The Cranky Product Manager has taken up grinding her teeth once again. It’s the frustration. From dealing with Development. What is it this time? Well, let the CPM explain.
The Cranky PM is sure that most of her product management brethren are familiar with that oft-cited formula for a product positioning statement:
For [target customer], who wants/needs [compelling reason to buy], the [product name] is a [product category] that provides [key benefits].
Unlike [main competitors], the [product name] [key product differentiation].
It should not surprise you that the Cranky Product Manager finds creating positioning statements to be VERY valuable. She’s a big fan. Because you can’t do everything and you need to focus. Because people are very different and thus their needs, wants, and priorities are varied. Because if your product doesn’t solve at least 80% of some customer’s problem, you probably shouldn’t even bother. This all seems obvious to her. It’s baked into her DNA.
So she asks for your suggestions please! What should the Cranky Product do to the DysfunctoSoft Sr. VP of Engineering (whom the Cranky PM happens to report to) who objects to the first part of this formula — namely the practice of identifying the target customer?
Waterboarding? Tacks on his chair? Club him on the head with Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm book (the Cranky Product Manager’s all-time-favorite product management book, btw)?
Listen to the ramblings of the idiot:
Why should we limit ourselves to just those types of customers? EVERYONE needs our stuff. Can we say “everyone” for our target?
Why do we have to have a target customer anyway? Google didn’t have a target customer.(Actually, the CPM suspects they did, but whatev.)
Well, ok, if you really want me to narrow it down, how about we say ‘everyone with money’? Or ‘users at large enterprises and SMBs located domestically and abroad’? Or ‘everyone who uses computers’?
If we limit ourselves, we’re in danger of leaving money on the table. We’re going to take over the WORLD one day with our awesome technology — it will be as ubiquitous as water. So I think specifying a target market is dangerous and dumb. No one specified a target market for water, and look at how successful water is!
ARGGGH. Seriously, these arguments are so nonsensical to the Cranky Product Manager she finds herself having difficulty even grasping them. To her, they’re like answering the questions “Why do we have to EARN money with our software, anyway?” or maybe “Why do we want people to buy our software anyway? It’ll send support costs through the roof!”
Please help. Before the Cranky Product Manager is forced to get one of those saves-your-teeth-but-kills-your-marriage bite plate thingies.
{ 15 comments }
I suspect the VP engineering doesn’t understand the impact of (not) making choice and having focus because it hasn’t been her/his direct responsibility to obtain customers. So, there’s no experience to draw from that would be shared with yours.
I’d try an analogy. How about the hard choices that VP’s of engineering need to make? Like picking a single software language in which to write a product. Sure, C++ has advantages over Java and vice versa (I have no idea what they might be), but imagine the cost of maintaining a development staff that has coders for both languages, or co-mingling two code bases in one product in order get the “best” from each langauge. The prioritized engineering needs, and implicit focus, are what would lead a VP to make a choice willingly. And isn’t this the same as your positioning statement?
I’m fascinated by the “fear” of making choice and narrowing one’s market focus. In my experience, it’s the rare business leader that’s comfortable with doing so and “suffering the consequences” (which probably means more revenue and happier customers, but that comes after the choice is made).
Don’t eliminate the other target customers. Just prioritize them.
This is a common agile trick when deciding what features to do, and you can do it with audiences as well. Because nothing is ever ruled out, people don’t fight you about the exclusion; they struggle with themselves and each other about what the right ranking is, which is much more productive.
You can also apply the trick repeatedly as you dig in. If you decide your eventual target customer is bloggers, you can break that down into subsets, so that maybe you start out making something that kicks ass for people who like frequently posting product reviews and news. Then once you’ve nailed that and gotten a core group of happy customers, you can expand the scope and go after other customer types. Perhaps you go after the professional blogger niche piece by piece. Then you expand again and go after bloggers.
And maybe ten years down the line maybe you really do go after everybody with money. But one step at a time, focusing most of your energy on where you are, not where you dream of being.
I feel your pain. My experience:
“Well, are we building a consumer product or a business product?”
“Obviously, it’s a business product.”
“Ok. Do we cater to 5 people or 50 people or 500 people or more?”
(and so on)
By the end of an hour, he’d made the decision and I swear he still hasn’t got a clue that he actually made a decision.
I have a phrase that I use to address this situation:
“Nail it, then scale it”
Similar to William’s response, get the thing working for one group — a good important one at that — then scale efforts, not just development but sales, marketing etc. to address other groups.
The VP should realize that development alone does not a product make. The “product” is the result of what is built, how it’s marketed, and who it is sold to. All equally important. The latter two, in many cases, more so than the first.
Saeed
When I get push back from engineering on some of the fuzzier parts of product marketing, I will often recruit some backup from other parts of the organization that see the benefit in what I’m proposing.
Imagine you told your sale dept that your product was applicable to “people with money”… I’m sure they’d get right to work digging up leads with that. Same with your marcom folks, your biz dev team etc.
