The Accidental Product Manager

What A Video Rental Store Can Teach Product Managers

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:00:35 +0000

Can you even remember racing to the video store to avoid late charges?

Not to date myself or anything, but can anyone else remember going to the video store on a Friday or Saturday night? I’d wander the aisles and take a look at every movie on the “just released” rack in order to decide which one or two videos I was going to rent. Netflix and the Internet have pretty much killed the video store these days and so what’s a video store product manager to do?

(Streaming) Video Killed The Video Store

To be a video store product manager in the 1990s was the bomb! Everyone finally had a VCR in their house and the movie studios were cranking out movies, both new and old, on video tape left and right. Your only real problem was trying to get your stock level right so that you could meet the needs of most of your customers.

Almost overnight everything changed. Those darn DVDs came along. Sure, you could start to replace the tapes in your stores with DVDs, but all of a sudden the product managers over at Netflix discovered that you could cheaply use the U.S. postal mail to send DVDs to people’s homes. Oh, oh – now your video store was under threat. There was nothing on anyone’s product manager job description that told how to handle this situation.

As though things couldn’t get even worse, they did. Since so many consumers now had high-speed internet service to their house, the Netflix product managers moved on to the next stage of their game: offering streaming video and making it so you didn’t even have to wait by your mailbox anymore.

Given all of these superior ways to get your hands on the latest and greatest videos, why would anyone still make the trek to the video store and run the risk of incurring late fees? There are some people for whom a weekend video is still a spur-of-the-moment purchase. These last remaining people were vacuumed up when the product managers from Redbox placed their self-service DVD rental kiosks outside of 7-11′s and other stores. That’s it, game over for the video stores.

How Video Stores Are Being Reborn

But wait, all of the video stores have not gone away. Sure, sure – the big chain ones like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video have been closing their doors left and right. However, a number of the independent video stores are still open for business. What have their product managers been doing?

A number of the video stores have changed the products that they offer to their customers. Some have started to offer events. Nicole LaPorte from the New York Times reports that these have included a film studies program, classes on anime mythology, lectures by filmmakers and spoken word events. Clearly, this isn’t your father’s Blockbuster store.

What you’re starting to see is that place that we used to go to rent video tapes is transforming itself into more of a community gathering place or a cultural hub for people who really like films. The video store product managers are positioning their products to be different than Netflix which clearly has no soul: it is both nameless (who is sending me those videos?) and faceless (exactly where is Netflix located?).

Video Store 2.0

All of this “connect with your customers” strategic management stuff is good short-term product manager positioning. However, what should video store product managers be doing in order to prepare for the long-term?

Dr. Peter Fader is a very smart marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania who thinks that he knows the answer. Here’s the most important point that he makes: as easy as it would be to do, video stores that want to survive must not consider Netflix as an adversary. Netflix is just too easy to use and if you position them as the enemy, then you’ll force your customers to choose and in the long run the video store will lose.

Dr. Fader has a different suggestion. He believes that video stores should position themselves as an alternative to Netflix. Yes, when people want to watch the summer’s latest action flick, they’ll turn to Netflix. However, when they want a film that might not be in the mainstream, one that is a bit harder to find and which Netflix doesn’t have, that’s when the video store can step in.

The video stores’ current efforts to provide film based events at the store is another great way to supplement what their customers are getting from Netflix. Instead of thinking of video customers as having to pick either Netflix or the local video store, instead start to think of the video store as just being a part of a video watcher’s portfolio of video information sources. This is the path to a video store’s long-term success.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we all seem to spend our time trying to figure out how we can make our products more successful. We scheme and plan ways to capture another 1% of market share. What we rarely spend any time thinking about is the very real possibility that one day our whole market might just vanish.

Video stores had this happen to them with the arrival of Netflix and Redbox. The video stores that didn’t adapt, are now gone. The ones that realized what was happening and who have transformed themselves are still here. In order to survive in the long run, these stores are going to have to create an entirely new market for themselves and find a way to coexist with the new video delivery services.

