How can you make your products DRAMATICALLY more successful? Is there a process you and your company can implement to ensure success?
Learn about the seven phases every product goes through and the related key questions and decisions. By understanding the phases you can ship products that better meet your customer’s needs, deliver increased revenues and profits and avoid common mistakes that can be disastrous.

Phases include:
1. Conceive
2. Plan
3. Develop
4. Qualify
5. Launch
6. Deliver
7. Retire

Also covered: nine key documents that contain the critical decisions that must be made in order for a product to succeed. Ignore these decision and you risk product failure.

Documents include:
1. Business Case
2. Market Needs (also called market requirements)
3. Product Description (also called product requirements)
4. Market Strategy
5. Roadmap
6. Beta Plan
7. Launch Plan
8. Marketing Plan
9. End of Life Plan

Brian Lawley: 280 Group CEO & Founder. Author: The Phenomenal Product Manager, Expert Product Management , 42 Rules of Product Management, Optimal Product Process. Former President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA). Awarded the Association of International Product Marketing Management award for Thought Leadership in Product Management. Featured on World Business Review and the Silicon Valley Business Report. 

We are VERY excited to announce the availability of our newest book in the 280 Group Press series:

Optimal Product Process
A Modern and Flexible Standard for Highly-Effective Product Management and Product Marketing.

The book describes the standard product process that all products go through, including seven phases during the lifecycle.

Based on the worldwide standard ProdBOK from AIPMM, the Optimal Product Process can help your company to do Product Management and Product Marketing much more effectively.

And the best thing is that you can download it at no cost along with the most recent version of our free resources, including our white paper library, free templates, samples of our toolkits and more.

Download a copy here...

• Put this new feature in the product!
• Drop everything - I need you to travel to a customer and do a product demo!
• Quick, give me a competitive selling sheet by tomorrow!
• We don't have a tech writer - you need to write the manual!
• You have to talk to this customer and explain why our product can't do what they want!

And the list could go on and on...

If you don't learn to firmly say "No" then you become what we here at the 280 Group call a "Product Janitor" - always cleaning up other's messes and doing the work that no one else wants to do. If you aren't careful then you'll end up doing a lot of low-level work and have no time for the strategic (and most important) part of your Product Management job.

Here are some suggestions for how to say No more gracefully:

• For feature requests implement a formal process for capturing requirements and communicate to everyone (many times) how you go about capturing and prioritizing requirements. Oftentimes all that your customers, salespeople, executives and others who insist on their pet feature being included just need to feel heard. And many times when you get to prioritization they will have completely forgotten about their request!
   
• Clarify your role and responsibilities - what you DO and what you DON'T DO and proactively communicate this to everyone you interact with. Post it in your cube. Get your boss's support and backing. Then stick to it.
   
• Practice saying No to another person. This may sound too simple to work, but I did this in a workshop once and it was amazing how many people had a hard time just saying No firmly. Have a friend or your spouse sit down with you and make several dozen requests and simply say No. Don't apologize. Don't try to justify why you can't do it. Just say No or "I'm sorry but I won't do that".
   
• When you do say Yes ALWAYS be thinking about how to leverage it. If someone asks you to go to a customer to do a demo and you say yes let them know that you will only do it if they learn the demo so you don't have to do it again for them (and write out a demo script for them so you can use it with others.

So here is our challenge to you for 2012 - count how many times you say No in the next 30 days.

Then come back and comment on this post and tell us how many times you did it, what worked and what didn't.

Check out 280 Group’s latest book, Lean Product Management.

Download the advanced reader copy now!

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times, even though there’s no evidence that Henry Ford ever said it: “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve said ‘a faster horse.’”

Regardless of whether he said it or not, though, the statement does capture a widespread belief: “I know better. I’m the expert.

Why should I take the time or spend the money to ask those [ignorant] consumers about an area they know nothing about?!”

Let’s pretend that Henry Ford did say that consumers would ask for a “faster horse”. The comment clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the primary objective of product innovation research.

It implies that when we ask questions of prospective customers, we are hoping for them to tell us the solution to their problems. Indeed, if we ask them for that, we are very likely to get a simplistic response, like “faster horse”.

However, that is not at all what we should be asking. Customers are not expert problem solvers. Coming up with a solution is your job.

The topic about which your prospective customers have ultimate expertise is the nature of the problem to be solved. This is the area that you will want to explore in depth with prospective users of your new product.

Marketing research can be extremely valuable, if it is conducted with insight and if the feedback is integrated into product planning. The early experiences of two successful CEOs with quite different attitudes about pre-launch customer feedback, Steve Jobs and Scott Cook, illustrate this point.

Despite his brilliance, Steve Jobs’ unwillingness to listen to customers cost Apple dearly in its early days.  Apple did conduct research, but management paid little heed to findings that contradicted their beliefs.

Apple spent 4 years and $50 million developing the Lisa computer. Prior to its launch in 1983, marketing research predicted disaster, but the company dismissed the forecast and made no course-corrections. Ultimately, Apple sold relatively few Lisa computers and the product was pulled in 1986. If the firm had not had deep pockets, Lisa would have brought it down.

Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, had an entirely different approach. His Quicken software was quite successful, and he was looking for ways to extend his product line. His next idea was to develop a small-business version of Quicken, a “small-business checkbook program.”

Scott brought marketing research into the product design process very early, and our explorations indicated that small business owners were looking for an easy-to-use ledger-type system, not an automated checkbook. The preliminary scope and direction of QuickBooks was reworked to match market desires, and the launch was among the most successful in history.

Designing products that suit market needs is crucial; understanding market needs up-front increases your chances of a successful launch. Before your design is set in stone, ask probing questions that explore and explain prospective users’ behaviors, problems, workarounds, irritations, and obstacles.

And, if they tell you that they want a “faster horse,” don’t stop the conversation there -- explore the reasons for that desire. It’s certainly a cheaper way to learn what people will actually buy than launching a flawed product and playing catch-up later.

BIO

JENI SALL is CEO of Genesis Research Associates. She was Manager of Marketing Research at Apple from 1981-84, and conducted product development research as a consultant to Intuit from 1987 through 1999. For over 30 years, she has conducted breakthrough research for start-up and Fortune 500 companies in the consumer packaged goods, high technology, medical products, and service industries.

Is it all Steve Jobs? Are there other factors, other causes? A strong set of best practices?

Do you believe the often-repeated statements that Apple does no market research?

As a product manager or product marketing manager, what do you think?

In this post, I wanted to dive into the numerator and what goes into evaluating something as subjective as product-market fit

or “fit” for short.  Achieving and maintaining fit is an incremental process and needs to be tested repeatedly from concept development through limited availability and post launch stages.  This testing occurs through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.

During concept development, fit is usually measured qualitatively though interviews and focus groups.  If the person being interviewed or shown the concept goes out of their way to ask to be notified when the product becomes available that is a good sign. If you ask them if they’d like to know when the product becomes available, assume they are just being polite when if they answer “yes.”  If they say they like the idea, it is fair.  If they say they love it, they probably only like it.  What does come out of these concept test interviews are the benefit and feature areas that customers like, are indifferent to, dislike, or have concerns.  This research not only helps guide the product priorities but also the messaging.

There are advanced methods, such as problem detection studies, that can help rank problems to be solved.  Kano surveys can provide insight into which problems if solved in the product would create excitement from users and if not solved would create dissatisfaction.  Adaptive conjoint allows companies to test different configurations and prices to understand relative tradeoffs users will make.  These advanced methods:

• Are expensive.
• Assume the user is familiar with the product category (not good for visionary products).
• Assume your implementation of the solution will meet the user’s expectation.

In this concept stage, measurement is often around trying to be directional correct.  The goal, however, is to learn and adjust the product design and messaging to increase fit by the time it is released.

In the next post, we will look at measuring fit once the product is available, either limited or general release.

In this first post, I will merely look to define Lean Product Management.  James P. Womack, author of Lean Thinking defines Lean as “Creating ever more value for customers with ever fewer resources.”  Dan Olsen adapted the definition to product management in his Silicon Valley P-camp 2011 talk “Lean Product Management” as “Achieving Product-Market Fit quickly in a resource efficient manner” which better captures Lean from the product management perspective. Building off Olsen’s definition, I consider Lean Product Management to be the pursuit of:

Achieving ever better product-market fit in ever less time with ever fewer resources

Thus, Lean Product Management is a journey.  It is a process of continuous learning and improvement.  There is no point where we can say “We have arrived.”  We can only say “we did better today than yesterday, and I believe with the following changes we can do better tomorrow than we did today.”

Lean Product Management can also be expressed in a simple yet powerful formula that can help guide the product managers decision cycle:

Looking at the formula, we want to perform activities that will increase product-market fit, decrease our time to market, and decrease our costs.  The first half of the equation deals with revenue and the second half with cost. The expression is a proxy for Profit = Revenue – Cost.  A team starts with a given structure, process and capability, so the formula focuses on changes or deltas that might be implemented.  Although it would be impossible to accurately quantify every decision, the formula can be used to guide decisions.  For example:

1. By answering a research question, the product achieve greater differentiation in the market leading to a higher price point and increased sales.  If the incremental profit from the better fit is greater than the cost of the research, then the activity should be performed.
2. If time to market can be decreased by 30 days with the help of an outside vendors and the profit during those 30 days is greater than the costs to accelerate the project, it is worthwhile.
3. However, if time to market can be reduced by skipping important concept testing that ultimately will decrease fit, then this is a bad tradeoff that will make the product less profitable.

Ideally, the improvement cycle is reinforcing, improving two or all three variables together.  For example, decreasing time to market by increasing collaboration between groups produces revenue sooner and reduces costs because the product team‘s salaries are now going towards the next project of value.

Lastly, it is important to optimize the whole system and not a local function.  For this reason, the formula looks at time to market and not time for individual steps. For example, if the product manager pushes user stories without good satisfaction criteria to development, he may have saved himself time, but the stories will require additional iterations to achieve acceptable fit and lengthen the overall time to market and to market fit.