Customer Visit: 2 creative ways to get a budget

Posted on November 8, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is a travel ban in companies, so as a product manager, how do you get a travel budget so that you can get out of your office for on-site customer visits? It is hard, but here are two creative ways you can make it work.Getting budget for customer visit

1) Think local - It is one thing to walk into your boss’s office and try to convince him/her that you have to fly to Hawaii to do an on-site customer visit. More eyebrows will be raised out of suspicion of your desires, no matter how relevant your product is to the Aloha market. It is a totally different and easy sell, if you want to ask permission from your boss to visit your local customers. Do you have customers within a 75-mile radius of your office that you could visit. If yes, what are you waiting for? If not, do you have any within a 200 mile radius that you could drive to? Yes, it could take 3-4 hours to drive to get there, but by announcing that you are a creative boot-strapper and that you are willing to even drive 3 hours to better understand customer needs, your management will very likely appreciate your initiative. Day-trips are cheap because there are no hotel stays, no expensive dinners or flights involved. Even in companies where travel budgets are tight, I am sure there is still a few hundred dollars to support a product manager’s day trip to a customer site. And if there isn’t, then your company probably does not believe in building products that are in-tune with customer needs or might be in deeper financial trouble than you think and you should start looking for a new job.

2) Piggyback - Are you scheduled to travel for any trade shows? In which case, most of your travel expense is already a sunk cost. Do you have any customers at or near the place where the tradeshow is going to be held? If yes, extend your stay for a day or two and visit those customers. The incremental cost to do this will not be much and approvals are easier to get. Piggyback on that planned trip to do customer visits. Are you going to go on a personal vacation, traveling for a wedding? Is it possible for you to extend your stay for a couple of days and mix in some business as part of your trip? If yes, ask the company to pick up the tab for your extended stay. Get creative and make sure your management knows that you are going over and beyond what is expected of you, to make sure that the products you build are in-tune with customer needs. It is such employees who will be valued the most when push comes to shove.

Does this make sense? How have you managed to do a customer visit during the tough economic times?

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Image: Courtesy of piperreport.com

Filed under: business, customer visits, leadership, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | Leave a Comment »

What is product simplicity?

Posted on November 3, 2009 by gopalshenoy

The KISS principle – Keep it simple stupid – something all of us have heard it one time or another. But when it comes to products, what exactly is prproductcomplexityoduct simplicity? Product usability and simplicity typically falls into three different categories, in my perspective. This perspective is based on my 13 year experience building products for the mass market – small businesss in particular. Enterprise products may be a different ball game and hence your mileage may vary.

1) Less is more – Don’t overload your product with all the features your users may ever want. Instead focus on those features that 80% of your customers would need. Yes, this will mean telling the remaining 20% one of two things – this product is not for you (sales – yes, be honest with the customer) or get used to the feature set we have because here are the benefits. In the latter case, here are couple of examples that come to mind: Apple iPod comes to mind. I would love to delete songs directly from my iPod, but I cannot. I need to go to iTunes for that. I can choose to complain that Apple was wrong, but given the huge other benefits offered by the iTunes-iPod integration, I get used to it not being there. Apple drew the line in the sand and said No.

One of the common pitfalls companies fall into is full product configurability. Full configurability is not necessary. What it does is create a slew of options, intimidates users and on top of it creates a maintenance and testing nightmare. Majority of the users tend to use products in the default configuration. How often have you gone to the preferences or options dialog to configure something, especially when you are a brand new user? Provide basic configurations and then let the customers guide you with the other configuration options they would need. Again, stick to the 80% rule.

This is hard to do because the 20% of those customers who need all of the complicated features could be your largest customers, the most vociferous ones but at some point in time, you need to own your product direction and learn to say No. I do not mean be arrogant, but reason with the customer as to why you don’t want to do it – in the past, I have been very honest with the customers as to how the general user base would not need the functionality being requested and they have backed down. The trick here is that your product should have such a high value proposition that these things end up to be gravy in the whole scheme of things. And if the features requests (which fail the 80% test) are the meat and potatoes for these customers. then your product after all may not be the right fit for them. Be honest with such customers and recommend the products they should look at – this may even be your competitor’s products. Don’t miss out on building the relationship, you would never know when it will come handy – for all you know they may find the competitor’s product complex/expensive and may dproduct simplicityecide to buy your product instead.

2) Your product behaves the way users expect it to – In this case, it is not about less features. Often, users expect the product to have the functionality to get their job done. To facilitate this, your product could end up being feature rich. But there is a difference – there are many products that are feature rich but not very user friendly. Then there are other products that are equally feature rich, but much easier to use. Personally, I was involved in one such product called SolidWorks which made its mark because of its production readiness and because of its ability to run on Windows with the same ease of use as Office applications at 1/5th the price of PTC’s product called Pro/ENGINEER. Pro/ENGINEER was powerful, super complex to use, ran on Unix workstations and costs tens of thousands of dollars at that time.

The trick here is to minimize the deviation between how the user expects to complete a particular task and how the software allows the user to do the task. Larger the deviation, lower the usability of the product. This is because users will have to learn new ways to do tasks that they think should be very easy to do. Usability testing is key to ensure that there is minimal deviation between the user expectation and actual difficulty in completing a particular task.

