Author: animeshjmathur

Getting blindsided in product management

Assumptions, differentiation, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management

When an idea for a product or service is our baby, even though we ask ourselves and all our team members of the possible issues that the product (or service) may have, we miss out on some of the most elementary things. This generally happens because all our team members get involved in group think.

For a product management guy getting blindsided by this kind of mistake ends up being most expensive , as you don’t realise “what hit you”. What you think as an essential differentiation could be a worthless factor which increases costs.

On the other hand two simple mechanisms that I use to try to exploit all the possible lacunae or weak spots in my thinking are:

  1. Red team, blue team: In thisI make it into a game where I have one team specifically work on figuring out all the items about my offering that the other team can utilise to beat my product. This is the same concept that armies of friendly countries use during their war games. Once the fatal flaws are identified, you then go about correcting them before you get into the market. Sometimes in these exercises, I have also heard comments like – “there is nothing about your product that we even need to bother about, we can beat it very easily”. If you hear this kind of a comment, it means you are in deep trouble. If your internal team doesn’t think your product has any strengths, then you better figure out something new.
  2. The second method I have found useful is to get a finance guy to figure out the plan and numbers. Typically finance guys are very good at doing a post-mortem and want artefacts for every assumption for all their bills. They will ask you for all your background checks and will help you surface the assumptions.

Getting internal people telling you all the possible negative feedback helps you build a much better product offering.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Compelling versus convincing

compelling, education, education, Marketing

The appreciation of the difference in the words Compelling & Convincing, and its implications in marketing was made possible due to Dean Jackson. I would highly recommend his podcasts Morecheeselesswhiskers.com and his podcast with Joe Polish, Ilovemarketing.com.

Whenever you place an argument in front of a person, even with all the data in the world and show them a conclusion, they will be resistive to it. If the conclusion is not drawn by the person herself, she will always try to find the “catch”. What is it that she’s missing.

On the other hand if you educate a person and logically lead them on a path, then the conclusion that they draw is their own and then they are compelled to look at you.

Look at Apple. They have well designed products no doubt. But look at the closed hierarchy of systems they have created. Every few months they have some global launch in which they showcase how the integration between their products and the newer technologies they are launching will make your life even more comfortable.

Till about 4 -5 years back we didn’t have a single Apple device, we now have 8. And my family members wait when a new item is getting launched. Apple does not try to convince them to buy, but they have got so strongly hooked into the Apple ecosystem, they will give you all the reasons why you should not buy anything else.

A person who is compelled to take action will be your customer for a long time because she has taken the decision based on the education you have given her.

So instead of trying to convince people to your point of view, give them the tools by educating them and compel them to take an informed decision.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem

Mapping all the steps to acquiring a customer

B2B, Marketing, Sales

Depending on the how you have structured your sales and marketing, these could be two independent functions and chances are that they both work independent of each other, often blaming the other for the non-performance.

However a customer does not see this as two functions. She is a seeing every single touch point as the company and you make an impression – good or bad based on that.

However if you can think of the whole journey a customer takes from the first touch point to the way the sales order comes in , you can iron out a lot of glitches.

By mapping this journey, you will also be able to identify the gaps between, how you think a customer should come versus how your systems are working for the customer to actually come.

During one of our marketing launches we covered multiple steps as to how the campaigns will flow, what will be the sequence of mails that the team will send out, how will the follow-up happen, till we get the prospect to come for a presentation. since we did not map the whole process backwards, we failed when a prospect asked us to share some content before coming for a presentation and in another case asked us for a justification document after we had given a demo. Now in both these cases we had not anticipated that a customer could need these because they were looking at a new technology.

If you go to sites like Gartner, they have a very nice item for their conferences, “documents to justify to your management” which are all the reasons why attending any of the conferences would help the company. This way they are helping the manager who wants to attend, get documents easily, instead of expecting him to justify by himself, in which case he could fail to justify properly and therefore not get the approval to attend. Which would be a loss to Gartner. So they have thought through the possible steps which could stop the sale from happening and put the data in place to help.

In B2b sales , where multiple levels of approval and justifications are needed, mapping the complete journey can help iron out the creases in both your marketing and sales plans.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Puzzles are no “child’s play”

possibility thinking, problem solving

Yesterday I spoke about how the puzzles are so difficult for people like me to solve. Even though I talk a lot about being open to possibilities, to think laterally etc. there are times when you give up or come out with compromise solutions.

However the puzzles that we give children to solve, have a single solution which needs to be identified. Most children are able to solve these problems by trying multiple times with an open mind. They also don’t operate on time pressure generally.

In the corporate world we generally have time pressures, but maybe I could be using it sometimes as a excuse. However when we are dealing with humans in the problem, there is no fixed solution because human beings can change stance. Then we are dealing with a moving target.

The main thing about myself , I would think is that I run out of patience, in trying out different options. I think that’s one take away after working on the puzzles.

Working on these puzzles is addictive in nature. So some kinds of puzzles like the simple to medium Sudoku, and word puzzles I am able to solve quite fast. But puzzles like Mashu have taken me an enormous amount of time for me to figure out eventhough the instructions seem to be simple.

The big difference between children and me I think is that I tend to take the instruction as the only possibility and not trying out the possibilities that have not been listed, assuming they are not allowed. This is the biggest problem with most of us adults. We don’t try to identify unlisted assumptions and explore solutions using that.

Till next time then….see what other possibilities can be explored.

Carpe Diem!!!