Pragmatic’s Steve Johnson: Strategy is over-rated

I caught up today with Steve Johnson, arguably the world’s foremost, and most entertaining, educator on Product Management. The interview started off calmly, but somewhat off-message, with Steve talking about how sometimes, tactical activities are the most strategic. “I’ve been growing in my appreciation of the people in marcom. They’re such an easy target, but let’s face it, with out them, the office would be pretty boring and ugly. It’s time to recognize the beauty that they bring to the tech company,” Steve said, wistfully recalling his first marcom coordinator, though he wouldn’t mention her by name.

Steve’s employer, Pragmatic Marketing is widely known to offer the “industry standard” training courses on product management, and has recently expanded its offerings to include more advanced topics such as roadmapping, conducting effective customer interviews, and choosing fonts and colors for your company’s brochures.

The company publishes a grid that is both its framework and its company logo. Steve offered the grid as an example of where tactics and strategy are indistinguishable from each other.

As the interview progressed, however, Steve seemed to be heating up, often stratying from the script that he delivers week-in and week-out as part of his courses. “Strategy crapagy”, Steve said in an outburst, “darn it, my opinion is not only relevant and interesting, but my opinion rules!”, seeming to contradict his oft-quoted edict.

“Sometimes, a data point does describe a market”, he raged, seeming frustrated with Product Managers who take his advice too far. “You can’t have a line without a single point!”

“Strategy is over-rated, Alan. Sometimes you have to get in there and just do it! Look at Nike, that’s what they do!”

There you go, straight from the horses mouth.- Alan

April First, 2008
(Updated: April Fools!)

GeneTree … are you serious?

A couple of things up front:

• I’m not a privacy bigot. You can find me on facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, multiple blogs, flickr, my own personal website, and my corporate bio page. I post fairly liberally about myself online.
• I probably have the best existing genealogical records for my family. I’ve spend HOURS formally interviewing my oldest living relatives, writing down their thoughts, touring grave yards, going to family farm land that my family lost during the great depression. I’m fairly interested in the topic.

So as I’ve started to think more about social networking, I became interested in the possibility of social networks to make genealogy work in the large. It makes intuitive sense to me that social networking is an ideal way to build a genealogical graph. The information is distributed and hard for one person to collect, but not so hard when each person contributes a node and a few branches.

Then I stumbled on Genetree. This company uses genetic testing to automatically build family trees, or at least to connect distant relatives.

OK, sorry, you lost me there. I have to submit my genetic material to a testing lab, have it encoded and stored in your data center, so that you can broker connections between me and my long-lost relatives in Scotland and Alsace-Lorraine?

Yeah, no. No thanks. Let me know how that goes for you. By the way, congratulations on getting funded. Can I speak with your investors?

Xobni: Cleaning up email

If this product works as advertised, it will help a lot of us. Email has become the unstructured data repository from hell. I read somewhere that up to 80% of corporate data sits in email somewhere. Filing email into folders is fine for some people, but most of us are not that structured, and even if we are that structured, it’s not always clear where an email should be kept for reference sake.

Xobni is trying to help change this. Check it out by clicking the badge below (or this link), and let me know what you think. I’m going to experiment with it as well.

Alan

Measuring the selling cycle

When I talk to Product Managers about Win/Loss Analysis, one of the first steps I suggest is to analyze the sales funnel to find out where we are losing traction. (Normally I’m focused on places we’re losing traction, but the same thinking applies to figure out what’s working.) From there, we design the win/loss analysis to focus on the stage in the selling cycle where we are having the biggest problem.

The trouble is that funnel ratings are all over the map. There are so many problems … where to start? Some of the most common problems I’ve seen are:

• sales people don’t use the CRM system reliably, so it can be very time consuming to determing where we are losing, or getting, traction
•  the ratings systems measure activity by the sales person, but don’t measure activities that the customer performs. Customer activity is a meaningful indicator and should be the primary thing we measure.
• the resolution of the ratings systems are too high or too low. If there is no rating between “we know their name” and “onsite presentation”, then we really don’t know where we’re at with the top of the funnel. Similarly, if we have too many ratings, the sales people will stop using the ratings, or they will be used unreliably.

As I have said before, I like the CustomerCentric approach to selling. They outline a good way to measure activity throughout the funnel; to advance to a higher rating, the customer needs to agree to something or take action on something, and the CCS approach holds back valuable resources, information, and expertise from the prospect until they perform those actions.

