Product Management Tips for Product Managers by Gopal Shenoy

Archive for June, 2008

Charity by a crowd - Monster.com

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 26, 2008

At the SHRM Conference in Chicago that I recently attended, Monster.com had a huge booth in the expo hall. But they did something that I thought was outstanding. Apparently, Monster used to have a grand party for the conference attendees every year. This year, they decided not to do the party and instead take the money and give away a million dollars to charity. Wow !! Here is how they did it using Justgive:

  1. Every person who visited their booth got a Monster bead necklace - beads with 5 cool looking monsters on it (My kids love it).
  2. At the end of the necklace, was a nice looking card with a bar code.
  3. If you got the bar code scanned, you won a prize and also a donation card with an amount written on it - some got $75, others got $25 etc. The card also listed a bunch of charities you could donate the money to.
  4. You login to a specific URL and then enter the promotion code written on the card.
  5. You choose how you want to spend the money - all for one charity and split it between different ones.

The money came from the million dollars that Monster is donating. Now that is thinking out of the box! All these parties are great - open bar, lot of food. But we have enough of these. We eat, drink, have fun and then forget about it. But think about the impact that million dollars is going to make. It is going to feed someone who is justing looking for a simple meal not the calamari and the burgers, who is looking to drink a glass of clean water and not douse beers after beers. Thank you Monster for making a difference and giving me a role in this whole thing. Hats off to you !! Good companies always give back to the community !! Liked this article? Leave me comments - I would love to hear your thoughts - or get an RSS Feed to this blog at http://productmanagementtips.com/feed

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Respect the competition and beat them ….

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 25, 2008

I just got back to Boston after spending three days at SHRM (the largest human resource show) in Chicago. It was a great show and just the second HR show I have attended. There were upwards of 14,000 attendees not including the exhibitors and volunteers. The expo hall was very big and there were a lot of exhibitors including many of our competitors.

I had a very healthy chat with employees of some of our staunchest competitors. We generally talked about our companies, how big each of us were, about each other’s booth traffic, how each of us were finding the show, where we thought the industry was going etc. None of the topics that would have made either one of us uncomfortable ever came up - nothing about our products, where we are headed in terms of our roadmap etc.

I always find these conversations very refreshing because they are conversations between two human beings without seeing each other as business enemies. I have always believed that it is all about people relationships and not products. Some of the people I talked to were very fun loving folks like all of us are - they were also good at what they do like all of us are. The fact that they worked for my staunchest competitor was largely irrelevant.

These very friendly conversations reminded me of the saying I have heard so many times “Always respect your competition and then beat them”.

After all life is short, why not enjoy every minute of it with everyone you meet.

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Zoho - what are you really?

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 19, 2008

Zoho has been getting a lot of attention lately - from the first reports of its CEO Sridhar Vembu turning down a buyout offer from Salesforce.com to being briefly mentioned in Business week magazine article on Inside Microsoft’s war against Google. In a recent interview with Fox Business, its CEO said that Microsoft is the one that has the most to lose because of Zoho. OK, but how?

Zoho has an impressive array of online applications such as Docs, spreadsheets, Mail, Zoho Creator (a database app), CRM, Wiki, Blogs, HR apps etc. The apps are very easy and user friendly with a very nice looking UI. There are many features that have been copied from other apps - for example, Zoho Notes has a lot of features that look and act like the same features in MS’s OneNote. They give it all of it for free to consumers and say that they are making more than a million per month from business customers. They are hiring mostly in India. They have some good things going for them, but then a lot of companies had this for them before they fizzled out.

But after looking at what they offer and trying some of their products, as a business customer, I have been grappling with what exactly Zoho’s focus is. It is one thing to come up with a wide array of cool looking apps, but it is another thing when it comes to focusing on one thing and getting it done right. Is Zoho a MS Office killer? Is it a Salesforce killer? Is it going after SQL/Oracle? Or after Inuit’s Quickbooks or Quickbase? Or is it just another cool looking Google Apps?

I don’t know. Startups during the early days typically tend to execute one thing like hell and when they become successful, they tend to diversify into related areas that leverage their core business. But what exactly is Zoho’s core business? What happens when push comes to shove - what will be left standing? Which apps will get the axe and which ones will be left standing? As a business user I want to know, before I jump into the bandwagon.

