A Litmus Test: Transitioning Technology to Product
I haven’t spent much time doing pure play product management posting in a while, so I thought I would today. I’ve been doing a bunch of leisure surfing and looking at a bunch of great stuff online and challenged myself to think about what it takes to transition a technology into a product. While I didn’t come to a great deal of conclusions, I think I’ve come up with some reasonable litmus tests for consideration:
- Does your product have more defects than enhancement requests?
- Can the users manage their own product experience?
- Does everyone tell the same story about the product inside your organization?
- Do customer users out number the support staff?
- Can your product be contracted the same from sale to sale?
- Are your training materials for the organization more lengthy than the prospect presentation?
- Do you use the words scripting and framework more than configurable?
- Does a product error message require research from development or is it in the knowledge base?
- Are there more sales tools for the product than product managers?
What questions do you ask about your product?
2 Responses to “A Litmus Test: Transitioning Technology to Product”
By Dave on Jun 2, 2008 | Reply
A technology becomes a product when you have a client paying you to build a custom application on top of the technology, or you’ve built a product on top of the technology. Once you’ve built your product on top of your technology, the product manager has to manage both separately.
If you have not built a layered architecture and you are selling your technology, it unfortunately is still not a product. Unproductized technology is a hard sale. If you are pushing it at geeks, don’t expect to make revenues.