One technique that I’ve found to be very useful is to put together a simple research plan and frame your research objectives as questions. As I describe in this post on the SiriusDecisions blog, by listing out the questions you hope to answer, you can better clarify the reason for the research, verify that you do indeed need to conduct research to get the answers, and tailor the type and amount of research you need to get the answers.

Read the full post: Simplify Market Research by Framing Your Objectives as Questions

Incidentally, if you like this blog post, you might like some of my other recent posts on the SiriusDecisions blog:

• New Research on Innovation Investment Allocation
• If you’re in Product Management, You’re in Marketing
• Meet Minimum Buying Criteria Before Exceeding Them
• What b-to-b buyers really want
• Product Management: Should You Eat Your Own Cooking?

The Best Companies Combine Marketing and Strategy
One of the best pieces I’ve read lately comes from Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. His blog post — The Best Companies Combine Marketing and Strategy — describes the disconnect which occurs in many companies between the organization’s “strategy” (and often a dedicated central strategy group) and marketing (or, more specifically, the marketing organization). As Roger puts it, “Good marketing and good strategy are both about making choices that build and maintain a particular set of capabilities that enables the company to outperform its competitors with a particular set of customers.”

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• Are businesses not doing #innovation b/c they’re too busy being efficient? Does focus & time mgmt hurt exploration? j.mp/11MFeUh (permalink)
• Commented on a great @cindyalvarez post “What Does It Replace?” j.mp/YlipHX #prodmgmt #ux #prodmktg (permalink)
• Good analysis of “Three flavors of freemium”- capacity-based, feature-based & use case j.mp/16jqKMl #prodmgmt (permalink)
• We at @siriusdecisions love models b/c they help reduce the amount of noise which clutters thinking j.mp/YSRXoQ (permalink)
• Scientific evidence that sometimes the best ideas do really come to you in the shower j.mp/Y1bTT3 #innovation (permalink)

New Research on Innovation Investment Allocation
At SiriusDecisions, we’re conducting ongoing research into how best-in-class b-to-b organizations optimize their investment decisionmaking, including how to allocate investments appropriately, pick the right initiatives to pursue and ensure those investments succeed.

I’ve started sharing some of the findings already on the SiriusDecisions blog, but our research is ongoing and you are invited to take part in this survey. It should take only 10 minutes, and everyone who responds will be given access to a summary of the results. We respect your privacy and the confidentiality of your information, so all responses will be anonymous, and data will reported in aggregate form only.

You can learn more about the research and some of the findings so far.

Free Webcast on Thought Leadership
On Wednesday, March 20, my colleague Pat McAnally will be presenting a webcast entitled Thoughtful Selling: How best-in-class companies leverage thought leadership into campaigns and conversations for game changing results.

Every company is focused on producing content in support of marketing, campaign and sales enablement programs. Yet most would admit the results of their efforts are still missing the mark.

A handful of forward-thinking marketing leaders know that their company’s thought leadership is the secret weapon to creating unique, differentiated and valuable content for campaigns and conversations that can change a sales path, elevate a salesperson into a more valued role and eliminate competitive similarity.

Pat has some fantastic insight into thought leadership and this webcast presented by Launch International and SiriusDecisions will offer some specific best practices and examples of how you can harness the power of your organization’s existing intellectual property and transform that insight into powerful and differentiated content and conversations.

Other Recommended Blog Posts
My SiriusDecisions colleagues have been writing some great blog posts lately — too many to mention here, but these are a few of my favorites:

In Beware of the Big Deal, Lisa Singer offers some great tips for product managers who are told that there’s a HUGE deal that MUST be approved, even though the proposal includes significant discounting. What should you evaluate? What are the risks? How do you know if it’s really a good deal or if it’ll come back to haunt you?

In When Did the Business Case Become Passé?, Marisa Kopec notes that in some situations, the business case is seen as “uncool” or shunned or deprioritized because those responsible are “too busy,” resulting in a lack of alignment between product, marketing and sales, as well as confusion around the direction of the go-to-market strategy. Yes, you want to be agile and nimble, but you also ensure that there is a solid business rationale behind your initiatives, and Marisa offers some advice for “making the business case cool again.”

One of our most frequent topics clients ask about is is how to improve product launch, though other than a Tweet or status update, often Social Media is forgotten or not fully leveraged. In Improve Your Next Product Launch: Engage Customers Through Social Media Channels, Pat McAnally offers insight from recent research looking at how best-in-class organizations are leveraging social media pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• Bad product managers make excuses. Good product managers make things happen. #prodmgmt (permalink)
• Why Good-Better-Best Prices Are So Effective j.mp/WYElax #pricing #prodmgmt #prodmktg (permalink)
• Great piece on why “corporate strategy” is often so vague and 5 questions you need to answer to get it right j.mp/Xf6eIn (permalink)
• I added the product features that each of you demanded. Now it’s a worthless hodgepodge of complexity. j.mp/Yw3zgP #prodmgmt #ux (permalink)
• Why are companies risk-averse? Great post: “Nobody ever got fired for failing to innovate” j.mp/XBMNty #innovation (permalink)
• #Innovaton is more than just cool new products; business models may need to change too. Great examples here: j.mp/YwbCdD (permalink)
• Good examples of different brand/product strategies to lure non-customers from @knowledgwharton j.mp/YGqHbG #prodmgmt #innovation (permalink)

How do companies make innovation investment decisions?
I’m asking for your help with some research we at SiriusDecisions are conducting into best practices in innovation investment and prioritization –- how companies make decisions on what products to invest in and prioritize, and what criteria are used to evaluate opportunities and measure success.

I’d like your input into this short survey, and I’d like to share the results with you. If you are involved in business-to-business product management, product marketing, or are involved in your organization’s process to prioritize investment across products, please take 10 minutes and complete this survey.

By completing this survey, you will gain access to unique intelligence about trends and best practices in this area – information that you can use to improve the way your organization approaches investment decisions for new and existing products. An executive summary with key survey findings will be provided to all interested respondents.

Upcoming webcasts and in-person events
I mentioned a number of exciting upcoming events in my last post, so here’s a reminder. All of these are normally for our SiriusDecisions clients only, but we’re opening a limited number of spots available to others. Space is limited, though, so please register soon if you’re interested.

• Webcast: B-to-B Personas and Buying Cycles (Wednesday, February 20, 2013)
• Webcast: Best Practices in Product Roadmaps (Thursday, February 21, 2013)
• In-person advisory forum in Minneapolis: Leveraging the SiriusDecisions PMM Model to Drive Customer-Centric Innovation (Tuesday, February 26, 2013)
• In-person advisory forum in Chicago: Leveraging the SiriusDecisions PMM Model to Drive Customer-Centric Innovation (Chicago; Thursday, February 28, 2013)

For more product management and product marketing links and insight, follow me on Twitter at @jefflash.