The truth is though, it’s more important that your company trains, uses, and enforces some kind of sales process. Just using one is more important than which one you use. And even if your sales people don’t use a disciplined approach, you can use a framework like CCS to do your own querying for specific opportunities.

Later this week I’ll describe a high-level framework that I like to rank progress through the selling and buying cycles.

Alan

To the sales people, you are just a chicken

In my first post on this blog, I mentioned that I had taken on a full-time sales role for the first time. Every one of you should consider a role in sales for a year or two … it is a real education.

It’s not as though I hadn’t “done” sales before. In product management and corporate strategy, I participated in countless sales engagements starting at the first conversation and leading to the roll-out / deployment planning. I have trained dozens of sales people on my products, and after taking Customer Centric Selling myself, I have even been a coach in a CCS seminar put on by Philippe Lavie, a consumate sales person himself.

It is so easy to criticize a sales person, and how many times have I done that myself? Oh, we used to make truly geeky jokes that sales people are like Stateless Session Beans (thankfully the sales people didn’t understand why this got such a laugh). They’re so coin operated. Just order takers. They don’t even understand the product.

I still do believe that the really good sales people are very rare, and I have strong opinions about what makes a good sales person. But I am beginning to understand, in my bones, the real difficulty of the sales job, and it gives me a lot more empathy for the coin operated people in sales. Every phone call matters. I am constantly negotiating. When people don’t call me back, what do I do? (Next!) How do I set up this relationship so that I maintain my own power and not give it all away to the propsect? Will the deal close in time? Forgetting to log my activity in salesforce. Forgetting the status of an account when asked by my boss.

I really do enjoy selling and sales, and I will be doing this for some time to be sure. Personally I think I’m good at it and I’ve had some wins, along with some errors that led to failures. And certainly some failures that were not my fault, and wins for which I should take no credit. There is a certain Tao to it all.

But I caution you … the next time you get upset with a sales person, think again. It’s like the man said: When it comes to the breakfast, the chicken is interested, but the pig is committed. And when you are sitting in product management, the pigs in sales look at you and all they see is a chicken. Drop off your eggs and keep moving buddy, I’m making some bacon here.

I am personally glad that I started on the product side. But after sitting in sales for just about 9 months now, I can’t recommend it strongly enough: At some point in your career, take a commissioned sales position, and not just an SE role. Be the seller, and stay there for a couple of years. Stay there until you get it right.

Come on, what are you? Chicken?

- Alan

Thank you Plaxo: You synchronize my life

For years I have wanted this service. Some promised, but no one delivered. And now along comes Plaxo.

I remember Plaxo a bit in the same way that I remember PointCast. PointCast was really a first generation RSS reader, in that it would go out to various websites and pull down new content, new articles that were published. I don’t recall all the details, and probably never knew them anyway, but I do recall that PointCast went down in a ball of flames, largely because the whole “push” model went down in flames. I was disappointed when the IT director started to block PointCast traffic, and then I realized that it was happening everywhere, and PointCast fell away.

Now of course Plaxo is a much newer service, but in a way, I think the name still carries some “first generation” baggage with it. Plaxo used to be about keeping my address book up to date; it would walk through my contact list and email everyone in there, giving them the option of updating their own information. I liked the idea initially because it pushed the problem out where it belogned … to the owner of the information. You know if your information is up to date, and you can quickly re-enter it for me, thank you.

But soon Plaxo got a bit of a bad reputation. People got sick of receiving the self-updating invitations, and many spam filters started blocking Plaxo traffic. It seemed to many, especially with the upsurge of social networks and free competition from CardScan, that Plaxo would die a slow death, or that it was already dead.

Not so! Plaxo came back a few months ago with a 3.0 beta product that is now central to my life. They have identified out a most difficult problem: synchronization across home and work. So now I have Plaxo running on my MacBook Pro at home, my iMac in my home office, and my Outlook at work. Not only that, but it is connected in wild and wacky ways with my Google GMail account, so now my Google Calendar and Address books are automatically synchronized with my home and work life.

And everything is all good. No longer do I have to wonder whether something I create at home will be sync’d with my work calendar. No longer do I actually have to fire up Outlook or Outlook Web Access to set an appointment from home. I simply enter it anywhere … on my iPhone, on my iMac, on my MacBook Pro, on my Google Calendar, or on my Outlook at work, and it magically appears everywhere else.

