the world of women’s fashion. Boutiques have been dealing with this very situation for awhile and they have a thing or two to teach us…

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A good product strategy will show you the right way to go…

So what’s your product strategy? If you are like most product managers, you probably don’t have one. Oh sure, if somebody asks you what your product’s strategy is, you can quickly come up with some words that sound good – increase market share, drive down costs, beat the competition, etc. But really, just between us girls, you don’t have a strategy for your product do you? Good news, I think that I can help you out here…

What A Product Strategy Is NOT

If we’re going to talk about what you need to do in order to create a product strategy, then perhaps our time together would be well spent if we started off by having a quick discussion about what a product strategy is NOT. All too often I believe that product managers make mistakes about what can pass as a product strategy.

First on this list is a mission statement. While these are good documents to have for a company, they don’t cut it when it comes to laying down a strategy for your product. A mission statement is a “big” thing – it’s designed to show a company what they should be trying to accomplish right now. Your product is a much more focused item – it needs to have a smaller scope that fits your product.

More than once I’ve run into product managers who when asked what their product strategy was would reach into their pocket and extract a list of goals for the year. Once again, this is a good thing to have, but it is most definitely not a product strategy. A list of goals for your product is too vague. Goals can be all over the map and although they may be a good thing to do, they don’t clearly show the direction that you want to move your product in.

Finally, I’ve seen product managers attempt to use a resource plan as a product strategy. This never works out because a resource plan is simply too unfocused. It’s a great way to make sure that you’ll have everything that you need when you need it, but it doesn’t tell you why you need them or even what they need to do once you have the resources.

The 3 Steps Needed To Create A Product Strategy

Now that we’ve identified what a product strategy is not, how about if we cover the steps that you need to go through in order to create a product strategy. These three product strategy creation steps were created by Dr. Richard Rumelt a very successful professor and business consultant.

1. What Is The Business Challenge?: Every product has a business challenge that they are facing. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to determine what the nature of this challenge is. Are you being crushed by the competition? Can your customers afford your product? Are your customers solving their problem using other types of solutions? You need to determine what is going on.

2. Create A Guiding Policy: Once you know what the challenge that your product is facing is, your next step has to be to create a guiding policy for it. This means that you need to determine the guidelines that you are going to follow in order to address your product’s challenge.

3. Create Coordinated Actions: Finally, you need to come up with a list of actions that will put your guiding policy into motion. These actions have to be very specific and they need to build on each other in order to move you closer towards meeting your product’s business challenge.

What All Of This Means For You

Every product manager has the responsibility to create a strategy for their product. Even if you don’t currently have one, you need to make one. The key is to realize what a product strategy is NOT: it’s not a mission statement (too big), it’s not a list of goals (too vague), nor is it a resource plan (too unfocused).

Instead, a product strategy is something that you create in three steps. The first is to determine the nature of the business challenge that your product is currently facing, the next is to create a policy that you can use to guide your product so that it will be at an advantage, and finally it’s a set of actions that you can execute that will allow you to put your product strategy into action.

It turns out that it’s not hard to create a product strategy. You just need to take the time to do it correctly. Once you have a strategy, you’ll know exactly what the next steps are that you have to take in order to ensure that your product will be a success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that a product manager should create a product strategy by themselves or working with a team?

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

Being a product manager is a hard job. It seems like there is always too much to do every single day. Keeping yourself focused on what needs to be done today or maybe even tomorrow is enough to keep you fully booked. Oh wait, there is one other thing that you need to be doing – visioning.

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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?

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

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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