Positioning statements == focus for the organization. They are not mutually exclusive for all eternity, simply a statement of our direction. Hopefully would find a ton of support (and input) for a positioning statement – and with a chorus of support in the organization, show that this is a valuable activity.
Yep. Willie has it. Rank them.
And laugh all the way back to your cubicle at his reasons for not being able to put one foot in front of the other.
Surely he understands the constraints of a budget? Specifically on the Sales and Marketing side of engaging ‘everyone’. If everyone is truly the market then maybe a roadmap to show the execution into that very broad market is necessary. Of course you will need data to support your priority for tackling certain markets first. Or data to prove that going after all markets is a bad idea.
I have similar disconnects. Sadly, I do not report to the Sr. VP of Engineering (thank god), but instead to our division’s general manager.
He talks like he believes in positioning out one side of his mouth, and then does his best to undermine proper positioning, and sing kumbaya to address everyone everywhere with everything we do.
Then he has the gall to fail to understand the reasons why our competition, with well targeted products and tight positioning, are eating our lunch.
Time to find an escape route.
Definitely like William Pietri’s suggestion – total jujitsu.
Another possible approach: “‘Cause the sales people aren’t too bright, we need to give them a very specific demo to go after, where they can have a single consistent message, otherwise they’ll just be floppin’ around like fish out of water.”
The more rational version of that is to note that sales can only grow at so fast a rate. So don’t target the entire world out of the gate when you can only sell to a very small portion of it realistically.
Does this VP not realize that it takes different channels, stories, capabilities, and approaches to sell to different market segments?
I once got the question “So how many users do we lose with this ‘positioning’ of yours?” in a similar situation…
Seth Godin’s book ‘Purple Cow’ is a must read on the positioning subject. Lot’s of refreshing examples.
I also agree William has nailed it. But, the VP’s attitude seems a recipe for your personal demise. So, time to pass the buck a bit. What I like to do here is go to the sales team and the other executives to define the corporate target market, and have them help with the prioritization. Unless this is a brand new company, then some demographic is already established, or certainly the CEO understands that the “everyone with money” although a fantastic revenue base, is not realistic. So if you get others in the organization to help, that alleviates the boomerang from your boss of “well this market you picked isn’t buying, so you obviously don’t know what you are doing.” To the extreme, but keeping your nose clean (or your jeans since we don’t see your nose) is always good to keep in mind.
Your problem is that you report to the R&D guy, not marketing. Every Engineering VP/Entrepreneur/Founder/CTO/You-name-it guy or gal thinks that they have invented the perfect Ginsu knife SW solution for EVERYONE’s problem. Typical inside-out thinking that ultimately kills every company, especially in downturn like the one we have now.
You can have product mgmt report to R&D, but product marketing should be under Marketing to avoid the ginsu knife marketing syndrome. If you don’t pick a defensible target audience to actually market and sell to for your prospective buyers, then you won’t be on too many shopping lists.
Save the ginsu knife positioning for investors and internal discussions so you can tout how big your market will ultimately be, assuming that you can actually execute for every audience in the universe.
When I have had pig-headed executives outside of sales and marketing to deal with, I simply take them to one of my analysts’ friends at Forrester, Gartner, (you name your favorite) and do an “off-the-record” briefing (sort of a “what do you think of this?” briefing before the launch) to get their reaction to the ginsu knife approach. Then i let the analyst blast away. It usually starts a Q&A session between the Engineering guy or gal and the analyst that ends the internal positioning debate with a huge slice of humble pie.
My other favorite tactic is to bring the Engineering ginsu knife proponent to one of the Pragmatic Marketing public classes. That also results in another HUGE slice of humble pie.
If neither tactic works and you report to this person, then its time to update the resume because that company is in deep do-do.
What Rockannand said…
There are also dangers with being under the Marketing department too. The Marketing Manager often won’t understand that it actually takes time and effort to create a product… this is especially true if it is a software product. “Can’t you just whip that up? It’s only code…”. Sure, we can cluge just about anything together, but it ain’t going to work very well and we won’t be able to build on it. We’ll just have a one off orphaned product.
The Marketing Manager is also going to be pushing hard for revenue (at least at my company) especially at the end of the quarter. They are going to want to “ship it” even if it isn’t shippable yet.
However, I still see it as being a better situation to report through marketing instead of engineering for a PM.
For Vice Presidents of Engineering, who wants his technology to take over the world, the Product Positioning Statement is a prioritization tool that ensures resources are used effectively (giving you more resources to use), that the company stays in business and that customers get to use your technology and you become a hero.
Unlike working without a target audience, a Position Statement lets you build products people will want.
If you’re reporting to this Eng VP, then the right approach is William’s IMHO – prioritization, preferably with clear feedback from the other parts of the org to inform/guide the ordering. This one has the best chance of maintaining the relationship responsibly.
In the end, I’ve never met an Engineering Mgr at any level who didn’t appreciate (more correctly, clamor for) prioritization. After all, its almost certainly how its going to get built – module by module, layer by layer – not all at once.
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