Zoho is owned by AdventNet which has its own share of developer and database products which adds even more to the product line.

It appears to me that they are using carpet bombing hoping that something sticks as opposed to using a laser like focus in getting 1-2 of these offerings become kick ass apps with a large base of paid users. You name it - Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, FaceBook, SolidWorks all did it this way in their startup days. Pick one thing and execute like hell as if your life depended on it.

I could be missing something completely and would love to be educated. Please let me know.

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Posted in business, marketing, product management, zoho | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

Social media and impact on marketing?

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 18, 2008

Talk about social media is everywhere - it is being used by everyone and some don’t even understand what it means. Francois Gossieaux has a very interesting blog post titled “We don’t do marketing with social media - social media is what caused marketing game to change” - a very interesting 5 minute read.

To me, the game changer brought on by social media is putting the customer in charge and not the vendor. I don’t spend on anything that does not have “real user” reviews whether it is making a hotel reservation, buying an appliance etc. I don’t go to any vendor’s website to read how their product is the greatest thing since sliced bread - the only thing I do is google “<productname> reviews” and if nothing comes up, conclude that the product is not any good or does not have enough buyers and just move on finding another seller who can sell me the same or similar product.

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Posted in business, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 1 Comment »

Vista nightmare over the weekend

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 16, 2008

OK, this post is more about my first and nightmarish experience with Vista than a product management tip.

Over the weekend, my aunt visiting from New York asked me if I could figure out what was wrong with her PC. She said her problem was that she just could not surf to hotmail.com using IE, but could happily get there using Firefox (go figure!!). She could get to msn and then click on My MSN and log into hotmail, but the text of all messages was blank (who would want to read text of emails anyways - after all the from and to and subject lines is all one needs, right?).

I told her that I should be able to easily fix this by uninstalling IE and reinstalling it. Last wise words spoken by me. I figured this was going to be a ten minute job - wrong - thanks to Vista. Found out that you just cannot uninstall IE on Vista - nor could I find what version of IE was installed because trying to do that started giving a never ending script error.

So started googling for solutions - so what do I find - every other Tom, Dick and Harry has run into the same issue - IE7 wants to ask the user if he wants the phishing filter on and a bunch of other settings (runonce.aspx). It is supposed to ask only once, but it has a bug before it gets to ask you. So it thinks it has never asked you and always gives you a blank page.

After 3 hours of trying to grapple with this and trying everything from using restore points (which fails) and editing registry to add two dwords that MS recommends you manually add, I just gave up. I told my aunt to stick with Firefox. She dropped her laptop on her way out - she said it was an accident, but I am not sure if she dropped it in sheer frustration - I would if I were her.

MS wants to discontinue support for XP by Jan 2009 and start shoving Vista down everyone’s throat - they are doing it to consumers now and businesses are next. What a great customer service? I think their slogan now is “Do all evil”

Then I read this article - Vista’s big problem: 92 percent of developers ignoring it - what a surprise?

It is amazing how MS just does not get it anymore. I think Bill Gates was smart once again - he quickly got off this Titanic before it is headed for the iceberg.

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Posted in business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 5 Comments »

How would your future users behave?

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 11, 2008

Product Managers pay (or should pay) a lot of attention to finding out more about why people are NOT buying their product more than why people are buying their product. This can be framed based on the current population of users.

But we are at a tipping point in history where a large number of baby boomers are approaching retirement and their places are being taken by a wave of new entrants. Many of these new entrants are currently in colleges. So if you are planning to develop a long term roadmap, make sure you are taking into account the behavioral aspects of the new generation.

I thought that the survery results shown below (Source: eMarketer.com) was very interesting in understanding the adoption of the latest technology by age (Low adoption of RSS feeds in the younger age group was a surprise to me). It is important that we pay attention to this because these represent the future users of our products.

The full article is titled Baby Boomers and Social Networking and is worth a read. Pay equal attention to some of the similarities called out in the full article.

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Posted in business, customer needs, marketing, product management, word of mouth | 2 Comments »

Goto Meeting - Free or not free? - Misleading free trial

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 5, 2008

The other day I was kinda ticked off that I had to reschedule two customer presentations because Webex just would not work for whatever reason. Webex customer support had all sorts of technical reasons as to why it does not work and what the customer should do (yah, great, it is all user’s fault). It sure turned out to be something on the customer’s end, but Webex gives no clue when it does not work - why and what could the customer or me ask the customer to do.

