Author: animeshjmathur

Just Ask …. identifying failure points

ego, Marketing, Product Management, Questions

There’s a term called “confirmation bias” which was coined by cognitive psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason. He ran a series of experiments called the Wason’s rule discovery task. Through these experiments he demonstrated the people have a tendency to seek information that confirms their existing beliefs.

So why is this important for a marketing / product management leader. In the earlier posts that I have written about this topic I have been cajoling you to start asking questions because you don’t know what could be the reason that people like or dislike your product.

However if you only ask questions and search only for data points which confirm what you are wanting to hear then there’s a problem. And all human beings have this confirmation bias. Its because of our ego that our first instinct is to prove ourselves correct.

But failures happen because we didn’t ear what the market was trying to tell us. And we didn’t hear because of this confirmation bias which Wason had showcased all the way back in the 1960s.

However every negative (relative to your data point) that you hear has the potential to get you closer to the truth. If you have watched “CSI” the detective show (its available on Amazon Prime) , you will see a lot of times the evidence doesn’t prove the hypotheses that the detectives have and then they have to dig deeper until the evidence and the hypotheses are in sync otherwise it won’t stand the questioning of the jury.

As a product management person, you have to stand back and let the market give you the evidence and if the evidence doesn’t suit your opinion, you need to change your opinion, otherwise you are in for big failure. The point is not to prove yourself right or wrong, it is to let the evidence (inputs from the market that you get by asking relevant questions) confirm where are the blind spots in your strategy or tactics. Once you cover your blind spots you may actually come out with a strategy which could break all records.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just ask….why finding what’s wrong is critical

Assumptions, Marketing, problem solving, Product Management, Questions

I have a pretty large ego. This comes into play a lot of times. And most of the times when I let it takeover I end up with a mess on my hands.

Especially when we have been in a role for some time we create a tool box for solving problems…and we end up molding the problem into what can be solved by the tools in the tool box.

So when things are not going the way they should be, in the market , we end up taking action using our tools which have proven worthy earlier. We assume we know the problem and like earlier can be solved the same way.

However markets are different…..they are dynamic in nature…the customers, your competitors and the environment are all changing, all the time. As a marketing or product management person you cannot let time pass while you keep grappling with the tools in your tool box.

This does not mean that having a tool box of proven techniques is bad. It is just that we should be quick to figure out if things are not working.

Sometimes its better to find out what’s wrong then to be proven wrong by the market. That happens when you start asking.

Till next time then…just ask.

Carpe Diem!!!

Bedrock

Financial Independence, meaning, Sales

I have used this term a lot of times. My understanding of the term was that it meant a fundamental principle. So for sales in B2B, especially in the technology domain, you need to be making calls on the customer. If you don’t make calls on prospects, you can’t get sales. Investing is the bedrock for financial independence.

However the actual meaning of bedrock is that it is solid rock lying below loose soil.

Why is this important.

It seems a bedrock can give out the history and evolution of that place. So as per National Geographic – the southern part of the state of Indiana in the United Sates has exposed bedrock while the northern part of the state of Indian has metres of soil below which the bedrocks exist. What that means is that it gives the geologists the ability to determine till what point did the glaciers exist in the Ice Age. So when it became warmer, the glaciers started melting and the water started interacting with the rock below and cause the rocks to break over hundreds of thousands of years to create soil. On the other hand since there is no soil and the bedrocks are directly exposed, the glaciers did not extend till the southern part of the state.

When space crafts land on places like Mars or on our moon, they actually collect these kind of samples to see and determine the age, the chemical reactions that the rock/soil have undergone and then determine if there was water , life etc on that celestial land.

I couldn’t imagine that the word which was part of my everyday vocabulary had such a major geological meaning behind it. The whole space program of many countries and now private parties is to find if other planets have life or can be inhabited. For anything to be inhabited, there should be an ability for life to exist. Life exists if there’s water among other things. Studying the bedrock you can estimate if water ever existed and if so how long back.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just Ask ….you never know – Part 4

ego, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, Questions

This topic has, I think been one of the longest, I have pondered on.

Yesterday I wrote about why it was critical for the marketing / product management / sales folks to be asking questions and how it impacts the ability to succeed in the market.

So why don’t most of the sales / marketing / product management folks do it. One of course is vanity / ego….we know all the reasons why someone does not buy, after all we have been doing this for “xxx” years. The other bigger one is fear because most of us are not prepared to listen to the truth, we don’t know how the prospect will react, we may realise we are the actual cause of the problem.

We would rather end up being busy sending emails, doing “busy” work, attend a lot of internal meetings, rather than go out into the market. These are things we know to do so we do them rather than go and check out the unknown.

Ozan Varol in his book – Think Like a Rocket Scientist has a very nice story – and I paraphrasing it here to get the point out – of your boss asking you to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and recite from Shakespeare. You break down the problem into different stages – building a pedestal, identifying a monkey and making it learn Shakespeare. What would you do first here.

Most people would first think of building the pedestal first – why because that’s the easiest to do and you will be able to show progress to your boss. If you were to first go to identify a monkey which can speak English, you will never be able to show progress to your boss.

Similarly its easier to show that you have done some activity by telling your boss that you sent a mail, than it is to get to identifying why some one is not buying your product.

This is one of the biggest frustrations I face in trying to get my teams to figure out why people are not buying something from us. If you can master this art of just asking – you can’t imagine what all you will learn.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!