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

Product Managers Need To Learn Faster Ways To Reach New Customers

Just in case you have been living at your desk for the past couple of years and hadn’t noticed, Toyota launched a new line of cars a few years ago called Scion. Now we all know the Toyota brand - in fact many of you probably own a Camry because it’s the most popular car in the world. However, it’s a bit on the boring side.

So what’s a major world class car company to do when they want to reach out and capture the hearts and minds of the Generation Y drivers who were not currently sitting behind the wheel of a Toyota? Simple: do the unexpected.

As product managers we are often proud of all of the customers that have selected our product. However, deep in our dark hearts we yearn to be selected by all those other buyers who have not yet picked us to go to the dance with them. We often find ourselves in the same situation that Toyota did: trying to make our product appeal to a whole new segment of customers.

Rob Walker has written a book called Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are in which he did a lot of studying of just what makes us buy things and he’s made some amazing discoveries. One of the things that he learned is that Toyota figured out that in order to market their new car to their Generation Y target audience, the brand’s “meaning” was more important than the product’s functionality. Can anyone say “iPhone”?

In this highly connected age we’ve started to believe that our customers have become immune to just about any type of communication that we can come up with. What Toyota’s product marketing team discovered was that this was not true. In fact, the pitch-free guerrilla marketing that Toyota engaged in to promote the Scion line actually seemed to be welcomed by their potential customers. Toyota advertised the Scion in small artsy magazines and stayed away from the mainstream ones. They hosted dance parties and gave out Scion CDs and magazines.

What Walker has found out is that the 21st Century “new consumer” is basically all made up. Oh, and this is really starting to screw up product managers. However we do live in changing times and you are going to have to be changing the ways in which you appeal to your customers.

No matter what product you are responsible for, you are going to have to start to emphasize the meaning of the product first and the functionality second (sorry about that feature lovers). Today’s buyers want to feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves (”I’m a Mac”).

This goes hand-in-hand with Walker’s other finding which shows that successful brands often build their eventual mass audience by cobbling together much smaller ones.

There is a great deal for product mangers to learn here even if you are not selling to Generation Y consumers. You need to realize that the world has changed and it’s now time to think differently about your customers. They never were nameless, shapeless blobs who mindlessly did or did not select your product. They have always been thinking, caring people for whom your product solved a specific problem. Now you’ve got to understand how THEY want to be reached…

Have you ever used any guerrilla marketing to promote your product? Did it work as well as you were hoping? Will you ever use this technique again? How did your management feel about you doing this? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking…

Technorati Tags: brand management, customer, customers, guerrilla marketing, new products, product, product management, product manager, product marketing, Scion, Toyota

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

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.

Technorati Tags: brand management, job, marketing management, marketing research, new features, product design, product features, product manager, requirements management

Product Mangers Have A Secret Weapon That Can Make Them More Successful

Being  a Product Manager is hard work, being a successful product manager is even harder. Wouldn’t we all like to have a secret weapon that would allow us to cut through all of the roadblocks that others seem to be constantly throwing up all around us?

Just imagine if there was some way to get everyone to actually do what they have promised that they would do. Wouldn’t that at least be a step in the right direction? We’ve talked in the past about other powerful tools that all product managers have at their disposal, but I’ve been saving the best for now.

It is a simple and perhaps sad fact of modern business life that nobody (including you) has enough time to get everything done anymore. What this means is that actions that people agreed to do during meetings, requests that you’ve made, and pleas that you’ve sent via email will probably mostly get ignored.

Yes, there is a possibility that people aren’t doing what you need them to do because they don’t like you. However, to not like someone takes energy so it’s more likely that people are probably blowing you off because they’ve got too much other higher priority work that needs to be done. Sorry, you lose.

This should be a big deal to you. The modern product manager really does not create anything - instead we work with and through others to get things done. Our dirty little secret is that nobody works for us and so we really don’t have any authority to demand that things get done. Instead, we can only ask. That phrase “all the responsibility, none of the authority” was really created for us.

It’s almost enough to make a hard working product manger throw his/her hands up in the air and give up. But wait - before you do that, I’ve got good news for you - there is a secret weapon that you can use to make your life better.

This secret weapon is called “the follow-up”. No, wait - don’t stop reading now! Trust me on this one, the follow-up has the ability to change your life (I know this because it changed my life). The reason that I like to call this a secret weapon is because amazingly enough it really does seem to be a secret - almost nobody else is using it!