3) Your product is a game changer – Your product comes up with a very innovative way to do things the users could never imagine possible with the current systems he uses. Two products that are classic examples are 1) Bose products and 2) Shazam, the nice little iPhone app.

waveradio-shazam

Whether it is Bose’s Wave radio or the acoustic noise reducing headphones or the iPod sounddock they sell, their products are game changers. They have hidden all the dials/controls that the user had to muddle with to listen to music and  made it dead simple – no dials, no controls, it just works. This to me is a game changer. Shazam is equally simple. It listens to the music that is being played, analyzes it and identifies the song – number of clicks needed – ONE to start the process. It even integrates with iTunes to download the song. To top it all, it is FREE. Can it get any better than that?

You can do this, it takes effort. When it comes to software, this is easier to do (or at least I think it is because all I have done is software in my career). One technique I have used successfully is to write down each and every step that is currently involved in completing a task and see how many of these can be automated or compressed into less number of tasks. You will be surprised in what you find. But when doing this, you will come across the naysayers who ask you – “What if the user wants to do this, what if they want to do that?”. The best way to counter is by making sure you know what the 80% of your users will need and then stick to the principle of Less is more.

Thoughts? What have your experiences been?

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Images: Courtesy of gizmodo.com, bose.com, shazam.com

Filed under: business, customer experience, product management, product usability | 1 Comment »

Death by a thousand paper cuts ….

Posted on October 26, 2009 by gopalshenoy

In my last post, I discussed the benefits of doing an on-site customer visit where you get to observe customers/prospects use your product or competitive products to get their job done. In my experience doing these visits, I often discover what I call “death by a thousand paper cuts” issues. These issues are essentially annoyances that your users have to put up with when using your product. By itself, each of these issues will sound trivial. If your users call you up to complain about any one of these issues or to propose a solution, you could easily laugh it off as trivial.

But when you are on-site observing these customers, you will notice that these trivial issues quickly add up to cause significant loss of productivity for your users, especially when your users have to encounter them each and every time they use your product. But these to me are the slam dunk features – they are so trivial and hence are usually very easy to fix, but when you fix them you will be able to significantly improve the user experience. Your customers will notice these small improvements because they will reap significant benefits especially if these issues were in the way of a frequently performed task.

I have had many instances where such simple fixes have generated the loudest applause from the audience where as the big feature we were so proud of was met with very muted applause (to our chagrin, if I may add). Have you experienced something similar?

Thoughts?

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Five reasons customer visits beat other requirements gathering techniques

Posted on October 7, 2009 by gopalshenoy

I am a big fan of customer visits – ones where you visit customers on-site and observe them using your or competitor’s product. Now why do this? What are the benefits of doing this over talking to the same customer/prospect over the phone, while at a conference/trade show or doing a survey etc. Here are the 5 reasons why I find customer visits trump other market requirements gathering techniques:

1) Customers misstate their pain points: Yes, they do. But not because they want to mislead you. But because what customers tell you is often very different from what they do. For example, let us say you are on the phone and ask them to walk you through the different steps they do to complete a particular task. They will tell you what they can remember. When they articulate these steps they usually tend to remember the ideal way they do things or the way they are supposed to do things. But this is often not the way they end up doing things. There are always quirks, there are often painful detours which you will never get to know. These painful detours could be a gold mine for you to solve such that the customer’s life becomes a lot easier when using your product. customervisit

2) They don’t want to look stupid: Usually customer phone calls have multiple representatives from the customer side and often folks with varying responsibilities and varying levels of expertise of your product. It is difficult for someone who is not as good as using your product admit that it is very difficult to do something. Here is a typical scenario:

Bill (a new user who is struggling with or learning your  product):  “You know I wish your product was easier to use when it comes to  doing <insert one of your product features here>. I use this every day and every time I use it, I either lose data or the performance is very slow.”

John (Mr. Power User who is also on the call):  “Oh Bill, that can be easily done. It is because you don’t know about feature X. I will show you how to do it after this call.”

Do you think Bill is going to tell you any more of his pain points? He shuts up from there on and all you get to hear would be from the Mr. Power User, mostly things that are useful for the power users. Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Power User could be the most passionate visionary you want to tap into or could be the most opinionated, smooth talking person who pretends he knows it all. You have to be understand which of these two you are dealing with. The above scenario is difficult to do over the phone, but easier to do when you are meeting them in person (because you can choose to meet in private with Bill or ask him to show you how he uses your product).

3) Surveys: Good data gathering tool when you are ready to do quantitative evaluations, but only to augment the qualitative data gathering you have done via customer visits. Again when responding to survey questions, customers will answer on how they think they are doing something vs. how they really do it. Surveys typically do not capture the real pain points customers experience. The customer also tend to propose solutions when responding to survey questions as opposed to explaining the real problem that needs to be solved. Survey responses by their very nature are monologues and are not a conversation.

4) Customers do not know what they do not know: Humans quickly get used to doing things in one way that it becomes second nature. Once you get used to something or you are too close to the problem – you lose the objectivity. By observing customers in their native habitat, you are able to observe all the inefficient things that they do by second nature. By observing these things and by solving them, you would provide solutions to problems that the customer did not even know he had. You get respected for your ability to look out for the customer.

5) You get to see the customer’s “native” habitat: Where does the customer spend his time when he is working? A nice cushy air conditioned office? Or a dump that is next to the manufacturing floor where it is noisy and dusty as hell? How computer savvy are they? On one of my customer visits, I visited a customer for whom Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V were major revelations. And he has been using the computer for a long time. It is very easy for us when sitting in our offices to assume that our customers are computer savvy. What are your typical customers like? Ones that wear suits to work? Or ones that are in shorts and flip-flops?  How often do they get interrupted when trying to use your product? All of this  will help you build up the customer persona you are designing for and also understand where your product fits in the customer’s working life. None of this is possible to do via customer phone calls, surveys or even while meeting customers in your offices or trade shows.

