The Need for a Product Vision

March 14, 2012 Leave a comment

Throughout a development cycle, product management and R&D teams spend countless hours trying to figure out how to build and release products that will make a significant impact in the market and be loved by customers. In other words, the game changer. This elusive game changer often has people caught up in deciding which cool feature to add to the product, instead of focusing on a well-defined product vision and direction.  No matter what you might think, there is rarely a single magical feature that makes a product a success. Even worse is to think that Marketing will find the right twists on how to hype a product release once it has been developed.

The bottom line is that you need a clear vision for the product. Before you start investing all of your resources, it is imperative to put pen to paper and identify who your intended users are, what their needs are, and how your product will satisfy these needs. Most importantly, you need to ask what you want your product to represent and define the essence of what you will market. If this is not clear from the beginning, it’s likely that you will get bogged down in techno-babble specs and suffer from feature creep.

A Vision Needs to Start with a Direction

All too often, we associate a vision with something that will happen in the distant future. While somewhat true, a vision is really about capturing the true nature of the product you’re building and defining the direction on how to get there.

For example, our mission at Ryma is to be the leader in product management by developing tools that will enable our customers to develop better products. We want to touch the lives of every Product Manager out there. So what’s our product vision? We want to offer a solution that will not only be powerful but that is also simple to use and empowers each stakeholder in the product management process to be better at their job. We want to give them the tools that will make their lives easier and will allow them to focus on what’s important: making great products for their customers.

In order to achieve this product vision, we have set a clear direction for the product development team. We want each and every new feature of our product to make life easier for our customers, while giving them access to the power of our platform.  We will shortly announce new capabilities for FeaturePlan that will demonstrate this new focus on simplicity combined with power.

A Direction is a Path to Follow

When a company is building a new game changer, it’s important to stay focused on the intent and not to get lost on feature creep. Achieving a minimal viable product is very much about choosing the right features while making sure you still are on the right path for your product vision. Remember the first iPod? While it pales in comparison with today’s version, you can already understand the product vision and the path that Apple was about to embark on. Having the right product vision, and ultimately releasing a game changer, is very much about that. Again, taking Ryma as an example, our next release will be very much like the first iPod when it comes to a new component named Document Center that’s being added; but the direction will be both clear for our development and our customer and partners.

Clarity in a Product Vision Does Not Make it Easier for Competitors

Recently, many people have been left disappointed by Apple’s product releases. It’s not that they aren’t great or highly successful in the market, but rather that people are now envisioning product ideas ahead of the market and are assuming that Apple will be moving at the pace of their imagination. We often forget that the bad years for Apple were when people had no clue about what would be coming next in terms of their products. Today, we can all see their product vision and can easily guess some of the steps that are coming from them. But even so, it does not make it easier for competitors to beat Apple at that game. I am sure that there are a few manufacturers right now that are scrambling because of the recent release of the new iPad. Companies should not be afraid of having a clear product vision and direction. You should only worry if you can’t execute properly.

Bottom line, if you seek clarity with your product vision and direction, your business will only be better off – and if you execute well, you’ll leave your competitors in the dust.

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The importance of becoming the CEO of your product

February 8, 2012 6 Comments

For many of us, we begin our product management career by doing what is basically feature management: defining what the development team will be working on. In its simplest form, all you need to do in this position is calculate the number of development cycles you have available for a given release and then try to jam as many features into the product as possible.

If you are lucky enough, you end up getting sufficient customer feedback (or complaints) that leads to some level of feature ranking and planning, based on what the market seems to require. This of course has its level of hit and miss. While customers are great at identifying problems, they are not always capable of defining the right kind of solutions they need.  Someone needs to step in and truly identify the right product to build.

After a while, you begin to wonder if there is any kind of best practice that would get you to be a “real” product manager. There are several groups that are offering different levels of training or framework (AIPMM, Blackblot, Pragmatic Marketing and 280 Group just to name a few). This definitively brings standardization and a common language to the world of product development.

But there is one aspect that most product managers forget to aim for: to become the CEO of their product. In my case, I was fortunate enough to have run my own company for several years before taking on true product management roles. While I had the inconvenience (and hard time) of having to adjust to the reality of working for someone else, I had the unique benefit of thinking like a CEO.

Managing a product is far more than just supervising which features are put in it. There are many important considerations to take in account: how big is the market opportunity? What are the financial metrics that will define the success of a product? What is the business rationale in a build vs. buy scenario?  What is the impact on the company’s P&L?  What kind of product can your sales channel successfully sell?