What’s the Best Way to Announce a Price Increase?
Also over on the SiriusDecisions blog, my colleague Lisa Singer tackles the fun subject of price increases. Pretty much every product or solution has to deal with it at some point, and there are ways to do it well and do it poorly. Often, companies stumble over the communication around a price increase — surprising customers with it, being accused of trying to sneak it in, not providing rationalization. Lisa provides a straightforward and practical set of guidelines for the best way to announce a price increase.

Meet me in Minneapolis and Chicago
I’m excited to announce some upcoming events in Minneapolis and Chicago in late February where Lisa and I will be presenting and leading discussion on product management best practices — and you’re invited. (If you like what Lisa and I blog about, you’ll love the live show.)

Product planning and innovation can be expensive, taking several months — if not years — before adding to a company’s bottom line. Similarly, the maintenance of a profitable portfolio of products has become increasingly important to organizations where there is stiff competition for sales and marketing dollars. Increasingly, b-to-b product managers and marketers are taking a detailed look at the success of new product introductions, seeking frameworks and decisionmaking criteria to enhance new product success in the market.

In complimentary half-day advisory forums in Minneapolis (Tuesday, February 26, 2013) and Chicago (Thursday, February 28, 2013) where we’ll share research and lead discussion on our best-in-class framework which is designed to help you optimize a customer-centric innovation and go-to-market business process for new product success.

These forums are designed for business-to-business product management and product marketing leaders. Seating is limited so learn more about Leveraging the SiriusDecisions PMM Model to Drive Customer-Centric Innovation and register today for your seat at the Minneapolis event or the Chicago event.

Upcoming webcasts: Best Practices in Product Roadmaps; B-to-B Personas and Buying Cycles
If you can’t make it to Minneapolis or Chicago, don’t worry — we’ve got some webcasts coming up which are open to all as well.

On Thursday, February 21, I’ll be presenting Best Practices in Product Roadmaps. Roadmapping is always a hot topic, though it seems like recently it’s been getting more attention. My blog post on Three Problems on Product Roadmaps generated a bunch of comments and got a ton of traffic — and roadmaps have been the subject of other recent posts on other blogs as well. I’ve been talking with a lot of product managers about the struggles they have with roadmaps — the challenges in creating, documenting, and sharing them effectively. Through our interactions with clients and other research, we’ve uncovered some key best practices to make roadmaps effective, including how to develop roadmaps which can align stakeholders behind a shared strategy and vision; how to use roadmaps to build support from senior management; and how to document and communicate your roadmap so as not to set unrealistic expectations (especially among your sales team, channel partners, and customers).

So, if this sounds of interest, make sure to sign up for the Best Practices in Product Roadmaps webinar on Thursday, February 21, 2013.

And, the day prior, my colleagues Marisa Kopec and Pat McAnally will be presenting a webcast on B-to-B Personas and Buying Cycles. While the traditional type of persona exercise works for consumer-based marketing, advertising and Web design, much of its content isn’t relevant to understanding b-to-b buyers. In b-to-b, where buying behavior is phased (buying cycles), highly complex and inclusive of multiple individuals with different requirements (buyer roles), what matters are the key attributes required to inform marketers, sales and product management on what b-to-b personas need to facilitate their buying process.

The webcast will cover how b-to-b personas are an important part of market / product definition and positioning/messaging; a template for defining a b-to-b persona and the key attributes that must be identified to build them effectively; examples of best-in-class personas and actionable guidance for creating your own personas. Learn more and sign up for the B-to-B Personas and Buying Cycles webinar on Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

What’s hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• The Ideation Switch – making a conscious decision between Ideation and Execution j.mp/10vciOf #innovation (permalink)
• Visualizing your product-market fit with a Value Proposition Diagram j.mp/10gq6w2 #prodmgmt #lean #startup (permalink)
• Good humor for Friday. RT @sehlhorst: If you’ve ever gathered #requirements, goo.gl/YtYRz will make you laugh #prodmgmt #baot (permalink)
• A good read from @johnpeltier on Product Fragmentation, ProductCamps, and the future of #prodmgmt j.mp/11cXfgP (permalink)
• Why Most Product Managers Suck (an oldie but goodie) j.mp/Wv7uFJ #prodmgmt (permalink)
• Saying no to feature requests b/c “he wasn’t our normal buyer profile”; shows value of good segmentation/personas j.mp/WfJA5r (permalink)
• Delivering Value by Moving From a PMO to a Product Centric Organization; applying #prodmgmt principles to internal IT j.mp/10DSaJT (permalink)

Why eating your own dog food may be hazardous to your health
You may have heard the expression “eating your own dog food,” meaning that you should use your own product or service. After all, if you don’t believe in what you’re selling, why should anyone else? Unfortunately, eating your own dog food (or, as I prefer to say, tasting or eating your own cooking) may not be the best thing for your company or your product.

So, when does it make sense to taste your own cooking? When does it make sense to eat it? And when does it make sense to do neither? Over on the SiriusDecisions blog, I present a simple quiz and some suggestions.

SiriusDecisions Summit 2013
Speaking of SiriusDecisions, we’ve announced our SiriusDecisions Summit 2013, our annual unique three-day conference where SiriusDecisions analysts and top sales, marketing, and product management leaders from leading organizations share how b-to-b organizations are solving critical issues that hinder predictable growth.

I’m very excited about this year’s theme — Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Product — and I will be presenting a on few product management topics. The Summit has become a legendary event in the world of b-to-b sales and marketing, and this year we’ve added even more content, including a break-out track focusing on product management and product marketing, plus presentations of our own original research on related topics like innovation and portfolio management.

Learn more about the SiriusDecisions Summit 2013 and see the full agenda. If you’re interested, register soon — early bird pricing ends January 15 and the Summit will likely sell out.

ProductCamp season

Speaking of conferences — or, in this case, unconferences — with 2013 comes a whole new crop of ProductCamps. ProductCamps are participant-driven “un”conferences for anyone involved in designing, developing, managing, or marketing products. All participants are encouraged to present a topic or run a group discussion, and all attendees cast their votes for sessions and presentations they’d like to attend. The most popular sessions get on the schedule — it’s a conference for the attendees, by the attendees.

There were over 25 ProductCamps last year, ranging from places you’d expect (like Silicon Valley and New York) to places you wouldn’t (like Kiev, Ukraine). Already on the calendar for this year are two for Saturday, February 2 — Vancouver and Chicago. I’ll most likely be attending the Vancouver ProductCamp, so make sure to say hi if you’re there. I would recommend you register if you’re interested, but it’s already sold out (though there is room on the wait list). Check the global ProductCamp schedule to see if there’s one in your neighborhood.

