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The Enlightened Stupid Marketer (a marvelous video)

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 3, 2009

in Marketing

Thanks to Midlakewinter for the link to this very-funny-but-in-an-uncomfortable-kind-of-way video, entitled the Enlightened Stupid Marketer.

It’s especially uncomfortable if you play it for your marketing weenie husband… in response to his declaring that product functionality is irrelevant to product success.  And as a crabby-ass beeyotch and an extremely insecure individual, the Cranky Product Manager took this wrong-headed statement as a personal attack on her career choice.  So, she decided to poke him where it hurts, the extremely mature individual that she is.

WATCH THAT VIDEO, MARKETING WEENIE HUSBAND.  WATCH!

Enjoy!

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If a PR / Marcom Weenie Wrote This Blog

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 2, 2009

in Marketing

If a PR / Marcom Weenie Wrote This Blog, here’s what the About page would look like:

About The Cranky Product Manager

Founded in 2006, The Cranky Product Manager (aka CPM) is a leading provider of world-class, robust, scalable, and market leading content platform that helps product professionals unlock value and position themselves for success in the marketplace, while realizing a high return on investment. Built on a next-generation, Web 2.0-based and AJAX-enabled platform, the Cranky Product Manager takes a three-pronged approach to content delivery utilizing social media and has thousands of users at leading Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Google, Yahoo, and the US Government.

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The Cranky Product Manager bitchslaps the Cranky Marketer

by The Cranky Product Manager on April 15, 2009

in Marketing

OK, so the Cranky Product Manager has been a big lazy pants lately.  No posts for over 10 days and then relying on guest posts for the past few weeks.  What can she say?  She’s drowning under a pile of work, dealing with her frakin’ taxes (which were WICKED complicated this year), and adjusting to being a de facto single parent (very glad that Darling Husband has a new job, but its hours are long – the kid only sees him for only about 30 minutes total during the week).

Ok, so sorry. Really. Mea Culpa. OK, sue me, why don’t you?

Anyway, the CPM still doesn’t have time to write a riveting post.  But she does want to tell a certain cranky guest poster where he can put his whiney rants.

To the Cranky Marketer (part 1 and part 2):

Oh, boo effing hoo.  Poor you.  Really, how OUTRAGEOUS for people at your company to expect you and your fellow MARKETERS to actually know something about MARKETS and customers.

Yes, blame your lack of basic knowledge of market segments and customers on the product managers — that’s the ticket!  Blame everyone else at the company because you  are consumed with tactical activities and don’t ever get to strategic activities.  SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN AND A HALF.

Seriously, WTF?   Part one is one of the whiniest posts ever.  You’re in Marketing, genius.  If there is one position that EVERYONE would agree should know something about the market, IT’S MARKETING.  And if there is one role in the company that has latitude to think and act strategically, IT’S MARKETING.

You think Sales or Engineering do?

Do you think Product Management is any more isolated than Marketing from the crushing backlog of tactical activities?

No way, dude.  The Cranky Product Manager’s to-do list typically has 100+ activities on it, 95% of which are tactical. And BOY, is it tempting to skip those 5% strategic activities that help the Cranky Product Manager learn about the customer, identify new market needs, and keep on top of new market trends and what competitors are doing. But somehow, like ALL decent product managers, the Cranky Product Manager manages to carve out the time for the strategic.  Even though she really doesn’t have the time.  Yes, it means tactical balls are dropping all over the place. And that she gets bitched at and whatever by Marketing Weenies who want to collect their salaries while having someone else (namely, the Cranky PM) do their work.  But despite all that, the MOST IMPORTANT STUFF – the strategic stuff – gets done.