There are a lot questions that need answers. The better you understand what it means to be a CEO, the more effective you will be in managing your product. Key differentiators include your ability to build the right kind of business case – which leads to obtaining approval of new product plans and ultimately receiving more resources and budget, which are needed to drive your product portfolio forward.

So how do you become the CEO of your product? First step is to want it – seek opportunities that will allow you to learn from your own CEO and others around you. Spend time asking about their job and what are the usual challenges they face. Not only you will better understand what it means to be a CEO, you will also be better equipped to sell your product pitches going forward.

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Quick tips on user experience for your web site

March 1, 2011 Leave a comment

For most companies, a web site is a fundamental tool of marketing and lead generation. It all began in having a site to showcase your products and services, and then you had to have an online store. Not to forget to ever-elusive blog page. And lately, you now must have a social media presence, from tweeting to liking pages on your site. But across all the must haves and checklists of things we must do, we often overlook user experience. What makes your site compelling to visit? Why should I come back? I am finding what I am looking for that will make me buy what you do? Online marketers should take a break from tracking unique visitors you are getting and measure instead measure the user experience. While this can sometimes be measured in terms of bounce rate, you can simply take a stroll on your site like if it was the first time. You might discover a few problems. Here is my quick list of usual suspects:

Target users

Who are you selling to? You better understand the buyer persona that you are trying to attract. For example: making a hip and snazzy looking site that is targeted at finance people might not be the right approach (they most likely will prefer a simple design with immediate access to stats and visual dashboards on ROI, etc).

Focus on message

What is your website saying? Visitors should get a good understanding of what you do and why you are relevant in a few lines (think of your cocktail pitch put on a web site…). Unless I am crystal clear on what you do and why I am here, you will need to educate me about your value proposition and competitive advantage.

Every page is a landing page

Don’t spend too much time just tuning the main page. While being the first page that many people will see, today’s search engines bring people directly to the relevant page as much as possible. Don’t assume that people will all start from the same place. Every page should have a meaning and an ability to quickly put the visitor in context.

Minimize navigation

Everybody hates searching on a web site for what they need, even more when you need to click a handful of time to just get started. Again, if you know you buyer persona, you should be able to place everything they needs within one or two clicks. While adding a search bar can be convenient, it is not the right way to fix a faulty and confusing web site.

What are you looking for?

If you are looking to capture leads or sell a product, make this an obvious and simple process. Many companies will ask you to fill a form in order to download something, make the process as enjoyable as possible. For example, don’t ask me to fill in something and then get someone in inside sales to review my request. People in today’s world expect downloads to be automated. Nothing more frustrating than to wait for a couple of days and then getting someone trying to sell me something before I am ready. There is nothing wrong in trying to convert business, just don’t make it annoying or painful.

Keep testing your site

Managers spend a great deal of time testing a brand new web site and then they go away. This should be an on-going process; to make sure that everything is running fine, that the user experience is not broken (don’t wait for someone to email you if something does not work, fix it before).  Getting regular focus groups is another good way of making sure you have not missed the mark. Even more when your site is your primary source of revenue generation; you can’t afford to have a bad user experience.

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My Presentation Tips & Tricks

February 8, 2011 1 Comment

Here is a follow-up on my latest post regarding the content of an investor presentation. Beyond the information that needs to be put into each slide, here is my top 10 list of tips when it comes to doing a presentation.

Simplify the content

Making presentation is an art form where less is better. Try to make each of your slides and clean and simple as possible. Try to extract the essence of what you are trying to say in each and every slide.

Use words that are easy to pronounce

Sounds silly but in a Province where English is most likely not your first language, try to pick words that are easy to pronounce. Be careful about words that might have a different meaning when badly pronounced (for example, saying “fuck us” when wanting to say focus). Of course, some words cannot be replaced so you just need to practice your pronunciation.

Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

You never rehearse enough; don’t just try to wing it. Even the pros practice a lot their speeches and presentations. Practice your timing, practice the quality of your speech. You can do this by yourself but it is also quite valuable to practice in front of a mirror, in front of people that you are not as comfortable with, and ultimately record yourself with a camera.

Lead the presentation

Too many times, we start talking once we have flipped the slide. If you ever have noticed great speakers such as Steve Jobs, they will lead the slides; starting to talk about the content that will appear next – BEFORE the slides is displayed. This will create a better flow and prevents you from just reading what’s on each slide.

Tell a story

Presenting is very much about telling a story. Make your presentation compelling by focusing in getting your audience engaged and getting them thru a series of steps; up to the closing statement.

