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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?

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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?

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

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?

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

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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How Will Microsoft

What’s a product manger to do when your #1 competitor is your own product? What can you do if you spend a lot of time and money developing a new version of your product and then roll it out and the customers that you want to sell it to appear to be happy using the old version of your product? This is exactly the situation that Microsoft’s Office product managers now find themselves in…

Done In By Their Own Success

Everybody knows what Microsoft’s Office product is don’t you? It’s the premier suite of business software tools that just about everybody uses everyday (this article is being written in Microsoft Word). The very fact that it’s so popular is what creates such a challenge for its product mangers.

Office 2010 is the next version that is getting ready to be rolled out. It’s got a bunch of fancy new features that are going to permit people to simultaneously work on documents, link into Facebook, etc. But are people going to buy it?

Over at the research company Gartner Inc., they’ve done some interesting studies on just how many people have been willing to upgrade their perfectly good versions of Office to a new version in the past. Only 60% of current Office users bothered to upgrade to Office 2003 when it came out. When Office 2007 came out, somewhere between 50-55% of users upgraded to it. I wonder how things will go for Office 2010?

Why Not Just Go Ahead And Upgrade?

As product managers, we can get very close to our products. Maybe too close. When we roll out a new version of an existing product, we can fool ourselves into thinking that all of our existing customers will of course want to upgrade to it because it has so many cool new features. But that’s just the problem, they are features, not benefits.

What we too quickly overlook is that from our customer’s point-of-view, any upgrade is a pain in the butt. There are a lot of hassles and expenses involved. Sure there is the cost of the new product (didn’t I already pay for this?) but then there is also the retraining that is involved. Once a customer takes into account just how large their user base is, both of these disruptions can quickly become too much to put up with.

Oh, Oh — Microsoft Is Late To The Party

Oh, there’s one more thing that the Microsoft product managers have to worry about. As you can well imagine, past versions of the Office product don’t do everything that customers want. Well guess what: a bunch of companies have seen this market opportunity and have dived right in.

Small start-ups that are run by former Microsoft employees have created tools that can be added to existing versions of Office that provide many of the key new features that Office 2010 will provide — without the hassle of upgrading. Some of these firms are Xobni (email search), DocVerse (collaboratively edit documents over the Internet), Gist (interface email to social networking sites), and Xiant (helps to file email more efficiently).

This, of course, makes life even more difficult for Microsoft’s Office product managers. Why should existing customers upgrade if they can already get the new product’s key new functionally simply by adding free or low cost plugins to their existing software?

What All Of This Means For You

The Microsoft Office product managers have a challenge on their hands. They have a very successful product; however, now they have a new version of the product and they want as many of their existing customers to decide that the expense and hassle of upgrading is worth the effort.

Just to make things even more difficult, an entire industry has sprung up creating add on products that eliminate some of the most obvious customer pain points that Microsoft could normally use to motivate customers to upgrade. This limits Microsoft’s options.

What should be most important for product managers everywhere is that Microsoft has deep pockets and they realize that they have a problem here. I suspect that we’re going to seem a full out push to motivate customers to upgrade: advertising, pricing, and incentives will all be used. We should all take careful notes and learn what works so that we can use it the next time we upgrade our product…

Do you think that Microsoft should lower the price of their Office 2010 product in order to get people to upgrade?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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…

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PayPay Is No Longer The Only Game In Town

You would think that if your product was the biggest one in it’s market, you’d be sitting pretty as a product manager, right? Sure, this might be an easy trap to fall into; however, if you start to take it easy once you are the king of the hill, then that’s when your competition shows up and knocks you off. Over at the big online payment processor PayPal, their product managers are currently doing quite well. However, they can see the handwriting on the wall and are taking some bold steps to remain #1…

What Me Worry?

If you want to have a successful product that everyone needs, then the world of online payment processing was the business to go into awhile back. Something like a zillion dollars gets exchanged online everyday and right now there’s pretty much one main player in this industry: eBay’s PayPal unit.

As product managers we all realize that when you become very successful, that is a signal for other companies to create products to compete with you. It’s taken awhile, but now the PayPal product managers are starting to see some competition. Serious competition. This when product managers need to be extra careful and not make marketing mistakes.

And In This Corner We Have…

Don’t get me wrong, the PayPal product managers have created a very good product and they’ve listened to their customers and they’ve made it very easy to use. However, this market is too big right now and growing too fast not to attract some highly qualified competition.