Thoughts?

Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer visits, marketing, product management, product usability, voice of the customer | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

How do you find usability testing participants?

Posted on September 24, 2009 by gopalshenoy

In the last post, I talked about best practices for doing usability testing. But how do you go about finding participants for usability testing. Here are some tips:

1) Define your target user who will benefit from the product/feature you have developed. If it is an IT management software, is it the IT admin? Or is it the CIO who will be using your product? If it is an eCommerce site that sells shoes, do you want women who will buy shoes? Do you want to target frequent buyers or the infrequent buyers? Usabilitytesters

2) Find them – In the B2B software market that I have been involved in, I have typically recruited users who I know have the pain points that are being solved by this new widget. This information has come from our enhancements database, customers I have interviewed and have this problem or users who I know have this problem based on my domain knowledge. Image the excitement such users have when you call them up and say -”Hey, remember the enhancement request you had send in 6 months back? We are planning to implement a widget to solve that problem and wanted to know if you would have 45 minutes to take a look at an early version of that widget. Your feedback will help us make sure that the solution meets your needs and since it very early, we can also make changes to it based on your feedback.” And to make them special, I also add “We are doing this only with few selected customers. Would you have the time?”. 99% of the time I have had heard a Yes. You kill two birds with one stone – 1) send the message that you are responsive to your customer needs and 2) you value their feedback on the new widget before it is set in stone.

3) Paid or Free? - 90% of the time I have never paid my usability testers especially in the scenario I have described above where the new widget is a result of an enhancement request that has come from a customer. The customer is more than happy to be given a chance to be heard and also very curious to see the early version of this new widget. They realize their time investment will pay off. In other cases where I have to find new users who are not customers, I have paid anywhere from $75-100 per test. I typically try to see if the user raises the question of $, before I offer to pay (OK, call me a cheapskate, but I like to bootstrap as much as I can). But whether it is a paid user or a free, I make sure that the user leaves with some company goodies such as hats, mugs, pens, t-shirts etc. If they are a new user, I want them to remember my brand and I want them to advertise my brand. This does not apply if you are a brand new company in a stealth mode.

4) NDA needed? – Depends on how much you can trust the user. If the user is not a customer, absolutely Yes. If the user is a current customer, in majority of the cases I get them to sign an NDA especially if it is a new product or a killer idea that has competitive benefits. But, one NDA per user, please. Typically NDAs cover two-three years. But I trust the majority of the customers I pick. In case I don’t get them to sign an NDA, I make it very clear that this information is confidential. If the user has signed an NDA in the past, I make it a point to mention that what they are about to see is governed by the NDA they have previously signed. The best part is to check with your boss – does he want an NDA to be signed – this will make sure that you are following company policies and also that your manager knows about you showing future functionality to customers/prospects.

Thoughts? Do you have any tips you would like to share?

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Image: Courtesy of NUS School of Computing

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11 Best practices for doing Software Usability testing

Posted on September 22, 2009 by gopalshenoy

I have been doing software usability testing for the past 10 years or so and here are 11 rules I go by every time I do a usability test. I have taken the liberty of calling it “best practices” only because these work for me really well. Take that as one man’s opinion if you want, since your mileage may vary depending on your product or service.usabilitytesting

Rule 1: Check your ego at the door before you sit down with your participants. The objective is to figure out if the software behaves the way “real users” expect it to. It is not a test of the users. And believe it or not, your software will NOT always behave your participants would expect it to behave. Do not get ticked off if the user slams your product or the new feature s/he is being asked to test – no one cares how much time you and/or your development team put in to build it, all that matters is if the user can do what s/he wants to do the way s/he expects to.

Rule 2: Make the user comfortable at the start of the test.  Why? Because it is difficult not to be nervous when you have someone watching over your shoulder while you are trying to figure out this half-baked, buggy new piece of software that you may have never used before. Chit chat, get the user some coffee or water. Do not dive right in.

Here is what I tell my participants before we start the software testing. “I want to make sure you understand that we are testing the software “usability” and not you the “user”. There is nothing and I mean NOTHING that you can do wrong in this test. If you don’t like something tell us and tell us why. If you like something tell us and tell us why. It is important for us to know both so that we don’t ruin what you like while trying to eliminate/fix what you don’t like. What we are trying to determine here is the deviation between how you expect to do certain tasks using our product and the way the product actually behaves. I would really appreciate if you could talk out loud what you are thinking while you are try doing the tasks you are about to do.”

Rule 3: Plan the test. Have a written down script for the tasks the user is supposed to do. Don’t change the script from one user to the other and importantly, stick to the script.

Rule 4: Forget about recording the audio/video of the test. Don’t listen to the usability pundits who tell you to do this. For the same reason, I have never spend a dime in renting professional usability testers or the facilities with the one way mirrors etc. Here are my reasons why I do not recommend any of this:

  1. It is expensive – read – $$$$$ and time consuming. I just cannot justify the extra return on investment compared to doing it myself.
  2. It is time consuming to set up and one more thing that can go wrong. I have tried using tools like Morae and even they introduce unnecessary complexities and modes of failure.
  3. I like to keep it very simple. And to me, nothing comes close than having a simple setup with my users. After all, it is my job as a product manager to make sure my product behaves the way the user expects it to.
  4. Getting the user not to be nervous without doing all of this is difficult in the first place. Their nervousness level goes up even higher if they find out that whatever they say or do is being recorded or they are being watched by folks behind a one-way mirror.
  5. No one is going to watch or listen to the recording – do you really think your product team has the time? – putting together the test is hard enough. I would rather spend time figuring out how to resolve the issues found.

