Better Product Managers, and Product Management

“A marketing launch establishes your positioning. If you don’t know what the right positioning is for your company, do not launch… When you launch with the wrong positioning, you have to spend extra effort and money later cleaning it up.” (Lessons Learned: Don’t Launch)

“It’s okay to expose these customers to the wrong product, positioning, and funnel as long as you learn from them. In fact, that’s the only way to test your hypotheses.”  (Don’t Launch? But the New York Times is on the Phone!)

Given how cheap online user testing and social media channels are for soliciting feedback, there’s really no justification for the traditional “launch”.  Even if you think you have your positioning nailed, you almost certainly cannot scale to handle that first-day traffic.   Why risk exposing that burst of new users to a negative user experience when your servers slow to a crawl?

“Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep.” (Streams, Affordances, Facebook, and Rounding Errors)

Most people are non-technical, and as such, they take their cues about “what’s possible” from the technology they’re using.  If that technology gives them a limited sandbox, the product manager can stand back and watch and consider if it helps the business to expand that sandbox.  They may demand more; often they won’t.

“There’s a big advantage to thinking about profitability from Day 1 of the business.  You can still decide to do things that are solving for growth, but you should at least be mindful of profitability.” (Startup Lessons from the Underpants Gnomes)

“Innovation and creativity are value-destroying activities unless they are carefully contained.”  (Why Are So Few Companies the Hotbeds of Innovation that Everyone Thinks They Should Be?)

Think big – within constraints.  A lot of devil’s advocate-ing can help here.

“Design the single, comparable metric to be as close as possible to the problem being solved.”  (One Metric to Measure Them All)

I’ve been commenting on a bunch of Facebook posts this week, most of which are taking the side of “Facebook users are a bunch of whiners”.  None of them seem to be asking “what is the problem Facebook is trying to solve with this redesign?”

And so none of them can really make an intelligent analysis.  First identify the problem, then measure the results.  Maybe Facebook is just trying to get people to Twitter about them, in which case: they are succeeding magnificently.

I said, “I don’t know. And if I tell you what I think we’ll just have one more uninformed opinion. But what we need right now is some facts. (SuperMac War Story 2: Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within – So Get the Hell Outside the Building)

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“Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one.”  10 Ways to Measure Social Media Success
“Rushing into social-computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and customer will be the biggest cause of failure…” Gartner Says Companies Need to Pursue Four Steps to Harness Social Computing in CRM

I’m hearing a lot of two extremes right now: social media is useless fluff, and social media is the magic bullet.  The truth is somewhere in the middle, and depends on your business, your industry, and your customers.

Put it into action today: Think about one thing you’d like for your audience to know about your company/product, and put it into a blog post, a tweet, or even one phone call to one person.

“What’s” are the specific things a business needs to accomplish, as opposed to the process they typically use to accomplish it. Some are high value; some are not. Understanding the difference can give you great insights into where you can safely pare away and where you should leave well enough alone.  A Better Way to Cut Costs

Put it into action today: Brainstorm the “what’s”.  Work with your team to figure where you’re creating value for your customers.  (Then go validate it through a quick and dirty survey)

“Stop looking at your member count to determine whether your community is successful, and don’t expect (or even ask for) rapid growth. Real relationships take time to develop, and if you want a real community based on real relationships, you need to be in it for the long haul.”  Member Count Not a Measure of Community Success

Put it into action today: Think of a question that you’re afraid to know the answer to, and ask it.  On your forum or blog would be great, but if you’re not ready for that, ask via private mail.  But take the first step towards ceding control.

” to a larger extent than you probably realize, your environment dictates your actions… So don’t fight yourself to change your behavior in the midst of the wrong environment; just change the environment.”  The Easiest Way to Change People’s Behavior

Put it into action today: Think about a result you want (a co-worker to stop doing something, a customer to start doing something, etc.) and brainstorm “How can I make it as easy as possible for this person to do this thing that I want?”

It could be asking a multiple-choice question instead of an open-ended one to your users (reduce their thinking time).  It could be proposing 6 meeting times instead of 2 to a customer (increases the odds that their calendar will be open for one).  It could be walking through a whiteboard exercise with someone instead of waiting for them to do it on their own (reduces their chance for procrastination, interactivity increases the odds of you getting exactly what you need.)

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Trying out a new feature here this week – these are the best of the links I followed from Twitter, with suggested takeaways.

“Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?”  Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People

Put it into action today: Look at the list of projects on your to-do list.  There’s probably at least one that doesn’t make sense.

Make a proposal to your boss explaining briefly the reasons this became a priority, what has changed, and the opportunity cost if you continued.  You might get overruled, but it’s good practice and repeated attempts can drive cultural change.

“The trick is that unlike traditional marketing you don’t talk TO your potential customers, instead you try to get them INVOLVED in a discussion with you.”  How to Use Web 2.0 to be a Better Product Manager

Put it into action today: Search for your product, or competitor’s product, or your industry (whichever is most relevant) on Twitter.  Read what people are saying and respond.  Ask a question.

What happens: “You are constantly questioning your vendor’s motivation, and they are pushing back on every little change because it effects their bottom line.”  How to Guarantee Software Project Failure

Put it into action today: Walk through the deployment process for your software or service.  Identify the points where you are dependent on your customer.  Maybe it’s waiting for them to give you information, install some code, make a decision.  Ask yourself if there is any way to move that responsibility from them to you (even a hacky way may be an improvement.)

“The only way to actually get things done is to mitigate the urgent to work on the important.”   How to Mitigate The Urgent to Work on the Important

Put it into action today: Stop reading this blog and go do something important.  (No, really, please don’t. I like you, audience.)

Go through the requests people have made of you.  If you can delegate it, do so.   Reply to the rest asking: specifically what do you need? what problem/answer are you trying to solve? what timeframe do you need this by?   (Most people make the mistake of replying to requests “right away” when the requester might’ve needed it “sometime before Q3″).  Once you’ve cleared the stack, you’re ready to use the tricks in this article.

“The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time.”   Employees should be Masters of Their Time

Put it into action today: If you find yourself telling someone how to do their job, stop.  Tell them the problem that needs solving and let them propose a way to solve it.  If someone tells you how to do your job, tell them “Am I correct that you’re trying to solve problem X? If so, let me propose a solution.”

“Negative feedback is valuable feedback; better to have it articulated in your own community where you can respond to it then have it only appear elsewhere on the Web.”  The 7 Deadly Sins of Online Community Management

Put it into action today: Suck it up and read your product reviews.  Be honest about things you know aren’t optimal and requests that you realistically are not going to provide anytime soon.

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I often hear product managers complaining that they don’t have enough time to listen to customer feedback, but in practical terms the opposite may be true: you may already be listening too much!

OK, not quite.  But not all customers are created equal, and not all have the same impact on your bottom line.   So start by figuring out where the value lies and how to measure it.

A couple years ago, I was talking with a customer, a bank business analyst, and she told me that they had solid data on three clusters of customers – the top tier, who through very high net worth and using multiple bank services brought in 80% of revenues, the broad mainstream tier that collectively brought in 40% of revenues, and — wait, isn’t that 120%?  … That’s right, the bottom tier of customers actually lost the bank money.

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