Take your time

By keeping the content short, you can make sure not to exceed any allocated time period. You can then make sure to take your time. Nothing worse than a rushed presentation because you have too much to say or are not sure on how long you will take.

Pause by taking a sip of water

One useful trick is to take a quick sip of water once in a while. This will allow you to take a second, make sure you are focused and composed (if you were starting to lose it). While this sip of water will feel like you have paused for a minute (or even feel like an hour), it creates just a small enough of a break to catch your breath.

No matter what happened, focus on closing strong

Even if you have fumbled plenty during the presentation, you always have a last chance upon closing. Take a deep breath and make sure you deliver a good and final message correctly. While always better to do a perfect presentation, a good finish can go a long way.

Be careful of your body language

How are you placing your hands? How is your body moving around can say a lot about your level of confidence and comfort. Make sure that you don’t do any twitching, dangling, or too many sidestepping moves. This is where recording your rehearsals with a camera can greatly help. Sometimes we are just not aware of all the things we do when we present.

Smile

Nothing worse than a presenter that is tense and looks like he is in a bad mood. If you can, remember to smile and have an upbeat attitude as you are presenting; even more when a presentation is recorded and then posted to a public website.

 

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The target customer

December 20, 2010 Leave a comment

It’s a lot easier to build great technology than it is to properly identify your target customer and ideal market. Sure you may have found a market that has great potential. Once deployed, your solution will have a significant impact on the industry – or will it?

Who has the pain?

Before getting a chance of successfully selling a product, you need to have a very good idea of the target customer. This is the person that has the pain (or the need) that your product will solve (or satisfy). If there is not a well defined pain or need, there is limited chance that your solution has value; besides selling to a few people. Of course, the greater the pain, the bigger (and value) is the market opportunity.

Who has the money?

Without revenue, there is no business. One common problem of a lot of startups is a lack of strategy around getting money out of the hands of your customer (a.k.a. monetization). You need to draft a path from where the money will come from. The simplest form is the customer giving you a fat check. The more challenging one is indirectly making money from sponsors, adverts – that is if you have the right kind of volume.

When is your solution needed?

Even after finding a market and how you will monetize, you still need to know about time to market. As an example, tablet PC that came out 8 years ago are obviously not as popular as today’s iPad … It is so important to have a clear understanding on when the critical mass of your customers will be ready to buy your product. It is always better to delay than to simply burn money on a market that is yet not ready to purchase.

Are you too close to the problem?

While you may have been thinking about these things for a while, it is sometimes beneficial to have a little distance or fresh eyes in order to find the right answers. This is where someone like me comes in. You might be surprised on the outcome if you were to consider asking the advice of someone that has many years in developing product plans and go to market strategies. And while such consulting services are not cheap, there are certainly a lot less money than to ship a product to the wrong target customers or at a bad time to market; or even worse to have forgotten how to monetize. Sales and marketing activities are many folds more expensive than product planning and building the right kind of product marketing strategy.

I would be more than happy to provide you some guidance, just drop me a line at michelbesner (at) me (dot) com …

 

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Promos: how to devalue a product really fast

May 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Over the past couple of days, I’ve received a few marketing emails that was offering me great discounts and promos. This got me thinking that many companies are just great at diminishing the real value of their products by having a disorganized, badly planned schedule of discounts and extensions of promos. Well planned and organized promos that fit within a global strategy do have some value, but you need to follow a few strict rules.

Promos need a hard time limit
If  you keep extending your promos again and again, you basically create a behaviour by which most customer will just wait until the next promo comes in before buying your software. It does not take much for a customer base to understand that you usually extend promos; so they do not necessarily feel the rush to go and buy before the deadline. No matter what, pick an end date to all your promos and stick to it.

Move away from cyclical or calendar based promos
Again, you want to prevent behaviours that make consumers wait for the next promo to arrive. So if you have a bad habit of having end of month/quarter/year sales, you are teaching your customers to wait for a given time. This also applies to making your sales quotas; linearity of sales should be more important than making your numbers. I know a few companies that basically went bankrupt because their customer always waited until the last days of the year to make the big purchases – getting this way the best discount possible. If you want to make such a promo, make it well focused (back to school for example), short enough (black friday sales) and do those rarely.

Discounts don’t need to be that steep
I often see 20-30% discounts (and sometimes even more) on software products. While these have very low COGS and high profit margins, it is not an excuse to go that deep on discounting. Sometimes just a 10 to 15% discount can go a long way. If customer need that of a deep discount to justify buying your product, perhaps your product is not well priced. A promo or discount should be just a little push in order to help the laggard make a buying decision.

