Product Management Insights

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that starting today our blog has a new name.

We used to call it “Practical Product Management” - since we write about topics covering practical aspects of product management.

It turns out that our friends at Pragmatic Marketing, Inc have trademark rights for the phrase “Practical Product Management”!

Since we’re known as good kids that play well with other kids , we’re changing our blog’s name to “Product Management Insights“.

Under this new name, we will continue to write about insights into practical aspects of product management, aimed at helping product management professionals everywhere. Thank you very much for your readership and support - and as always, we wish you outstanding products and continued success…

There was an excellent post recently at the Product Management Tips blog by Gopal Shenoy that discusses how the usability of a product is severely affected when you add a lot of features.

Gopal compares his stand-alone GPS unit vs the built-in GPS unit in his new Toyota Camry car, and poses a question:

The system controls not only the GPS, but also my bluetooth telephone via speed dial, phonebook etc, the four disc CD changer and a bunch of other things.
….
It sure does meet all product functionality requirements that it was set to achieve, but it falls well short of usability requriements - thanks to product integrations. Do your products suffer from this same problem?

The question of “Should we keep adding features requested by various stakeholders even though it may drastically affect usability?” is one of the important questions faced by Product Management teams at many companies. Here are our thoughts on this.

Balance is the Key

The key thing for product managers to keep in mind as we ponder this question is the difference between:

• Purchase Criteria, and
• Usage Criteria.

The most common argument to keep adding new features, especially for B2B products, is that buyers prefer products with more features. This argument is usually made by Sales teams.

In our experience, this argument is often true. Many vendors use Feature Matrices as one of their key sales tools. These matrices are used to convince prospective buyers that the vendor’s product has more features than products from their competitors, and hence is better.

As a result, there is a lot of pressure on product managers to keep adding new features. Adding new features eventually leads to loss of usability - and if left unchecked, ultimately makes it very hard for users to achieve the single main task that they bought the product for!

Here are some ways product managers can ensure that their product remains easy-to-use even against the pressure to add new features: 

• Only add features that are requested by many customers. Do not implement one-off feature requests.
• When adding new features, always keep usability in mind. A trick you can use is to make one usability enhancement for every new feature.
• Educate key stakeholders that adding features is not always the best way to go - use recent successes like the Apple iPod as an example that focus on usability can win in the market too.
• Create spin-off products rather than adding features to current product.
• In the battle of Usability vs Features, champion Usability - odds are your company already has many champions for Features!

In Summary:

We think Product Management teams should carefully balance Features with Usability - and never lose sight of their product’s Raison d’être (”reason for being”), the one thing it must do very, very well.

If you just keep adding requirements and feature requests from every stakeholder, you just might end up with a product like this!

What do you think - do you agree with our thoughts, or did we miss something?! Let us know your comments.

There is a good discussion going on at the Ask A Good Product Manager blog run by Jeff Lash on the topic of how a Product Manager who doesn’t have direct access to customers can gather feedback to help define product requirements. Adam Bullied (of Write That Down blog) has a great, detailed post on this.

We agree with Adam’s points in his post about the importance of getting customer feedback. We are very strong believers in getting direct customer feedback, and using it to drive product requirements & feature enhancements. As a matter of fact, our own product roadmap for Accompa is >80% driven by direct feature requests from our customers.

Ways to Gather Customer Feedback

This got us thinking about a related question:

What are some of the ways a Product Manager can gather direct customer feedback to ensure that her product roadmap is driven by customer needs rather than other (far less significant) factors?

Here are some ways that we’ve seen work well in our past experience at a number of software and high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

1. One-on-One Customer Calls: Talking with a customer directly (or meeting with them in person) is one of the best ways to get detailed customer feedback. Of course, this is also the most time consuming - you may only be able to use this for “VIP” customers, such as large accounts.
   
2. Usability Testing: This is another very time-consuming method - but one of our favorites. In this method, you observe customers using your product to perform various tasks - and ask them questions, including what they’d like to see added. If your product is web-based - you can do this using tools such as WebEx or GoToMeeting.
   
3. Focus Groups: In this method, you get a group of customers together - in person, or over phone/web conference call. Then you discuss how they use your product currently, what they like/dislike, as well as their future needs.
   
4. Email Surveys: One of the least time-consuming methods. You can create a customer survey using a web-based survey tool such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang and invite customers to participate using email. Make sure to keep the surveys small (we recommend no more than 10 questions) to ensure you get good response rate and “real” responses.
   