What’s hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• Eliminating #prodmgmt from your company b/c of financial problems is like selling your car’s engine to pay for gas. (permalink)
• New on my @Pinterest #prodmgmt comics board: “Software bloat” is not a feature j.mp/TYETLP (permalink)
• Four Reasons Why Social Media is Not Research j.mp/SclFUZ from @LauraVEM; relevant for #b2b #marketing #prodmktg #prodmgmt (permalink)
• How Thinking Like a Designer Can Inspire Innovation; 4 simple, practical tips j.mp/VOtOub #innovation (permalink)
• Thanks for the personal and heartfelt holiday greetings, companies whose email newsletters I tried to unsubscribe from months ago (permalink)

Over on the SiriusDecisions blog, I provided some food for thought (pun intended) last week in advance of the U.S. Thanksgiving break with my post on Three Problems With Product Roadmaps. What are the problems, you ask?

• Confusing short-term plans with a roadmap.
• Executives confusing a roadmap with the roadmapping process.
• Product managers having an ad hoc process for roadmap creation.

Want to know how to solve them? Well, read the full post for my three recommendations, and be sure not to miss good comments from Geoff Anderson (@gander2112) and Bruce McCarthy (@d8a_driven). Maybe you have some comments to add too?

What’s hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• A Gantt Chart is not a Product Launch Plan. #prodmgmt #prodmktg #launch (permalink)
• Pricing: Why Customers Choose The Higher Priced Product (More Than 95% of the time) j.mp/Ql0AXu #pricing (permalink)
• Without product documentation, would your customers be able to use it & get 80-90% of the benefit from it? j.mp/Ql0ajJ (permalink)
• Good article on #gamification and considerations for adding it to your products j.mp/XBuEAb #prodmgmt (permalink)
• American Breakfast & the Mother-in-Law: How an Anthropologist Created Go-Gurt j.mp/UJp88l #prodmgmt #ux #anthropology #innovation (permalink)

Best practices in communications around sunsetting products

Announcing the end of a product’s life is no fun but there come times when it has to be done. Unfortunately, communicating to current customers and the market in general is often overlooked or mishandled. My colleague Lisa Singer (@lisagsinger) provides these tips on what she calls a product marketer’s least favorite task.

Buyers don’t want your content

Lastly, also from the SiriusDecisions blog, my colleague Erin Estep (@eeestep) has a realization for business-to-business marketers that Buyers Don’t Want Your Content. As she writes, “organizations of all sizes are struggling to make internal changes so they can meet the ‘content requirements’ of today’s buyers. But buyers don’t want more content! They actually want less content, and more information. … While content strategy is important, it needs to be based on information that buyers are actually looking for, instead of thinking about content as an end in itself.” Read the full post and the discussion that follows.

After months of campaigning, and billions of dollars spent, the latest round of US elections (presidential and other) is (mostly) behind us, and it’s a good chance to look back and ask — did we learn anything? Over on the SiriusDecisions blog, I argue that, beneath the griping about negative advertising, campaign spending, and over-focusgrouped talking points, there’s a bigger story of what elections can teach product managers and marketers about competitive strategy.

What’s hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash

• Programmers who can talk to customers, marketers who can be technical have huge advantage over colleagues who can’t j.mp/RMBFa8 (permalink)
• When you present a list of positive product attributes, buyers don’t add them up, they average them j.mp/Q2mr5V (permalink)
• Don’t think research is a phase; it is ongoing. Prototyping is the way you learn. j.mp/RRBRF9 (permalink)
• Good example of real-world bottom-up market sizing for a product idea j.mp/Q9i20Q (permalink)
• WRITING a business case is the easy (and least important) part; what’s harder but more important is research which goes into it. (permalink)

Developing Marketing Messages? Turn to the Phone

I’ve written here before about how it’s important to speak in the language your buyers use, including leveraging common industry terminology and avoiding internal acronyms. But how do you make sure that you are hitting the mark?

My SiriusDecisions colleague Jason Hekl has a great post that describes one often-ignored approach — leverage your teleprospecting organization to improve marketing programs by listening to the language customers are using over the phone, and use teleprospecting calls as an opportunity to test variations on your message. As Jason points out, “the teleprospecting organization engages the most prospective buyers in actual conversations.”

We are well into American football season here in the U.S., and while I’m normally not one for sports metaphors, it struck me that football provides good analogies for how companies bring products to market. Many organizations struggle with product launch, ending up with ineffective and costly go-to-market failures. Similarly, some football teams run too many unsuccessful plays, struggling week after week to make any progress. See what you can learn from football strategy in my most recent post on the SiriusDecisions blog: Do you have a “Hail Mary” approach to your product launches?

How to handle a product launch failure

Speaking of product launch, Fortune had a great article recently on Hosain Rahman, co-founder and CEO of Jawbone, and the disastrous launch of the Jawbone product UP. Hosain Rahman’s beautiful failure is a refreshingly honest look inside why a product launch failed and how the company handled it and recovered.

Why cash Cows need market requirements and marketers need to go on sales calls

Back on the SiriusDecisions blog, there are a few specific postings from my colleagues which are worth mentioning. Pat McAnally describes how cash cow products need to be nourished, not just “milked,” and how to leverage the Market Requirements Document to help in that effort. And Megan Heuer provides an unfortunately much-needed reminder that marketers should be going on sales calls.

How to lie with focus groups

Lastly, if you’re like me and love some qualitative research humor, check out 7 Ways to Lie with Focus Groups.

Learning from Apple’s mistakes

Over on the SiriusDecisions blog, I posted on Five Lessons for B-to-B Marketers from Apple’s iOS 6 Maps Gaffe. If you’ve used iOS6, or been following the news, you know that the iPhone 5 launch has been overshadowed to some extent by problems with Apple’s new Maps app. What can you learn from this? Though it’s geared towards business-to-business audiences, it’s really applicable to product managers and product marketers regardless of the type of product.

From the How To Be A Good Product Manager archive

Speaking of Apple’s mistakes, I wrote about how product managers could Learn from the mistakes of the iPhone 3G S back in 2009 when it was released. It’s interesting to go back and read that post now (and the comments) and see what Apple has (or hasn’t) changed since then.

Product Management Talk: Personas

My SiriusDecisions colleague Marisa Kopec was the speaker/leader of this week’s Product Management Talk, focused this week on The Persona Based Approach To Effective Product Marketing. If you’re not familiar with it, #ProdMgmtTalk is a weekly Live broadcast with Twitter Chat. Here are some of my favorite tweets:

• From @jefflash (that’s me!): Personas should be based on actual research with lots of buyers/users vs. stereotypes (gut feel; anecdotal example; relatives) #prodmgmttalk (permalink)
• From @repossibility: Well-designed personas are the sales person’s best friend by showing what prospects think BEFORE they contact sales people #prodmgmttalk (permalink)
• From @Convo_Craig: Targeting a specific persona and a well-defined problem they need solved aligns #prodmgmt #marketing and #sales… #prodmgmttalk (permalink)
• From @jefflash (me again!): Big mistakes people make w/personas: thinking job title = persona; that personas are automatically reusable across products #prodmgmttalk (permalink)

If you’re reluctant to kill a product because you’re in love with it, remember … Every product that hangs on beyond its shelflife represents loss of opportunity, loss of momentum, loss, loss, loss. And that’s if you’re lucky.