Product managers should learn from this story that the game is never over even when your account manager or business development manager starts to panic. The rules might change, the players might change, and how we keep score may be done differently. However, as long as you have the ability to roll with the punches, your product can deal with almost any change that comes along and you’ll emerge on the other side stronger and better for the adventure. Now put that on your product manager resume!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you were the product manager for a video store, how would you hold on to the customers that you already have?

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

I’m sure that any product manager living in the U.S. has encountered one of the Capital One ads for their credit cards at some point in time over the last year or so. What might get lost in the blizzard of Capital One ads and promotions that seem to always be around us, is that the product managers at Capital One are very good at what they do. Perhaps we can learn something from them…

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Is Being Yellow The Worst Product Management Job In The World – Or Not?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:00:52 +0000

Image Credit

Should A Product Manager Let Their Customer's Fingers Do The Walking?

When I was first out living on my own, the arrival of the latest copy of the yellow (and white) pages was a big deal. Since my parents had always received these huge volumes, when I got mine I felt that somehow I was now a “grown up”. Fast forward to the 21st Century and man have things changed. There still are Yellow Pages®, but is it possible that owning this product is the worst product management job ever?

What Happened To The Yellow Pages

Once upon a time the Yellow Pages ruled the world of local search. Everybody in the U.S. had a phone and we all got service from the same phone company, AT&T, so it was simple for AT&T to create a Yellow Pages product and drop it off on the doorstep of each one of their existing customers.

Then things started to get weird. AT&T got broken up by a Federal judge. All of a sudden, we still had AT&T, but we also had 7 local new companies that provided local telephone service. There was also a bunch of new guys who were starting to also provide local phone service. What this meant is that if you had a phone, then you started to get multiple Yellow Pages-like books dropped off on your doorstep.

Just to make things even more complicated, the online world started to explode. The mean that the stronger local provides could start to push their online equivalents of the Yellow Pages such as SuperPages.com (offered by Verizon). In case that didn’t confuse you enough, both Yahoo and Google started to customize the results that people started to get when they’d do searches for local businesses.

What A Yellow Pages Product Manager Could Be Doing

Pity the poor Yellow Pages product manager. Once upon a time he/she was king/queen of the hill in the kingdom of local search. However, now they are just another player and they keep finding themselves losing ground to the new entrants (when you own a market, what else can happen to you?)

The local search marketing agency TMP Directional Marketing | 15miles, did a study of how consumers were searching for information on local businesses. What they found was that in the 3 years from 2007-2009 consumers reported that their use of the print version of the Yellow Pages to find a local business went down by 5% during that time. This was coupled with 71% consumers reporting that they use the print version of the Yellow Pages less than once a week.

So what’s a print Yellow Pages product manager to do? I believe that this is one of those marketing conditions that screams out for “out of the box thinking”. Here are three ideas for what Yellow Pages product managers could do:

Syndicate: What this means is that when a local business agrees to place an ad with the Yellow Pages, make sure that that ad starts to show up in more places than just the printed book that gets dropped off at people’s houses. Dare I say that the Yellow Pages needs to become a portal? Instead come up with a way to offer local discounts and promote a vendor-of-the-day, etc.

Go Mobile: let’s face it, who wants to take the time to find their printed copy of the Yellow Pages let along open it up and try to find what you are looking for when you can do the same thing quicker on your mobile phone? The Yellow Pages needs to come up with a local search “app” that everyone instinctively uses when they want to find a local business.

Get Social: Give it up – Facebook is here to stay. There has to be a Yellow Pages angle to all of the social networking that everyone is doing. Yellow Pages product managers need to become the conduit between their advertisers and the local customers who are using everything from Facebook to Twitter.

What All Of This Means For You

Don’t laugh at the yellow pages product managers too loudly – you could be in a similar situation with your product some day in the future. What we need to do is to understand how they got into this situation and what they are doing to get out of it.

The Yellow Pages is a product that competes in a market segment called “local search”. Once upon a time, the big Yellow Pages book that got dropped off at everyone’s house owned this market. Now new competitors such as Google Maps have taken the lion’s share of the market away from the Yellow Pages.

Yellow Pages product managers need to be willing to change with the changes in their market. This means that they need to find ways to have their product be effective in multiple channels. Additionally they will need to move aggressively into new media areas such as mobile devices in order to remain relevant.