5. Webinars: You can conduct periodic webinars (again using tools like WebEx or GoToMeeting) for customers as well as prospects - and you can question the attendees at the end to understand their needs better.
6. Customer Support Database: If your company uses a CRM system to keep track of customer support requests, that can contain a wealth of information about the issues customers are facing and how you can improve your product to address those issues.
7. Online Forums: Last, but certainly not least - online forums (whether maintained by your company, or an unrelated third-party) and other social media can contain a trove of customer feedback and needs. This is especially true for B2C products.

Summary

In summary - we believe it is very important to get direct customer feedback in as many ways, and using as many tools, as possible. This will help ensure that your product roadmap is driven based on actual customer requests - rather than other (usually, far less important) factors such as the latest cool technology, sales team pain points, support team pain points, etc.

What do you think - is it important that your product roadmap is primarily driven by customer feedback, or are there exceptions? Let us know your comments.

There has been a good discussion over the past couple of weeks at the How To Be A Good Product Manager and Ask A Good Product Manager blogs run by Jeff Lash on the topic of how Product Management can work effectively with Sales.

One of the questions that was discussed caught our attention:

How much should Sales be involved in Product Development?
….
In my opinion, we should just keep them informed… of the progress of the projects and whether they are on track, waiting, etc. — and not any more.

How involved should our sales group be in product development planning?

This question of “Should Sales have a strong say in defining product requirements?” is one of the important questions faced by Product Management at many companies. Here is our take on it.

Coin Operated!

A key thing to keep in mind as we ponder this question is the motivation of the Sales personnel - i.e. what drives them? At the vast majority of software and high-tech companies, a substantial part (say 30-70%) of Sales personnel compensation is from commissions. They get this commission when they close deals.

So… the most important motivating factor for a Sales person is closing the deals he has on his plate - right at this moment. This means: the features a Sales person will push for at any point in time is based on the deals he is working on at that moment. Alrighty then - How should Product Management work with Sales when it comes to defining requirements?

We believe that Product Management should take input from Sales personnel, and then use objective criteria (such as ROI, revenue & profit potential, NPV, etc) to pick which requirements to implement while keeping the following in mind:

• How many customers have requested the same (or similar) feature?
• Can you validate the requests by directly talking with customers who requested them?
• How does a given feature fit with your company’s product strategy and roadmap?
• Would implementing a certain feature give your company a key competitive advantage? How sustainable is it?
• Is it within your company’s capabilities to implement this feature?
• How can you implement this feature without negatively impacting the product’s ease-of-use?

In Summary:

We think Product Management should certainly listen to requests coming from Sales - they are in direct contact with the customers and the market every day, and their input is crucial. That said, Product Managers should validate these requests, and use objective criteria before defining product requirements based on these requests.

Product Management’s role is to make the product as successful as possible - which often times may be compromised by giving Sales free reign to drive product requirements. We’ve seen some companies in the valley where Sales indeed drives product requirements - although we’ve noticed that these companies are usually not leaders in their market segments. Coincidence? We think not!

What do you think - do you agree with our points, or are we way off?! Let us know your comments.

Last week, Paul Young at the Product Beautiful blog made an excellent post titled “Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?“. His post is based on a recent Fortune magazine article titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs“, and Paul asks the question:

“Is Product Management incompatible with creating products that inspire passion? Product Management’s function is to discover market needs and fulfill those needs with products. But people don’t buy on need alone; they also buy on emotion and other soft factors.”

This is a very thought-provoking topic, and had several insightful comments - make sure to check out Paul’s post. Here are our thoughts on it.

As Paul says above, one of the key roles that Product Management plays in a company is to discover market needs, and meet those needs with products.

iPod - a Quick Case Study

Let us pick a recent, uber-successful Apple product as an example - the iPod. It turns out that in the market the iPod plays in (i.e. personal music players) - one of the market needs is sexy design & ease of use.

I remember the MP3 player I had before the iPod hit the market - it was really ugly and damn hard to use. Apple ( aka Steve Jobs?! ) identified this unmet market need and fulfilled it admirably with iPod & iTunes.

As Paul wondered in his article, we are not sure how much involvement Apple’s Product Management team had in uncovering/meeting that need - but we think whoever did that job (Steve Jobs?) played the role of Product Management very, very successfully.

In Summary:

We think that Product Management & products that inspire passion are not at all incompatible. As a matter of fact, we believe it is Product Management’s responsibility to identify all the market needs - including “passion-inspiring” features, where applicable. And then work with others - Design team, Engineering team, seemingly overbearing execs, et al - to bring the product that meets (exceeds?) those needs to market. And help make the product successful!

What do you think? Let us know your comments.

Hello everyone - We have finally launched our blog!

Our goal for this blog is to make posts that cover the practical aspects of Product Management - based on our experience doing product management at various companies in the Silicon Valley since the mid-1990s. We hope to make 1-2 posts a month.

Let us get the party started - woohoo!!!!!