Marketing Weenie, maybe you could try a similar approach?  CARVE OUT THE TIME for the strategic.  Stop whining and just make it happen. Suck it up.  Do you own job, and stop expecting the Cranky Product Manager to spoon feed you market knowledge. Go get some of your own. Stop blaming others.  NO MORE EXCUSES.  Be a BUCK-STOPPER, not a buck passer….  You get the point. (Well, maybe not – you do seem like the kind of Marketing guy who needs things phrased 40 different ways before you get it.)

Oh, and does telling you this make the Cranky Product Manager an “arrogant asshole who does nothing but look down on Marketing”???  Perhaps, although usually the Cranky Product Manager is called an inveterate bitch or a c-word, not an asshole.   But anyway, IF YOU DID YOUR DAMN JOB SHE WOULDN’T LOOK DOWN ON YOU.  In fact, she’d fall down on her knees and thank Sweet Cheezus Christ for sending her a Marketing Weenie who wasn’t preoccupied with colors, website fonts and product names (should this one be the “Express Edition” , the “Personal Edition” or the “Web 2.0 Clusterfuck Edition”???) and instead actually offered some STRATEGIC insight.

Oh and, for the record, the Cranky Product Manager thinks the Cranky Marketer is pretty atypical.  She doesn’t know any other marketers who (overtly, anyway) blame their lack of market knowledge on product management.  Even the weeniest and whiniest of Marketing Weenies typically see it as their own responsibility to actively acquire market knowledge and not just be passive recipients.

—–

OK, the Cranky Product Manager has to get back to work.  She’ll take on the frakin’ Cranky Sales Engineer and Cranky Engineer later.

Also in The Cranky Marketer Goes Off

  1. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off (Part 1)
  2. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux
  3. The Cranky Product Manager bitchslaps the Cranky Marketer
  4. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Part 3 – The Problem with Product Management
<< Previous in series | | Next in series >>

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Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux

by The Cranky Product Manager on March 26, 2009

in Guest Posts,Marketing,Sales

The Cranky Product Manager is SUPER LAZY these days. Once again, she’s letting someone else do the work – the Cranky Marketer – the dude/dudette in charge of Marketing at a B2B tech company. This is part TWO of three (see part one here).

This post is a  longie but a goodie, so check it.

—————-

The Cranky Marketer on The Problem with Sales and Senior Management

While I really had a tough time with Engineering when I was a Product Manager, it was nothing compared to the problems I have with Sales, now that I’m in Marketing.

As individuals, most salespeople are pretty decent folk. There are a few assholes in every company who don’t give a sh*t about who they abuse en route to meeting quota, but when it’s getting late in the quarter or the economy sours, and account reps are hustling to hit their number, even the normal ones turn into the highest paid set of babies and whiners you’ve ever seen.

And while they’ll blame everyone in sight if needed, a lot of the complaints point to Marketing.

“There weren’t enough leads.

“The lead quality was sh*t.”

“I needed new success stories. The existing ones aren’t relevant to my prospects.”

And my favorite of all:

“My territory is different than other territories. The standard collateral doesn’t apply to my patch. What else have we got?”

And while this is clearly an exercise in creative excuse making, Sr. Management never fails to give in to this crap and an edict comes down from above to generate more “quality” leads, “refresh” the collateral etc. And the downward spiral continues.

There are ways to address this, but most companies don’t have the patience, skill set or culture to fix the problem. They’re too caught up in the quarterly tactical objectives than to do what is right.

First of all, even in companies where there are way too many leads – and believe it or not, I once worked in a company where even an order taker could meet quota – a number of reps complained there weren’t enough leads.

Why is it that no matter how good the lead generation programs, 98% of leads end up in the dustbin? And isn’t it such an amazing coincidence that no matter what company, no matter what product, 49 out of 50 people who are counted as leads turn out to be uninterested or unable to buy the product? What are the odds of that?

Here’s a novel idea: put some accountability on the sales people beyond simply “making their number”. I’m pretty sure some territories are better than others, but there’s no way all sales reps are doing their jobs even moderately well.