Being a Yellow Pages product manager is not an easy job. However, if you really wanted to go to work every day and face a challenge that would allow you to make a difference, then perhaps the Yellow Pages is the place to be!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you were a product manager who was responsible for the Yellow Pages product in your area, what would you be doing right now?

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!

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What A High-End Boutique Can Teach A Product Manager About Marketing

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Image Credit

Just because you are a boutique doesn't mean the big boys can push your products around…

So there you are, a happy product manager creating and delivering products that meet your customer’s needs. All of a sudden (but you should have seen it coming) a big box competitor with tons of selection and low, low prices shows up in your backyard. Oh, oh – what’s a product manager to do now? It turns out that we can learn some lessons from the world of women’s fashion. Boutiques have been dealing with this very situation for awhile and they have a thing or two to teach us…

How Boutique’s Stand Out From The Crowd

So you’ve got to picture the scene: there you are, a hard working luxury boutique who’s just found out that a much large competitor has moved into town. As though having the extra competition wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that they are going to be able to offer things that you can’t.

What can they do that you can’t? Basically a lot of product related things that are associated with having deep pockets: brand selections and generous return policies. Oops, I almost forgot to mention that both of you have another competitor: online retailers who always seem to be able to sell for less than you can. This is exactly the kind of thing that can cause an account manager or a business development manager to start to tear their hair out. However, product managers need to play it cool.

This brings up the interesting point product manager: how can you make your store / product stand out from the crowd that does a lot of things better than you will ever be able to do? Christina Binkley has been looking into this and she’s found out that some strategic management is called for here. The first thing that you need to learn from the luxury boutiques is that your customers have grown resigned to living in a world where everyone is treated the same. It’s not that your competition is going to treat your customers badly (sorry, nothing is ever that easy), but rather it’s that they are going to treat them like they treat everyone else – just good enough.

This open the door for you. If you can take your customer care up not one, but several notches than all of a sudden doing business with your boutique is going to be an experience, not just a purchase. You’re going to want to offer your customer not only perks that they can only get with your product, but also a level of personal service that they can’t get anywhere else. Now that’s something that you can put on your product manager resume!

How To Attract And Hold Onto Customers

Getting a customer is great, finding ways to hold on to that customer is fantastic! How are you going to do that? One way is to remain in frequent and direct contact with your customers. This allows you to find ways to offer perks that no other supplier can offer your clients.

One way to hold on to your customer is to reshape your product for your customer. If you are running a luxury boutique, then this means custom tailoring garments to fit your customers perfectly. It also means coming to where your customers are located (instead of making them come to you) in order to do the product customization for them.

Ultimately, your ability to hold on to customers once you’ve got them is going to come down to your personal knowledge of your customers. Once you have this level of knowledge, you can always be thinking of your customers and you’ll be able to identify ways to solve their problems that they may not have even thought of. When you’re able to do this, then you’ll have gotten a customer for life!

What All Of This Means For You

In a perfect world, your product would have no competition. The reality that all product managers face (turns out that it was listed in your product manager job description) is that not only does your product face competition, but it can face a competitor that is much bigger and better equipped than you are.

Luxury boutiques have faced this competitive situation for a long time and product managers can learn a great deal from how they have adapted to it. Boutiques work very hard to stand out from the competition. Frequent and constant direct contact with customers is one way to do this. This also allows boutiques to offer perks that larger competitors can’t match. Once they have a customer, boutiques hold on to them by using their personal knowledge to better meet their unique needs.

As the world becomes a more complex place with more and more competition, product managers need to make sure that their products are the ones that customers look for. Luxury boutiques can show us how to do this and not only allow our products to survive, but to grow and thrive.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that there is a limit to the number of customers that you can support using luxury boutique techniques?

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!

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Video: Stop Giving Your Customers Too Many Choices — They Don’t Want Them!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:28:43 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW5jkXWEPL4

It makes sense that the more choices that a Product Manager gives to his or her customers, the happier they’d be, right? Dr. Anderson takes a look at what happens when we present our customers with too many decisions to make.