Never have a promotion page on your web site
Once in a while you see companies having a permanent promotion tab on their web site. I believe that this is a really bad idea; it shows how much you use promos to drive revenue. Unless I really need to buy your product today, I will just bookmark this page and wait for the right discount to arrive. And since this becomes a widely used behaviour, the discount will indeed come; with sales not coming at the right level (again focus on linearity, not on sales quotas).

Never discount a product at launch (or even before)
I never liked pre-launch and on-launch product discounts. As you release a new product, this is where your customer base should be willing to pay the highest price (assuming your pricing is fair of course). Discounting from the get go just means you are telling your customer: “please disregard our standard pricing, they are bloated and know about it”. Announcing a new release should be exciting enough that your customer want to buy it; if it’s not the case, maybe you want to sit down with your product management team.

If you seeing yourself do some or all of these bad behaviours, you are ultimately hurting the product value and actually leaving money (i.e. better margins) on the table. Be smart about promos and make them fit within a global and well thought out strategy.

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Business Plan: Knowing who is your real customer

April 20, 2010 Leave a comment

So your Company has identified a real market problem and you have the technology to solve it. You have drafted a business plan and are looking for funding in order to execute your plan. The revenue forecast sounds pretty exciting as you are looking to commercialize a solution for the general mass (B2C). But have you answered this question: who is your REAL customer?

End user vs. customer
There is a big difference between the end user (the person that will ultimately consume your product) and your real customer (the person that will give you money – that will help you monetize your technology). The answer is far from easy in this day and age with electronic distribution, apps stores and social media platforms that allow you to integrate and sell plug-ins.

Partners can be your competitors
If you are trying to acquire the wrong customer base, you might end up competing with someone you thought would be your partner. For example, if you are looking to release a great solution that will help Facebook increase its revenues, you need to make sure that they do not plan to do the same as well. If you follow closely the customer ownership trail, it will help you create an answer.

Monetizing vs. customer ownership
Great technology will allow your Company to get to bigger revenue if you pick to right way to monetize it. Don’t focus on customer ownership – this is even more important when you are making low prices one-time consumer products sold for a few dollars. OEM or Affiliate partners can be most of the time the better customers, giving you indirectly access to their large customer base and share revenue.

Listing all potential customer types
You should take the time to list all potential customer types you might have: consumer, hardware manufacturer, distributor, etc. Thinking out of the box can actually help you identify a better customer that you might have thought about initially. For each type, you need to recognize the benefits and revenue potential but also (and that is very important) the cost to acquire the end-user base.

Having clarity about your real customer will not only give you a better path to success but also minimize any burn rate you will have in trying to monetize with the wrong audience…

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Getting market data at all cost

March 16, 2010 2 Comments

I have read a fairly large amount of business plans in the latest coupe of months and I can say that there is no excuse for lack of market data and research. Of course, you might say that it is time consuming to do such research and you already know the market – but this is not necessarily the case of your potential investor. No entrepreneur should assume that the VC gets it and knows it all. Having solid references for your market (including sizing, breakdown by geo, age, function, etc.) taken from a valid source is key to not only support your hypothesis but also help educate any potential investor that might not know as much as you do.

Free market data

There is out there a lot of different sources for free market data including Google search, Wikipedia, the Bureau of labor statistics (http://www.bls.gov/), and the LinkedIn direct ads program (https://www.linkedin.com/directads/). The BLS is a gold mine of lots of data such as definition of the types of employments, breakdown by age, salary range, employment growth, etc. LinkedIn direct ads might not sound like a place to do market sizing but I find it quite useful to simulate the creation of an ad (you do not need to really create the ad, just pretend). LinkedIn will allow you to select specific criteria such as job type and function, seniority, location, industry, etc. After you have selected a few elements, LinkedIn will indicate the “addressable market size” for your potential ad. You can then take these numbers and bake them into your own spreadsheet – courtesy of LinkedIn …

Paid market data (but with a free trial)

While the D&B Selectory (http://www.selectory.com/Selectory/Login.aspx) is a paid service, they do offer a free trial; enough for you to extract key information about market sizing and demographics – you can extract international as well as USA breakdown: east, west, northern, south, central, etc. Of course you will need to pay if you want to get access to the customer list but you can decide to do so when you have money to spare …

Paid market research

I know a lot of people that think that buying for market research is a waste of your dollars. While I would agree that you do no buy anything and everything that moves, I believe that buying a few and well selected paid market research. This is quite key when you are looking to extract market trends and information that might not be otherwise available for free (for example, expected customer spend for a specific product type or service). Some of my favorite sites for such paid content include Market Research (http://www.marketresearch.com) and Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com).

