Product Managers Can Use The Start Of The Year To Get A Jump Start On The Year

Happy New Year to everyone! As we stand together at the start of another business year, it’s important to realize that this time of year provides a product manager with a unique once-a-year opportunity to use this time of the business cycle to accomplish a few things that you just can’t get done at any other time of the year.

I’m not exactly sure why this is such a special time of year, outside of the fact that we’re coming out of the holidays. Considering how much of a product manager’s job revolves around contacting and communicating with people, this time of year just seems to make this task that much easier.

Here’s my list of what a product manager needs to do at the start of the year:

• Plan For Success: Forget New Year’s resolutions, I’m talking about Product Manager plans. Take a few moments and picture the end of 2009 - what do you want to have accomplished by the end of the year? Keep it real - no, your product is probably not going to become the next iPhone, but if you want to still have your job it is going to have to have some level of success. This plan can be a simple as a list of 5-10 items that you jot down. Paste it on the wall and you’ll be reminded of your yearly goals all year long.
• Reconnect With Old (Business) Friends: The madness of the end of the year is now over and everyone is in the process of trying to get their acts back together. This is a great time to reach out to everyone and connect with them in order to rekindle the relationship and get yourself in good standing for when you really need to talk to them later in the year.
• Hoard Resources: The neat thing about the start of the year is that nobody has a clear plan for what they want to do yet. This means that if you show up and ask for “things” - people, funding, office furniture, etc.  you have a better than average chance of getting what you want. What’s that phrase, “The early bird gets the worm…”
• Visit Customers: Just like everyone else, your customers are going to get more and more busy as the year starts to pick up steam. If you want to have a chat with your customers about their needs and wants this can be the best time of year to have that discussion.
• Pick Your Product’s Next Features: We’ve talked about Job Mapping as a great way to find out what features your customers would like you to add next to your product. No matter how you go about doing it, the start of the year is THE time to plan out what features you are going to add and in what order you are going to add them.
• Plan Your Next Product: As product managers, we can easily become too comfortable with the products that we know and love. The truth is that all products have a life cycle and will eventually end up going away. We need to take the time to plan for what products will come next. The start of the year is a great time to do this type of activity.

Once again, the first few weeks of each year are a special time that, just like Christmas, comes only once a year. Make sure that you use this time to ensure that the rest of the year is merry for all of your products!

What do you do during the first part of the year to get ready for the rest of the year? Do you find that it’s easier to get in touch with people during this time? Have you ever asked for more resources at the start of the year? Was your request successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: launch new product, new product, new product development, new products, product life cycle, product management, product manager, product mangement, product manger jobs, product manging, Sales

Product Mangers Can Create New Products Using Company Data - But Beware Of Having Them Multiply Like Tribbles!

All too often when we think about the products or services that we are product managers for, we get hung up on the need to be able to touch something. Many of us like boxes with lights on them, CD jewel boxes that snap shut with CDs with nicely printed product labels on them, etc. If I can touch it, then it must be a real product. Hmm, but maybe we’ve been missing an alternate universe of products that could boost not only our company’s bottom line but also our careers…

Your company’s most valuable resource is NOT its people. At least according to your accounting department. Instead the most valuable resource that your company owns is all of the data that it has collected since the day that it opened its doors.

Thomas Redman is the author of a book called Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset. He has studied the information that companies have stored up and he’s got some suggestions for us product mangers.

There is a good chance that within all of this data lies a new product that you could bring to market. I’m not saying that this would be easy to do, but it would have a far better chance of succeeding than dreaming up some other risky new product.

Let’s take a look at just what you would / could do to in order to turn this potential pile of gold into a product that you could successfully manage:

1. Create New Content: How the data that you currently have is organized and formatted may not be of any value to your potential customers. Instead, think about ways to reformat it to create new, richer or more targeted data.
2. Repackage, Repackage, Repackage: Even the oldest information can take on a shiny new look if you reformat, synthesize, or filter it. Doing this can also open the door to adding data created by others to the data that you already have to create something new.
3. Informationalize It: Perhaps a new information product could be created by simply adding monitoring functionality to your existing products. Once you collect data about how your products are being used, perhaps this data can then be sold back to the customers who were using it!
4. Got To Keep ‘Em Separated: Take a look at the products that you are managing right now. Are you bundling a product and data together when you sell it? Try separating the data from the product and selling it separately. Hey, it worked wonders for the Xbox!
5. Make The Most Of Asymmetries: Use your data to gain a better understanding of your products and your market in order to leverage any perceived differences in the value of your products or services. Things that your data tells you that nobody else knows can be key to boosting your bottom line.
6. Sell Asymmetries: If your data would provide insights to another firm that they can’t get any other way, then consider selling it to them. Even if the data is not valuable to you, look for other firms to whom it would be valuable.
7. Sometimes Labels Are Good: take the time to classify your data by adding unique labels to customer types in order to help other users of your data to more easily find what and whom they are looking for.
8. Access Has Value: Just by making it easier for consumers to find the data that they are looking for can create a valuable information product.
9. Start Mining: Often the raw data is useless. You need to mine the data and start to conduct analysis of it. Your goal should be to gain an understanding of customer behavior and spot marketplace trends earlier than anyone else.