Dr. Anderson discovers that the one thing that our overloaded customers really don’t want is to have to make more decisions. If product managers can find a way to simplify the way that customers find and select their product, then their product will become an even bigger success!

To get more great product management tips and techniques, sign up for the free The Accidental Product Manager newsletter at: http://goo.gl/3b8vR

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Why Product Managers Need To Learn How To Do Visioning

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:00:03 +0000

Image Credit

Can you see where your product will be 5 years into the future?

Being a product manager is a hard job. It seems like there is always too much to do every single day. Keeping yourself focused on what needs to be done today or maybe even tomorrow is enough to keep you fully booked. Oh wait, there is one other thing that you need to be doing – visioning.

What Is This Visioning Thing?

I’m pretty sure that we’re all familiar with the concept of a business case – creating one is a basic part of every product manager job description. It’s the written document that product managers put together once a year in order to request that the company fund their product. Part of this effort involves telling the rest of the company how great the future is going to be if they give you the money that you are asking for.

Visioning is a little bit like that part of a business case. However, it also has its differences. The first of these is that a visioning exercise is solely focused on creating a clearly defined picture of what the future is going to look like for your product. You don’t have to worry about how much money you’re going to need or in what order you are going to roll out new features. The vision document should be something that you can hand off to an account manager or business development manager in order to show them where the product is going.

The output of a visioning exercise is a vision for your product. This vision will clearly describe the world as you see it 3, 5, 10 or however many years you want to go into the future. The vision that you create has to answer a bunch of questions: what will your product look like? How will it stack up against the competition? How does your company feel about your product?

Note that a product vision is not the same thing as a strategic plan for your product. The difference is that a product vision very clearly describes where you are going with the product. A strategic plan lays out how you are going to get there.

How Do You Do Visioning Correctly?

The expert in how to do visioning correctly is Ari Weinzweig. He points out that visioning isn’t necessarily something that you just sit down and do in order to crank out a vision for your product. Rather, you need to view visioning as being a process that keeps getting executed. Learn to do this well and it’s something that you’ll be able to add to your product manager resume.

In order to make this happen, you are going to have to secure some quiet time for yourself to sit down and do some writing. Here are the steps that Ari suggests that product managers take in order to create a vision for their product:

Pick Your Product: a vision can be created for just about anything. Be very clear what you are going to create a vision for: is it your product, is it your product team, or is it for a brand?

What Time Is It?: How far out into the future do you want to position your vision at? Ari suggests that you go far enough out that you can get beyond all of the issues and challenges that you are facing today, but not too far where everything may have changed.

Create Positive Energy: spend 10 minutes coming up with a list of past accomplishments for your product. What are you the most proud of – key sales, great new features, etc. This is designed to get you in the mood for what comes next.

Write It: Now just sit down and do it. Just crank it out – don’t waste too much time on it, just get your words on a piece of paper. Make sure that you paint a great future for your product. Make it something that everyone would be proud to be part of.

Review: Spend some time reading what you wrote the first time and then start to rewrite it. Don’t be surprised if you end up changing most or all of what you wrote originally.

Review Again: You’d be amazed at how many changes you make the next time that you come back and take another look at what you wrote.

Get Input From Peers: Now is the time to shop your vision around. Collect everyone’s inputs and consider them. Add the ideas that you like.

Advertise the vision: now that you have a compelling vision for your product, make sure that you get it into everyone’s hands. Promote it far and wide both inside and outside of the company.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

As a product manager you are the chief evangelist for your product. What that means is that it’s part of the strategic management portion of your job to keep everyone excited about making your product a success. In order to do that, you’ve got some visioning to be doing.

Visioning is the process by which a product manager takes the time to picture what the future is for your product is going to look like. There is no wrong way to do this. However, you need to make some decisions about how far out into the future you want to look and how much detail you want to add.

Once you’ve created a compelling vision of the future you need to share it with everyone. Only by doing this will you be able to get their support and generate excitement about what lies ahead. As experienced product managers know, working with an excited and motivated bunch of people makes everything a lot easier to do!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How often do you think that a product manager should perform visioning for his/her 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!

