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As Long As You’re There, You May As Well Make The Most Of Your Time

As the global economy snaps back, product managers are going to start traveling once again. Where will we be going? One place that we should plan on spending some time will be at industry trade shows (pause for collective groan). No, these are not the most enjoyable things to go to just to hand out your business card; however, maybe you feel this way because nobody ever told you how to get the most out a trade show…

It’s All About Having Goals

In all of my years of attending countless trade shows, it’s only been in the past 10 or so that I’ve gotten my act together and started creating goals for what I want to accomplish while I’m there. As simple as this may sound, there’s actually a trick to doing it right.

The goals that you set need to consist of creating a specific business purpose that has an associated objective that is quantifiable. It can be very easy to get caught up in the show (the ton of pre-show material that you get can help to build the hype), but in the end identifying who you want to talk with and what you want to learn will make sure that your time is well spent.

Time Management Counts At Trade Shows Also

You wouldn’t show up for work without having a plan (would you?) so you need to have a plan in place BEFORE you hit a trade show. You can create your plan by taking the time to read the convention promotion material and go over the meeting agendas.

If you want to take it to the next level, you can spend time studying the layout of the show floor so that you know what vendor booths you want to visit and in which order you are going to want to visit them. Just before the show, take an hour and surf the web sites of the firms that you are thinking about visiting and make a final decision as to if you want to spend the time with them.

It’s All About Appointments

To get the most out of any show, the best way to maximize your time is to schedule appointments with customers and vendors before the show. Now you are not the only one to realize this and so you’ll have to set up your appointments well before the show date in order to get on everyone’s calendar.

Too Much Really Is Too Much

A trade show is a dynamic event – you might think that you know what is going to happen before the show, but things can change either before or during show. This means that you don’t want to fully book your day – leave open times. This “free time” will become valuable as you meet new people at the show and want to have discussions with them.

Having a list of back-up people and booths that you’d be willing to visit with is always a good idea. If an appointment cancels on you or if a scheduled vendor doesn’t show up, you’ll need to have a plan to fill in your sudden free time.

Work With Non-Competing Firms

Look, any trade show is probably too much for you to handle as a lone product manager. Even if other people from your company are going, you could still quickly end up being overloaded. One way to deal with this situation is to enlist help from product managers at other firms.

This might sound a little weird to you, but here’s how it goes. You reach out to your network of product mangers who work for other non-competing companies and find out who will be attending the same show. You call them up and find out what they are going to be pushing at the show. Likewise, you tell them what you’ll be promoting. Finally, you offer to send any prospects that you run into their way if they’ll do the same for you. This can be a great way to reach out to potential customers that you might not otherwise be able to contact.

What All Of This Means For You

A trade show can easily appear to be a big waste of time – if a product manger is not prepared in advance for it. However, if you take the time to plan out what you’ll be doing, it can turn into a big success for both you and your product.

The key is to take the time before the show to sit down and identify what you really want to accomplish, who you want to meet with, and how you can get your message out to the most people who will be at the show.

Time is the one thing that product managers never seem to have enough of. Trade shows can be an enormous waste of time if you don’t plan for them. However, by doing some planning before the big show, you can transform this potential waste of time into a big boost for your career and your product.

How do you prepare in order to get the most out of attending a trade show?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I can only speak for myself, but I actually enjoy going to industry trade shows. That being said, the reason that I get to go to a trade show is because I’m expected to do things there that will help my product be more successful. That is the part that requires some preparation on my part.,,

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How Much More Product Could You Sell If You Included Some Time With It?

Selling Time With Your Product

As product managers we are always looking for ways to give our products a unique selling proposition. We add unique features, we drop the price, we try bundling the product with other products, etc. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the single most important way that we can get our potential customers to turn into actual customers: start selling time with our product.

Now clearly we’re not going to be able to box up a bunch of time and offer it to our customers. However, AT&T is currently running a series of ads for their wireless service where they make their “rollover minutes” appear to be tangible things that people can keep track of. Instead of something that our customers can touch, maybe what we can start to sell is experiences.

