Muthu Ranganathan, Author at ProductNation

16/09/201415/09/2014

Need 9 months to get baby out

One of the pressures and challenges of working on products is to get it out soon – the release. But I often recollect one of the leaders that I have worked with saying “need 9 months to get baby out”.

What’s the right time for a product release – Some Considerations?

Build for market, not a customer

Remember products are not built for one customer, its built for several of them, for a market. I highlight this as especially in India, we have abundant services companies and people with great experience driving innovations and solutions for one customer, and often the release time for such delivery can be done in a shorter duration as we are working towards a specific requirement set. Its different to build it for a market or many customers in mind.

Enough research time to iterate

The other key aspect of building a product is to spend good time on researching the market, understanding user problems and figuring out what to build, before start building it. In certain cases it could also be some initial prototypes to get the thinking process going. Often this time is ignored when building products.

9 moms cannot make 9 babies in 1 month

By getting more people assigned is not the solution to get the products out faster, actually it could be counter productive as there may not be enough components that can be built parallel and also could result in confusion on co-ordination.

It’s not just about development

Many software products fail primarily because they put all the time and effort only in engineering and developing the product and do not plan for an effective early adoption and go to market (including pricing) launch time planning. They consider this as lesser important task and often consider this as a post product release activity. But the market readiness and go to market should be planned well ahead, and enough time to be allocated to early adoption and launch cycle. The other aspect that gets ignored many a times is user empathy and design for user interaction and interface.

Focus on quality, differentiators

Bugs are fine in software, can be fixed is the typical attitude in software industry. But depending on the mission critical nature of the products, quality is going to be key criteria. Thorough testing and quality is an important part and while dates can be compromised, quality should not be compromised as the word spreads if its buggy. Get it out with good quality.

Many products compromise on features and differentiators, to deliver a product in time. This again can be dangerous in the current extremely competitive world.

So usually the right time of the release should have key focus on quality and differentiators.

Alpha, Beta….

We come across examples of products that get released to market without alpha, beta cycles – without being taken to first few customers or users to try out. This can be dangerous, inspite of the time pressures or the brutal confidence that you may have about your products and self testing, there should be time allocated for alpha and beta trials.

Rapid release cycles

The other side consideration here is that while products have to be planned, it can’t take too long as well. Many of the established players get into this syndrome where they spend too much time planning and laying it out but by the time the product comes out, the market is lost or captured by some one else. This is where agile methodology comes in handy. Products should be planned in such a way that there is minimum viable scope covered coming in from the research and there is agility built into cover a rapid release cycle post the first launch, where more enhancements can be planned, based on customer adoption.

So if you started reading the blog hoping to get the answer on the right time for a product release, sorry for disappointing you. But from my experience where I have been involved with enterprise software products that were built in 3 months, 6 months, 1.5 years, 3 years etc. , some of the above points were the learnings for the success or failure of the product. Plan time for the ideation/research, design, development, thorough testing, beta and GTM launch planning before getting your baby out…

Share your experience or other considerations that I may have missed here…

08/09/201408/09/2014

No. 10 : product manager is for successful products, let’s explore 10 success tips

Keeping with the world cup fever, where No.10 is center of everything for success, thought of writing this post on success of product managers, who are the No.10 for success of products.

Here in plan to share 10 tips for successful product management. This is based on my dozen years’ experiences in the function, working in Ramco, Hyperion and SAP, rolling out both successful and not so successful products, primarily enterprise software products.

1. Network to thrive: product managers most important tip is to be really networked, this needs to be in person in 1×1 and 1xN interactions, through social media and web and with internal team for key influencing, especially if you are in a bigger organization.

Network across

Build key customer circles
Stay close to Sales
Specialist groups
Coffee corners and peer to peer networking

2. Communicate to succeed: closely connected to the networking, the success to networking is communicate, communicate, communicate…product managers should constantly be communicating with all stakeholders. Whom

Internal – Influence without managing, especially with designers, developers and architects
Internal – Talk technical or functional
Internal – communicate to executives
External – Speaking in events, develop Executive presence
External – Speaking with customers/prospects

3. Specialize: Remember product managers are the Specialist…

Different levels of specialization – Level 1 across company portfolio and strategy, Level 2 across your product portfolio and functional, Level 3 in your product and best practices
Functional & Technical expertise (product managers need a balance and understanding of both)
Better customer exposure levels will only be more when you are a specialist

4. Know your competitors: product managers need deep understanding of competitors through publically available…Analyst Reports, websites, interacting with sales/presales, Win stories, loss analysis participation.

Important tip is to contribute to competitive differentiation.

Both feature/function as well as more strategic levels.
Have different comparison charts, ones for your field/sales that will help to highlight how products are better than competitor’s products to sell and for development that highlights weaknesses that will help better the product or build new ones.

5. Know your markets: product managers do not make products for specific customers, but for markets. So it’s important to understand which markets that you are focusing and understand the dynamics of those markets.

Understand Developed and Emerging market dynamics.
Understand Nuances of each market, cultural aspects e.g. US: Keep it simple and bit high level, Europe : Get to the details.
Style of business function e.g. whether in general the focus market is more result oriented or more believers in process oriented style.