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Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 04:01:24 +0000

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 Can A Product Manager Create A Good Product Strategy?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:00:57 +0000

Image Credit

A good product strategy will show you the right way to go…

So what’s your product strategy? If you are like most product managers, you probably don’t have one. Oh sure, if somebody asks you what your product’s strategy is, you can quickly come up with some words that sound good – increase market share, drive down costs, beat the competition, etc. But really, just between us girls, you don’t have a strategy for your product do you? Good news, I think that I can help you out here…

What A Product Strategy Is NOT

If we’re going to talk about what you need to do in order to create a product strategy, then perhaps our time together would be well spent if we started off by having a quick discussion about what a product strategy is NOT. All too often I believe that product managers make mistakes about what can pass as a product strategy.

First on this list is a mission statement. While these are good documents to have for a company, they don’t cut it when it comes to laying down a strategy for your product. A mission statement is a “big” thing – it’s designed to show a company what they should be trying to accomplish right now. Your product is a much more focused item – it needs to have a smaller scope that fits your product.

More than once I’ve run into product managers who when asked what their product strategy was would reach into their pocket and extract a list of goals for the year. Once again, this is a good thing to have, but it is most definitely not a product strategy. A list of goals for your product is too vague. Goals can be all over the map and although they may be a good thing to do, they don’t clearly show the direction that you want to move your product in.

Finally, I’ve seen product managers attempt to use a resource plan as a product strategy. This never works out because a resource plan is simply too unfocused. It’s a great way to make sure that you’ll have everything that you need when you need it, but it doesn’t tell you why you need them or even what they need to do once you have the resources.

The 3 Steps Needed To Create A Product Strategy

Now that we’ve identified what a product strategy is not, how about if we cover the steps that you need to go through in order to create a product strategy. These three product strategy creation steps were created by Dr. Richard Rumelt a very successful professor and business consultant.

What Is The Business Challenge?: Every product has a business challenge that they are facing. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to determine what the nature of this challenge is. Are you being crushed by the competition? Can your customers afford your product? Are your customers solving their problem using other types of solutions? You need to determine what is going on.
Create A Guiding Policy: Once you know what the challenge that your product is facing is, your next step has to be to create a guiding policy for it. This means that you need to determine the guidelines that you are going to follow in order to address your product’s challenge.
Create Coordinated Actions: Finally, you need to come up with a list of actions that will put your guiding policy into motion. These actions have to be very specific and they need to build on each other in order to move you closer towards meeting your product’s business challenge.

What All Of This Means For You

Every product manager has the responsibility to create a strategy for their product. Even if you don’t currently have one, you need to make one. The key is to realize what a product strategy is NOT: it’s not a mission statement (too big), it’s not a list of goals (too vague), nor is it a resource plan (too unfocused).

Instead, a product strategy is something that you create in three steps. The first is to determine the nature of the business challenge that your product is currently facing, the next is to create a policy that you can use to guide your product so that it will be at an advantage, and finally it’s a set of actions that you can execute that will allow you to put your product strategy into action.

It turns out that it’s not hard to create a product strategy. You just need to take the time to do it correctly. Once you have a strategy, you’ll know exactly what the next steps are that you have to take in order to ensure that your product will be a success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that a product manager should create a product strategy by themselves or working with a team?

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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Great Product Managers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:00:20 +0000

Image Credit

Great product managers always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for a product that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s product managers who are perfect are rewarded while product managers who fail are kicked to the curb. Nowhere on the product manager job description is there a place where you can brag about how many times you’ve failed. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your Product Management Career

In your job right now, what would happen to you if you failed? If the account manager and business development manager for your product didn’t get to you first, then that end-of-year review would still be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our workplace and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger career disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? Can you remember watching old-time movies where the hero would get a job at a company and then spend his or her entire career working there? We all know that those days are long gone.