Here’s a typical scenario that this secret weapon can come into play in: you attend a meeting, a discussion occurs, actions are created and assigned, the meeting is over and everyone leaves. All too often, that’s it - nobody ever follows up on those actions. This means that the same topics will be revisited in another meeting, more actions will be assigned, and those actions won’t be followed-up on either. And so on, and so on.

As a product manager with your new follow-up secret weapon, you can take charge of the actions that you care about. Make sure that each of them has a clear owner before the meeting breaks up. Also make sure that each action has an associated due date. Once this is done,  you need to make yourself a “follow-up checklist”.

This checklist will tell you who you need to hound in order to make sure that they complete their actions on time. This list will grow once you start including outstanding emails on it. How many times have you sent an email with a question to someone and then forgotten about it (and they have too!)? Not any more, now when you send that email w/ a question, add it to your follow-up checklist.

What’s going to happen is very quickly you are going to take on the demeanor of a bulldog in your work environment. People are going to start to realize that when you are promised information, you are not going to let up until you get it. This means that the people who owe you info will move it up their priority list.

Yes, I know that this sounds like a very simple secret weapon; however, it’s power is not to be underestimated. Give it a try and I think that you’ll be pleased with the results.

Do you have trouble getting coworkers to provide you with the information and answers that you need? Do actions that get assigned during meetings get answered or do they get forgotten? Have you ever asked a question in an email that didn’t get answered and that you then forgot about? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: action items, brand management, follow up, meetings, product management, product manager

Product Managers Need To Work With Sales To Find Golden Customers

As the CEO of your product, at the end of the day you are the one who is responsible for it being a success. Not the sales team, not the developers, not the CEO. You. This is one of the HUGE differences between a project manger and a product manger. Project managers can complete their tasks, make sure that everything is checked off, and then have an immense feeling of satisfaction. A product manger doesn’t get to feel this way unless his/her product is a commercial (or internal) success. At too many companies, the process for making a product a success are way to complex and appear to have been designed by a project manger: they are littered with lots of steps and dozens of milestones. Making a product a success is actually a relatively simple process and a product manager can make it so if you follow the following three steps.

In a nutshell, making your product a success comes down to doing three things correctly: improving the quality of the prospects that your sales teams generate, improving the presentations about your product that are given to potential customers, and increasing the number of potential customers that your sales teams call on. In order to simplify the life of a product manger, improvements need to simultaneously be made in all three of these areas. Now here’s how to do that:

• Improve The Quality Of The Prospects That Your Sales Teams Generate: Help your sales teams out by getting existing customers to provide referrals to new customers. Hey, the job of selling any product let alone your product is a difficult task. When a salesperson shows up on a new customer’s doorstep, do you think that that potential customer is happy to see them? No. However, if you can get existing customers to open the door for your sales team then the prospect’s guard will be down and your salesperson will actually have a fighting chance of getting them interested in your product.
  Direct your sales teams to only meet with decision makers. You know better than anyone else what kind of job title is going to be required to shell out the cash needed to buy your product. Tell you sales teams what to look for. This will help your sales teams make the best use of their time - if they can’t get access to the right person, they’ll know to move on to the next prospect.
  Guide your sales team toward the big buyers and away from the little buyers. Every deal takes about the same amount of time to close and if it turns out that a prospect does not have much money to spend, then in reality they are a poor fit for your product. Remember that just a few big deals is much better than a whole bunch of little deals.
• Improve The Presentations About Your Product That Are Given To Potential Customers: Help your sales teams out by equipping them with the material that they need for multiple meetings with a potential customer. Rarely will a deal be closed on the first meeting so you are going to have to teach your sales teams about the flow of the conversation as it relates to your product. A key part of this is to help them identify goals for the first and second meetings. If possible, as a product manger you should practice with your sales teams in order to ensure that they aren’t repeating themselves due to nervousness nor are they bringing up objections before the customer does.
• Increasing The Number Of Potential Customers That Your Sales Teams Call On: You are the CEO of your product. It’s up to you to guide your sales teams towards the right potential customers and then let them work their magic. Ensure that your sales teams are only meeting with decision makers - meeting with anyone else will allow your team to be identified as a salesperson instead of potential business partners. Have your sales teams take charge of their schedules. Have them agree to meet with a prospective customer at whatever time works best for the customer and then call back later to move it to a time/date that works best for your sales team. This way they can pack more customer contact into a given day. This is how they will eventually end up selling more of your product.