If you are a product manager for a resort that is located on a Caribbean island, you are probably already doing this. However, for the rest of us, this comes back to that pesky “user experience” thing. Just how do your customers feel while they are using your product?

I must confess to having been a product manager who was in charge of a number of products that had fantastic functional value. However, I was so enamored by what my products did, that I spent very little time thinking about how my customers must have felt while they were using my product.

If you need a very simple example, then consider the ubiquitous progress bar found on most software these days. I for one can tell you that seeing a progress bar progress from 0% to 100% while a software tool is doing its job makes me very happy – I don’t like having to sit there looking at a blank screen wondering just what is going on. The progress bar makes my user experience much better and makes me feel like I have more control over my time.

Allowing Your Customers To Control Their Time Better

Taking the idea of “selling time” to your customers one step further, the next thing that a product manager can do is to put the control of how long something takes into the hands of your customers.

Internally we are always looking for ways to speed up the buying process. What can we do to move a potential customer from lead to prospect to paying customer as quickly as possible so that we can book the revenue and move on to the next customer?

The problem with this approach is that it can cause the customer to feel pressured to buy. If instead we put control of the buying timeline in the hands of the customer, then they get to control just how fast the process goes.

The clearest example of this can be seen on web sites where you can allow the customer to “build” their own product. Putting them in charge of creating their own pizza or computer means that once it’s been built, the customer already feels a sense of “ownership” and is much more likely to buy what they’ve specified.

Product managers can take this time control process one step further and equip sales teams with the tools that they need in order to guide customers down several different paths. How long each path is and what is covered can be controlled by the customer so that a contract is not placed in front of them until they are truly ready to buy.

It’s All About Attitude

How your customers feel about time will be something that is constantly changing. Just because you’ve found something that works now, doesn’t mean that it will keep working tomorrow.

You can expect your customers to become bored with the steps that they have to go through to use your product today and want to be able to do things quicker and better. It’s going to be your responsibility to be constantly coming up with new approaches that work for them.

What All Of This Means For You

The next time (sorry about the pun) that you are faced with a competitor that appears to have a better or cheaper product than you can offer, take a step back. Think about how you can start to offer your potential customers what they really want – more time and better control over their time.

There are a number of different ways that you can do this. The key is to understand how your customers are using your product and to then make the time that they spend with your product even more enjoyable.

Selling time is the one product that will never go out of style. Sure you can’t box it up and no, you can’t store it in a warehouse, but all of your customers will keep coming back and asking you for more of it…!

Do you think that you could boost your product’s sales if you started to advertise the user experience more?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the global economy snaps back, product managers are going to start traveling once again. One place that we should plan on spending some time will be at industry trade shows. No, these are not the most enjoyable things to go to just to hand out your business card; however, maybe you feel this way because nobody ever told you how to get the most out a trade show…

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Now AT&T Product Managers Need To Slow Down Their Customers

Now AT&T Product Managers Need To Slow Down Their Customers

AT&T’s iPhone Problem

Who among us product managers has not heard about Apple’s iPhone product and its incredible retail success? Currently in the U.S. there is only one wireless service provider on who’s network these highly desirable phones work: AT&T’s. You’d think that that was a good thing from an AT&T product manager’s point of view, right? Well it turns out that the old saying “too much of a good thing is bad” truly applies in this case…

It turns out that the iPhone, while it’s a great phone to use, is a terrible phone to have running on your network. A recent story in the New York Times reported that AT&T’s reputation is taking a severe beating because of the connectivity problems that iPhone users have been having. What makes this ironic, is that it turns out that the problem isn’t really AT&T’s but rather how the iPhone was designed!

No matter, AT&T needs to do something and do it quickly. One of the issues that they know that they have to deal with is the problem of customers who love their iPhones just a little bit too much – the heavy data users. To deal with this problem, AT&T is planning on taking steps to curtail excessive data usage by these iPhone customers.

