ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Marketing and Management topics. At ProductCamp everyone participates: by presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process from the Austin area!

I had an opportunity to attend the first product camp and led a session at the second (here’s my presentation).  Both camps were filled with insightful sessions, great discussions, and wonderful people.  I highly recommend attending (you can register now) if you are interested in product management and product marketing.

I am working on a session for the next camp and have an outline started for review.  The idea behind my presentation was an event that happened about a year and a half ago.  A product I was working on was getting ready to launch and through a series of unfortunate events, was almost canceled at the last minute.

My plan is to share how we recovered from this situation and some practical ideas that you can use during product development to increase your chance of success.

Session outline for ProductCamp Austin spring 2010 presentation:

Related posts:

1. ProductCamp Austin
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Not only are stories a powerful way of illustrating the value of your product, in many cases they are the way that your prospects and customers will explain what you do to others.

The Experience is the Product – Customer Development Interviews How-to: What You Should Be Learning

The important thing about these questions is that they set up an environment where the customer is the “expert”.  They avoid yes/no answers, and give people the opportunity to tell a story – one that may trigger them to think of related problems they’re having, or may trigger more questions from you to ask later.

Startup Musings – Positioning statements

To be honest, I’ve never actually seen a positioning statement generated outside product management.   I can’t quite grapple with outsourcing such a strategic deliverable to an agency who can’t possibly be as close to the target personas and the product benefits and feature sets as an in house team.

The Accidental Product Manager – A New Way To Listen To What Your Customers Are Saying About You

Although this may seem like the way to go in the future, it turns out that you need to be a bit careful here. The people who are talking about your product already know about it. You will want to advertise to people who may not already know about your product. This means that things like focus groups and traditional market research are still an important part of what you need to be doing.

Spatially Relevant – You wouldn’t even read your own case study

While case study candidates are hard to find, fluff pieces immortalized in Adobe aren’t that helpful to most sales people or buyers. Try to better understand why someone/a company might want to do a case study. It’s not that hard, just ask them “So why are you looking to do the case study?”

Seeing Both Sides – Mother in Law Market Research

“I see,” replied my professor dryly and then turned to the class with a withering look on his face, “Steve appears to have fallen into that fatal trap of ‘Mother In Law Market Research’ – believing this new product will be a hit just because his mother-in-law likes it.  Instead, let’s look at the data, shall we?”

Related posts:

1. Favorite Product Management Posts Jannuary 2010
2. Signs You Have Crossed The Line
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It was one of those books that you pick-up off the shelf and within minutes know you have to buy.  The book was written by Paul Arden, a famous creative director, as an advertising guide but has a lot of sage advice for business and life in general.

I put together a presentation with a few of the quotes that are worth sharing:

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1. What Are You Reading Over the Holidays?

I had the following question asked of me last week:

How do you factor in customer complaints during your product development process?

It’s a great question to consider in this day of online product reviews, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  A lot of issues that may surface you try to address tactically, but how do you make sure strategically, you are making the right changes?

It was this post on the Smart Blog that really got me thinking about the importance of the process.  Derrick Hull writes on being prepared for good, bad, and ugly reviews from a restaurant standpoint but I think there is correlation to product development.  While you are back in the kitchen cooking up the next tasty dish, your customers are out front eating your current creations and if they aren’t happy, you need to know about it.

Thinking about a crowded restaurant, there is so much hustle and bustle that it is hard to keep track of everything not to mention to immediately respond to customer feedback.  Derrick comments on the importance of filtering the feedback:

Responding promptly and diplomatically to reviews gives you the ability to fix problems and make people happy. However, if you begin to receive multiple negative reviews with recognizable patterns — stale bread, rude server, etc. — it may be worth examining your operation and identifying ways to improve.

The opportunity here is to make sure you are not just handling the issues as one-offs and are looking for trends that illustrate a much bigger issue.  It’s hard not to bring up the ongoing Toyota recall mess that is going on right now as an example of not addressing bigger trends.