Finally, make sure that the sales teams that are selling your products are out of the office during prime working hours. If they are in the office, then they are not in front of a customer selling your product and this is bad for both of you. All though this may seem like a lot of sales work for a product manger to do, remember that you are the only one in your company that will ultimately be judged by how successful your product is. You need to be able to do it all…!

How much interaction with your sales teams do you have today? Do you help them qualify leads so that they are only working with high potential customers? Have you spent time with them coaching them how to give presentations on your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customers, potential customers, presentations, product manager, prospects, qualifying, Sales

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 Take Advantage Of The Current Recession

Psst - don’t look now, but it sorta looks like all of the economies in the world are all tanking at the same time. If you are a product manager, this sure does not look good for your career. I view a product manager as being the CEO of your product and so at the end of the day no matter what the economy is doing you are responsible for making sure that your  product is a success. Hmm, if only someone had 7 suggestions for what a product manager should be doing RIGHT NOW…!

Good news - I do. As the CEO of your product you are going to have stand up and take charge even as everyone else in your company may be ducking in order to avoid attracting attention and getting laid off. At this time you can’t afford to be quiet - if your product fails, you’ll be gone so you may as well go out swinging. If you are willing to work to make your product a success no matter what, then this list of 7 things that you should be doing is just what the economic doctor ordered:

1. Get Offensive: No, I’m not talking about working (more) four-letter words into your everyday vocabulary. Rather, I’m suggesting that you realize that during a recession other product mangers are going to be playing defense. They are going to be trying to hang on to the customers that they have because they fear losing them and they’re going to not be spending enough time pursuing new customer opportunities. That means that that this recession is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you to build market share for your product. Work with your sales team and make sure that they are leaving no rock unturned right now in order to find new potential customers.
2. Incent Your Customers: Once again, no - don’t get them angry; instead, get them motivated to try/buy your product. If ever there was a time to roll out a marketing program that is designed to get those customers who might be sitting on the fence eager to use your product, then this is the time to do it.
3. Don’t Travel: Within your company, the bean counters are going to be keeping their beady little eyes posted in order to find ways to reduce costs. If you are hopping on a plane every week to go “gather requirements” from customers, all of a sudden you are going to find yourself wearing a nice bright set of concentric circles on you back when it comes time to reduce staff. Instead, use the full power of the 21st Century to reach out and contact both existing customers and new ones that your sales team has found. Although we are often tempted to use email for everything, don’t forget to pick up the phone and start calling!
4. Get Creative: … with your marketing. One of my favorite quotes from the master marketeer, P.T. Barnum is “Without promotion, something terrible happens … NOTHING!” We’re not talking about a big iPhone launch ad campaign here, but rather a whole series of small marketing efforts that can have a big combined effect. Things like free trials of your product, special discounts, or even using the web to set up a customer portal to provide access to special information and support. Doing an online survey can be a great way to collect valuable customer information while reminding your customers that you are still here.
5. Talk To Me Baby: How many times have you been told that an existing customer is 5x cheaper to sell to than getting a new customer? Well, now is the time to put that knowledge into action. Use your existing customers to help drive your product’s innovation direction. Collecting this type of information from customers who have already selected your product will allow you to make the product even better which will help capture more market share during the recession.
6. Retrain Sales: We product managers know our products inside and out. How well does your sales team know your product? Probably not as well as you do. Use the recession to take the time to bring your sales teams up to speed on what they need to know: new features, planned features, competative info, etc. Once you’ve got them pumped up, there will be no stopping them from selling more of your product.
7. Work Smarter: When times are good, we all have a tendency to focus on ourselves and try to meet our own objectives. During hard times, we need to instead look at our customers and try to figure out what we need to do to better met their objectives. This may be as simple as adjusting the hours that you work in order to better match your customer and to ensure that you’ll be there if they need to call you directly. Little things like this can make all the difference in ensuring that your product is a success even during a recession.

How is your product doing during this recession? Do you feel that your sales teams are out working hard enough to sell it? Have you done anything creative to help the company sell more of your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: brand management, discount, marketing, marketing management, product manager, product marketing, promotion, recession, Sales