Bottom line; do not go forward with you business plan and funding process without some level of market research and sizing. No matter how little you do, it is always more credible than to try to explain your gut feeling :-)

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Beyond the recession and blaming sales: check your Product Management

January 25, 2010 Leave a comment

Now that we are starting to see the end of the tunnel with this recession and startups have used this as a strong reason for lackluster performances (when they are not blaming their sales or marketing), it’s time to really evaluate our product plans. I find that too many times (and I’ve done the same mistake more than once) we forget to closely look at the cause (product plans) and focus all our energies on the symptoms (sales, marketing, economy).

The Economy is not the mother of all problems
Yes everybody has been hit to some degree by the recession but as things are picking up, this will be less of a reason to explain you’re past couple of missed quarters … Of course, we can always feel better when we compare to our competitors but, and this is a big but: I strongly believe that startups can navigate better in a storm. Startups should be nimble and quick enough to move around (some regions are doing better than other, re-focusing sales efforts for example).

When beating on sales and marketing does not suffice anymore
Ok by now, you have changed more than 75% of your sales team, re-built your marketing team two or three times, the average tenure for anyone in sales and marketing is now below one year. There is so much you can do by shuffling around sales and marketing resources. Rarely a good person turns bad in a few months (unless you have a very bad environment but let’s assume that is not the case). So what happened? Well, just like you can build a new software product (from scratch) in a few months, a sales and marketing team takes time to build and strengthen.

When was your last deep product review?
If you can’t just blame the economy and beat on the sales and marketing team, what else can you do? Clearly there is nothing wrong with the engineering team … Well, how do you decide what features (and why) are being done? How many customers will want to buy this upcoming release – are you on the right time to market? When was your last product review? So maybe your engineers review code together. I am talking here about a market driven product review. What were the steps that you took to decide what goes in (or not)? Have you measured if there are sufficient customers out there ready to buy this? And to buy this WHEN it is released? Great ideas and innovative technologies are all over, building and bringing to market a great product – not so much.

Small steps in product management yield great results in sales
I will not say it enough. Product Management is a common weakness in engineering heavy startups. How many engineers do you have? How many product managers and product designers? While a proper Product Management process requires investment in market research, product validation, and other important facets – you can always start small. This is what a believe is the best thing to do in any engineering driven company that is looking to be more market driven. Of course, this will take a few years before you have a fully functional Product Management process, but at least you will do better during each step of the process. You will be surprised on how much little steps can yield a much better product plan and roadmap.

Don’t be shy to challenge status quo
Ok sometimes it is not so easy to do so from the inside. This is a great opportunity to bring a consultant in and help you assess where you stand on both your Product Management process and how you can quickly improve your product plans. If you want to see how Product Management can make your overall business run better, please contact me an I can put you in touch with a talented Product Manager in your area …

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Don’t let anecdotes run your business

October 29, 2009 Leave a comment

Don’t you love the excitement when you land a brand new deal?  The company is a big player in a market you never addressed before. Your current product does not do what they need but with a few extra efforts from the development team, you could. This is too good to pass up. The sheer excitement of having found the next big market for your business…

One deal does not make a trend
Entrepreneurs should never let anecdotes run the business. Yes these one off deals can be exciting and very profitable on an individual basis. But does this mean that you just entered a new market. As an example: if you are building a software for architectural design and it happens that one dentist purchases your solution, does this mean that you can stat selling to the dentistry industry? Of course not. While this is an extreme example, anecdotes do not make for real market trends – or new market opportunities.

Can you repeat more than once
Ok lets say that you truly believe that this is a new trend or a new market, how easy would it be to sell exactly the same solution to more than one customer? If you can actually do this many time, then great; perhaps you have stumbled into a new market. If you product needs to have new features for each new potential customer, then you are blind being led by a blind. Step back from the excitement and try to be realistic on your ability to repeat a deal many times without requiring extra product development work.

Adjusting a product to a new market
So if you can’t really repeat the anecdote that easily, you need to evaluate if this is a market you want to enter. This is where Product Validation is a key element in determining if you are on the right track. IF you are able to define a feature set and competitive positioning that will allow you the successfully build a product for more than one customer, then maybe it’s worth the time to investigate.

But in my own experiences, anecdotes are usually just that – nothing more. So you should set a limit on the number of anecdotes you try to nail in a given time; even better if you decline to steer away from your plan. Of course, some people might just call this FOCUS.

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