Sometimes you have to pull an all-stop and fix things immediately even if this means turning off the stove for a while.

Photo credit:  Seattle Municipal Archives

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Make a product that a billion people will fall in love with and use for the rest of their lives.

Make it easy for a single-digit percentage of them to pay you a few bucks a month once in a while.

Make sure your variable costs are low enough that you can make a mountain of profit if you get #1 and #2 right.

Simple enough but that first one sure is a big step.

On a side note, I haven’t given up on Evernote yet but I am still not using it on a daily basis.  I do like how they have incorporated a great demo video (see Don’t Hide the Demo Button) on their front page for showing how Evernote can save you from the note monster.

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3. Twitter is Not a Focus Group*

Ad Age’s Want to Be a Smarter Marketer? Here’s What’s Worth Learning:

Numbers, schmumbers. The quest to measure the success of new media in marketing has staged a dangerous illusion that massive traffic is the holy grail. Richer veins of loyalty and brand advocacy (with smaller cohorts of consumers) are paying off more handsomely for brands in the near and long term.

Entrepreneur on 10 [and 1/2] Trends to Watch:

Everyone’s eating lower on the food chain these days. Consumer spending is down more than 30 percent from this time last year, to an average of $57 a day, according to a Gallup poll. And even those who can still afford to spend are beset by “luxury shame,” which means high-end retailers are out, and discount shopping is in. Wal-Mart’s earnings increased more than 5 percent this year, while Neiman Marcus reported a 14.8 percent drop in sales.

Gapingvoid’s “selling by giving”, or, “gift economics”:

I could see that in another five years, ANYONE who wants to market ANYTHING successfully- be they small mom n’ pop shops to large companies, will have to be fluent in Gift Economics, to a level that seemed COMPLETELY alien only a few years ago.

Microsoft’s Study on Data Privacy Day:

Our study found 70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a candidate based on online reputation information. Reputation can also have a positive effect as in the United States, 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the U.K. and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent; almost half stated that it does so to a great extent.

Photo credit:  MoreInterpretation’s Flickr

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1. Customer-Centric Thinking at NetApp
2. Product Potluck January 2010
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Purple Cow was published in 2003, way before Facebook, Twitter, and social media became household names.  There are so many gems in this book it is hard to know where to start and the best part is that save for a couple of dated examples, Seth’s points are even more relevant today (the dated examples actually prove another of Seth’s beliefs that it is hard to maintain a remarkable position).

Seth’s thoughts on the end of mass media advertising:

After Advertising, we’re almost back where we started.  But instead of product succeeding by slow and awkward word of mouth, the power of our new networks allows remarkable ideas to diffuse through segments of the population at rock speed.

On the new rule:

Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

and on ideas that spread:

It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some don’t.  When an ideavirus occurs, it’s often because all the viral pieces work together.

Read Purple Cow again or for a first time.   You won’t regret it.

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Enjoy!

Outside-in-view -A New Roadmap to Consider:

As I peruse my product roadmap, I was thinking about what the benefits would be for a product marketing roadmap, how would we change behaviors? We could start product positioning sooner, define the product benefits, do internal education while product is being developed, test potential messages as we test the features – matching critical product launch elements to the product roadmap process.

My Product Management Opinion – The Power of Advanced Research for Product Management

But, are you making the most of some of the advanced research techniques that have become more accessible over the last decade?  Do you understand your market’s preferences for specific features or messaging?  Do you know how various segments will react to price changes?  Can you conduct robust competitive what-if analysis?

Strategic Product Manager – Art or Science?

Since building and delivering software or other high-tech products is generally done with the goal of making a dollar and sustaining a business, I sure hope decisioning is not done within the realm of “human creativity” but with quantitative predictions.

Where the Product Management Tribe Gathers -  Product Management Leadership – Converting Theory into Action

Product management leadership is all about action. It’s converting the theory of product management into sustainable methods. It’s organizing, guiding and enabling a team and teaching them a common language that builds momentum as a team, creates consistency in your activities and ensures product management maintains a level of credibility across organization and with executive management.