Something else is changing also: our jobs. The job that you had when you started working may already be gone. The one that you’re doing right now probably won’t exist in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he realized that he had failed, quickly adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. Failure is actually a part of your product’s overall strategic management. You need to learn to make lots of small bets. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your career.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your career can take off. Sorry, there’s still no place on a product manager resume to proudly list your failures. However, if you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better product manager then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your product to fail, but if you try your hardest and your product still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

Product managers who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful product manager.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to get your management to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

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Product Management 101: How To Market Your Product

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:00:23 +0000

Image Credit

If you don't do a good job of marketing your product, it won't sell

You’d think that we’d all know how to market our products simply because we get marketed to every single day. It turns out that this is not the case simply because there are a lot of different components that go into successfully marketing a product. Although you’d think that this kind of activity would be part of everyone’s product manager job description , it turns out that picking which component is the most important is where most product managers go wrong…

What Product Marketing Is NOT

One of the reasons that creating an effective marketing program for your product is so difficult is simply because there are so many different ways to go about doing it. If you go ask an account manager or a business development manager at your company what they are looking for in a product marketing program, you’ll get two very different answers. Simply trying to figure out where to start can be a challenge in of itself.

The first place that many product managers start is with customer segmentation. The thinking goes that if you can figure out exactly who is the best fit for your product, then selling it to them should be simple. Good thought, but it’s not quite right.

The next thought comes down to focusing on exactly what you are planning on offering to your customers. Exactly what you include in your offer (extras, warrantee, guarantee, etc.) is important, but it’s not the right place to start.

All product managers seem to be drawn to the words that we use in advertising and promoting our product. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that this is one of the few things that we feel that we actually have some control over. Once again, this is not the place to start your marketing efforts.

Price is something that can keep a product manager up all night: am I charging too much or, even worse, too little. I’ll grant that price is important, but when it comes to marketing it’s not the most important thing.

Finally, your distribution channels can be a key part of any product marketing program. Keeping your channels happy and getting them to promote your product is a key goal for any product manager. However, it’s not the most important thing when it comes down to marketing your product.

What Product Marketing IS

Now that it seems as though we’ve just about eliminated all of the possible things that a product manager could use as starting points for a product marketing program, what’s left? Well, the most important thing is left: your product.

Yep, that’s where you need to start your marketing efforts: the product. Maybe I need to explain myself here. I’m not really asking you to focus on your product with all of its features. Rather, when it comes to marketing your product you need to focus on your customer. What does your product really do for your customer? What problems does it solve? What benefits does it deliver? Get the answers to these questions right, and you’ll have an important addition to your product manager resume.

Here’s the key point: do your customers really need your product? Is that need urgent and immediate? If they buy your product, will their lives get better?

If it turns out that yes, your customers do need your product then all of the other components of your marketing program will fall into place. Keep in mind that you first need to nail down what your customers really want.

In the end this is going to require three things from you: market research, testing, and guessing. Yep, sorry about that folks. No matter how much data you have on your customers in the end it’s always going to come down to making an educated guess on your part. Sometimes you’ll be right, sometimes you’ll be wrong. Every good product marketing program has to have the ability to monitor customer reactions and adjust as needed.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers have a great number of different roles that we are expected to fill in order to make our products successful. One of these roles is to market our product to the potential customers who need it – part of the overall strategic management of our product. The challenge that we face in doing this is that there are many different ways to market a product, which one is right for your product?

It’s all too easy to get lost in the details of marketing a product: market segmentation, defining the offer, creating ads, or even setting the right price. In the end what really matters is the product. Not the actual product, but the bundle of benefits that you are offering to your customers.

There’s an old saying that goes like this “A great product will sell itself even if the marketing is poorly done, but great marketing will never sell a poor product.” Take these words to heart and make sure that your product does the best job of meeting your customer’s real needs.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What criteria do you think that a product manager should use to determine if a product should be killed?

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

Product Management 101: How The Bar Rescue TV Show Can Teach You How To Turn Prospects Into Clients We’re going to kick it old school this time around...

Video: Product Manager Job Hunt – Do You Have The Cover Letter Covered

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:53:45 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xcD3BWWODY

Dr. Anderson looks into the question of whether or not Product Managers should create a cover letter to go along with their resume when they are looking for their next job.

Dr. Anderson discovers that there are some important rules for creating cover letters that will work for you and not against you. He shares his insights and shows how to create effective cover letters that will help you to get the job that you really want.

To get more great product management tips and techniques, sign up for the free The Accidental Product Manager newsletter at: http://goo.gl/3b8vR

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