It’s missing a few things in my view. For example, its duplicates tool is not good enough to be useful, and I think it needs a sort of audit service. I have 1000 contacts, and I’m sure there have been a few mistakes in sync’ing; I have found some entries that are total nonsense, so I wonder if there may be some bugs. Also, Plaxo does not sync photos from my Mac address book. I know that Outlook doesn’t have photos as an option, but both of my Macs do, and my iPhone does, and I’d like to sync them.

Customer service is also on Plaxo’s radar. I had one inquiry that went well beyond their promised SLA. I emailed their “Customer Advocate” after not getting my response in time, and I got a response pretty quickly.

Notwithstanding these glitches, this is a service that I love. They have overcome their own first generation hurdles and created a new product that solves a big problem for me, and I hope they are successful forever. Amen.

Question for you: Corporate Blogs

I mentioned earlier that my company has a blog. So, what’s new about that? Well, like many things, there are good blogs, bad blogs, and good and bad corporate blogs. I dislike blogs that are blatant marketing pitches, and it’s clear that readers don’t like them much either. One of my recent entries was picked up by Jesse Wilkins, where he gave a very nice compliment, namely that “I can recommend it comfortably as a good example of how to do a vendor blog”. Thanks Jesse!

Blogging for my company has got me thinking, and Jesse’s comment focused it for me: what makes a good “vendor blog”? In a future post I would like to write about corporate blogging from the perspective of product management and marketing. But who better to ask about this topic than you, dear reader?

Here are my questions for you:

1. Are you involved in your own company’s blog? If so, drop me a note and tell me a little more.
   1. What is the purpose of your blog?
   2. What works for you and your blog?
   3. How do you measure success?
   4. How do you avoid irregular posting schedules
   5. How do you deal with company confidentiality vs. transparency, and … here’s a hot issue, how do you share openly while staying “on message”?
2. Do you read any blogs regularly? If so, what are they? What do you like about them? Are there any corporate blogs on the list?
3. Any war stories about publishing your content would be most helpful.

I hope to hear from you. You can email me here: Alan Armstrong.

How different people handle change

As a Product Manager, you are required to deal with all parts of the company, from marketing to development to finance to operations to the executive team; you need to be able to work with all of them. Furthermore, you are often an agent of change in the organization. You need to sift through massive amounts of information, find the relevant bits, assemble them, synthesize, and make an argument for changes. In fact, if you’re not changing something at your company today, just what are you doing?

It’s worthwhile, then, to think a little bit about change and the ways that different people handle change. A lot has been written on this topic and I do not pretend to offer an exhaustive or even a properly distilled treatment on it. But I do have some suggestions. This whole issue came up for me tonight in a totally unrelated context, but one where the issue was just so clearly visible, almost a microcosm of situations I’ve faced dozens of times in work and social environments.

A little story then.

When I lived in the SF bay area, I used to attend an East/West meditation evening at the Mercy Center in Burlingame. Normally I would go for Sushi afterwards, and if you get the chance, you must try Sakae on Park Road in Burlingame just across from the Apple Store. And after a Zen meditation session, one should take in a little sushi. But I digress.

Tonight as I am visiting the bay area on vacation, I attended another meditation session. After the meditation, the teacher, Father Greg Mayers SJ, introduced a new aid to meditation that he will be using at the upcoming Zen Sesshin in November. The aid was called a kyosaku, a finely crafted wooden stick that is used in Zen meditation. One of the attendants walks around, and when the meditating person invites the kyosaku, the attendant smacks the meditator on specific pressure points between the shoulder and the neck on the upper back. Each side gets two smacks. The smacks are not painful. Rather, because of the construction of the kyosaku, the technique used, and the pressure points used, the smacks help to clarify the mind and also help release certain muscles that can become sore and tight during long sitting meditation sesshins.