You could be giving your competitors an opportunity to gain market share and mindshare within your segment. Which could be the kiss of death.

In other news, Jason Brett’s presentation The 60 Second Business Case won Best Session at ProductCamp Atlanta 6 on August 18, 2012! If you were like me and weren’t there in person, you can still see what all the fuss was about and see the slides on SlideShare. I commented on Twitter that it really wasn’t as much about business cases as it was about portfolio management, to which Jason replied: “agree. It’s precisely about doing the most important things and explaining why those things are important.” If that’s not the essence of product management (and of a lot of work — and life), I don’t know what is.

In closing…

For more regular product management and product marketing thoughts and links, follow me on Twitter: @jefflash. And don’t forget to email me your feedback or leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the new blog format.

Until next time,
Jeff

• I’ve published over 150 blog posts providing practical tips for product managers and those involved in product strategy, product development, and product management.
• The blog has received hundreds of thousands of visitors; there are tens of thousands of individuals who have subscribed to receive new posts via email or RSS; and there have been hundreds of comments left.
• Posts have been translated into several different languages and republished on web sites (and in print publications) worldwide.
• I’ve had the opportunities to “meet” — via email, over the phone, and in person — hundreds of product managers and product leaders from around the world, representing all different types of products and industries.

By those measures, the blog has exceeded my wildest expectations. I am amazed and honored by its success and the feedback I have received from readers.

However, just as important to me is that through this blog — and through my product management roles over the past few years — I’ve realized my passion for helping product managers, product teams, and organizations improve the way their approaches to product management. Or, as my Twitter profile says: Passionate about making successful products and making product managers successful.

That’s why I’m so pleased to announce that I’ve joined SiriusDecisions, a research and advisory firm focused on helping business-to-business companies improve their sales and marketing effectiveness. I’m humbled to be part of a tremendously talented and experienced team which is doing some fantastic work in aligning sales and marketing functions across various industries. One area they focus on is Product Marketing and Management, and I am now part of a team which works with companies to improve how they develop, manage, and market products and services and improve their product management effectiveness. This includes identifying and sharing best practices and providing advice and consultation through data-driven research, advisory services, webcasts, in-person forums and workshops, consulting, and e-learning, and other methods.

Helping others improve how they approach product management is something I have enjoyed doing as part of my product management jobs — and through “extracurricular” activities like this blog — and I’m excited to be able to now focus all of my time and energy on it.

As part of this new role for me, I’ll be making some changes to this blog, though some things will remain the same:

• All of the existing blog posts will remain on the site unchanged. They still serve as valuable references for hundreds of thousands of visitors and still generate discussion. Hopefully they will continue to be useful for a long time to come. They will still be licensed under a Creative Commons license, meaning you’re free to republish or create derivative works as long as you follow a few minor conditions.
• I’ll be contributing to the SiriusDecisions blog regularly. It’s a fantastic resource for all things b-to-b sales and marketing, and I encourage you to visit and subscribe via RSS. (And pass it along to your sales and marketing colleagues, too!)
• I’ll continue to post to this blog, though the format will change. I’ll be posting links and summaries to other good product management resources available on the web like articles, blog posts, videos, white papers, etc. That will include links to some of my blog posts on the SiriusDecisions blog, as well as posts from my colleagues. As other SiriusDecisions relevant content is available — plus information on webinars and other events — I’ll include that too.

If that’s not enough for you, you can also follow me on Twitter as @jefflash, check out product-related visuals I post on Pinterest, and see what questions I’m responding to on Quora. (And, as new relevant services pop up, I’m sure you’ll find me there too.)

I’ll go back to my original goal for this blog — to share what I’ve learned and connect with the product management community. I realized a while ago that those goals would never be “achieved,” because there will always be more to learn and there will always be new people with whom to connect and from whom to learn. Thank you for helping me along the way so far and for continuing along with me for the journey ahead.

If you want to be a good product manager, understand that your product is part of a broader portfolio of potential investments. Most companies have more than one product and all companies have other options for investment. When you are proposing a new product or product enhancements, you not only need to make the case for why this is a worthwhile use of company resources, but you need to understand that those making budget decisions will be evaluating all other product proposals as well as other areas of investment, including operations, customer support, marketing, and sales.

Of course, product managers nearly always complain that there is not enough investment in their products. When is this a legitimate complaint and when is it just a strategy to get more funding? What is the appropriate level of product investment? As I argue in “What’s the Appropriate Level of Product Investment?”, an article just published by Pragmatic Marketing, there might not be a magic formula to calculate product investment, but there are some metrics that companies can use to help make smarter product investment decisions.

Many companies approach product investment ad-hoc, with each product requesting investment independently and without an overarching portfolio strategy. This can lead to haphazard strategy and sub-optimal returns as investment options are not evaluated appropriately. Product groups should look at the overall corporate strategy, innovation strategy, financial and business goals, and other objectives to determine the right approach to balancing product investment. Individual product managers should seek to understand these drivers of product investment in order to position their initiatives appropriately with respect to the other funding options.

Too much self-aggrandizing — or too weak of an argument — can hurt the prospects of getting the right level of investment for your product. Product managers need to put together solid financial business cases for their product investments which accurately represent the potential benefits of any initiatives they propose. And, like the products themselves, these business cases need to be positioned appropriately against all of the other options available.

If you want to be a good product manager, speak in the language your customers use. Speaking in the customers’ language means two things: making sure that your language and approach resonates with the market, and making sure that you are tailoring your marketing effectively to the type of buyer/persona.

If you’ve told family members or friends that you work in marketing, you may have received responses of chuckles and eye rolls. Have they followed up with jokes about “paradigm” and “synergy” and “world class”? Their reaction is understandable, given the sheer amount of bad product marketing that is out there in the world. Bad marketing gives marketers a bad name, but good marketing can improve the impression of marketers by increasing overall marketing effectiveness and driving companies’ success and revenues.

Too often websites, brochures, and other marketing materials are filled with jargon that only makes sense to people within the company or to industry insiders. Sure, your whole product development team might know what the acronym means, but does the customer? Does a “scalable, best-of-breed cloud-based framework leveraging cutting-edge XYZ technology” mean anything to your buyer (or even your sales team, for that matter)?

Customers don’t care about features, they care about benefits. They don’t care about whether your solution is “built on the newest JRE platform” or not, so long as it “works on all devices.” Saying that your product “addresses key government regulations” is much clearer — and more concise — than listing a handful of acronyms.

Not only do you need to talk about benefits in language the reader will understand, you also need to think about the target reader(s). For most products — especially those in business-to-business markets — there is not a single individual “customer,” and you need to address those buyer personas differently. With an enterprise IT purchase, for example, the IT manager deciding which product fits the organization’s needs the best is going to have different questions, concerns, and lingo than the finance manager approving the expenditure. In that case, the IT buyer may really want to know about the technical jargon, while the finance buyer may be more concerned about long-term maintenance costs and licensing terms.