From a product manager point-of-view, these users are responsible for much of the growth in wireless data traffic on the AT&T network as well as perceptions of problems with the network. In order to deal with the issue of customers using too much of the available bandwidth to send and receive data from their iPhones, AT&T is thinking about introducing what they are calling “incentives” that they hope will encourage customers to cut back on their iPhone data usage.

Just to show how much of a problem the iPhones are causing, a recent study revealed that the average iPhone user consumes five to seven times more data on a monthly basis than an average AT&T subscriber who mainly uses their handset for phone calls. Clearly the AT&T product managers have their work cut out for them!

Possible Solutions

What’s a product manager to do? The trick here is that AT&T loves to have subscribers. In fact, the more subscribers that they can get to join every month, the better they are doing as a business. The problem is that some of these subscribers are degrading the quality of service for the remaining users and people might start unsubscribing because of this.

If we take a look in an AT&T product manager’s bag of tricks, the solution that we’ll almost immediately stumble across is of course usage based pricing. The way that AT&T has their product pricing structured right now, it’s almost encouraging iPhone users to send and receive as much data as possible. iPhone users are only required to pay $30 a month for the right to send and receive an unlimited amount of data.

As the AT&T product managers consider their options, they need to be careful that whatever they decide to do they don’t end up punishing the majority of their users for the actions of a few data intensive users. They could start to ration data like they do for talk minutes and once a user exceeds their monthly allotment amount of data that can be sent or received, then they would start to pay an additional fee.

A more controversial solution is for the AT&T product managers to take things into their own hands and when they detect a heavy data user, they could start to slow down (“throttle”) an iPhone user’s connection if their usage is hurting the network access for nearby users.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we are always taught that the more that our customers use our products, the better life will be for us. Clearly, the AT&T product managers have run into an exception to this rule. Their next steps have to be taken carefully.

Two levers that they can pull include changing the subscription pricing to encourage the behavior that they want or changing the way that the product works to restrict heavy data user’s access. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

No matter which option they select, the AT&T product managers need to do something. Nobody ever said that being a product manager was going to be easy and this is a classic example of why product managers are so valuable…

What do you think that the AT&T Product Managers should do in order to minimize abusive iPhone data users?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Why Not Create A Good Looking Catalog For Your Product?

Why Create A Catalog?

So here’s a novel thought for you to consider Product Manager: why not create a catalog for your product? Based on a recommendation from a friend, I’ve been reading the book “Catalog Design: Creating Desire” and it has given me a whole new appreciation for catalogs. I used to just get them in the mail, scan them quickly, and then toss them aside. Now I better understand just what a valuable product tool they are…

Look, no matter if you are a product manager for a single product or for a whole line of products, you are actually selling a number of different things. Whether it’s different configurations of your product(s), training, different bundles, different support programs, etc. we are all selling more than just one thing. This opens the door to creating a catalog to describe to our customers everything that we sell.

As product managers we are always thinking about our competition. We’d all love to have a way to make our products stand out in their markets. Since none of us have an unlimited budget, it’s time to get creative. Does any of your competition currently create a catalog for their products? If not, then you’ve got a real opportunity here.

Brochures don’t count. A catalog is a “book” that allows you to lay out everything that you offer to your customers in one place. A brochure just provides information on one product. A catalog will allow you to build an image for both your product and your company.

What does it take to make a catalog?

In order to create a catalog, you need to first start by selecting a theme that you want to use for your catalog. This is going to depend greatly on the type of product that you manage and the people who are your customers. Remember, businesses don’t buy products, people do. The theme needs to be something that your customers will respond to – something that they want to be part of.

Once you have a theme selected, you next need images – photos. You are going to need a lot of these because the whole purpose of a catalog is to allow your customer to experience your product. Don’t even think about filling a catalog with screenshots of some software product. Instead, spend some time and think about what your customers do with your product and include images of the end results that your customers want to achieve.

Finally, you’re going to need words. But not just any words. The words that you drape in and around your photos need to explain what your customer is seeing in the photos and how they can get the same results. The tone and the specific words that you use need to reinforce the theme that you’ve chosen.