6. Negotiate: Product managers spend most of their time negotiating, so acquiring some tips to better negotiate is very important.

Talk like a customer to developer, brining customer perspective and value for every key step
Be face of development to sales and customers, and bridging the business /technology gap
Build data points to back up every discussion
Build credibility across internal/external stakeholders, remember the expert tip which is interconnected to make this happen
Talk use cases/real life examples/personas…

7. Senior management buy in : connected to the negotiation, but more important is the ability of product managers to negotiate and influence their management.

Remember it’s not enough if you have great idea, you need to convince senior management

Be prepared for a 15mins, 30 mins…meetings with ideas & how it can be monetized
Leverage every opportunity :
Investment in new areas
Convincing to continue investment
Strategic acquisitions for fast time to market
Managing different point of view – as management may have a broader understanding so you need to think and be prepared to tackle those povs.

8. Spread your knowledge: product managers are the experts, but experts are known only if they share their expertise. Important you spread your knowledge

Find all avenues to share your knowledge on product, best practices and the “whys?” more than what? Or how?
Blog, tweet, build content, do trainings, challenge yourself against real life examples
Drive discussions towards the way you want to position your product
Pick on customer advisory board sessions
Tell your customer success stories

9. Balance your time: Product managers face customers/sales, development and strategic (with management). Time is precious. Important tip is to balance and spend equal time amongst different or else you can’t be successful

10.Mini CEOs: Finally product managers have to behave like mini CEO, within the scope of the products they work. Essentially product managers

Claim ownership – with which comes the responsibility of success or failure of the product
Have Business (for sales), technical (for development) and user (for designers) views
Compare it with market – and constantly strive to improve or reinvent
Know your numbers – important to know how is the business doing and what are financial or other goals
If you are product manager or one aspiring to be, the above tips should be very handy. While you may or we all have come across, consciously following this may help, as i have found it to be useful as i practice it in my past years of experience as product manager.

Let me know if you have other tips to share, questions on the above or other comments

29/08/201428/08/2014

Bridging Code to Customer Gap

One of areas I have focused in many years that I have been involved in building and taking enterprise software products to market is, bridging the code to customer gap. This really is the main reason for success or failure of products.

Success of Failure

Inspiration

Inspiration for many of us building high tech products is offcourse Steve Jobs, and here is his take on bridging the code to customer gap

Steve Jobs

Enterprise Business Software vs Consumer Software – Gap is wider

Most enterprise software products have atleast 3-4 layers between the person who codes the software and the business user who uses the product. Here is the illustration of the chain.

Product Management

Main challenge when we build products, especially business / enterprise software vs. consumer software, is often that we don’t have direct access to what the ultimate business user wants. Here are few more specific challenges that causes product success or failure

Customer side challenges

Most people in IT department of customer do not have knowledge of what is required for their business, its many times their interpretation of problem or their perspective of a solution
Business users who have the problem does not have time to invest in sharing the same
Business users can articulate the problem but do not know how technology can solve it
Business users cannot believe that problems can be solved in a different way – resistance to change
Business users resist to share information, as it may cause them becoming redundant
Business users and IT users have the knowledge of the problem but cannot influence their management to invest the time and money
Many business think they are unique and different, and standard products cannot solve their problems
Decision makers in Business and IT have different views on priorities and have conflict
Cultural differences and perception without objective assessment of problem and solution that the product can solve – startup vs established vendor, geographical boundaries, technology preferences

Product company side challenges

Focusing on what customer wants, usually solution provided by customer IT, rather than what’s the customers problem that needs to be solved by the product, which usually needs to come from customer’s business user
Carried away by new technology, instead of understanding business impact it can make
Lack of adequate specialized skills to build product – architecture, design, product management, developer, testing – assuming having just developers can lead to good products
Thinking with a services mindset, basically just focusing and building for few customer requirements rather than for market, especially due to the $ temptations there
Lack of understanding of how product gets sold
Lack of business /domain knowledge with development team
Complete lack of knowledge with sales /presales to show the value of the product
Huge reliance on consultants to get the products implemented , to configure and/or customize

Tips on how we can bridge this gap

Bridge this gap

Pilot with 2-3 key customers in the market you choose, where key Business person is involved – Get many user stories and business use cases defined from them
Identify key people in customer side who has business + IT knowledge or get a team
Culture of getting developers to focus on the problem that’s being solved, rather than just getting excited about technology and language
Key developers/architect to meet business users instead of just IT
Investing in acquiring the functional/industry/domain knowledge imparted to the development
Training extensively the product capabilities – Level 1 for Sales, Level 2 for Presales and Level 3 for consultants
Training development team how sales happens, who are the target users and what can help sell the product – listen into sales calls, customer sessions
Adopting Agile development methodology
Building a conscious product mindset into development team
Building products that can be managed by business user without IT dependency
Adopt design thinking methodology that helps understanding the business viability, technical feasibility and user desirability

Cloud helps in bridging this gap better

The biggest advantage for me with cloud is that it really helps in bridging this gap extensively, as the developer can see how the product is being used, they can quickly react and there is a far simpler code to customer connection.

cloud

Share your thoughts on this and experiences of any additional challenges you have come across or tips that you have in bridging this code to customer gap…..