When you address the right buyer in their terminology, it allows them to determine better whether the product addresses their needs and allows you to overcome any potential hurdles they may have in the purchase process. There are few things worse than convincing several key stakeholders that you have the right solution for them, only to be hung up on one required approver because your messaging didn’t speak their language.

The most ineffective product marketing is filled with internal jargon, overused hyperbole, and targets the wrong audience. The best product marketing connects with the customer by speaking in terms which they understand and which resonate with their needs.

By understanding the language your buyers use, and understanding the differences between your different buyer personas, you’ll not only make your marketing much more effective, but your company revenues may grow dramatically. Plus, as a side benefit, you just may change the reaction you get from family and friends.

Note: A version of this was originally published in 42 Rules for Product Marketing, along with 41 other rules contributed by leading product marketing experts.

If you want to be a good product manager, satisfy customers first before attempting to delight them. There is a lot of talk lately about how to “delight the customer,” and organizations are attempting to do this through exceptional customer service or unexpected product features. This likely driven by an attempt to generate buzz and goodwill by customers raving about these delights, often on social media. When done well and appropriately, the benefits of these delighting product aspects can truly differentiate an offering and an organization.

However, when companies attempt to add delights to a product or service without first satisfying the basic needs and expectations of customers, the extra add-ons have the opposite effect. When customers see a company putting effort into neat/cool/unnecessary features or benefits but ignoring basic fundamental aspects, it implies that the organization is either (a) trying to cover up their faults, or (b) oblivious to customer needs. Either way, it does not send a positive message to the market and is likely to backfire.

Simply put, you can not exceed the customer’s expectations without first meeting them. Furthermore, to paraphrase Dan Pallotta (from his excellent blog post I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore), it is so rare that a customer actually has their expectations met, much less exceeded — a problem caused by companies not having any idea of what the customer’s expectations are in the first place, or forgetting basic tenants of customer service. This lack of customer understanding can have disastrous results.

Take the example of Qantas Airlines, which launched a contest on Twitter which asked customers to respond with their “dream luxury inflight experience.” Normally, this would have been a reasonable promotion, but, as David Meerman Scott writes in his blog post Qantas Airways Twitter #fail:

In the past month, Qantas had faced a major strike, which grounded the fleet and has experienced ongoing disputes with the unions that represent pilots, mechanics, baggage handlers, and caterers.

The travelling public was greatly inconvenienced during this period of turmoil and cancelled flights. I had friends who couldn’t make it to America for long-planned meetings because of the strike.

Qantas offering this frivolous contest struck people as insensitive.

Luckily, there are other companies and products more successful at delighting customers, but only because they have first satisfied basic needs. For example:

• The Volkswagen Beetle — both the original 1950s version, and the “new” 1998 revision — famously included a flower vase on the dashboard. A bud vase in a car is certainly an unnecessary feature, though one which captured a lot of attention from customers. Luckily for VW, the reaction was positive because the car met all the expectations of potential buyers and then some. Had the car suffered from poor reliability, dismal fuel economy, safety problems, or any other major flaws, the bud vase strategy would have backfired. (Sidenote: VW announced earlier in 2011 that the next version of the classic car would not include a bud vase, in an attempt to make it seem less like a “chick car.”)
• MailChimp is an email marketing service provider, competing in a growing and fairly crowded market. They stand out from their competitors through their quirky and comical yet friendly style. A newsletter administrator is notified of a new subscriber to their mailing list not through a dry, curt note, but with a friendly “Nice! Guess people like what you’re saying.” Analytics showing which countries are most popular are noted by “Hey look at you being all popular in these countries!” Newsletter unsubscribes are announced with “Nuts, you had a few people jump ship. Ah, who needs them anyway?” This style is beyond just the copywriting (though their recently-unearthed internal style guide — Voice and Tone — provides many more examples), but it permeates their entire company culture. Of course, this is only successful because the fundamental service that MailChimp covers the needs of customers and is on par with others in the market. Had they attempted this style but offered a product which was missing several expected features, customers would likely jump ship to another less quirky but more reliable competitor.
• Google’s “Easter Eggs” are uncovered on a fairly regular basis, from the recent let it snow (which displays falling snow) and Happy Hanukkah (which adds a Star of David banner below the search box) to the more obscure do a barrel roll. The decorative changes to their homepage logo — known as Doodle 4 Google — have taken on a life of their own, to the point where there is a team of Doodlers dedicated to these regular logo changes. Clearly, these Doodles and easter eggs are successful in getting users to return over and over again to the site, but only because they are (at a minimum) satisfied with the quality of the search results they receive. A less-robust search engine which attempts these attention-grabbing tricks would certainly have not have as positive a response from the market.

As a product manager, when a opportunity to “delight” the customer appears, but before acting on it immediately, ask yourself these questions:

• Has the product first satsfied the basic customer needs?
• Are there any obvious flaws in the product which should first be addressed?
• Does the effort needed to “delight” the customer have the potential to offer a return?
• Is it likely that a customer will notice this “delighting” aspect?
• Is this “delight” done in a way to enhance the current offering, or will it have the potential to highlight preexisting issues?

It is a noble goal to delight the customer, as both companies and consumers benefit when executed well. However, product managers need to ensure that basic needs and fundamental expectations are first addressed before attempting to enhance products and services with unexpected delights.

If you want to be a good product manager, take the blame for problems with your product. Blaming others is never productive — it ruins relationships, decreases morale, makes others less likely to help in the future, and, most importantly, does not do anything to correct any problems which might exist.

Product managers may complain about having all of the responsibility and none of the authority and may argue that blame is an appropriate response when something goes wrong and it is outside of their control. Unfortunately, this is destructive behavior which may provide a temporary reprieve but will inevitably make the problem worse.

Blaming others is dangerous not just because it is counterproductive, but also because it delays — and likely amplifies — the fallout related to the problem. For example, maybe a product is not selling well, and you blame the salespeople, whom you claim are just not good at their job. In reality, the problem may be that the salespeople were not trained appropriately on it, or that they do not have enough support from sales engineers, or that they do not have high quality leads on which to follow up. There could be a whole myriad of reasons why the product is not selling beyond just the skills and ability of the sales team.

Blaming the salespeople in this example does not fix the problem. Replacing the salespeople does not fix the problem either — a different sales group would likely have similar (lack of) results if the underlying and related issues are not addressed. Imagine that you blame sales and succeed in getting a replacement sales team, but do not address the root causes of the slow sales. If that new sales team is not successful, you not only have alienated a large group of people within (and now outside of) your organization, but you have put your credibility and career in serious jeopardy.

Ultimately, even if your problems are the result of another person or group, it still does no good to blame them. In fact, it is usually counterproductive. You will need their help to fix the problem, and blaming them means they will feel more insecure and will be more likely to put energy into defending themselves rather than improving what is wrong.