How do you go about using a catalog?

Once you’ve gone to the effort of creating your catalog, the next step is the most important. You’re going to have to sit down with your sales team and go through the catalog page by page in order to make sure that they understand it.

One they understand the theme, the content, and the intent of the catalog, then they can take it to their customers. As a part of their selling process they can go through the catalog with their customers in order to show them what’s in it and to motivate them to take a closer look after the salesperson is gone.

Finally, you will also need to update that part of your company’s web site that deals with your product. Its look and feel needs to be the same as the theme that you used in the catalog. As customers read the catalog and decide to visit your web site to learn more, the theme should carry over to the web site.

What does all of this mean to you?

No matter how fancy we get in this all-electronics age, it turns out that catalogs still serve a purpose. They do a fantastic job of laying out in one place a company’s entire line of products and telling a story to your customers. Catalogs are not going away anytime soon.

As an example of this I’ll refer you to my favorite catalog, Cruchfield. They do a great job of transforming commodity electronics into a product that you really want to buy from them.

Catalogs can provide a product manager with a unique way to make your product stand out in a crowded market. Please note that creating a catalog is the start of a long-term commitment. Once you’ve created one, your customers are going to be eager to see the next edition…

Do you think that you sell enough products that you could fill a catalog?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the best interviews that I’ve ever read was with Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) in which he scoffed at doing things like focus groups and such in order to get input for the fantastic products that Apple makes. He said that since what Apple is doing is so revolutionary, getting input from potential customers wouldn’t help much because they couldn’t even imagine what a product could do. I do respect Steve, but could he be wrong?

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The AccPM Blog Now Looks Better On Smart Phones

Loyal Readers,

It has been brought to my attention that the AccPM blog’s appearance on touch-based smart phones was, shall we say, poor at best.

I think that I may have found a way to solve this problem. I’ve installed some new software that should change the AccPM into an iPhone application “looking” site, complete with Ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

As with all great experiments, we’re going to have to see how this goes. If you’ve got one of these devices do me a favor and check the site out and then post a comment to let me know how it looks — you should be able to switch between the old (“mobile unfriendly”) look & feel and the new (“mobile friendly”) look & feel.

Thanks for all of you help in making the AccPM better!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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Do Product Managers Need To Catch The Bus To Advertise Their Products Properly?

A New Way To Create Ads For Your Products

Welcome to the world of the 21st Century – there seems to be a new competitor who is trying to win the attention of your customers every day. What’s a product manager to do? The answer lies in getting the message about why your product is better out before your potential customers in a way that connects with them. But how? Maybe the answer lies in what your existing customers are saying about your product…

How To Use This New Approach

For years now product managers have been told that we need to listen to what our customers are telling us in order to find ways to make our products better. However, nobody has ever really taken the time to tell us what we need to do in order to create product advertising messages that work.

With the arrival of the Internet, product advertising is yet one more thing that is undergoing a significant change. For the first time, the Internet gives product managers a chance to “eavesdrop” on what your customers are saying about their experience with your product.

We often think about these types of customer conversations in terms of the negative things that our customers are saying – that’s how we can discover what features need to be added to the next version of the product. However, it turns out that the positive things that they are saying can help us out also.

New technologies are becoming available that allow the big Internet to be scanned in order to collect all of the different things that are being said about your product. This information can reveal just what aspects of your product your customers are talking about (“I like the way that it feels in my hands”) as well as what they are not talking about (what? No mention of the extended warrantee that we debated about offering for two months?)

The power of this new approach to creating product ads is allowing your customers to determine what theme you end up using for your next advertising campaign as well as the words and images that you use. Even better, once you’ve launched the campaign, you can monitor the feedback and make changes to it in order to have an even greater impact.

Example: Harrah’s Takes A Gamble

A great example of one set of product managers who are doing exactly this comes from the casino company Harrah’s. Emily Steel has done some research on how they’ve been using these new tools.