Software Product Manager – Software product manager’s first 30 days at a new job ….

Understand people dynamics – This is the most important part, more important than even your product in the first 30 days. You have to start building relationships from day one. Every company has some form of internal people dynamics that you need to observe and learn as you get used to your new position especially in a new company.

Mohan Sawhney – Do Dedicated Devices Die? Principles of Convergence

My take is that, like all questions in marketing and strategy, the right answer is – it depends!  I believe that convergence (and the consequent death of dedicated devices) is a function of several contingent factors.  So, rather than taking one side or another of this debate, I would like to reflect on som principles that will help predict whether we will see convergence win out in a specific context.

Rocketwatcher’s Everything You Say Matters

In your own company you can probably think of a dozen messages like the LinkedIn subject line, that you are putting in front of your customers everyday.  Do they all reflect your company’s value as much as they could?

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Product Potluck is a monthly gathering of product managers here in Austin, TX.  The event starts with an hour of networking during which time you get to enjoy a beverage and vote on the topics for the night.

Usually there are 3-4 speakers who have prepared material and the two with the top votes win.  The best part of Product Potluck is the collaboration that occurs during the presentation.  Attendees are encouraged to share their own expertise and experience.  The shared discussion is packed with information and usually very entertaining.

Here is the presentation I attended last week from Dr. Briones on Value on Use Analysis for New Product Introductions and some of the Twitter notes that were captured during the talk:

Keep an eye on @PP_Austin for information on the next Potluck and @Product_Camp for other Product Camp events across the country (Product Camp Minneapolis is Jan. 30th, Atlanta is Feb. 6th, Silicon Valley is March 13th).

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I spent last week putting the final touches on a Voice of the Customer research effort we conducted near the end of 2009.  As a product manager there is something very satisfying about coming back to the office with a list of potential ideas.

Listening to your customers is a great way to generate ideas.  Some of these ideas will align nicely with your current thinking and some will present challenges.  Then there are ideas that sound just plain crazy.

The just crazy ideas are usually the quickest to be dismissed.  The idea maybe technically impossible or cost prohibitive.  Often, it comes down to a belief that customers just won’t buy it.

However, paying attention to crazy ideas can pay off, and LEGOs are a great case study to prove it.  LEGO (eventually) started listening to the 5% minority of their customers (adults) who had become enthusiastic fans of the product line.  This minority set of customers were spending 50 times more a year than the 95% majority customer (the Gaspedal word of mouth marketing blog has a good overview of the LEGO case here).

The Death Star LEGO set is a perfect example of catering to the adult fan base.  With close to 4ooo pieces, 25 mini figures, a manned turbolaser, and a price tag of $399, the Death Star is not an item you casually pick up at the airport gift store (if you haven’t seen it, check out the time lapse video of the Death Star being assembled).

What LEGO did was re-frame their strategic goals while looking at their customer feedback.  Getting to Innovation is a book I would recomend for understanding the importance of framing when it comes to innovation.  From the book,

Failing to devote attention to how we frame innovation is a failure to test assumptions and, more than likely, adopt less than optimal perceptual frames.  How we see and define things determines how we behave.  If we do a less-than-adequate job of framing a problematic situation, we are less likely to resole it.

The (very) general idea is that by looking at your data through the same lens over and over again you are going to potentially miss significant opportunities.   Changing your assumptions and your questions can result in crazy ideas not being crazy.

As a side note, my son got the LEGO book for Christmas and it is filled with some fascinating facts worth sharing:

• Approx. seven LEGO sets are sold each second
• More than 400 million children and adults will play with LEGO bricks this year
• On average there are 62 LEGO bricks for every person on earth
• In the manufacture of LEGO bricks the machine tolerance is as small as 0.002 mm

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2. A.G. Lafley On Innovation
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