The Forrester Blog For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

The misuse of social media

Tom Grant — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:37:51 -0400

The "inbound social media" research grew to massive proportions, then underwent mitosis to become three separate documents, because it's difficult to encapsulate the discipline of using social media. Like any new field, social media are fraught with both opportunity and risk.

In the particular application that I was investigating, social media as a new source of requirements data, people can commit the same mistakes with this new source of information as they have with the old ones. For example, important players in the product development process often make decisions based on the customer with whom they last spoke. An equally common temptation is to listen to customers who echo what you want to hear, and disregard the rest.

In the best possible circumstance, you get a single person who appears representative of a larger user population, gives you credible insights, and even articulates their needs clearly. The obvious problem is that you're only listening to one person, who will never be 100% representative of the larger population. That's especially bad if the population contains distinct segments of people with different needs, habits, and skills, and you have to build something that fits the bill for more than one of these cohorts.

If you're not taking advantage of the opportunity to use social media to collect more data than you could through traditional, labor-intensive methods (for example, customer meetings), you're missing a big part of the reason for paying attention to social media in the first place.

And if you don't believe me, take a look at this item from The Guardian about how British businesspeople went gaga over a single 15 year-old intern's analysis of how teenagers use social media. To be fair, both traditional and social media contributed to the buzz around the document. But that's the point: you can repeat all the mistakes of old media when using new media.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

The Heretech, Episode 13: Dave West on Agile adoption

Tom Grant — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:05:33 -0400

Dave West, fellow Forrester analyst, tells us how and why Agile adoption has spread. We ponder the ailments of software development that inspired Agile, and we discuss the overlap among Agile, Lean, and other methodologies.

Picking the right social media for requirements

Tom Grant — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:27:10 -0400

All three parts of the series on social media as a new source of requirements data are now published. The first shows how product teams can use social media to create reach more accurate conclusions than traditional sources of requirements (customer visits, enhancement requests, customer advisory boards, etc.) alone can provide.

The second document distills the lessons learned from attempts to use social media in this "inbound role" into a methodology, PLOT (persona, location, options, test). Since the choice of which social media can best answer particular kinds of questions isn't immediately obvious, I devoted the third document to that topic alone.

During the research for this series, it became glaringly obvious that there is a major dividing line in the type of information that product teams collect and analyze:

Product-centric, which related directly to the company's products and services. How many people have voted for a particular feature is a good example.
Problem-centric, which depicts the customer's world. The patterns in how organizations adopt particular kinds of solutions, for example, is vitally important for product teams, even though the best form of that information makes no reference to the vendor, or even the supporting technology, whatsoever.

Shown here is a graphic that summarizes the kinds of requirements information that falls into these two categories. To borrow a phrase from William James, the breadth of social media options appears, at first glance, as a "blooming, buzzing confusion." This distinction between product-centric and problem-centric issues is the first of several filters needed to select the right social media outlet to answer a particular question.

This distinction is also critical for determining whether the company's current investment in social media can be at all useful for the product team. Already in many technology companies, Marketing's enthusiasm for social media inspires skepticism in Development. In the worst cases, it's almost as if someone were to propose to John Calvin, "The papacy has some interesting ideas about transubstantiation. Why don't we look into them?

This product/problem distinction helps decide whether the existing social media channels will be of any use to the product team. In some cases, they certainly will be. In others, either the company will need to build additional social media tools, or the product team will need to look outside the company's web presence altogether.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Twitter without the airbrushing

Tom Grant — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:02:52 -0400

Some recent statistics on Twitter show how the reality can be more convincing that the hype. Do we never learn that the eye-rolling, "Oh my God it's going to change the world" enthusiasm for a new technology buries that technology's real success in an avalanche of hyperbole?

Click here for the full treatment at The Heretech.

Why use cases matter: Memex

Tom Grant — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:59:18 -0400

Memex, a company that makes software for police departments, is a great case study in use case-based product design. If the requirements didn't start with detailed insights into police departments work, the application might be just another set of UI components with a database behind them.

Click here for the full discussion at The Heretech.

Should Google be the next Microsoft?

Tom Grant — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:34:53 -0400

Google's announcement about the Chrome OS raises a whole lotta questions about the future of the operating systems market, or what an operating system really is, or how the Chrome OS fits into Google's larger strategy. As interesting as these questions may be, we also have very little foundation on which to answer them.

I have a much longer post here about the reasons why we can't reach any conclusions yet. Here's the short version:

Netbooks, which play a significant role in the prospects for Chrome OS, can be both a blessing and a curse.
You could say the same thing about the degree to which the Chrome OS depends on the Chrome browser.
Users may not see the compelling reasons to use this new platform, or even understand it fully.
Governments may not be thrilled about the implications for competition and privacy.
There's still a lot of murkiness about cloud computing in general that this does nothing to dispel.
Serious technical challenges lie ahead.