I’ve seen sales reps who can’t tell you what business their prospects are in, what the business issues are for some of their larger opportunities or whether any channel partners have in roads at a prospect and can help move the deal forward. Forget about channel conflict or compensation issues for while. The question here is whether or not the rep even has a clue about the dynamics of the account. But that’s rarely analyzed. It’s time consuming to actually keep on top of sales reps. It’s a lot easier to tell Marketing to do a better job.

For many reps it’s simply a numbers game. With enough leads, even a very unsophisticated approach can yield results. And instead of trying to maximize the value of the deal, they’ll discount more to close the deal sooner. But then, they’re compensated on quarterly revenue so why not take a smaller amount now right?
So it’s not their fault. It’s Sr. Management who set up the sales compensation plan that forces them to behave that way. And that compensation plan along with Management’s tacit consent of the “big baby” behavior, in turn forces Marketing to fall into line and ensure the reps are properly “fed and nurtured”.

Moving beyond the sales issues, it turns out that virtually every Sr. Executive wants to be a Marketer. Yup, absolutely true. Why else do they forward emails they receive from competitors to the Marketing department, with comments like “FYI, check out the messaging in this email I just received.” Or, “Has your team seen what X is doing lately?”

OK, thanks Mr. CFO. First, I’m glad you are taking such an interest in our competitors that you’ve decided to surreptitiously add yourself to their marketing database. But do I forward you links to our competitors’ 10K statements pointing out how much better they are doing financially than we are? Or how about this Mr. CTO? Maybe I should start forwarding the patents our competitors are filing, you know, just as an FYI.

And I hate nothing more than the Sr. Exec who decided to spend 5 minutes actually reading our website, and then starts making suggestion on how to “tweak” it. Listen, those pages on the website have been like that for the last 9 months. What took you so long to send your suggestions forward? Needed a bit of time to think about them? Thanks, but we’re way ahead of you.

By the way, we don’t “tweak” anything in Marketing. We have a plan and we’re trying to execute on it. We’re measuring our work at every stage in more detail than any other part of the business. I’ve got so many metrics and measurements I could unload on you, you’d think you’re an actuary.

And one more thing. The website isn’t simply a “website”, its a freaking web application. It’s got integrations into our CRM, bug tracking and order processing systems. The Partner and Customer portals are sitting atop a home-grown CMS (cuz the company was too cheap to let us license a real one) and both portals are tied back into our Identity Management System. There is a lot of content on the site that we have update regularly. It’s a critical part of our business operation.

And yet, we have to keep it up and running with no budget, on second rate servers and without full support from IT. Why? Because they’ve decided they’ll only support the “back end” databases etc, but the “front end” belongs to Marketing. Gee, silly me. I thought we all worked for the same company.

I could keep going but I’m sure you get the point. Somewhere between having to baby sit the sales team, let everyone think they are a marketer, and maintain a complex web application with only a minimal development staff, we still have to do our marketing jobs. And none of this includes all the crap we have to put up with from Product Management.

I’ll get to that in the next installment.

Also in The Cranky Marketer Goes Off

  1. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off (Part 1)
  2. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux
  3. The Cranky Product Manager bitchslaps the Cranky Marketer
  4. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Part 3 – The Problem with Product Management
<< Previous in series | | Next in series >>

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Why it doesn’t matter where Product Management lives in the organization

by The Cranky Product Manager on December 2, 2008

in The PM Profession

The Cranky Product Manager has read, and listened, and pondered, and debated, and bit her tongue over the years, as others have debated the proper place in the organization for the Product Management function.  Should it be in Engineering? Or in Marketing? Or in its own Products organization that reports directly to the CEO?

Not surprisingly, the answer depends on who you ask.

If you ask the CodeBoyz and CodeGrrlz, they generally think PM should be in Engineering. Because then the PMs could be forced to hang out in the Agile Tomb all day with the engineers. And because some CodeBoyz and CodeGrrlz think the PM should even pitch in and write some code now and then (a generally bad idea – see footnote 1).

