Product Management, Dolphins and Awareness

Business and technology, the one function that needs to know the customers and the value we bring to them.

You are a Product Manager in a technology organization.  Your life is exciting, dynamic and ever-changing.  Usually you are busy moving from one task to another.

You are always focused, always busy. However, by constantly focusing on specific tasks you may actually lose one of your key roles as a Product Manager –watching the market!

This is about Product Management excellence.  One position in the company that needs to look at the business andtechnology, the one function that needs to know the customers and the value we bring to them

Product Manager – Watch the Market!

You are a Product Manager in a technology organization.  Your life is exciting, dynamic and ever-changing.  Usually you are busy moving from one task to another.  You are always focused, always busy. However, by constantly focusing on specific tasks you may actually lose one of your key roles as a Product Manager – watching the market! Dolphins

Product Managers should be like Dolphins* in order to make real progress you need to constantly go in and out of the water – watch this.  When you are in the water you focus on delivering user stories and writing MRDs or getting on sales calls and answering RFPs, but it is a MUST for you to also spend time outside of the water where your vision is wider and you see things from a different perspective.  Take a look at the market, new technologies, new industries and new ways for your customers to conduct business – All this will affect you, and if you stay underwater for too long you may miss your market!

* The original Product Manager Dolphin analogy was made by Adi Pundak-Mintz, a VC investor and formerly a Product Manager.

Awareness

Take a look at this before you continue reading!

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This little demonstration is based on an experiment by Christopher Chabris of Harvard University and Daniel Simons of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Fact:  People focused on a specific task will not notice other obvious market trends.  As one of the key responsibilities of the Product Manager is to be in touch with the market it is imperative that Product Managers keep time for listening to the market activities so they will notice the moonwalking bear (or the invisible gorilla as in the original experiment – see www.invisiblegorilla.com ).

Notes on Pricing

This is what we need to focus on – our customer’s Demand – and guess what is missing from the graph below

Here are my thoughts on the issue today:

Goal:

The goal of this series of blogs is to get you think out of the box about pricing and to get away from cost based pricing.

My point about traditional economic pricing theory is that, unlike classic supply and demand theory, in hi-tech we do see a demand curve, however there is no supply curve and we should actually aim to be on as many points on the demand curve as possible.

This discussion is not designed to be a theoretical academic discussion about pricing but to be a practical way for you as Product Managers to think about Pricing.

 

Assumptions:

  • Companies want to maximize their profit and in order to do that they need to optimize the price point on the demand curve.
  • A company’s goal is to be on the demand curve for every single point on the curve above a certain price point.
  • Hi-tech companies are not (in most cases) producing commodity Products.

 

Few Notes on Pricing:

Hi-tech companies all too often take the easy way out of the Pricing Dilemma by resorting to cost base pricing.  That would not be so bad except in most cases they actually underprice their product!

If a company does not understand the market then it is unlikely to understand the Demand curve.  Marketing Principle Number 1 – know a day in a life of your customer.

In almost every market there are companies who can and are willing to pay more for your product than others; however they will not be paying more if they can pay less for the same product and the same quality.

Your challenge as a Product Manager is to optimize your product portfolio so to offer to each customer the maximum value for their needs.

Value for the customer is perceived value in the eyes of the customer not in your eyes.  Marketing Principle Number 2–perception is greater than the truth.

Mind the Gap

Sometimes it is all about the distance. Proxemics – You can tell how close people are by the distance between them when they talk.

Mind the Gap – You need to watch the distance between the train door and the station platform.

In Hi-Tech Product Management you need to be careful about the distance between you and your customer.  This is a key issue for many companies.  As a Product Manager you need to understand the customers and the value you bring to them.  That is very difficult to do when you keep your distance.

This is a huge issue for young companies and startups (and their Product Managers) struggling to establish a business model.  Get too close (engage directly with your customers) and you find out your resources are stretched and are holding you back.  Get too far (use various self-serve options or distribution channels) and you will not understand your customer.

The answer is to do keep just the right distance:

* Engage directly with a few, wisely selected, customers that will be a representative sample of your target market.

* Use Self-Serve sales in a way that you are still engaged and build a process where you can actually learn about your customers

* Use traditional distribution channels carefully – make sure they do not extend  the distance unnecessarily

This is important especially early on when you are shaping your product strategy and define your business model.

Science Fiction, Star Wars and the Future – Prediction in Product Management

Niels Bohr, the Danish Physicist (1885 – 1962), said that predictions are difficult especially about the future. We all make predictions all the time. We have to. Specifically if you are part of a technology company. You need to consider what direction to take with your product.

What can we learn from Science Fiction? Do you watch a science fiction film and think “wow, this is the way life is going to be like”? Can we look at science fiction that was done 50 years ago and see if the writer was able to predict the ways things are today?

What can we learn from the Science Fiction predictions? What can we learn from the miss-predictions?

Think about Star Trek. How technology was predicted? Is there technology there that shaped our future (Cell Phones)? Is there technology that is yet to come – “Beam me up, Scotty”?

 

Think about Blade Runner[1], written in 1968 by Phillip K Dick, depicting life on earth at 2020. We are almost at there. Can we compare the way Phillip K Dick foresaw 2020, or Ridley Scott[2] in the film adaptation (1982), to what 2020 will really be like?

Think about Minority Report, Written in 1956 by the same author adapted to screen in 2001 by Steven Spielberg[3], depicting life in 2040. Is this the movie that predicted the iPhone touch screen?

This lecture series focuses on these questions from a technology-product perspective. We will be looking on how Science Fiction creators look at the future and see what we can learn from it.
What does the prediction process look like? What do we consider? What do we ignore? Where do we predict well? Where do we fall?
How can we predict more successfully?
Lecture 1 of 3 is by Lior Zadicareo, Partner at StarVision and Product Management Expert


[1] Story by Phillip K. Dick is “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, Film by Ridley Scott named “Blade Runner”
[2] Screen Play by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.
[3] Screen Play by Frank Scott and Jon Cohen

Product Management and The Cyber Revolution

Do you read books?

I was at Tel-Aviv University today.  In the Social Sciences Library they are giving away books.  Giving away books for free!

It made me realize books are dying.  Libraries as we know them are fading away.  One day your grandchildren will come to visit and they will look at your books and ask “…hey, what’s this?”  What will you say?  Will you tell them that for thousands of years this was knowledge, wisdom, education?

Go to your book shelf, take a book, feel its weight, smell it.  Then realize that we are the last generation that will experience books in this way.

The world will never be the same again.

In the Product Management course, I try to explain that we are going through a revolution, a cyber-revolution.  How is this going to impact your product?

What products are in danger?  Think how fast things are changing.  Remember voicemail?  Remember Comverse?  Remember older Cellphones?  Remember Nokia?   Remember sewing machines?  Remember the typewriter?

What is next?  What does the future hold for telecom?  What will happen to traditional Billing Systems?  What will be of the computer desktop? Will they survive, and where will Amdocs, Ericsson and Microsoft be in 10 years?

In the meantime – go smell your books.