So what do I use – the good old pen and paper. I take so many notes while the user is trying to do. Talking, writing and observing is hard to do all at the same time. So this helps you reduce the “talking” part. The main point of the testing is to observe.

Rule 5: Never ever take control of the mouse. Usability testing is not a demo of the brand new widget you have slogged on to create. So if the user cannot figure out, it is not good. After all, when the product ships, you are not going to be there to help the user figure it out. The objective is simple – “Can the user figure it out on his own and does it behave like s/he expects to. If not why not?” On the other hand, this does not mean that you have to leave the user to be lost, frustrated and feeling helpless if he cannot figure it out. Give it some time and if the user still cannot figure out, provide some hints to see if it helps. If it does not, note it down as a serious issue and ONLY THEN show the user how it is supposed to behave. But again, make sure you understand that you may have a serious usability issue.

Rule 6: Never do the usability test alone without announcing it to your product team. Announce it, inform them about the test schedule and make sure you get one person from your product team to help you during the testing. But keep it to one additional person – so that you don’t make the user nervous. My choice for that one person – the developer who worked on this new thing that you are testing. This extra person can help you take notes, can observe it from his perspective etc. Plus, it is one more person who is witness to the test such that later when you present your findings to the team, you do not have to deal with the “data you collected” being dismissed as “your opinion” or because of the incorrect testing method used. Trust me, this happens.

Rule 7: Make the test no longer than 45 minutes. If it is anything longer, you will see a significant drop in feedback from the user. It is very difficult to work while the user is nervous for more than 45 minutes.  How do you keep it this short? Keep the number of tasks the user has to do no more than 2 or 3 that can be easily completed in 20 minutes or so. This will take 45 minutes to complete during the test because of the Q&A and discussions.

Rule 8: Never make any changes to your product unless you have convergence from multiple tests. Don’t run to your development team after one test and ask them to make changes. Wait till you have more data points from more tests before you see a pattern of the issues that are tripping users up. How many tests do you need to do? I recommend at least 5 data points.

Rule 9: Analyze the data After all the tests are completed, read through your extensive notes and process it along with the colleague who observed the test with you. What did the users really like? (make sure your preserve this). What are the things you need to fix? What should be the action plan to resolve these issues. Do it right after all the tests are completed while it is all fresh in your mind.

Rule 10: Act upon the data, execute your action items. Make sure your stakeholders know about the results and what you learnt. Make sure that they know your product team participated in the effort and learnt a lot from it. It is not “your” show, but make sure they understand that it was a “we” show and the product team is on-board to make the changes. Then make the changes and repeat the tests if needed.

Note: I have had a lot of success doing usability testing using web conference tools such as GotoMeeting and have successfully applied these same rules.

Your thoughts from your experiences – are there any other best practices you have learnt along the way? Do you agree or disagree with the above? Please share via comments.

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Image: Courtesy of Cadfanatic.com

Filed under: business, marketing, product management, product usability | 2 Comments »

Lots of data, no information

Posted on September 18, 2009 by gopalshenoy

I am big about making “data driven” decisions. I have written in the past as to how wiring your product can help you make data driven decisions. You cannot make the right decisions unless you know what is happening in the market, in your product. Data can be collected in a myriad of ways – listening to customers (one of my favorites – talk to real humans who use or will use your product/service), analyzing usage (web analytics, product usage metrics), win/loss analysis (again talking to humans to understand why they bought and why they did not), conversion analysis (who bailed out vs. who put money down etc.). mountainofdata

There are companies that don’t collect data. But there are a whole lot more companies that collect a lot of data. Unfortunately, they find that no one analyzes the data or the large volume of data is not what they need to help them make decisions. Just like how one says that a wrong decision is sometimes better than indecision, to me having no data is better than a ton of worthless data. At least you are not going to spend time analyzing the worthless data and draw wrong conclusions.

The sole purpose of data is to create “actionable” information that will allow you make decisions that will move the needle – increase in revenues, improved profitability, faster performance, higher customer satisfaction or whatever business metric you care about. But what I find is that many companies collect a lot of data, but none of it is actionable. It is almost like someone said “we need data” and someone ran and collected whatever he could.

So next time you or someone you know is going to start a data collection exercise – here is what I suggest – pause, take a deep breath and ask yourselves three simple questions:

  1. Why do I need this data – meaning what decision am I looking to make?
  2. What is the right question I should ask that will get me the “actionable” information? Make sure you phrase the question right.
  3. How many people do I need to collect it from before I can call it trustworthy?

Make sure you have solid answers to questions 1) and 2) and if you don’t, drop the data collection project. Yours truly is also guilty of this rush to go and collect data. Surveys especially are not easy to do – hence put in the right amount of time to make sure you ask only the needed questions (and phrase them right!) to get the right information to make the right decision.

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Optimism vs. Reality

Posted on September 14, 2009 by gopalshenoy

As product managers, we have to be cheer leaders for our team. We have to make sure our sales team, marketers, developers, the QA team are all staying pumped up about the products that we have asked them to sell/market/develop/test. But optimism that is not well grounded in reality is bound to backfire.

