Product Plagiarism: Answers are There if You Know How to Spin It
In these troubled times, as companies see their sales slump and dark days ahead, marketers are battening down the hatches, eliminating non-core businesses and looking for ways to cuts costs and save money. Everyone likes the idea of doing more with less. With the economy the way it is, how can you not look for ideas that let you do more with less?
It’s not just the state of the businesses, it also the state of product management in many companies – more with less. So knowing your buyers and your product placement is really important in recession. Optimism isn’t a bad thing in this market, neither is being prepared. To steal a Scandinavian proverb, here’s a more positive way to look at Product Management in this market: there is no such thing as bad weather. There are only poor choices of clothing.
Preparing for the Economic Winter
So these times are getting tough and while the Cranky Product Manager was not laid off, but this guy she knows was. He lives in her house, is father to her child, and pays a bunch of the bills. These types of stories are being echoed throughout the technology community – top to bottom. This is NOT the economy to be the same marketer or product manager you were last year or the year before. The problem is many of us are and a common theme that continues to pop up when talking to the recently laid off when speaking about their products the discussions tend to be very development focused, not market focused.
Ultimately their products weren’t terribly unique and it (sic) may be a bit less than what the competition offers. With such an unstable job market, product managers must challenge themselves to differentiate INSIDE their business the value they bring and the value their products bring to the market. One of the easiest way to do this is to make sure you’re networking–online, in real life, anywhere you can.
Why? To learn from others, get better and bring a better product and message to market. It’s probably not the time to “just wait – it’s starting to come together.” If it was an easy thing to accomplish wouldn’t everyone be doing it? Wouldn’t everyone be successful at it?
Know the Economics
Waiting for things to come together just doesn’t hunt in this economy. One of the hidden problems most technology sales and marketing teams have is financial illiteracy. Most team members have at best a superficial understanding of basic financial concepts. While they may know a few of the terms, they generally can’t apply them in business situations to explain or justify the value of a specific product, service, or proposal. If you can’t find the answer inside your company – go outside. Get a personal advisory group to hep you out. Folks with all kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, the more successful your friends are, the better advice they can give you, so having some true winners in your circle is useful. Not my words!
Be the Drip Pan. Be A Leader
Product management has increasingly become the clean-up crew in many organizations. Buyers were already becoming more discriminating; now, with the economic downturn, technology companies can afford even less to have Development working in its walled garden, only emerging occasionally to deliver some basket full of things that people on the outside may or may not want. This is only going to continue to be more of the case as sales continues to confront you with “If I could only get this feature in the release, I’d close this deal,” they actually mean, “I feel like I’m losing here, and surely it cannot be my fault.” The Product Manager’s job is to help the team understand, and to keep them focused on their current work. If a Sales person makes a statement like that directly to development, without any translation, the team might believe the rhetoric, and quickly switch to satisfying one sales person. The Product Manager needs to help everyone see the market clearly and objectively.
In this market you need catch the things that fall through the cracks AND lead the organization.
Look at the Package, Look at the Market
One of the PM 101 questions to start with is “How much should I charge for my software?”. If you are delivering an ROI, you might want to repackage into the ROI story standalone and reprice, not unlike Tripwire who packaged DOWN into success. Other idea – up the ante on product simplicity (usability). Take a page from Apple’s book and see the impact to your top line and competitive position.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
Product managers are the messengers to the market for their companies, this is no different today than it was 10 months ago, just could be a little more dangerous. “Market-centric messaging” starts with your audience, their problems, and explicit statements about what customers can expect to gain if they let you help them address those problems.
In the end you need to convince your organization to understand that marketing is always about telling a story. Sometimes it is a new story; most often it is a more simple story. How to save money, how to improve your effectiveness, how to improve your quality of life – all them threads which position a product. Market leaders must achieve their leadership results in an area that is meaningful to a customer or market. Such as, leadership in product development, leadership in customer service, leadership in distribution, or leadership in bringing ideas to market faster.
Getting a repositioned product to market requires you to work with, through and over other people in your organization that don’t necessarily share your goals and it requires you look at the whole product and what the market views your product as.
Create a Downturn Brand and a Focused Product
In the end one of your critical stakeholder groups is going to be pissed at you: Sales, Development, QA, Tech Support, Marketing, or Operations. Special bonus if you get all at once. You just might get the bonus if you do your job right, this isn’t a warm and fuzzy market. Create products which establish a promise in the market and continues to innovate.
Cold hard reality teaches that you cannot typically think yourself out of a black hole. Some sectors of business simply will not resume their prior degree of profitability. So who you were last year, may not be who you are GOING to be or NEED to be to be successful in a different market.
It’s going to take some work. Research, analysis, surveys and honest looks at where you are in the market with your products. You may need to find a new segment for your brand/product’s promises and the smaller the better. Think about it – The more things you try to become, the more you lose focus, the more difficult it is to differentiate your product. Mark Twain said it best, ‘I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.’
The whole reason you want to have a few target segments is so you can build company expertise around a particular business problem in a particular market. This understanding helps you satisfy those customers better, make decisions about the product direction, focus your marketing spend and helps your service and support people meet the needs of those customers better. Brands and product deliver on problems and all successful brands share four important things:
So the economic downturn should be seen as an opportunity for product managers and marketers everywhere.
So In Short:
- Find the Problem
- Be the Brand
- Know the Buyers
- Partner with Sales
- Focus on the Product
- Know the Competition
- Repositioning Might be a good idea
- It’s Just Economics and Math
- Customer Communities Drive Value
- Product Messaging is Important
NOTE: I try to do what I call a mosaic/patchwork quilt piece 1 time a year, a way to acknowledge those I read and have a little fun. While I may have used a couple of the verbatims outside of original intent, what these folks write contributes to the industry in a positive way with every post. Thanks to all the contributors to this piece, add them to your RSS reader and drill down on the respective pieces, without them this piece wouldn’t exist.
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cheers! ~jon
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Comments
really like doing this type of post. the challenge is making it not suck, so thanks for the feedback. really enjoy reading your stuff Bob!
~jon
Excellent Summary!
“So the economic downturn should be seen as an opportunity for product managers and marketers everywhere.”
Couldn’t agree more. Just need to make it happen!
Wow, this is like a distillation of many of the thoughts that have been swirling around my head–and then some! A ton of good content in here. Thanks!
- Chris