Amazon.com currently sells just about everything on the planet. Amazon.com already has a huge customer base and enormous computing power. They are looking to leverage this with a new transaction processing service that they are calling “Pay-Phrase” . The Amazon.com product managers are betting that if they make it even easier to shop with them, then more people will do so.

Google offers the most direct competition in their “Google Checkout” payment processing system. One of their greatest strengths going forward is that this service has been integrated into the Android mobile operating system.

Facebook may represent the greatest threat to the PayPal product manager’s long term success. Simply put, Facebook’s user base of over 300 million users gives it an unprecedented reach into the consumer market. This is exactly what any online payment processing company needs in order to succeed.

The Facebook product managers have created a virtual currency called Facebook Credits that can be used to buy both virtual and real goods. Right now only a few vendors are using these credits to allow users to buy things, but that may all change quickly. Facebook has opened up a gift shop that accepts Facebook credits and they are starting to sell both virtual goods as well as products from other companies. This sure sounds like what they talked about in that book The Innovator’s Dilemma…

How PayPal Product Managers Are Fighting Back

As you might expect, the PayPal product managers are not taking this competitive challenge lying down. They believe that the key to their long-term success is to make their payment processing system an integral part of many different products so that it will always be there ready to be used by consumers.

In order to make this happen, they are preparing to rollout a new system that will make it easier for software developers to integrate the PayPal system into their own applications. This new software, called PayPal X.

The key goal of this new software is to eliminate the need for customers to have to sign into a separate PayPal web site in order to complete their purchase. Instead, they’ll be able to complete it without leaving the web site that they are on.

What All Of This Means For You

All product managers dream of being responsible for a wildly successful product. The PayPal product managers have clearly succeeded in achieving this dream. What is interesting for the rest of us to observe is what they do now: do they rest on their laurels or do they kept moving forward?

Clearly PayPal’s competition has shown up in force in the guise of both Amazon.com and Facebook. Both of these companies have the luxury of having been able to watch what PayPal has done and learning from their mistakes. The products that the competition rolls out will pose a serious threat to PayPal.

Before you start feeling too sorry for those poor successful PayPal product managers, realize that they seem to have realized that they are facing a threat and are taking steps to stay in the lead.

For the rest of us, I believe that the message from this competition needs to be that no matter how successful our product becomes, we can never take it easy. We will always have competition, it’s what we do to meet it is what determines how successful we will be as product managers.

What do you think that Google has to do in order to be a true competitor to PayPal?

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

What’s a product manger to do when your #1 competitor is your own product? This is exactly the situation that Microsoft’s Office product managers now find themselves in…

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What Batman Customer Wouldn't Want You As His Robin?

As product managers, one of the things that we enjoy doing the most is sitting back and counting the number of customers that our product has. Although this is great fun to do, it’s not really what we should be doing with our time. Customers are great to have, but it turns out that what we should really be doing is looking for ways to turn them into something much more valuable: partners.

What’s Up With This Partner Thing?

If you have really been doing your job as a product manager, then you’ve already gone through your product’s existing customers and “fired” those customers that were costing you more than you were making from them. What you are left with is (hopefully) a collection of traditionally good customers. Now you’ve got to get ready to make the next step.

What you’ve got to do is to find ways to collaborate with your customers. Sorry you self-centered product managers, this collaboration isn’t about you, rather it’s all about finding ways to help your product’s customers become more profitable.

Exactly how best to do this is going to depend both on the business that your customer is in and what your product does for them. Collaboration could take the form of using your product to help your customer with their long-term planning, perhaps it can help address issues with their supply chain, etc.

Building A Bigger Box

All of us product managers suffer from a common fault. In our daily lives, the things that we work on can expand to fill all of our available time. This include tasks such as working with product development, creating new product collateral, picking new features, etc. What’s missing from this is interaction with our customers.

The walls that make up our cube / office can easily start to define our world. If we want to start to collaborate with our customers, then we are going to have to push those walls out far enough so that our customers are now inside of our daily lives. It’s only by doing this that we’ll be able to find ways to get closer to our customers.

Can You Say Indispensable?

The difference between a customer and a partner is that you are simply another supplier to a customer whereas when you become a partner, then you have become indispensable. Your sales teams are working hard to make themselves indispensable to your customers, you need to be doing the same for your product.

Hopefully by now you’ve realized that you can’t create this kind of deep relationship with all of your customers. You are going to have to sort the customers that you currently have and select the few that you’d like to move to being partners with.

Developing a partnership with your customers is difficult, maintaining it can be even more challenging. This will require more of your time; however, it’s quite difficult to do this kind of relationship creation and so if you can pull it off, then you will have created a significant competitive advantage for your product.