If you ask the Marketing Weenies, well, naturally they want Product Management to be part of Marketing. Because then the Product Managers would somehow be more focused on customers and THE MARKET. Because, supposedly, you can’t focus on THE MARKET unless the letters M, A, R, K, E, and T are in your group’s name, in that order.

And if you ask many of illustrious luminaries and pundits that consult and train on the fine art of Product Management… well, they will all tell you that Product Management is such a strategic function that it should report directly to the CEO. Screw Engineering and Marketing!  We need a pipeline to the Big Cheese! And this is all fine and good, especially if you are the VP or Director of PM and want the ego boost of saying you report directly to the CEO. You could then give both the VP of Engineering and the VP of Marketing the finger if you so desire!

Anyway, for a long time the Cranky Product Manager has read these various arguments churning about in the blogo-sphere-iverse, and something about them — no matter what their theory or conclusion — pissed her off.  Just a little. And she couldn’t quite figure out why.

Until now. It’s the assumptions underlying this debate that irritate her.

The assumption is that if we sit in Engineering we’ll be too spineless and too tunnel-visioned to focus on the customer, market problems, issues for the field, the competition, or market positioning.  But if we sit in Marketing that we’ll be so focused on empty soundbites and website color schemes that we won’t be able to give Development detailed enough requirements, that we’ll conjure up product features that can’t possibly be built (a la Warp Drive), and that we’ll stare vacantly into space instead of considering technical extension points (i.e. APIs) for our products.

What a bunch of crap.

On the one hand, all these proselytizing and theorizing folk say that Product Managers need to be these gifted cross-functional leaders and act as CEOs of their products, but then on the other hand they don’t trust these Product Managers to do so, based on nothing more than where the Product Management function sits within the organization.

For the Cranky Product Manager, and for every decent product manager she has ever asked, EVERY SINGLE decision made as a product manager comes down to the following two questions:

1. Is this the right thing for my product?

2. Is this the best thing, out of all the possible “right” things, for my product?

GOOD product managers are obsessed with doing the RIGHT thing for their products – their bosses opinions be damned, and their bosses’ bosses opinions too.  They will fight tooth and nail to make the right things happen, to prioritize the activities that will move the needle the most (i.e. make the most money).  Whatever needs to be done to make the product a success.

This holistic, obsessive, determined, and pig-headed attitude is WHY good product managers are respected throughout their organizations.  It’s why people from different functions listen to them. It’s why they have credibility. It’s why they get stuff done. And, it’s why they are often “challenging” to manage, especially if your agenda includes items other than product success.

If good PMs were able to be easily pushed around by their VP’s latest political maneuverings, well they were probably not good PMs anyway. If this seems to be your challenge, well maybe you need to reconsider how you are evaluating your PMs – are you sure it’s based on their RESULTS and not their docility?

Anyway, possession of this do-it-right-and-do-it-best attitude has very little to do with WHERE the product manager sits in the organization.  It has everything to do with the personality, passion, and focus on results that each product manager brings to the job.

So instead of pondering this infernal, and pointless, organizational design question, perhaps we should focus on hiring the RIGHT types of people of Product Management jobs.

Read what others have said about this topic:

Footnotes:

1. Having product managers code is a dumb, dumb idea – trust the Cranky Product Manager. She’s a
fantabulous product manager but at this point has forgotten more about writing code than she ever learned. Like playing a musical instrument, coding is something you need to do on a regular basis to be anything but a crappy programmer.  Plus, it take the efforts of two mediocre programmers to undo the damage done by one crappy programmer. If a good PM has time to code often enough to not be completely crappy, he/she should probably instead spend that time looking for new market problems or doing competitive analysis.

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The Engineering VP Who Couldn’t “Get” Product Positioning

by The Cranky Product Manager on October 6, 2008

in Marketing

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.

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