How to Fail Fast: Keep the Momentum Building
This post is part 4 in a series. Read part 1, part 2, part 3.
Silence is deadly. Lack of information leads people to imagine the worst-case scenario.
This is why, even if your new strategy is humming along beautifully and you’re hitting your early risk-reduction milestones, you can be derailed by FUD.
A customer writes a lengthy blog post theorizing that the lack of updates to the old site means you’re going out of business. Sales reports that existing clients are getting conflicting messages from the company. Internally, some teams feel like they’re doing a ton of work and haven’t heard about any payoff yet. Competitors are gunning for existing customers, planting the seeds of doubt that you may not have a long-term strategy.
This can all be avoided by Momentum-Building Communication. Very simply, make it your practice to share updates at minimum:
- Once a week internally
- Twice a month externally
It takes time to put together a meaningful update. But I’ve found that for most product managers, it’s not the time so much as figuring out what to say!
Here are some ideas for information that is memorable, useful, and builds excitement:
Share with Internal Teams, External Customers:
- User Quotes – every time you send out a simple survey, include an optional free-form question about how customers use your product. (Tip: “How do you use” will get more interesting responses than “What do you like”)
- % Successful Registrations – set up a simple “funnel” in Google Analytics to see how many people made it past your landing page to the “registration success” page. (Don’t be depressed if this number isn’t near 100% – a “good” percentage for many types of services is 40-50%!)
- % Successful Conversions (upgrades, purchases, completing a core action) – hopefully these metrics were built into your product. If not, get thee to a change request spec, stat. (Again, remember your comparison points – the cart abandonment rate was around 40% industry-wide, last I checked.)
- Login Frequency - Are people coming back more often? For internal sharing, be sure to take the next step to explain how more usage -> more revenues.
- Analyst or Tech Blog posts that validate your concept – You probably already have Google Alerts set up for your company name and product name. Add alerts for your “concept” (i.e. “recommendations technology” or “personal financial management” as well to help find trending articles)
- Spotlight on a customer suggestion that was implemented - Spread the credit around! Recognize the customer(s) who made the suggestion, talk about why it was a great idea, and show off some screenshots of the newly-implemented piece. It will prove that you listen to customer feedback, and tying it back to the “why” will implicitly remind customers that their ideas are evaluated in terms of the whole business.
- Spotlight on a problem that was fixed – We screwed up, here’s how we fixed it. Honesty (sadly!) amazes customers because of its’ relative rarity.
Share Internally:
- Customer/Prospects Quotes – What a great excuse to talk with your field sales team! Ask them how existing customers and prospects are responding to the new direction. If customers are excited, pass that along. If not, share that news – as well as how you’re going to work with them to turn it around. Either way, give credit to your sales folks and help build that relationship.
- Efficiency Improvements (by % or number of hours) – Talk to your engineering and QA teams to understand the progress they’re most proud of – and then explain how that helps the entire business. Increased automation of test cases, shortened time to bug resolutions, or creation of standard libraries may not sound exciting – but they translate into faster turnaround of revenue-driving products and happier customers.
- Ratio of Positive to Negative Comments – Whether this is a “good” or “bad” number, report on it so that you can show people the trend over time. (Immediately after any launch, comments are often skewed negative; it’s exciting when six weeks later you can show a big turnaround.) You can get this number from a combination of customer surveys, VOC from customer service reps, and your customer feedback channels.
- Spotlight on customer suggestions/issues that will NOT be implemented (and why) – You won’t build everything that everyone asks for – and that’s a good thing. Highlight some ideas that are not core to your business and why they won’t increase revenues/customers/deals closed. This helps keep everyone focused.
- Summary of resolved issues / outstanding issues - Again, the beauty of this is trending over time. The first time you report on this, it may sound like an uphill battle – but in a few weeks you’ll be able to show significant progress. When everyone is heads-down working, it’s hard to realize how much has been accomplished. It’s your job as product manager to make that tangible and share credit with everyone.
- Net Promoter Score – best as a standalone survey. I prefer to extend this to TWO questions, the default “Would you recommend this product to others?” as well as “WHY would you recommend/not recommend this product to others?” You can make the latter optional, but I’ve found people with strong opinions usually answer it – and those are the people either attracting or repelling new customers for you.
You’ll notice that the “share internally” list includes some bad as well as good. That’s an important part of building the momentum – giving everyone enough of a “big picture” vision that they understand the good and the bad.
If you only cheerlead, you’re setting folks up to be blindsided by bad news later. You want them to know the bad, be able to refute the bad or explain how it’s getting better, and counter it with some good.
So, pick 2-3 of the above. Write a SHORT update now and share it. Then set up reminders on your calendar so you’ll remember to do it again. And again. And again.
At some point you can decrease the frequency to once a month. But there’s really never a finish line, is there? That’s the fun part.
This post is the final part in a series. Missed the earlier posts? Go back and read part 1, part 2, part 3.
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