Have you ever considered selling your company’s data as another product? Do you currently sell data along with your existing products? Would you consider selling data that is “useless” to you to other firms in order to help them compete? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: information, IT Product manager, new product, new product development, new products, product, product design, product development, product management, product manager, products

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.

Technorati Tags: features, marketing research, new product, new products, product development, product management, product manager, requirements management

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.

Technorati Tags: confirm, customer, customers, define, features, job map, locate, new product, prepare, product design, product management, product manager

Dell Consumer Product Managers Are Having Problems Creating Christmas Gifts

Q: How can you tell when a Product Manger drops the ball?

A: When there is an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title “As Holidays Approach, Dell Lags In New Products”

Man, talk about having your failures broadcast to the whole world! In the consumer space in which Dell sells some of its PC and notebook computers, the end of the year Christmas holidays are the key to a company’s survival. The sales that occur during this time generally account for 30% - 50% of Dell’s annual consumer PC revenue. Miss this revenue train and you’re going to be standing around waiting for the next opportunity for quite some time!

Where did product managers let Dell down? One place is in an ambitious mini MP3 player that Dell was planning on introducing. Way back in 2007, Dell bought a company called Zing in order to get access to their entertainment software. However, now Dell has decided not to launch this product before the holidays. Ouch! What this means is that the folks who would have bought this product will now go out and buy iPods and, maybe, Zunes. Once they do that, Dell is probably flat out of luck - once you’ve loaded your iPod up with $200 worth of songs, you sure don’t want to change players.

Interestingly enough, Dell product managers are not just falling down in the cutting edge new product area, they also seem to be dropping the ball in their bread & butter areas such as notebooks. So far this season, Dell has only released two netbooks (low end laptops, good for web surfing and emails) and some new paint schemes for some existing notebooks. Remember, they are playing in a highly competitive market - Apple just cranked out that very cool all aluminum Macbook and even Acer has released a bunch of new notebooks computers that have fancy styling and built-in access to 3G networks. What’s going on with those Dell product managers?

Michael Tatelman is Dell’s retail chief. He has been forced to tell the press that “You’ll see some very sexy products coming out of Dell”, though they may come out after the holidays. Double ouch!

Way back in the Fall, Michael Dell had told investors that Dell would “focus on killer products…” and they they would have a “shorter development cycle” that would allow them to get products out “40% to 50% faster”. Hmm, missing the Christmas season sure makes it seem like that is not going to happen.

This isn’t the first time that the Consumer products division of Dell has missed a great opportunity. Back at the start of the school year they had to hold back on introducing their first netbook because of keyboard problems and so they missed most of the back-to-school selling window. That probably explains why the consumer products division failed to make a profit in the last quarter and why Dell just got done laying off 9,000 of its workers.

What’s going on here? As product managers we are all probably quite familiar with the problems that Dell is facing. It sure looks like their new product pipeline, which is the lifeblood of Dell’s consumer division, has a friction problem - products are not traveling through it quickly enough. A product manager can’t fix a problem like this by his / herself. However, it is our responsibility to get the various folks who can fix it together and knock some heads in order to get it solved. Since this problem has existed since the start of the school year, clearly there is a lingering sense of a lack of momentum at Dell.

What should the Dell product managers be doing? They need to start with a calendar and determine when they need to have new products in order to match up with their customer’s buying cycles. Once they have this, then they need to start with a with the finished product and work back. What should the next product look like and what features will it have? Once this is nailed down, they need to determine how that product can be available by that date. Very basic stuff, but it sure looks like this is not happening. If a product can’t meet a date, then you need to determine what functionally can be dropped to still meet the date. If too much would have to be dropped, then and only then should you start to move dates around.

Dell can recover from these blunders, but it’s going to require that their Product Mangers step up and take responsibility for fixing the system.