So why do product managers blame others? There are probably a myriad of reasons, though most frequently it is to avoid looking weak. There is a mistaken belief that by deflecting problems on to others, you look infallible. The irony is that most people are smart enough to see through this, and when you attempt to deflect the blame off yourself, people lose respect for you and you end up looking weaker. Accepting responsibility is a sign of a strong leader — one for whom a single problem is not going to cause a downfall.

There are certainly times when others make mistakes and they need to be held responsible. A good product manager does not let obvious or intentional mistakes go unnoticed; a good product manager addresses them professionally and works towards a solution. More importantly, a good product manager seeks to get to the root of the problem and address it so that the problem goes away; even better, a good product manager learns from the issue and institutionalizes a solution so similar problems do not come up again.

Take the earlier examples: If customers are complaining about bugs, is that a QA problem? It could be that QA was understaffed, or that they were pressured to push the release out the door before they felt it was ready. It could be that the engineers did not do adequate initial testing before handing off to QA. It could be because the developers did not get clear and complete specifications, so they made decisions about how the product should function; absent of proper direction, this results in an classic example of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” It could be (and often is) that a combination of various forces which, when combined, created the problem of a buggy product being sold to customers.

Rather than finger-pointing, product managers need to step up and accept the blame when a product is having problems. By definition, they manage the product, and with that position and title comes the responsibility to own the success of the product. Do not sweep problems under the rug or blame others — acknowledge the issues and take the lead in fixing them. The product development team and other internal stakeholders will respect you more for taking ownership and not “throwing them under the bus,” making those groups and individuals more likely to put in the extra effort to lend a hand this time and in the future. Then, when you address the issues and things start to get on track, share the credit, and you will end up being not just a successful product manager but a well-regarded product leader.

If you want to be a good product manager, be comfortable getting involved in all aspects of your product. Ignoring issues which demand further scrutiny is a sure-fire way to miss important details, hurt your credibility among the product development team and other internal stakeholders, and reduce your overall effectiveness as a product manager.

Product managers should know how to and spend time with activities like:

• Follow up with a customer after a salesperson reports a customer complaint during a sales call
• Getting to the root cause of strange problems being reported by customer support
• Working out details of the implications of product plans with internal groups like finance, legal, and sales operations
• Conducting customer interviews personally (as opposed to delegating this to other internal or external resources)

Often product managers do not get involved in these activities because either they do not know how to do them, are not comfortable doing them, believe that their other duties are more important, or feel though they are “above” doing some of these activities.

This is not to say that a product manager should be involved in all of the “none of the above” tasks at all times. Often, product managers fail because they are perceived as the person who should do all of the miscellaneous work, or they spend too much time in tactical responsibilities rather than delegating those. However, product managers should get involved in some details from time to time for a number of reasons:

1. It will help you identify things related to the product which you would not find out if someone else carried out the task. Yes, a customer service representative can follow up with a major customer to find out more details about the error they received, and they will do a good job of it — but they may only be focused on identifying more out about the error and when it occurred. If you follow up, you will (should) also probe more to learn the scenario which led to the customer performing the task which caused the error, how often that customer performs that task, the broader scenario surrounding that task, the value your product provides by solving the customer need need, and a long list of other information which you would not have learned by delegating the follow-up to someone else.
2. It will give you credibility with your colleagues. There is nothing which turns off colleagues more than responding to a request they feel is completely reasonable with a response that you do not have time for their request, that their request is not important, or that the request is “not my job.” Implying that you are “too good” to do something (but your colleague is not) is a recipe for disaster for product managers, whose success depends on influincing people over whom they do not have authority. When you can go the extra mile and help them out with a problem, show them that their request is important, act courtesly and respectfully, and finish what you started in a timely fashion, your colleague will be more than willing to return the favor at some point in the future. (Bonus points if you genuinely thank them for the opportunity to get involved and for their assistance along the way.)
3. It will help make you a better product manager by teaching you about other areas of the business. By “rolling up your sleeves” and diving into different areas within your organization, you will make yourself more knowledgeable about the overall operations of your company and about the various aspects of business in general. The more you learn about the manufacturing operations, the supply chain, the CRM system, or the human resources policies (yes, even HR), the more well-rounded you will become, making you a more valuable product manager for your organization and a more marketable product manager overall.

Finding the right balance is important — too much time spent in the details will take time and attention away from important strategic responsibilities, though avoiding all of the details will shield you from important information which can help enlighten your strategic responsibilities. Product managers who are comfortable getting involved in all aspects of their product and can devote the right amount of time to these details will undoubtedly be more valuable and successful product managers in the long run.

If you want to be a good product manager,plan, protect, and position yourself for future competition. If you are entering a market where there are competitors today, it is fairly certain that there will be new competitors tomorrow. If you have found something “new to the world,” it is guaranteed that others will follow you in to the market if you are successful. As a product manager, you need to plan for future competition, protect yourself from it, and position yourself to actually use that future competition to your advantage.

There have been a number of examples recently showing how new competitors — and in many cases competitors who are much larger and more powerful — have entered certain markets, and how existing products have been prepared and responded effectively.

Apple’s iCloud service is currently the buzz of the technology industry. Only time will tell about  the impact of Apple’s iCloud service, but the announcement alone created a lot of questions around its impact on existing services (for example, the Fortune story “Why iCloud won’t send the competition to the ground“).

Dropbox used the announcement as an opportunity to showcase the additional problems they already solve today that iCloud will not address. They likely predicted market entry by Apple (and Google, and Amazon, and others) and designed their solution accordingly. By supporting additional use cases — including the need to access files on multiple platforms and the need to share files with others — Dropbox has a good chance of emerging from the iCloud release not just unscathed but potentially stronger, as Apple’s entry brings more interest and attention into the benefits of cloud-based computing.

In another technology example, the popular screen capture tool Snagit identified a need for a simple and easy screen capture tool and built a large customer base around their well-designed solution. However, Windows 7 included a built-in Snipping Tool providing the same functionality.

Is Snagit doomed? Unlikely. First, they long ago began adding additional functionality to address more complex needs and problems around screen capture — including more complex post-capture editing features, add-in toolbars for common software programs, and a wider variety of different screen capturing options. While Windows may meet the needs of some users, for the market segments on which Snagit focuses — including technology professionals, trainers, and graphic designers — the built-in functionality Windows offers will be too limited, and Snagit will be able to retain their customer base. And by introducing a whole new segment of the market to screen capturing for the first time, Microsoft has expanded the potential market for Snagit, since likely some users discovering screen capturing through the Snipping Tool for the first time will feel limited and look for a more robust solution.

Secondly, TechSmith, the company that makes Snagit, did not rest on their laurels and stop at static screen capture. Years ago they innovated and expanded their product suite to related offerings, including video capture (Camtasia), usability testing and market research software (Morae), and online screen and video sharing (Screencast). Had TechSmith simply added incremental enhancements based on current customer feedback, they would be left simply with a bloated Snagit tool and in a much more vulnerable position with the release of Microsoft’s Snipping Tool.