Having very good experience with GotoMeeting in my past job, I decided to try out their free 30 day trial. It said “FREE’ all over the place and so I started signing up.

Specified my personal information, created a password and then landed on the third page to see that a credit card was required - there was nothing in the earlier steps that told me that this was needed - everything was about this is easy - unlimited - takes only 2 minutes etc.

Then I saw the hyperlink which said “Why do you need my credit card?” Clicking on it told me why they need a credit card - but it is all about them - not me the customer.

I like the first sentence - but the second, I have no idea - if they want to restrict it to one trial per customer, why can they not do it using email accounts. Yes, there will be people who will try to get multiple accounts and try to get more than one trial, but how many - the majority? Or do you want to penalize everyone because there are a few that may be unscrupulous?

So what did I do - I walked away. Interestingly, they found out (I am assuming they are tracking this on their website) and I get this email the very next day.

So what happened to their cost proposition for the free service? They don’t have these costs anymore? They don’t want to restrict it to one free trial per customer?

I understand that there are many vendors that do require a credit card for a free trial - magazine subscriptions, NetFlix, credit card protection services, travel insurance etc - but these are more of transactional or consumer facing applications. Goto Meeting to me is a B2B application, so why not trust your prospects?

Believe me, GotoMeeting is the best web conferencing tool that I have used - it is so easy to use - so what do they have to hide? - I would invite the world to do a drive thru of their awesome product - the hardware costs that they have to bear is nothing more than a marketing expense. I would rather spend on this (you have a much more qualified prospect you could try to convert because you have a great product) as opposed to spending the same money on SEO, ads etc. whose sole purpose is to attract someone to your site - but I am already on your site, way down the funnel and you threw me out.

To me this is an example of poor marketing execution of an awesome product. GotoMeeting, are you listening?

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Posted in business, customer experience, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »

Build products that customers will buy ….

Posted by gopalshenoy on June 1, 2008

We as product manager are well tuned with doing a market read, determining the unmet needs of the market and then getting someone to build products that will satisfy the need.

But there is an important trap that product managers should avoid. History is full of examples of products that fell into this trap. You want to build products that customers will BUY and not JUST LIKE. You could build a product that satisfies the unmet need in the best possible manner, but if it is not something that the customer is willing to pay for, you are out of luck. Your product will languish on the shelf and it will join countless number of other products that have met a similar fate.

We have four different scenarios of Like vs. Buy as shown below.

Obviously, the two categories you want to avoid are the red ones and the places where you want to be are the green ones.

You may wonder how you could ever make a customer buy a product that he does not like - there are many classes of products that fit the bill here. For example, insurance products - not that I like them, but I have to buy them - isn’t this such a sweet category to be in? Other examples include anything related to taxes (Turbotax for example), funeral planning products (that one needs no explanation) etc.

The biggest trap among all this is the Like and Don’t Buy category. Lot of customers may tell you how much they love your new product idea, but you absolutely need to find out if they will put their money down to buy it - or in other words, is the painpoint you are attempting to solve painful enough that they will be willing to spend money on it? If not, it is not worth pursuing.

Beta programs kind of fall into this category - everyone is all excited to be part of your Beta, but not many give you feedback. It is OK to have this happen on your Beta, but you don’t want this to happen to your product.

One way to avoid this trap is to try to get customers to buy the early version of your product at a heavily discounted price - you would get them the Beta version, they will give you the feedback and then you would ship them the real product at the very low price that they paid you. If you run a subscription model, you could offer the customer a heavily discounted price upfront and the opportunity to lock down the price for say the first 2 years. If you cannot get enough customers to bite on this and sign on the dotted line, then the writing is on the wall - your product is in the trap category - how are you ever going to sell at the full prize?

Having said this, I would love to hear from my fellow product managers on other techniques that could be used to avoid falling into this trap.

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PS: I have to thank my mentor Jon Hirschtick, founder and ex CEO of SolidWorks for having drilled this into me whenever I have had different product discussions with him.

Posted in business, customer needs, marketing, product management | 6 Comments »