Why is this relevant? Well, after the teacher had his student demonstrate the technique on him, he began to describe the purpose of it. The reaction from the room of meditators was quite fascinating:

• One woman began by saying that she was very offended by the presence of the stick in the peaceful meditation room. It reminded her of the stick that nuns used to use to punish catholic school kids. She said that she would not attend the retreat if that stick was to be used.
• Another chimed in that she agreed. She said that the symbol of a person hitting another, regardless of whether it was helpful or hurtful, the symbol itself was simply intolerable.
• The teacher welcomed the comments. He reaffirmed though that the kyosaku was going to be used at the Zen Sesshin, not in the regular meditations, but it would be used on that weekend. It was a liberating aid to meditation, and that it would only be offered to those who requested it, and that no harm would come to anyone.
• One person reflected on her experience of receiving the kyosaku unexpectedly during a Sesshin in Toronto. She said that although she was unaware of what she was receiving, it was a tremendously clarifying aid to her meditation, and that she was glad to have received it. She said that there was no pain involved, on the contrary, it relieved some muscle tension.
• Others suggested that perhaps another method should be used, such as gentle touch.
• Later in the discussion, others chimed in.
  • One person said that he had been coming to these sessions for several years and had never heard of the kyosaku. He did not like the idea of changing anything.
  • Another said that he had been on a Zen path for five years, had never heard of the kyosaku, but after the explanation, he was opened to the idea. Initially he might have thought it negative, but was now open to it.

I was quite amazed by all of these reactions, and my own reaction. Initially I was very intrigued by this instrument and I found the idea of such a clarifying aid to be quite exciting. As I saw it demonstrated, I was even more intrigued. I was hoping they would call for volunteers right there!

When the discussion got underway, I found myself quite stirred by it. I felt angry, but was probably just quite upset that such a promising aid was dismissed without understanding. I perceived that fear and people with stuck, fixed ideas, were trying to shut down something that could be quite beneficial. I expressed this to the group. I also suggested that these feelings of fear could be seeds of further meditation, and that perhaps the very fear they were experiencing was itself a teacher for them. They weren’t buying it, but I did hear some positive feedback about that idea after the discussion.

Why have I spent so much time describing this situation? And how is this relevant to you as a product manager? Different people have different attitudes to change. You need to learn how to read peoples’ styles and do your best to adapt to their style. If you can’t adapt, you won’t get very far with those people. If those people hold crucial power or are responsible for crucial activities, you’ll be left with big holes in any plan you hatch.

How can you adapt? I have certainly hit my own pitfalls and have failed to adapt in many situations. In some situations I’ve managed to work with others with very different styles. Here are some things I’ve learned, and I’m interested to hear from you about your own experiences, especially links to articles that would be helpful. We will repost them in our article list.

OK, so here are my ideas:

1. Relationships are important. If you develop relationships with people, they will have a larger context with you, and you will have the ability to approach them even when you are blocked on a particular issue. If you are only dealing with a person with a very different style and you have no relationship, you’re going to have a very hard time getting anywhere. This means that you need to take time to get to know people and really care about them. You can’t fake this, it has to be real. I have worked with people very different than me but have also worked hard to find the things about them that makes them effective and even likable, and try to notice when that comes through. I try to tell them about it and share my positive thoughts about them, with them.
2. Figure out what kind of information people will accept as decision-making criteria. Some people need data, others need personal connection, others need to talk things out. Whatever they need, you need to try to furnish it. If a discussion is what a person needs, spend time with them, preferably over a meal. If they like data, provide the data. A lot of people need to understand how the change will affect them, particularly if their own position will change or be threatened by something you want to implement. Work with them to find a solution, or flag the issue for HR and upper management. Ask HR to work with you on the issue.
3. Focus on defining the problem first, and gaining agreement on the problem to be solved. This is 80% of the battle. If people agree with you on the problem definition, on what is wrong with the current state of affairs, they are much more likely to be open to solving it. They also need to believe that the problem you describe is relevant and significant; it can’t just exist, because there are a lot of problems and we can only fix some of them. They need to know why the problem matters to the company and to them personally.
   Some people need to be involved in problem definition, and you may need to redefine the problem if someone provides information that might change the problem definition. In any case, a robust, believable, complete, and true problem statement needs to be agreed on before any change will be made.
4. Once the problem is defined, try to get people involved in creating their part of the solution. This is tricky because some people aren’t able to generate solutions, and some simply don’t have time or are not interested. These people need to be provided with a menu of options or even a very specific set of directions. Ask the question “how independent, how competent, and how involved is this person?” The more independent, competent, and involved, the more they need to have a hand in the solution design. In fact if you are a generalist product manager, or even someone with limited time (!), you NEED THEM to create the solution. Try to get buy-in from their management for them to help you solve the problem. For this, their management will need to buy in to the problem statement.
5. Get management support. Sell management on the problem and the need for a solution. Share with them the degree to which you need or want help in designing the solution, and gain the commitment of their resources.