Protecting against future competition does not always mean product innovation, however. For example, with a rather simple consumer product like bleach, preparing yourself for future competition may focus on marketing and distribution. When Proctor & Gamble tried to take on leader Clorox in the bleach market, they found that Clorox was prepared for this potential competition and reacted swiftly, according to this interview with former P&G’s former CEO A.G. Lafley:

P&G chose Portland, Maine, as the test market, hoping to escape notice from Clorox, which was headquartered in Oakland, California. But Clorox got wind of the plan in time to distribute free gallons of Clorox bleach to every household in Portland, making all P&G’s advertising dollars, sampling, and couponing irrelevant. “Game, set, match to Clorox,” Lafley says.

Had Clorox been unprepared or unable to react swiftly, they may have faced more severe competitive threats with P&G attempting to enter the market. True, it could be argued that Clorox had made themselves vulnerable to competition by not being more innovative with their core product. However, they were effectively able to put down the competitive threat and are still the market leader in traditional bleach, while both Clorox and P&G have gone on to innovate tremendously in other areas.

Hoping you do not face competition or planning on riding out the good times until a larger competitor eventually enters the market are not effective strategies. It is possible to effectively fend off competitors — be they scrappy startups or well-funded multinationals — though this can only done through proper planning, preparation, and proactive innovation. Good product managers will consider traditional and possible new competitors in their overall strategic planning and roadmapping, and guide their products accordingly.

If you want to be a good product manager, understand your customers’ buying process and factor that in to the overall design of your product. Yes, you must have a good product in order to succeed, but a good product alone will not lead to sales success. Without understanding the process which your customers go through to evaluate and buy a product, you may be missing crucial elements in the product or in surrounding elements — everything from sales channels to product support — which will impact potential revenue.

• What budget is used to fund purchase of the product? Understanding where the money comes from within an organization is important because the budget for that area may be shrinking. For example, you may develop a fantastic service to help companies organize and optimize their in-person training, but if budgets for in-person training is being cut across the board, you’ll be facing an uphill battle no matter how good your offering is.
• Whose approval is needed for the purchase? Depending on the type of product, and the amount that the product will cost, there may be other individuals who need to approve the purchase. For companies, it is standard that a manager has a certain level of signing authority, above which the individual will need to seek his or her manager’s approval. You may have designed a product which will improve the effectiveness of a company’s marketing efforts, but the price point may be such that it requires approval by higher levels of management. Those higher levels of management may have different priorities, questions, and timelines for approving such a purchase, so understanding those approval levels and their implication is essential to build your overall value proposition.
• Does the purchaser have a different set of criteria than the user? Products for children are classic examples of this. Toddlers never purchase their own toys — and the purchasers (most likely parents or relatives) will have different criteria than their young users. Parents may look for criteria like durability, materials used, age appropriateness, and even country of manufacture; children may focus more on colors, shape, familiar characters, or unintended uses. (One can imagine an inner monologue of “I like this toy car because it’s black and it would let me pretend that I’m talking on a cell phone just like daddy.”) Purchase criteria need to be factored into the design, development, and marketing of a product to ensure that all elements of the product strategy align with the factors which will influence purchase.
• Are the purchasers used to making this type of a purchase? Addressing an unmet need of a customer segment who has been ignored is a ripe opportunity for product success, though it presents new challenges in executing a sale of a type which may have no precedent. Maybe you have software that will help a company with their financial reporting obligations. The users of this software and the decision to purchase may come from a Finance Department, which may have no experience evaluating this type of software. Or, you may be selling a product which is a large capital expenditure to a group which is used to deciding on smaller operational expenses, and they may be paralyzed by the prospect of a large initial investment, regardless of its long-term benefits.
• Are there other decision-makers which need to be included? Many companies traditionally have grown by selling the same products to more of the same customers, and also selling new “similar” products to those same customers as well. As products branch out to new groups within existing customers or entirely new customer groups, there may be new stakeholders for which there needs to be accounting. Imagine you are a product manager at a software company which traditionally has provided products to allow individuals with an organization to perform statistical analysis. If you now plan on launching an product to facilitate enterprise data mining of customer information, there may be a whole new set of individuals involved in the purchase process — those focusing on legal, security, and privacy — whom were never a part of the purchase decision for your other products.

There are a multitude of different factors which need to be accounted for when creating a product and setting it up for success. Identifying unmet market needs and meeting them is a crucial part of successful product management, but if the overall purchase process is not understood and accounted for, all of the great work which went in to developing an innovative product will be all for naught.

If you want to be a good product manager, understand relevant switching costs and attempt to reduce them as much as possible to improve customer acquisition and perceived value. Every product has a cost, whether implicit or explicit. Even “free” products have a cost, most notably the time a consumer spends learning and using it. People will buy and use products where the value and benefit they get from the product is higher than the cost to them.

Want even more product management tips? Follow me on Twitter for daily bite-sized nuggets on product management and innovation.

In most cases, the main cost is explicit — the price of the product to purchase. However, in many cases, the cost to someone is beyond just what they have to spend and takes into account other factors. These switching costs take multiple different forms:

• Learning cost: A new product might have improved functionality or capability which requires an investment of time and training to take advantage of. Switching from a car automatic to manual transmission may require the driver to learn how to drive a stick-shift. Switching from Windows to OS X may offer some benefits, though there is initially some loss of efficiency at a minimum for even the most experienced computer users. For a computer programmer, coding in a new programming language may offer many benefits, though it will require time to learn the language and potentially cost to purchase resources and training in order to become knowledgeable about the new language.
• Opportunity cost: In some cases, consumers have to deal with mutually exclusive product offerings, and choosing a new one which provides benefits may require losing some benefits their current offering provides. A hospital choosing an electronic medical record system on which to standardize will select the option which best meets their needs, though invariably there will be features and benefits of other systems of which they will miss out. A long-time elite member of one airline’s frequent flyer program considering a switch to another airline as their primary carrier will invariably get some additional benefits with the new program, though will likely have to give up perks of their previous program.
• Implementation cost: The cost of getting to the point where a product can be actually used is often higher than the cost of the product itself and is often a huge consideration in enterprise environments. Installing a new ecommerce system may offer significant improvements for an online retailer, though there will likely be costs in adapting that system to billing, fulfillment, customer service, and related technologies within the organization. Solar roof panels may be an improved option for a homeowner looking to reduce energy costs, but there are significant costs in not only installing the panels themselves but wiring the home’s electrical system to take advantage of the new technology.
• Conversion cost: For some products, data or settings need to be converted from the old to the new product. Switching to a new contact management system involves proper transition of the data from the old to new application to ensure no data is lost or rearranged. Anyone who has avoided upgrading an aging computer knows the cost (in time, and often in money) to convert data and settings to the new version.