She reports that Harrah’s mined the customer comments that had been posted on the travel review web site www.TripAdvisor.com along with watching what was being said on Twitter and Facebook in order to determine how they should promote their hotel / casino. What they discovered is that their customers valued the views they could get out of their hotel windows as well has the amenities in their rooms.

Harrah’s used this information to change the way that their web site looked as well as changing the types of information that they sent to prospective customers. Since doing this, they’ve reported that they’ve seen a double-digit increase in the number of on-line bookings for their properties.

What All Of This Means For 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.

Ultimately, as a product manager you need to add this new technique for creating advertising that works for your product to your toolbox. It is yet one more way that the Internet is changing everything about the way that product managers do our job…

Do you think that knowing what your customers are saying about your products online would change how you talk about your product?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers we are always looking for ways to give our products a unique selling proposition. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the single most important way that we can get our potential customers to turn into actual customers: start selling time with our product…

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NCR Is Getting Into The DVR Rental Business – Bad News For redbox

Who Doesn’t Like A Little Competition?

There’s not a product manager out there who doesn’t dream of the day in which their product is the only show in town. Man – wouldn’t that be great? You wouldn’t have to worry about any real competition, you’d just be spending your time working to grow the market. And then you wake up.

The new-kid-on-the-block firm Redbox who has taken the DVD rental market by storm with their low-price, limited selection kiosks that have been popping up everywhere. For the longest time it looked like it would be a Redbox vs. Netflix battle. However, things have changed.

There’s a new gorilla in town: NCR. Just a little while ago NCR purchased Houston-based TNR Holdings which was a smaller player, but they were in the kiosk DVD rental business also. This wouldn’t be all that remarkable if the product managers at NCR hadn’t done something else interesting: gotten into bed with Blockbuster.

The NCR product managers have somehow talked Blockbuster into licensing its brand to NCR. This allows Blockbuster to take a cut of rental revenue from the kiosks. Hmm, I had sorta thought that Netflix had Blockbuster on the ropes. Is this a way for the Blockbuster product managers to stage a rebound (“don’t call it a comeback”)?

What Does This Mean For Redbox?

As though things weren’t heating up enough for the Redbox product managers, the latest news is that NCR is acquiring DVD Kiosk operator DVDPlay Inc. and plans on converting its 1,300 kiosks to the Blockbuster Express brand name. Now we’re starting to talk about a lot of kiosks.

What makes this latest purchase by NCR even more interesting is that it will give NCR a leg up in one of Redbox’s weakest markets: California. As product managers are all too painfully aware, it’s a lot harder to boost your product’s market share when you have to take market away from your competition!

That deal that the NCR product managers struck with Blockbuster seems to be paying off. NCR is reporting that converting kiosks to the Blockbuster brand appears to boost their traffic significantly. Think about it, would you rent a DVD from NCR? No way; however, when you see the Blockbuster name and the blue and gold colors you start to think about Friday nights and relaxing at home in front of the TV.

Remember, the key to this product’s success is volume. The kiosks rent out movies for as little as $1 per night. In order to boost their volume so that they can compete with Redbox better, as NCR replaces the DVDPlay kiosks with the Blockbuster kiosks, they plan on moving them to better locations. Some of these locations include moving them outside of stores so that people can still access them even when the store is closed.

The 900 lb Gorilla In The Room

Gosh, you’re thinking, it looks like the Redbox product managers now have their hands full. Wait a minute, it gets even more complicated. Redbox’s low-price marketing strategy has been so successful that some studios try to keep their newest releases out of kiosks to avoid devaluing the same products that they are trying to sell in stores for $30.

Kiosks operators like Redbox have been trying to get around this problem by buying DVDs in quantity from either Walmart or Best Buy. The bad new is retailers have caught on to this strategy and are now putting restrictions on how many DVDs kiosk operators can purchase. In some cases they are restricting purchases to just three of any single title.

Redbox has antitrust suits pending against Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures.

New Competition Is Arriving Every Day

As though having competition from a large firm with deep pockets that has gotten into bed with one of your biggest established competitors wasn’t enough, there are the other start up firms that Redbox still has to worry about.