How many times have you met an optimistic sales person? They are always optimistic about meeting their sales quota – “Oh, I will make my $100K!” – when they very well know that the average deal size is $10K and there are only 3 potential deals cooking in the pipeline. How many times have you heard developers being very optimistic of shipping on time even though they are currently two weeks late and the original ship date is only a week away? It is also common for many of us to overpromise on what we can do for others, just because we hate to say No to someone.

To me, such optimism is very common but when reality strikes, such optimism does nothing but burn trust. Be optimistic about future success, but make sure it is grounded in reality. There are only 24 hours in a day and you are not inventing time to make the impossible come true, just because you are optimistic.

Trust once lost is hard to gain. Push yourselves to do more, but don’t set yourselves up for a definite failure. Under promising and over delivering is always a good option!

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Market Research – How many customers do you need to visit/interview?

Posted on September 9, 2009 by gopalshenoy

As product managers, we are chartered to unearth painpoints by interviewing customers/prospects. But how many do we have to talk to before we feel comfortable that we have talked to enough? How many is too many?

I have always used the following guidelines which I picked up from the great book “Customer Visits” by Edward McQuarrie (If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it. I consider it the bible on how to do effective customer visits). His research shows that interviews of

  • 30 customers in the right market segment will identify 90% of the needs
  • 20 would probably identify 80-85% of the needs
  • 12 will identify 70-75% of the needs.

I typically start with 5-10 customers and see if I am already seeing convergence and then decide if I need to probe any specific areas even more by talking to more people. Make sure that you have randomly selected these customers from the target market segment and that you are not talking to same 5-10 everytime you need to do customer visits.

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User communities – The 100-10-1 rule

Posted on September 8, 2009 by gopalshenoy

PS: I am back after a much needed long vacation in India. Decided to take it easy by taking a long break from work and also from blogging so that I can spend some time with the part of the family in India after having not seen them for 2 years. Now that I am back, want to get back to my blogging ways.

User communities – The 100 – 10 – 1 rule

Very often, when building user community sites or sites that will predominantly be driven by user generated content, the question that always gets asked is how many users do we need to attract to ensure that there is a steady stream of new content that is generated on the site. In the book, Citizen Marketers, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba talk about a very easy to remember 1% guiding principle. The 1% rule says that

  • 1% of the visitors to a website will create new content or contribute content.
  • 10% of the visitors will interact with the content by writing comments or say rating the content.
  • The remaining (a very large majority by the way) will merely read the content

They have validated this 1% estimate (give or take a few percentage points) using leading websites such as Wikipedia, TiVo Community Forum, Microsoft’s Channel 9 website, Yahoo Groups, Quickbooks community etc.

I have found this to be very true in the user community websites I have created, beta programs I have run. This rule which I find appropriate to refer to as the 100-10-1 rule serves as a great guideline to determine how much traffic you need to generate to your website such that it is self sustaining in terms of content generation. If you need say 10 new articles a day from 10 different contributors to keep your website going, then you need to make sure that at least 1000 users visit your site everyday.

It also helps you understand how user communities behave such that you do not set unachievable targets such as “1 in 5 users (20%) who visit my website will contribute content.” – it is very likely not going to happen.

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Agile Product Owner – New Name, Same Old Problem

Posted on July 29, 2009 by gopalshenoy

This is a guest blog post by John Mansour, Founder and Managing Partner of ZIGZAG Marketing

In the world of agile software development, the confusion over product owner versus product manager is hardly new. This problem has existed as long as software and product managers have been around. It merely has a new name.

First, let’s cover the basics. There are two key roles in the software product delivery continuum that must precede the first line of code being written, regardless of development methodology.

  1. The “what & why” role – responsible for determining “what” functionality should go into a product and “why” from a market and business perspective. The “what and why” role serves as the conduit for all inputs both internal and external. The end game of this role is to grow revenue by aligning product direction with market dynamics and customer needs. The “what & why” function is typically the responsibility of the product manager. Traditional or agile, it’s necessary regardless of who does it, their title or how it gets done.
  2. The “how” role – responsible for determining “how” product features should work to support the things users do. In its most basic form, this role is a surrogate user responsible for explaining in verbal, written and illustrated forms and in excruciating detail, what users do, how they do it and how software must work “functionally” to support the users. They spend most of their time with developers and they test functionality to make sure it works as designed, along with a host of other responsibilities. And yes, the best people for this role are former users or those who have worked intimately with a variety of users in multiple environments.

The “how” function is typically the responsibility of a functional product designer (for lack of a better title). For the fraction of software companies that have them they go by such titles as Business Analyst, SME (subject matter expert) and Technical Product Manager. In an agile environment they’re called Product Owners. Call them what you want, every company with high user interaction products needs them. They get much of the credit for things like iPhones and TiVo where the cool factor is the usability.

In my humble opinion, the confusion lies in two areas. First, software companies have been trying to combine responsibilities of the product manager and functional product designer for years and it’s a nightmare in every single case I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. Plus it creates the same identity crisis as the product manager vs. the product owner in an agile world.

Regardless of development methodology, combining these roles is a recipe for failure because the skill sets and personality types required are distinctly different for each, not to mention the time commitment. When combined, the end result is either the right functionality with poor usability or highly usable features no one cares about. A dilemma on par with, “would you like to lose an arm or a leg today?”

