Prioritizing the top 3 or 4 – Product Management

Assumptions, B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, Marketing Stamina, messaging, prioritizing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

Last week I put up a post in which I highlighted the top issues that we need to focus on when looking at the product management in a technology environment. Product Management being a subset of marketing, some of the core items remain the same. However the focus changes a little. In my opinion, B2B technology buying needs to prioritize as follows:

Understanding the ecosystem for technology adoption
Getting footfalls (incase of a store) or hits on your website or people coming to your webinar
Cost of various media to get you the traffic
Cost of converting the footfall into a buying public

Perry Marshall calls items 2-4 as Traffic, Conversion and Economics. The reason I put the ecosystem first is because there’s a huge dependency on the existing infrastructure for the technology to be adopted. Most technology products that fail are because the ecosystem did not exist for the adoption.

Since 80/20 is fractal within each of these there’s a further 80/20 which exists. So within each database/list, there could be about 20% who would respond 80% of the times or even within the ecosystem there could be a 4% which accounts for the 64% of the ecosystem dependency.

If you are able to identify the few challenges in the ecosystem that you will face which can have a major impact on the success of your product, addressing them will ease your product launch or product entry or penetration dramatically. Its the small hinges which move doors in all areas.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Calling out the elephant in the room – Assumptions -3

arrogance, Assumptions, ego, Leadership, Marketing, Product Management

Last 2 posts I had written on listing out the assumptions about your marketing plan or product management plan. I have gone into quite a bit of detail there.

I had no plans for writing a third post for this topic. I subscribe to the newsletter Knowledge@Wharton. I was surprised when I got the newsletter in the email today. The headline of the first item was…..Want to Become a better leader? Question your assumptions

It’s an article where the Dean at Wharton Erika James spoke with author and professor at Wharton Adam Grant on his new book Think Again; The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know . As per the article , this book is about why executives should reconsider their approaches to manage people….

You can read the full article here.

Not listing out the assumptions for marketing I mentioned was a sign of either arrogance or ego or you just being too naive. Depending on the stage in my career I have been all the 3.

But after reading this I realized that what I thought was a good practice for marketing is also a good practice for leadership. Like in marketing if you let your arrogance or ego come in the way, so in leadership if you can’t see and accept that some assumptions that you are making can defeat your purpose then you are in a bad spot.

I haven’t read this book yet, but just the fact that this came up was very serendipitous. I am definitely going to be buying the book to look at how he thinks on the assumptions for leadership.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Calling out the elephant in the room – Assumptions – 2

arrogance, Assumptions, B2B, Business, ego, Marketing

For a background to this post, I would suggest you have a look at the fist part of the topic here

Not many know that the digital camera was first created by a team in Kodak. Whether you call it arrogance on the part of the managers at Kodak, who assumed that no one would want to buy such an expensive camera. What was assumed was that the technology would make it unviable for most folks to afford the camera.

No one thought that technology was following Moore’s law, where the power of the chip was roughly doubling every 18 odd months. A similar thing happened at Xerox who actually had designed the “mouse” long before it became a standard accessory. But they never moved forward on it.

It is said , the Swiss already knew about battery powered watches, much before the Japanese, but because they prided themselves on their engineering and movement, they never bothered taking a patent. Suddenly the Japanese were all over the place with watches leaving the Swiss, gasping for breadth. Again technology assumptions can go wrong very badly.

Brainstorming on the assumptions you are making and listing them, gets you grounded to think better. Also its a better idea to ask an outsider to check out your assumptions.

In marketing, because you are dealing with human perceptions, understanding and accounting for the assumptions can help you avoid expensive mistakes. In B2B scenarios where there are multiple people involved in a decision and there’s general inertia, not accounting for these assumptions can be fatal.. Its a good idea to keep asking ‘what else are we assuming”.

Like assuming that the person on the production line will easily adopt the new technology you are bringing in via the CIO and /or the CFO. More IT projects have failed because of these faulty assumptions than the problem with the technology itself.

Especially when you are making the marketing or sales plan at the beginning of the year, if you don’t account for these assumptions, very soon when you hit the road, all your plans will fall flat.

Don’t make the mistakes that I have done. Whenever you make a plan list out all the assumptions and make everyone aware about them so that collective wisdom can find a better solution.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Calling out the elephant in the room – Assumptions

arrogance, Assumptions, ego, Marketing

Whenever you are doing an analysis of the market or doing a post mortem of why an iteration did not wok out, one of the biggest things to bring out in the open is the “Assumptions” based on which you have chosen to take an action.

A simple mathematical example will show the problem. Most often people like to say the market for some broad category is X billion dollars per annum and growing at Y percent. Now you have chosen a niche in the segment whose market size could be 20% of the X billion dollars. Suddenly you have lost 80% of the market size. This could be growing at 50% of Y per annum. So assuming that X billion was the market today and it was growing at CAGR of 12%, then this category would become 2X in 6 years.

Now your chosen niche however is only 20% of the X billion dollars and this is growing at 50% Y or 6% rate. Which means this market will double in 12 years. Suddenly your niche is not so attractive as the overall category.

Now suppose that the growth rate is dependent on the availability of a key raw material which comes from only one country and if there’s a problem in the production of this product then this growth rate could become 10% of the projected Y or 1.2%. At this rate the market will double in 60 years and it may not be worthwhile for you to invest in the market at all.

Yes you could come back saying what is the probability that this scenario would occur. Maybe not much. However if you don’t identify it and list it as an assumption even though the odds are low, then you can be caught completely unawares if that scenario plays out.

In marketing – Murphy’s law – paraphrased by me – if anything has to go wrong, it will and at the most inappropriate time – always plays out. Most of the times it is sheer laziness on part of the team or sometime even arrogance / ego which causes us to not list out the assumptions. This happens especially when we have had a string of non-stop successes.

If you call out all the assumptions that you are making, then it becomes far easier to plan and execute on your strategies.

In technology buying a very small dependency like availability of trained resources to work on the technology can cause your product to not get the same traction. I remember the RDBMS market was growing in double digits about 20 years back, what with UNIX, Windows and Linux all giving an impetus to the growth. However there were 2 companies which took a major portion of the market because the other companies did not realise that the trained manpower needed for running these RDBMS was not there. even though most of these RDBMS were very good, they were not able to garner any worthwhile marketshare.

Inspite of the fact that I am writing this post, I have also happened to miss assumptions a lot of times. And chances are that the assumption I missed calling out, was the one which came to haunt me for the failure.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!