Mosquito Productions has a BigBox DVD kiosk that contains between 2,000 – 3,000 DVDs compared to 500 for Redbox and 950 for Blockbuster Express.

In a business with very low barriers to entry, Redbox needs to anticipate that there will be even more firms like this showing up over time.

What All Of This Means For You

What the Redbox product managers are going through should serve as an example for all of us. It’s great to be one of the first entrants into a new market and to be successful for awhile. However, we all have to remember that success is like blood in the water and it will attract other sharks soon enough.

Once competition heats up product managers need to shift some of their focus from growing their market share to holding on to what they already have. This means that they need to find ways to differentiate their product.

This might be a great time for Redbox to start to develop a “frequent renter” program in order to allow customers to build up “credits”. This could help customers decide to choose a Redbox kiosk over any others when they have a choice.

What do you think Redbox’s next step should be?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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It May Seem Strange, But Listening To Your Customer Really Works

Why Bother Listening To Your Customers?

One of the best interviews that I’ve ever read was with Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) in which he scoffed at doing things like focus groups and such in order to get input for the fantastic products that Apple makes. He said that since what Apple is doing is so revolutionary, getting input from potential customers wouldn’t help much because they couldn’t even imagine what a product could do. I do respect Steve, but could he be wrong?

For those of us product managers whose products are NOT the next best thing to sliced bread, just maybe taking some time to talk with our customers might help our products be more successful. I mean think about all of the decisions that we have to make that getting a customer’s input would help with: what we should be selling, what our products should look like (will anyone buy the gold colored model?), what to price our products at, and just exactly where and how we should go about selling them.

In tough times there is another powerful motivation for tapping your customers to act as your product advisors: they sure are a lot cheaper than those fancy high priced, suit wearing, professional consultants that a lot of us normally use. Customers can also deliver something that no professional consultant can: they may actually buy your product simply because they were involved in creating it.

How To Listen To Your Customers

Deciding to listen to your customers is a great idea. Where things start to get just a bit sticky is when you sit down and try to figure out just exactly HOW to go about doing this. The simplest way to start things off is to use everyone’s new best friend: Twitter. Why not set up a Twitter account for your product, advertise its existence to your existing customers and interested parties, and then start throwing product related questions out there. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it sure can’t do any harm.

Your next step could be to set up a blog to talk about your product. This is a great way to get your customer base to drop by in order to find out what you have planned for the product. A great example of this are the blogs that the Google team have set up for their products.

You can take this one step further and setup online communities. This starts to allow your customers to not only talk with you, but to also talk amongst themselves. Yeah, this can be a little dangerous but the benefits probably outweigh the risks.

If you want to get all formal about it, then you can set up product related forums on your company’s web site where you can allow your customers to contribute and vote on ideas. No matter how you do it, it’s pretty easy to get in touch with your customers.

The Downside To Listening To Your Customers

Before you go running off and start to design your next product solely based on guidance provided by online potential customers, you might want to hold on for a minute and give it some further thought. As powerful a force as this may be, there are some drawbacks to listening too closely to what your customers have to say.

The first big issue is that simple fact that the folks who are willing to talk to you online may not be a good representation of the people who will eventually buy your product. I’m sure that the product managers at Coke got lots of feedback from people who liked the taste of New Coke, but that turned out to be the wrong group of people to be asking.

A much more subtle drawback to allowing your customers to have a big voice in the creation and marketing of your product is the fact that by doing so you may be stifling internal creativity. It turns out that the more democratic you make the product design (or marketing) process, the less people are going to be motivated to contribute their ground-breaking ideas and will instead op to go along with what the crowd is saying.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end, the voice of your customer is a powerful tool that can help you to design and market your product better. However, you need to have a firm grasp on when you need to listen to your customers and when you need to follow your own ideas.

No matter how you choose to proceed, it’s important to realize that you’re making a commitment if you ask for input from your customers. Once you’ve done this, you need to find ways to show that you respect it and make it clear to the people who provided input how that input is being used so that everyone feels appreciated.