The bottom line – your products will eventually fail. Second, “product owner” couldn’t possibly be a worse title, given the responsibilities of this role. Furthermore, product managers have always been affectionately referred to as product owners because they “own” the ultimate success of a product. Perhaps a dope-slap is in order for the person who coined the title “product owner.”

In summary, two distinct roles are necessary to feed requirements to software developers if you want usable products the market will buy, regardless of development methodology. The titles are less relevant as long as the responsibilities are clearly defined. For more on functional product designers read the article titled, Product Management & The Functional Designer – 3 Reasons it’s a “Must-Have” for Successful Products.

Filed under: agile, business, leadership, marketing, product management | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »

5 symptoms that you are worrying more about your competition and not customers

Posted on July 27, 2009 by gopalshenoy

In the video presentation soon after Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said “Obsess more about your customers than your competition.”  I could not agree more with him.

Here are 5 symptoms that you are worrying more about your competition and not customers:

  1. You spend more time benchmarking your competition than talking to your prospects or customers.
  2. Your sales team says that they cannot sell your current product because it does not have the latest gizmo widget that your competitor just released. They say “We need just that.”
  3. In internal company meetings, your team members spend more than 25% of the meeting time reviewing what the competition has done and dismissing them as a joke.
  4. Your company bad mouths your competition to customers and prospects.
  5. Your sales team brings up your competitor’s in presentations with customers and how you are better than them.

Don’t get me wrong, you need to keep a very good tab on your competition. You need to have a detailed understanding of their product strategy, their products, their financials, their pricing strategy – do as much competitive intelligence gathering as you can and make sure it is kept upto date. Use their products as prototypes. Get one person dedicated to that effort if you have the resource.

But spend at least 5 times more time talking to your prospects and your customers. Even talk to your competitor’s customers – understand how the competitor’s products work, where they fall short and why. Why did they select their product? What drove their decision making? What other products did they consider during purchase? How happy are they, why and why not? Would they be willing to test drive your product and give you feedback of what they like and don’t? Keep all of this customer centric and not competitor centric. Forget about the “corporate” nature of your competitor, instead keep it human, keep the focus on their products/services and how well they solve your market’s problems.

Just because your competitor build something does not mean they are right. They could be dead wrong. We definitely do not want to jump off the cliff with them, would we? Empower your sales team with all the competitive intelligence they need, in case they get questions on why you are better. But don’t make it their focus. More time they spend talking about the competition, less time they spend talking about you. Your sales team must not bring up your competitors unless you are asked. The whole show is about you, not about the competition. By bringing up their names unprompted, you are essentially creating free awareness and legitimizing your competition. For all you know, your prospects may have never heard about them.

I have written in the past on how it is not possible to win a feature war. Your competition will invariably have features you don’t have and vice versa. Instead focus on how you can build value for the customer and make them more successful in what they do. If you do this well, your success will come. No matter what competition throws at you, remain human. Civility never loses!

Never bad mouth the competition, respect them and beat them.

Thoughts? What are your insights?

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7 things about product pricing

Posted on July 13, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Here are 7 things I have learnt about product pricing.

#1 If price is your ONLY product differentiator, you are selling a commodity. And if your competitor is much larger than you, you may not have a prayer – they can run you out of town by giving the product away for free.

#2 There is nothing called perfect price. You will either overprice or underprice your product. The key is to test quickly to see what the market can bear, quickly iterate and arrive at your final price. Pick test markets, learn and manage, so that if you do not get it right, you do not have a customer backlash to deal with.

#3 Never roll out pricing increase to existing customers all at once. Why? – see #2.

#4 You cannot increase price without adding additional value for your customers. Customers don’t care about your expenses especially when they have choices. Focus on value you bring to the table for the customer, how it solves their pain points, not your expenses.

#5 You do not have to drop prices if your competitors do. If price is all you have to talk about, see #1. Refocus the discussion to customer value you provide and why the value is worth the additional price. If the customer will not, assess if the customer is worth acquiring. Not all customers are.

#6 You do not have to have single pricing. Promotions to attract new customers, rebates for large volume customers are things to consider only if it makes business sense. Don’t do any of this unless you have a sales strategy in place – what is the end goal for promotions and rebates – new customer acquisition? customer retention?

#7 If you want to price products based on value, think about packaging. Car companies do it – EX, LX, RX; consumer products do – large, medium, small; online services do – Basic, Pro, Premium.

What are your learnings about pricing based on your experience? Please share with me and other readers.

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Filed under: business | 5 Comments »

Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life

Posted on July 12, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Couple of weeks back, I was invited to write a guest blog post on On Product Management.

My post was titled Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life. I hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, please leave comments either on the post there or here.

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Prevent your development team from turning into “blind men”

Posted on July 7, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Involve them in exactly ONE customer interaction whether it is a customer visit or a customer phone call!

Not more, not less, exactly ONE and you as a product manager would have done them the greatest disservice. blindmenandelephantThere is no better way for you to taint your team’s perspective of your market, your prospects, your customers, your buyers. They will now have ONE data point to rely on. Later when they question your market research based on your large number of customer data points, can you blame them? You will hear “That is not what I heard from the customer I talked to…..”

Instead as a product manager, involve your cross functional team members (development, QA, product marketing etc.) in multiple customer interactions as possible. Avoid the situation where a team member just attends one. Set the ground rules – either you attend at least three customer calls (visits) or you don’t attend any. Having a musical chair of developers attend these customer calls (visits) such that each one gets to listen to one customer is not useful. If this happens, your team’s perspective of the customers will be akin to the Blind Men in the famous Indian fable of Blind Men and the Elephant.