What All Of This Means For You

Having customers for your product is fantastic. However, savvy product managers realize that just having customers is not enough. Instead, they know that they need to go to the extra effort to turn some of those customers into partners.

In order to create a partner for your product, you need to find ways to collaborate with your customers. This is all about them: how can you and your product help this customer to increase their bottom line?

If you are successful in doing this, then you will have made your product indispensable to your customer / partner and that’s the secret to your long-term success as a product manager.

How many partners do you think that a single product manager could support?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You would think that if your product was the biggest one in it’s market, you’d be sitting pretty as a product manager, right?  Over at the big online payment processor PayPal, their product managers are currently doing quite well. However, they can see the handwriting on the wall and are taking some bold steps to remain #1…

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May This Be Your Best Year Ever!

It’s still the holiday season and I’m still on vacation!

This is the time of the year that we all make plans for what we want to accomplish in the upcoming year. This time around, take your time and give some thought to what you can do to make this your best year ever…!

Here’s hoping that you’ll have peace, love, happiness, and success in the upcoming year. The blog will be back next week…

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume after the holidays…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time, you will enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness when the new year begins…

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk again next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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How Would You Market A Commodity Product Like Bullets?

So there you are: the product manager for a boring product. How often have you caught yourself gazing longingly over at one of those iPhones, Kindles, or some other such highly desirable product and though to yourself “Now why couldn’t I be the Product Manager for a cool product like that?” I have one message for you — get over it. It turns out that there are other product manager who are responsible for products that are even less cool than yours and they are doing some pretty amazing things to make their products successful…

How One Goes About Buying Bullets

I’m sure that there are some of you out there that have very strong feelings about guns and such. Let’s put those feelings aside for a few minutes and take a closer look at the issue of, what else, bullets. If you are not an avid survivalist or hunter, you probably haven’t purchased bullets before.

It turns out that people really care about what gun they buy. However, bullets are almost an afterthought purchase. Sorry about that bullet product managers. Rob Walker over at the New York Times got interested in this product conundrum when he researched a company called Alliant Techsystems (ATK)<.

One of the products that ATK makes is bullets. In fact, they make a lot of different types of bullets — currently some 20 different brands. Awhile back ATK bought a company and inherited the Federal Premium brand of bullets. I think that most of us will understand that the way that this brand of bullets was being sold was based on function and performance. That’s ok, but it really wasn’t brining in the big sales.

Building The Better Bullet (Brand)

The next line of bullets that ATK brought out was called Fusion. With this product line the product managers at ATK were targeting (sorry!) the 25-35-year-old deer hunters. In order to catch their eye, the company created a new “aggressive” box design and even went so far as to add a foil label. They basically pimped the box.

These two products gave the ATK product managers the experience that they needed in order to gain the confidence that they needed in order to do their biggest product launch to date. They recently rolled out a new line of bullets for duck hunters called Black Cloud. This time around they are showing that they know what needs to be done to turn a commodity product into a must-have product.

ATK has partnered with a well known TV personality (in duck hunting circles): Phil Robertson who is known as the “Duck Commander”. They’ve also gone ahead and made a couple of “viral videos” in order to build some buzz around their new ammo. Just to show that bullets also play a role in the 21st Century, they’ve gone so far as to create their very own social networking site called StormChasersNetwork.

Just to top things off, they have also make sure that the box for the Black Cloud product virtually jumps off of the shelf. They dressed it up in a bright color scheme that is designed to catch a hunter’s attention and remind him of the first light of day (which is the best time to be hunting ducks).

What All Of This Means For You

I can’t say for certain what kind of product you are responsible for managing. However, I can bet that it’s probably a little bit more interesting than a commodity product like a bullet. In fact, no matter how boring you may find it, it’s probably a whole lot more interesting than a bullet.

With a little luck this story about how the product managers at ATK were able to see beyond the simple fact that they were charged with trying to sell more of a commodity product that the other bullet makers should inspire you. What the ATK product managers did was to step into their customer’s shoes and identify how they see the world. Once they knew this, it became clear as to what they needed to do.

Spend some time thinking about not what your product does, but rather what your customers will do with your product. This can point the way forward for how you can turn your boring commodity-like product into something that will take off like a (what else?) bullet.

What do you think that ATK could do in order to make their bullets stand-out even more with their customers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers, one of the things that we enjoy doing the most is sitting back and counting the number of customers that our product has. Customers are great to have, but it turns out that what we should really be doing is looking for ways to turn them into something much more valuable: partners.

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