For some of this thinking, I am indebted to Interaction Associates, a collaboration consulting and training company in Boston and San Francisco. They have models for creating a “path to action” that describe the problem, vision, constraints, and solution approaches. I recommend checking out their classes on collaboration and facilitation; they’ve really helped me. They have a solution design model that I can’t find on the web and my copy can’t be redistributed. But really, check them out.

Again, I would love to hear from you about your ideas here and relevant articles.
Alan

Starbucks and iTunes: The new click-and-mortar channel for music?

I wasn’t fortunate enough to be in Seattle or New York today, the initial two cities selected for the launch of the iTunes / Starbucks wifi store. The news is that the user experience is smooth, even if there were a few initial glitches along with one usability complaint reported by this reviewer. Frankly I am not surprised that there were a few glitches with this one. The baristas pull a mean espresso, but I doubt the T-Mobile gear has on-site expertise.

I think this is a brilliant move for both Starbucks and Apple. Starbucks has been aspiring for a few years now to become a third place, somewhere we can all just go and hang out between home and work. It has wifi, unlimited use of its couches, comfy chairs, working desks, and a supply of coffee and sweets limited only by the balance on one of your plastic cards.

And of course Starbucks is monetizing this third place. Now it is looking to expand its access to a market segment totally distinct from coffee and sweets: music distribution. But why create another HMV or Virgin Record store? Instead, it is serving up iTunes Store for free through its T-Mobile wifi connections. I need to dig for some info on the relative monetary value projected for music vs. coffee. Please send me a note if you have any info or links to such info.

I still get noticed when I pull out my iPhone and take a picture, check my mail, or just call someone. But today I was wishing that Apple and Starbucks had chosen the San Francisco bay area to launch its partnership, and I would have been there to write up the experience. It wasn’t to be.

Instead, I was in Monterey today, and went into Starbucks to tease the baristas for not being among the launch stores. As they were making my espresso macchiato, I discovered yet another co-marketing action: The Digital Release!

Here’s the concept: Starbucks promotes a shiny card looking like a CD cover, which is actually a coupon you can purchase at Starbucks to allow you to go home (or to your laptop in the store) and redeem the coupon for an album at the iTunes Store. Here are a couple of pictures of the cards I bought.

Not having my laptop with me, and not being able to use the iTunes store on my iPhone, I waited until I got back to Belmont, and typed in the code for KT Tungstall, Drastic Fantastic. I’m listening to Hopeless now as I type.

Will this method of distribution work? I’m skeptical. What is the benefit for the buyer of these shiny little cards? I had to buy one. OK, I bought two. It’s a business expense for me to check out the workflow, test out the concept, and write about it. Not sure my partners would agree, but after all I only spent $25.

But here’s the thing. I don’t get anything extra by buying this card versus just buying the Deluxe version of the same album on iTunes. So really the only thing this little card does is to serve as an advertisement for this particular album, and perhaps an ad for purchasing digital music. But if I want the next album they advertise, I likely won’t buy the card. I could lose the card before I got to my laptop.

Maybe I am missing the point? Maybe Starbucks gets a larger cut for the shiny cards because it can say that it legitimately influenced the purchase. Or perhaps it allows Starbucks to advertise more “Starbucky music” with less cost of materials. But these all seem like benefits to the seller, not to the buyer.

I don’t think there is much future for the shiny little cards. I will of course keep mine in a safe place to show my kids years from now, alongside the 8 tracks, cassette tapes, and vinyl records ,and even CDs and DVDs that they will laugh at in a few years. Perhaps I have in my possession one of the rarest forms of music distribution ever! Seriously, I don’t think it will last. But I’ll be watching, and I hope you’ll let me know if you disagree.

But iTunes Store over wifi? That will be a huge win. If only I could get myself to a city where they offer it this month.

Que você disse? OPM translated into Portuguese

Well this is a nice surprise for us. Our blog is being translated into Portuguese! If imitation is the highest form of flattery, translation is right up there.

You will notice that I added a comment to the first article because the translation is being done without attribution, and the translator / author did not contact us first. But … aside from that, we take it as a big compliment to be picked up this way. And whoever the author is, please do contact us!

Alan

PS: Some information on the Portuguese language can be found here.
PPS: I’ve always believed that our blog is best read while listening to some Jobim. Preferably some stuff with Getz and Gilberto backing him up. Hard to believe I hadn’t mentioned that earlier.