They will miss out on seeing the patterns, trends, consensus, variations, contradictions that emerge after multiple customer calls. You will be better off in having less number of developers get a good feel for the user base by having them consistently attend multiple calls (visits) than spreading the wealth among all of your team members. Once you do this, it will be a lot easier to prioritize and decide what to build.

Thoughts?

Image Courtesy of: Satrakshita

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Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »

Business Lesson from Wimbledon Finals 2009?

Posted on July 6, 2009 by gopalshenoy

What an amazing Wimbledon Men’s final it turned out to be between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. An epic battle of 4+ hours, 77 aces, 77 games, the fifth set alone lasting 90 minutes. Roddick brought his A+ game to try to beat his arch nemesis Federer who had beaten him 18 of the previous 20 times they had met. But alas after 77 games, 27 aces, holding serve until the very last game, winning 83% of his first serve points – the result ended up to be the same – Federer won it all. I felt bad for Roddick because he gave it everything and still came up short.wimbledon

As I was thinking about the entire match over the course of the afternoon, something dawned on me as a business lesson from this finals. It is every tennis player’s dream to win at Wimbledon. But not many do, it is a lot harder. But then there are tons of other tournaments where the competition is not that tough but with a lot of winners. This is where I thought businesses could learn from – which dreams to chase, where to play, where to spend the energy and time etc.

Imagine that you sell sales automation software. The market is huge since every company on the planet can possibly make use of it. Let us assume that you have $100,000 sales and marketing budget. Would you want to spend all of it in trying to win the “big fish” account – a Fortune 500 company trying to replace their current sales automation software? The stakes are high, competition is stiff with a lot of bigwigs with a lot of money in the fight. You could transform your company overnight if you win it all – but should you play? The question comes to something simple – what are your chances of winning? Are you better off playing in the smaller “tournaments” and building a strong customer base before trying to play on “center court” in the biggest tournament of your market? Will you survive if after all the effort you end up like Roddick – with no Wimbledon title to show? (Andy Roddick is still an awesome player who still has a lot to show since he has won 27 singles titles, $15M+ prize money).

The key is “focus” – where do you want to spend your money, time and energy? It sounds simple right? No. It is very easy to try to be everything to everyone and be nothing to anyone. It is easy to go chasing after the biggest deal on the planet and come up with nothing. It is easy to try to solve a problem more than you can chew and fail completely. A local company that recently shuttered its doors comes to mind – it (I am withholding the name) was launched with an ambitious goal of  developing a cross-channel commerce platform that would allow large retailers to integrate and manage content and sales across the Internet, catalogs, and physical stores – a novel idea, but with one problem – they had just one customer (its parent from whom they had spun-off) sign up on the vision – eventually the company folded when it could not deliver. TechCrunch report said “In retrospect, the warning signs were everywhere: 1) big company spin-off; 2) raised way too much money for a series A round; 3) reliance on that same big company as its main customer (and as an investor)”.

So everytime you are told by sales that this is “the” deal – ask about the stakes. What if you don’t win after all? Will you survive? Do you have eggs in other baskets? It could be your biggest win but could be your death knell as well. It may just be OK to say “No” to play and spend your energy in the smaller “tournaments” and notch up wins. Business after all is never a sprint, it always is a marathon.

Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »

Keep it human

Posted on July 5, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Susan Oakes of M4BMarketingBlog asked me if I would be willing to write a short tip for her upcoming post on “How to Keep your Customers Loyal”. The post outlining some great tips should be coming out anytime now. Here is what I submitted.

Keep it Humantips
In the times we live in, customers are bombarded with marketing messages from all over. In this noisy world, companies that stand out are the ones which retain the human touch. The best way to buy customer loyalty is by treating each one of them as a unique human being at every touch point. Buying after all is a human behavior, so make sure you respect the “human” part of it.

Now what does “keep it human” mean? It could mean any or all of the following:

  1. An introductory greeting and opening the door to the customer when they walk into your store
  2. Helping the customer “buy” the right thing to solve their problem and not just try to “sell” them what you have. In some cases, you may not even have the right thing that the customer wants – recommend where they can “buy” the right thing – it means loss of a sale, but could be earning a longtime “relationship”, people typically don’t forget those who help them.
  3. A thank you card send to the customer after purchase
  4. A follow up phone call to make sure the customer is satisfied a few days after purchase
  5. A website that helps the customer finalize the buying decision and written in a language that the customer understands as opposed to one with marketing gobbledygook where the customer feels stupid
  6. A no questions asked, quality guarantee for all purchases
  7. Reachable customer support and friendly voice of the rep that engages with the customer to solve the problem
  8. A business that the customer would like to associate with and recommend to family/friends thereby putting his/her own reputation on the line
and the list could go on.

If you think about it, many of the above holds good for local businesses – the mom and pop stores in your neighborhood. The owner knows many of his customers by name, he chit chats with them when they come in, helps them solve their problem (not just sell them what they have). This is a relationship that has been painstakingly built over the years. The value of the relationship is not completely based on how much money you have spent in the store, but being respectful of you as a human being. In the good and bad economic times, one scarce resource is “customer’s attention”. Business that win more of the customer’s “attention” will succeed. Customers tend to give more “attention” to those that respect them and keep it human.

Do you agree? What would your tips be on “How to keep Customers Loyal?”

Image Courtesy of: Montgomery Public Schools

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Contact Us but facilitate it ….