Decisions to stick with a current (and often inferior) product rather than switch or upgrade can also be attributed to these more psychological or behavioral reasons:

• Inertia: People in general stick with what makes them comfortable. They use products that have worked well for them, and do things a certain way because they have always done things a certain way. (“My mother always used this brand of pasta sauce, and her mother always used this brand of pasta sauce…”)
• Fear of change: Rather than looking at the benefits of a change, people may look at only the things which can go wrong. (“What if the new detergent doesn’t clean as well as the old one? What if my cell phone number doesn’t get switched properly to my new carrier and I’m without a phone for several days?”)
• Overestimation of the difficulty of the change: Some changes can seem more daunting than they actually are. If consumers do not have a clear picture of what the change requires, they may resist. (“I’d like to switch to a new bank account with higher interest rates, though I can’t bear to think of the hassle of changing my direct deposit setup and automatic bill payments.”)

Switching costs are relevant for most products in some form. Even with totally new and groundbreaking products, consumers are switching from some other prior option, even if not a direct competitor. (Consumers using ZipCar for the first time, for example, do not switch from using Hertz or Avis, but instead from using public transportation, a taxi, or maybe borrowing a friend’s car.) Product managers need to identify what the potential barriers to adopting their product could be and how to overcome these obstacles. These can be built in to the product or service itself to not only remove objections but actually provide additional competitive differentiators. For example:

• A customer relationship management (CRM) application provider could offer data setup for free to all customers who sign up for an initial contract term to ensure that conversion costs are not a barrier to adoption. To provide additional benefit, they could offer to “clean” the data while converting it, providing an additional service and benefit to customers.
• For a product with a learning curve, certain elements like an online demo and customer testimonials on the product’s ease of use could address customer fears about learning cost. Discussion forums, free online training, and implementation guides could help support users after adoption as well.
• A bank attempting to lure customers to a new checking account offering could offer a checklist of automatic payments the customer needs to consider changing. Better yet, the bank could offer contact information for the most common payees, forms for the customer to provide to their payroll department to change direct deposit settings, or even provide personal assistance in setting up automatic bill payments on the new account.

Successful product management is not just about having a “better” product — it is about understanding what it will take for a customer to adopt the product. By understanding the explicit and implicit reasons for a customer to resist switching, product managers can better design their offerings to allow a larger number of people to actually adopt them.

Want even more product management tips? Follow me on Twitter for daily bite-sized nuggets on product management and innovation.

If you want to be a good product manager, realize that your product is likely one of a multitude which your customers use in the course of a day. Only in very unique cases is a product truly the center of someone’s universe.  Product development teams need to recognize that they are thinking about their product much more than anyone else outside their organization, and make decisions about design and communication accordingly.

Overestimating the importance and focus your customers place on your product can have negative implications — here are a few examples:

• You come up with a fancy new user interface, which you think is “better” than anything else out there, though it’s so different than the other programs your customers interact with that they can’t figure out how to use it.
• You add features that users would find relevant only if they used your product exclusively.
• You do not consider any potential opportunities to integrate your product with other services or products, and thus do not realize that those integration touchpoints are key to users’ workflows.
• You use very specific terminology which is not easily recognized by anyone new to your product.
• You send emails to people on your mailing list talking about nuances of your product, yet you don’t remind recipients what your product actually is. (I received an email like this recently, with the email boasting about new features in their 2.0 version — yet nothing in the email told me what the product was or what it did. Had I been a regular user, I would not have needed this explanation; however, since this was one of probably many  web-based free “beta” products I had signed up for in the past year, I couldn’t remember what it was or why I would have tried it.)

As a product manager, you likely think about your product all day, every day. It is very unlikely that your customers think about or use your product nearly that much; to them, it is more likely just one of a thousand stars in the galaxy.

Taking this into account, here are a few things a product manager can do:

• Use existing standards whenever they are relevant and applicable. “Control-C” is the shortcut for copy — do not use that key combination for some other function. If there are standard sizes, connections, conventions, or metaphors with which customers are familiar, avoid breaking them unless are absolutely necessary — and even then weigh the benefits of the new approach versus the drawbacks of doing something different than what is expected.
• Reinforce your positioning and benefits on a regular basis. For customers who are using a multitude of products, they may need a reminder about the explicit benefits and value proposition even well after they have made a purchase decision. Confusion or forgetting about your product could lead to apathy, lack of recommendations / referrals, or even negative attention.
• Understand how your product functions as part of a system. Realize that your product needs to work with other products which your organization produces as well as products and systems created by others — including your competitors.

By not overestimating the importance and use of your product in your customer base, you will end up creating an improved product which ultimately will better serve the needs of your customers — and, in a strange coincidence, may actually make it a more important part of their day.

If you want to be a good product manager, save some features for later. It’s important to include enough functionality when a product is first released, though there are legitimate reasons to delay the addition of some non-essential features for future releases, including:

• Customers have difficulty processing too many features at once. With new products, it is too easy to get into “feature overload” and make it hard for users to focus on the most important functionality. Extra features may divert attention from the truly differentiating elements of the product, so much so that some customers may get distracted by the less important elements and lose sight of what truly adds value. However, adding new features over time allow users to slowly acclimate themselves to new functionality as it is added.
• Fewer features initially allows you to capture more value later. Some “one hit wonder” products release all of their best functionality on their first release, then fail to follow it up with subsequent improvements. In many cases, this problem could be partially resolved by staging their incremental releases. If all of the truly worthwhile features are in the initial release, it will be a challenge to capture additional value later through price increases or add-on modules. Instead, a slimmed-down Version 1 product with just the essential functionality may be enough to prove the value of the product and garner customer acceptance, paving the way for you to better construct a roadmap which will capture more value from existing customers and target new customer groups. This provides more flexibility for charging for add-on modules or overall price increases as the product is enhanced over time.
• Staging features provides you the ability to adjust new features based on market feedback. There is one certainty in product management — you always know more tomorrow than you did yesterday. What may seem like a great set of features before your initial release may turn out to not necessarily be the case after you launch. By holding some features back initially, you get the benefit of customer feedback. Once users interact with the product, they will be able to provide feedback not only on the features you have, but more importantly the features you do not have. Functionality you maybe previously thought was crucial may turn out to be less important, and innovative ideas which you had never thought of may be suggested by your customer base. Feedback based on real-world experience will allow you to identify new directions and adjust your future roadmap, saving you from potentially releasing less-worthwhile features and allowing you to put energy and effort into more valuable functionality.

As product managers plan enhancements and additional releases, an awareness of potential future features will help establish the foundation for the product roadmap. However, product management is a marathon, not a sprint, and product managers need to look after the long-term success of the product. Instead of trying to release any potentially relevant feature right away, product managers can release a good set of essential functionality first, allowing for quicker time to market. Then, by holding some features back and staging future product releases, product managers can better establish a compelling roadmap to stay ahead of development while also preparing for any changes ahead in the market.