The Heretech, episode 12: Saeed Khan on the PM role

Tom Grant — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:07 -0400

Saeed Khan of the On Product Management blog identifies the dangers of defining product management the wrong way. Plus, a quick review of some inspirational material about the political aspects of a PM's life. Click here for the MP3 (hosted on The Heretech blog).

Product management and marketing mix it up

Tom Grant — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:02:06 -0400

For people in product management and product marketing, organizational questions—for example, Where should we report? What specializations of the PM role seem to work?—are always high on the list of hot topics. That statement is true of this week's Heretech podcast, to be posted later today, in which Saeed Khan and I spend a good deal of the interview discussing these issues. It's also true of the research that I do, including a recent study that revealed some interesting results about the relationship between product management and product marketing.

A small chapter in a bigger story
Unfortunately, this latest research about these organizational questions puts me in a bit of a bind, since I'd like to share more of the results than I can. Forrester always requires you to be a client to access our research, with minor exceptions. In the case of the just-finished study, "Best Practices For Product Management And Product Marketing Leaders," I'm really constrained. Members of the Forrester Leadership Board (FLB) for PMs asked us to do this study, which gets circulated among the FLB members, but not all Forrester clients. (It's one of the perks of FLB membership.) If there's a curtain between the general public and the typical Forrester research, there's yet another one between you, Dear Reader, and the FLB research.

Fortunately, we can always share a little bit of information from our research, even if we can't share everything. In this case, I'll share what we learned about one important organizational question: Should product managers and product marketers be part of the same department? Looking at successful PM teams, the answer is, Generally, yes.

What makes a successful team?
For this research, we deliberately picked successful PM leaders for our interviews. The adjective successful could mean a lot of things, and in our case, it meant...

Tenure. The PM department heads whom we interviewed have been doing the job for at least a few years.
Authority. These PM leaders handle important deliverables and activities, such as go-to-market strategy and product portfolio management.
Accountability. Along with real decision-making power over matters like product strategy, these PM groups bear responsibility for the business outcomes of these decisions.

In other words, you know you're successful when the company entrusts you with important things.

One group or two?
Since I started doing research on product management and product marketing, I've seen a lot of different organizational formulas. Sometimes, these two groups are separate. At other times, they're two sides of the same group. I've also seen these job functions broken down further, with the pieces scattered even more widely around the organization. We've also spoken with groups that have introduced new roles, such as solutions manager and community manager, that overlap with the product management and product marketing functions.

Therefore, when we reviewed our interviews for "Best Practices For Product Management And Product Marketing Leaders," we were genuinely surprised to discover that approximately 80% of our interviewees ran departments that combined product management and product marketing. That's a result worth italicizing.

These arrangements made sense, since product people look to the same information about business problems, use cases, personas, competitors, and other aspects of the market. This knowledge guides everything from broad-brush messaging to nitpicky feature/function priorities.

Of course, separating product managers and product marketers also makes sense. However, the habits of these highly successful PM leaders strongly imply that the unified department not only makes sense, but also works. There are lots of reasons why, including both external and internal ones. For example, if you're going to produce different content for different audiences—requirements for Development, demos for Marketing and Sales—that's ultimately based on the same customer and product knowledge, that process goes a lot more smoothly when you don't have two separate groups trying to stay in sync.

Two jobs, but what do you call the one department?
The success of the unified product management/product marketing model makes me wonder if there's a a good umbrella term for both of them. "Product professionals" doesn't quite do it for me, and we definitely don't want to confuse the two distinct functions, even if they wind up under the same management. I'm certainly open to suggestions.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

The unbearable lightness of Bing

Tom Grant — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:11:24 -0400

Competition breeds innovation. Usually.

So far, Microsoft's launch of Bing hasn't inspired big new ideas in the world of search, but it's still pretty early. You never know. Read more at The Heretech.

Of designers and developers

Tom Grant — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:25:18 -0400

In today's post at The Heretech, I come out of the closet. Yes, I am a bigger history geek than you can possibly imagine. Hello, my name is Tom, and I play wargames.

However, by playing a lot of games designed to simulate historical events, I've learned a couple of things that apply to designing products in the technology industry. Specifically, how do you create a design teeam that can overcome some of the common pitfalls, such as unnecessary complexity? To read more, follow this link.

[P.S. Thanks for pointing out the problem with the link. Typepad is intermittently eating the hyperlinks I enter. From now on, I'll just have to test them before I publish.]