What do you think that Dell’s product managers should do next? Why do you think that they are having their current problems? Do you think that they should try to be more like Apple? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Dell, new product, product manager, product managment, Sales

Product Managers Need To Be Involved In Making Complex Sales Happen

As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the middle of a complex sale. Hopefully you’ve got a great sales team working at your company; however, even the best sales team is going to have to reach out to the Product Manger to handle a complex sale. Let’s talk about what you are going to have to do to help “land the big one”…

I guess the first thing that we should all agree on is the simple fact that a complex sale is much different than a normal sale of your product. This type of sale is going to require extra preparation on your part, it will probably require a longer selling cycle, and will, of course, require more effort on your part to make it happen. I’ve found that complex sales are pretty easy to identify. There is never just one decision maker, rather the product selection process is often spread across multiple departments and may  require several levels of executive authority in order to get the deal approved. Nobody said that this was going to be easy!

Making a complex sale happen is really the responsibility of your sales team. However, as the CEO of your product, you care and you have a critical role to play. Here are the three things that a Product Manger needs to do in order to help make a complex sale happen:

1. Understand What The Real Business Issues Are: Since you are the Product Manger, you should fully understand what business problems your product can solve. Using this knowledge  you need to learn what the customer’s current situation is and determine if there is a match. If there is, then you’re going to have to explain this to the sales team in words that they can then use when they are talking with the customer.
2. Find Out Who ALL The Decision Makers Are: Every company is different and so this question will have a different answer every time. Your sales team may get too wrapped up and focus too much on their point of contact within the company. We all know that, especially for IT products, the ultimate decision maker may have had very little input to the product discussion; however, they are the go-to person that the buyer will double check with before making a decision. It is ultimately your responsibility to keep your eyes open and guide your sales team to talk with ALL of the decision makers.
3. Determine What Criteria Will Be Used To Make A Product Selection: Is there a specific business result that the customer is hoping that your product will create? If you can figure out what criteria will be driving the customer’s decision making process, then that is where you can equip your sales teams to spend their time showing how your product is better than all of the competition.

Remember, one of the things that the customer is going to want you to really, really understand is just exactly what he is trying to accomplish. If you and your sales teams can do this then you’ll be able to win more complex sales than the other Product Mangers out there.

Would you say that most of your sales are complex or not complex sales? When they are complex sales, does your sales team come looking for help from you? Do you find that the customer has a whole collection of people on their side who will make the final product selection? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: complex sales, customer, deal, deals, IT Product manager, new product, new products, product manager, Sales

Being A Product Manger For A Service Requires Different Skills

It’s hard enough to be a product manager for a “real” product, just imagine how hard this job gets when your company decides to switch over and start to offer service products. You’d think that a flexible product manager could just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products and “service” products. Umm, you’d be wrong.

When your company makes the big decision to move over and start offering service products, your life as a product manager will change big time. There are four key success factors that you will need to make sure that you take care of in order to ensure that you will be a successful product manager for services:

1. Make The Company Understand That It’s Already A Service Company: Once your company has decided to start offering service products, you may find that you are already doing this. Instead of inventing new products, perhaps all you have to do is to start charging for things that you are already doing. As a product manager, your first step here will be to work with your customers to make sure that they are aware of the value of your existing services. You’ve got to be careful here: when you suddenly switch a service from being free to now charging for it, you’ve got to make sure that you clearly define the value of the service to both the customer and your internal management. The larger your company is, the better the chances are that you already have services hidden somewhere in how you are currently doing business. One of the best ways to uncover what you already have is to take a look at customer bills - often different parts of the company bill for different items and some may already be billing for services.
2. Transform Your Back Office To Support Services: Product managers know just how important stable internal processes are to  your ability to deliver products consistently. Bad news: when you start to offer service products you are going to find that customer requests to have the service customized to meet their particular needs will have a dramatically bad impact on your cost of delivering the product. In order to solve this problem, there are three things that you can do: (1) build a flexible platform for delivering your services and meeting customer needs, (2) monitor the cost of each of your delivery processes in order to spot the most costly, (3) use new technology to implement process improvements as soon as possible. What all of this means is that the product manger needs to stay on top of how service products are being delivered.
3. Update Your Sales Teams: This may be the most important thing that you do - find a way to transform your sales force that is comfortable selling “real” products into one that can sell service products. One of the most difficult points to get across will be the simple fact that service products take a lot longer to sell and the actual process of selling them is both more complex and strategic. As a product manager it’s not your responsibility to make the sales teams change; however, how well they manage the transformation will determine how successful your product is. Understand that more often than not, a significant number of your current sales teams will end up leaving the company and will be replaced by new salespeople who better understand how to sell services.
4. Focus On How Your Customers Do Their Work: Since a service product is really designed to be used by a customer to make their business run more smoothly, a good product manager now needs to shift his/her focus away from how he/she is delivering the service and start to think about how the customer is going to use the service. This is an important difference from how “hard” product companies operate - they normally focus on things like how much the product is used and how many of a given product a customer is using. A service product is really designed to solve a problem for your customer. This means that the correct way to measure it’s value is to see if it is really solving that problem.  Be careful, as a product manger you may find that you have a lack of expertise to determine how to use your product to solve the customer’s problems better. This may be a great time to bring in a consultant.