Do you think that your customers have anything to say that would make your product better?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

There’s not a product manager out there who doesn’t dream of the day in which their product is the only show in town. Man – wouldn’t that be great? You wouldn’t have to worry about any real competition, you’d just be spending your time working to grow the market. And then you wake up.

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Don’t Mickey Mouse Around With Your Customer’s Time

Quick: what’s the most valuable item in the world? Gold? Diamonds? Nope, it turns out that the thing that most of us would gladly give our left arm for more of is: time. Now since I can see that you are nodding your head in agreement with this, I’ve got a question for you. Why aren’t you selling time along with your product?

Don’t Worry, Nobody’s Doing It

Study after study of both consumers and businesses have shown that both share our view that time is the most valuable of resources. Nobody has enough of the stuff. Customers have stated over and over again that they would probably buy any product that could save them time. Hmm, sure seems like a great way for a product manager to make their product (more) successful…

The real tragedy here is that so few of us seem to be listening to our customers on this subject. You don’t have to be able to read your customer’s mind to see that there is a real need here. A study performed by Paul Nunes and company has revealed that only 5% of customers believe that the companies that they do business with and the products that they buy respect their limited time.

How NOT To Try To Sell More Time

All too often when Product Managers discover that their customers are looking for ways to gain more time, they try for the quick & dirty solution. These are the types of solutions that allow the product manager to make statements like “now takes only half the time that it used to”. This no longer cuts it with your customers.

One of a product manager’s biggest problems is that your customer’s world keeps on moving faster and faster. This means that just because you find a way to reduce the amount of time that it takes to use your product, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s really going to have any value to your customers. I mean really, doesn’t the concept of having your photos printed and ready for you in 24 hours seem like it still takes too long?

The Correct Way To Sell More Time With Your Product

If you want to add “more time” to the list of items that you are offering to sell to your customers, then there are four things that you need to start doing. None of these approaches to making your product more valuable are all that earth shattering, but if they buy your customer more time, then you should see sales of your product shoot up:

1. Multitasking: how much attention to your product is required by your customer when they are using it? Although we all know that trying to multitask in our daily lives is a bad thing, it turns out that customers will flock to any product that allows them to do more than one thing simultaneously. This is one reason why desktop search tools that run in the background silently indexing your hard drive are so popular – buy, install, run, and then forget. Customers love that.
2. Get It Faster: how long do your customers have to wait from when they buy your product before it is in their hands and ready to use? If you are selling a software product that requires a significant installation project to get it up and running, would it be possible to allow your customer to start to use some functionality before the entire system was up and running? This would go a long way in reducing the perceived time between purchase and use.
3. Fear Of Commitment: are customers avoiding your product because they believe that it’s just going to require too much of their time to use? If so, you’ve got a challenge on your hands. What can you do to convince them that either they’re wrong – the time commitment is not that large, or that they really do have the time? You see this type of product positioning with exercise equipment ads all the time – you can get flat abs in just 10 minutes a day!
4. No More Waiting: how hard is it to purchase your product? Do you make your customers go through a lengthy RFP process and then have to sit through multiple product configuration meetings once you’ve been selected? Why not take a look at what you’ve actually been selling and pick the three most popular configurations and offer those as a pre-packaged product with the option to further customize?

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we are always under pressure to make our products more popular. The levers that we have to pull in order to make this happen include things like lowering the price and increasing the features. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the one thing that our customers are most desperately looking for: more time in their lives.

If we can find a way to allow our products to help our customers get more control over the time in their lives, then we’ll have created a unique selling proposition for our product. We can do this by allowing our customers to better multitask by using our product, do things faster, reduce the commitment that the product requires, or even by getting rid of waiting for the product.

Time is a universal desire – everybody wants it and they are always going to want more of it. As a product manager, if you can figure out how your product can provide your customers with more time, then you will have found your secret to product success.