Posted on June 8, 2009 by gopalshenoy

All companies on their website have an About Us or Contact Us section. However, not all companies provide their phone contact information phoneon their website and instead ask you to fill out a web form or email them if you want to contact them.

This unfortunately sends wrong messages. The message could be construed as any of the following:

  1. Sorry, we are too busy that we don’t want you to bother us by calling us.
  2. We don’t value direct communication between humans, we want you to write to us even though you may be a prospect with a willingness to buy.
  3. You are too many and we don’t have the bandwidth to answer your questions, most of which we could deem to be stupid anyways – so we only want to talk to the serious folks who take the time to write to us though we will not commit if we will ever get back to them either.

In a world where people value authenticity and human touch, you are essentially creating hurdles for people so that they do not communicate with you. In one of my previous posts, I had written about email and 7% – how you lose 93% of your communication power when you use email as the communication channel.

With a web form or email, there is no feedback as to when one will get a reply as opposed to getting to talk to a human being – customers/prospects usually have a question that they want answers for now, not later. Would these companies say this to a prospect in a face-to-face meeting? But unfortunately these companies are sending the wrong message to the millions that are on the internet that they will never have a chance to have a face-to-face conversation with.

I understand the scalability issue, but that is not a prospect’s or a customer’s problem – that is the company’s problem. Airlines list their contact phone numbers, banks do, telephone companies do. But some of these companies have the long phone trees which we all have come to hate so much that websites such as gethuman.com have cropped up. But all of this is better than not providing a contact number for your customers/prospects to reach you. Hiding your phone contact information behind a web form or email is outright insulting to your site visitors.

Now this is applicable not just at the organization level. It is very applicable to us as product managers. Whenever, I talk to my prospects/customers or meet with them, I hand out my business card, my direct number, my email address – if they call me, I want to talk to them. There is nothing more important that I am doing that is more important than talking to customers. I am not saying that I do customer support for them, but I want to hear their concerns, questions etc. and make sure that I get the right person to help them. In 99% of the cases, the caller is happy that I am going to transfer the call to the person best to help them. I thank them for having called me.

Be authentic, be human and more importantly be reachable. If we as consumers get offended by the lack of contact information, I will guarantee you that our customers are as well. There is a lot of downside and no upside for hiding your phone number. After all, our jobs exist only to serve our customers.

Thoughts?

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Image: Courtesy of geekologie.com

Filed under: business | 5 Comments »

Product Camp – New York

Posted on June 7, 2009 by gopalshenoy

Are you a product manager who lives around New York City or will be in NYC during the weekend of July 18? Do you want to learn about product management from other product managers who are walking in your shoes everyday? Look no further, ProductCamp is coming to town on July 18th. I will be traveling all the way from Boston to attend it.

Don’t know what a ProductCamp is?

ProductCampNYC is a free collaborative “unconference” where product managers can discuss the most current topics facing them on a daily basis.Loosely based on the successful BarCamp and Open Space formats, ProductCamp is an intense ad hoc gathering of product mangers and marketers to share, present, network, learn, laugh, and discuss. The agenda is defined by and voted on by attendees the morning of the event, ensuring the participants get the most out of their experience.

ProductCamp has been successfully hosted in San Francisco (twice!), Austin, and Boston. And…Atlanta and Seattle are in the works. Here are a few reviews following these events.
- “This was a great event. I took back more useful ideas than I have gotten at large industry events. The interactive format and the use of Brainshark and other tools made it very valuable.”
- “What a great experience to get together with a (large) group of passionate product managers and have lively discussions about how we can improve.”
- “There was a lot of collective talent assembled all striving for the same goal … let’s make product management the best career opportunity in the next few years.”

Here are the details:

ProductCamp NYC
Saturday, July 18, 2009 8am – 5pm
FREE to attendees!
St. John’s University – 101 Murray Street NYC
Registration & Additional Info: http://barcamp.org/ProductCampNYC
Register now, what are you waiting for? It is absolutely FREE to attendees.

Filed under: business | 1 Comment »

Adding customer value by subtraction

Posted on June 2, 2009 by gopalshenoy

As product managers, we are trained to look for ways to add value to customers such that they are willing to buy our products. Now, what does adding value actually mean?

Adding value, does not necessarily mean that customers have to necessarily see an uptick in their revenues after they buy your product. For example, your ad product may allow the customer to place their ads to the right audience and at the right places and sell more of their products thereby generating greater revenue. Your product may help them to increase the attach rate of their subscription renewals.  Nothing wrong with any of this.

But there is a whole slew of propositions that generate value without increasing revenues, but instead improve the bottomline by reducing the expenses – what I call addition by subtraction.

For example, does your product help the customer

1) Do more digital iterations that helps them optimize their material costs before building any physical prototypes? (for example, 3D CAD software)

2) Prevent loss of customers and associated brand destruction if credit card data gets stolen (for example, credit card encryption software)

3) Manage double the service events with same or reduce number of staff? (oops, this may mean job loss, but business productivity goes up)

4) Reduce inventory and storage costs by better forecasting of demand (for example, just in time manufacturing)

5) Reduce costs by allowing them to buy in bulk at fixed cost (for example, fuel price hedging)

6) Reduce operational costs by eliminating the number of steps involved in completing an operation

and the list could go on .

To get an accurate view of the impact your product may have on the customer, you need to understand where your product fits in the value chain of the customer’s business and then look at all the upstream and downstream benefits brought by your product.

So does your product add value by subtraction?

Thoughts?

Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »

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