Is your company thinking about starting to offer service products? Do you feel that you are ready as a product manger to take charge of these products? Is your sales team up to the task of switching over to selling services from “hard” products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, new product development, new products, product management, product manager, product managing, project management, Sales

A Service Product Is Different From Other Types Of Products

Pick up just about any Product Management book, thumb through it, and you’ll quickly come to realize that most thinking about how to be a successful product manger is based on real products. Things that you can touch and feel. Things that people somewhere in the world manufacture. Even if you are responsible for a software product, there is almost always a set of CDs/DVDs that you deliver to the customer. It’s a bit weak, but you can still touch this product. So what’s a product manger to do when you CAN’T touch the product - because it’s a service. How does this change the product management game?

Before we dive in to this discussion too far, let’s take just a moment and ask the question “why sell services in the first place?” If you work for a company that has traditionally sold “hard goods” - things that you can touch, then one of your biggest product manger worries is that your product will eventually become a commodity. When that happens, the only thing that will matter to the customer is your price and I’m going to bet that you probably don’t have the lowest price out there.  Most firms see selling services as a way to make their hard products unique - provide them with a competitive advantage. The challenge here is that all too often, companies that enter the service space end up struggling to make money - it’s not as easy as it looks.

So why is it so hard to start selling services instead of hard goods? A couple of researchers from Europe, Dr. Werner Reinartz and Dr. Wolfgang Ulaga spent some time looking into this and wrote up their findings in the Harvard Business Review. One of the interesting things that they found was that the back-office automation of services that are complex turned out to be much more difficult than anyone though that they would be. The tendency of customers to want service offerings to be customized for them meant that there really was very little knowledge that could be leveraged across customers.

Another big problem was with the sales teams. They had spent years developing relationships with low-level purchasing staff who were authorized to buy small quantities of hard goods. Once you started talking about selling a service that the whole company could use, the price tag went up dramatically and the sales teams needed to be talking with purchasers who were much higher in the food chain.

Finally, actual knowledge about the new service always seemed to come from “outside” - contractors, consultants, etc. This meant that it was both difficult and time consuming to answer customer’s questions. Clearly all of these challenges made it look like the move to selling services is a real pain in the neck. So why even bother?

The answer to that question is simple: once you get beyond the product differentiation issue, it’s all about the money. As an example, one group of companies that the good Dr.’s studied was able to get 50% of their sales from services and on those sales they were able to get 8x margins over their hard product sales. That’s just too much money to walk away from.

It turns out that there are four steps that hold the key to successfully transforming your product line from a hard goods product line to a services product line. Of course, we’ll cover each of those four steps, in detail, next time.

Are you currently a product manager who is responsible for “hard” products or services or both? How do you feel about your current sales teams: could they sell services if they had to or would a lot of retraining be called for? Do you know what you would have to differently if you were responsible for services instead of “hard” goods? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, new product development, new products, product development, product management, product manager, product marketing

Product Managers Need To Help Solve Sales Problems

As product managers, we are ultimately the source of all knowledge about our products: why it was created, what it does today, and what it will be able to do tomorrow. That being said, we often become part of a sales team when the sales rep has the relationship with the customer, but doesn’t understand the product all that well. This means that we can run into so-called “problem sales” for our products. As awkward as it may feel, this is the time for a product manager to rise to the occasion and help the sales team out. Umm, ok - so now what do you do?

What are some of the problems that you can encounter as a member-of-convenience of the sales team? Here is a common situation that product manager find themselves in :

1. The potential buyer really has a need for your product, they have the budget to buy it, and they have been granted the authority to make the purchase.
2. Your product / service is the perfect fit for their problem.
3. And yet, the buyer does not seem to be willing to make the purchase.