Do you think that your customers would be more willing to buy your product if it provided them with more time?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Welcome to the world of the 21st Century – there seems to be a new competitor who is trying to win the attention of your customers every day. What’s a product manager to do?  Maybe the answer lies in what your existing customers are saying about your product…

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Even The (Seemingly) Best Product Ideas Can Fail

Is there any part of a product manager’s job that is more exciting then being responsible for introducing a new product? For that matter, is there any experience that can be more nerve racking than introducing a new product? If only there was some way that we could take out “flop insurance” that would help to prevent our becoming known as the product manager who introduced the next “new Coke” disaster…

Why New Product Fail

In 2003 34,000 new products were introduced. 90% of them failed. In 2008 122,743 new products were introduced and the failure rate was about 80%. Those odds don’t look so good for your next new product introduction, do they?

Dr. Rita Gunther McGrath has been studying the tools that companies use to plan for new product launches and she thinks that she knows what we’ve been doing wrong. It turns out that we’ve been using the wrong tools.

What’s Wrong With The Way That We’ve Been Doing Things?

As any product manager who has spent any time working for a large firm knows, there is no shortage of tools available to help product managers plan for the introduction of a new product. It turns out that most of these tools no longer work correctly.

The problem is caused by the simple fact that things have changed. A lot. Most of the tools that are currently available to product managers are based on an assumption that what’s happened in the past can be used to predict what will happen in the future. Now that most of the markets that we design new products for are moving so quickly, these assumptions are no longer valid.

Is There A Better Way To Plan For A New Product Launch?

Thankfully, yes there is a better way. Dr. McGrath proposes that we start to use what she calls “discovery driven growth”. This approach is basically a plan for learning more as the launch process moves forward. The part that I like about this way of doing things is that it doesn’t require the product manager to have a lot of analytical information at the start of the launch process. In my opinion that’s a good idea simply because there generally isn’t a lot of information available!

What Makes This Approach Different?

So in the graveyard of products that were bad ideas from the start (e.g. New Coke, Pets.com, etc.) what went wrong? These products had bright, smart product managers running the show and they created elaborate, beautiful plans that they followed to the letter when launching their products.

It turns out that they did two things wrong and these conspired to cause them to fail. The first was that they started with untested assumptions and then used them as facts on which they built their launch plans.

The second thing that they did wrong is that they built a false reality that blocked out the truth. They built products, and then second generation products, they launched advertising programs, etc. They did so much work that it all started to seem real to them, when in fact everything was built on some bad guesses about what the market really wanted.

What Is The Right Way To Launch A Product?

Dr. McGrath says that what we should do is to start any launch process by writing down what our assumptions are as we are creating the business plan. Overtime we’ll forget what our assumptions are.

Next you need to identify the milestones that you’ll be reaching as you get closer and closer to launching your new product. Once the milestones are known, you need to determine which of your assumptions you’ll revisit at that milestone in order to determine if they are still valid.

The ultimate goal of this is to spot when any assumptions are found to be no longer be valid as early in the process as possible. You may end up killing the new product, but you’ll save the company a lot of money.

What All Of This Means For You

Launching a new product is the ultimate thrill for a product manager. If successful it can make your career. Likewise, if it’s a flop then there is a good chance that your career at your company may be over and done with.

One of the biggest problems that product managers face when launching new products is that the planning tools that we use are out-of-date. They assume that the future will be like the past, and that just ain’t true any more.

Using the discovery-driven growth approach allows product managers to document what their initial assumptions were and to revisit them during the launch process. This allows any fundamentally wrong assumptions to be detected as early as possible and corrective action (including killing the product) to be taken.

Launching a new product is never easy. However, this new approach to launch planning just might make it turn out successful more often!

Have you ever based a new product launch on assumptions that turned out to not be correct?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Quick: what’s the most valuable item in the world? Gold? Diamonds? Nope, it turns out that the thing that most of us would gladly give our left arm for more of is: time. Now since I can see that you are nodding your head in agreement with this, I’ve got a question for you. Why aren’t you selling time along with your product?

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