When The Customer Is The Problem: If the customer appears to be dragging their feet, there may be more going on than anyone on your side knows. Big changes like an impending acquisition or money troubles within the customer (like when Wall Street turns upside down!) can cause any sale of your product to slow down or even come to a complete stop. Interestingly enough, the better the relationship between your sales rep and the customer the more likely the customer will be hesitant to pass bad news (”we’re not going to buy your product”) on to them. In these cases, it’s important to develop another contact withing the customer’s organization that you can talk with. If the primary decision maker doesn’t want to disapoint your sales rep, then this secondary source might be able to provide you with the straight scoop.

When Your Sales Rep Is The Problem: If the customer is unwilling to buy, then the core reason for this is that they simply just don’t understand how your product will meet their needs. This means that your sales rep has not been successful in communicating the value of your product to the customer. In order to fix this problem, more discussions with your customer are required. You need to uncover what their pain points are and then you need to be able to relate your product’s features to solving those pain points. Congratulations - if you can do this then you are now a salesperson!

When Your Sales Rep’s Boss Is The Problem: This is a tricky problem for product managers to diagnose. What you might not realize is that Sales Managers are often former star sales people. This means that they were good at selling; however, they may not be good at managing other sales persons (gosh product managers: does this sound similar to what goes on in our world?) Ultimately, the solution to this problem is to have a sit down with the sales rep and his/her boss. I find it easier to blame the product - it’s too complex, it’s too new, whatever and by doing this it allows the sales manager to feel better about the mess that they may have caused. Generally, they have just confused the situation. As Product Manger you can step in and offer to talk with the customer to work out all of the “complicated features” of the product. More often then not, the sales manager will be thrilled to have someone clean up their mess. Make sure that you take the sales rep along with you when you talk with the customer so that they can swoop in and close the deal after you’ve got everything cleared up.

So how many times have you found yourself as an unofficial member of a sales team? Were you ready to play this role or did you feel like a duck out of water? Who had caused the problem that you were having with the customer: the customer, the sales rep, or the sales manager? How did you solve it? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, product manager, Sales, sales manager, sales rep

Netflix is looking for different ways to stream video to your TV

Once upon a time, going to a Blockbuster Video store was a regular part of my weekend. Since I am such and engineer, running back to the store the next day to return the video that I had watched was also part of my weekend. However, I don’t do any of these things any more - now that Netflix has entered my life.

Netflix blew Blockbuster Video out of the water and they did it very quickly. Instead of trying to compete with Blockbuster on their own terms, Netflix redefined the market and did away with all of those video stores. Poof! I’m sure that we can all applaud what Netflix has done so far; however, if you were a Product Manager working at Netflix, what would you be doing now?

Let’s look at the facts: Netflix currently has a very successful product. However, technology keeps moving forward. This product, like so many of our products, has a limited shelf life. Netflix has a lot of existing customers. What do they need to do to retain their existing customers even while they move forward?

Right now it sure looks like the future of at-home movie watching is streaming video via the Internet. Exactly how this is going to work itself out is still just a bit unclear. So what should a Netflix product manager be doing right now? How about laying down the path to the future with the full realization that things may change on the way.

The key is to make delivery of the Netflix movies to their customers as easy as possible. I’m pretty sure that Netflix believes that the transition from mailed DVDs to watching streaming video will be a gradual process that will happen over time - not a flash cut. Netflix has been offering access to streaming video over the Internet for over a year now. Initially they limited how many hours of video each user could stream each month; however, at the start of 2008 they made this unlimited. The only downside to this service is the selection: it’s pretty much movies and TV shows that have run their course. The new releases are not available here.

What’s next? Allowing end users to stream video not into their laptops, but rather into their existing humongous TVs. In order to do this, Netflix needs some serious partnerships. This appears to be what the Netflix product managers are spending their time doing. Netlfix and LG Electronics have teamed up to offer a $500 Blue-ray DVD player that will also stream Netflix movies. Netflix has announced a partnership with Microsoft to allow users of Xbox live to stream Netflix movies. Finally, Netflix has worked with Roku to develop a standalone player that will allow movies to be streamed to your TV.

Which one of these partnerships is the right one? Who knows? I suspect that alot of what is going on here is an attempt by Netflix to discover what the correct product pricing is for this new type of product. The bet is that one of these approaches will bear some fruit and will allow Netflix to remain in the lead in their market. In the end, can any Product Manger ask for anything more?

Do you use Netflix now - what do you think of them? Have you used any of their streaming services? Did it cause you to use less of their DVD-via-post service? Which one of Netflix’s partnerships do you think is the right way to go?

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