2018 Ltd - Product Management Training and …...1. Marginal Gains How can we as Product Managers use marginal gain to ensure we always stay ahead of our competitors? First gaining

©2018 Tarigo Ltd 1

A Look Back on 2018 | Thoughts on Product Management

©2018 Tarigo Ltd 2

In 2018 we shared many Blogs and Papers with you all written by product management professionals with over 20+ years of experience.

Here is a collection of our best bits for you to download and read at your leisure. Keep following Tarigo on Social Media and our website as 2019 promises to be an exciting year.

CONTENTSSelection of Blogs from 2018 - page 3- 42

Tarigo Papers from 2018 - page 43 - 118

What's next for Tarigo in 2019 - page 119

Tarigo courses for 2019 - page 120


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1. Marginal GainsHow can we as Product Managers use marginal gain to ensure we always stay ahead of our competitors?

First gaining prominence with Sir Dave Brailsford, Performance Director for Team Sky, the UK’s professional cycling team, he pushed the team to search for the 1% in hundreds of tiny areas that were overlooked by their competitors: they looked at more obscure areas such as taking their favourite pillows on tour to get the best night’s sleep and teaching riders how to wash their hands to avoid illness and time off training. They were relentless in their pursuit of marginal gains and it paid off.

What can we learn from this? Lots of small gains in isolation mean nothing but can add up to remarkable aggregate improvements over time. Think of apple and blackberry handsets – a product that is marginally better across the board translates into a hugely dominant market performance.

Marginal gains in your product can mean the difference between success and failure, because when product deals are won, it can be on the smallest of margins.

2. Product Management Skill Set

The role of a product manager is complex. I’d argue one of the most complex roles in a business. This graphic gives an idea of the level of complexity. The key is to hire and train around the skills that are important for your business. Hiring a product manager with great ideation skills when your business needs pricing expertise is the equivalent of hiring Ronaldo and playing him in goal.

3. Pricing Strategies

Pricing is a complex job with many parameters. One of the key points to think through is where your brand sits in the market. If you work in Product Management at easyJet or Rolex and price points are constrained by where your brand sits. The Volkswagen group handles this with a series of brands that stretch from value to premium. So it is worth thinking about where your brand sits before setting price points.


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4. Team Planning BoardA tool we use to work out what your priorities are and what skills you need in the team, then build a skills curve - compare team skills to business need. Then you can close the gap - upskill the team to get them ready for the year ahead.

5. 5 Step Product Management Plan Board

Here’s the five step Product Management team planning board in action. To optimise your team:

1. Plan your 2018 priorities

2. Write down the skills you’ll need in the team to deliver those priorities

3. Test the team for skills capability - we have tests for that

4. Build the individual and team skills curve

5. Close any skills gaps - we have online training on the complete skill set.


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6. Pricing

IS THE PRICE RIGHT? It was great delivering a Product Management pricing masterclass at Synetics Solutions - very impressive team. Here’s a thought to start the week off - for a typical software provider, a 1% increase in price nets a 7% increase in profit. By contrast, a 1% decrease in fixed costs nets a 4% increase in profit. How much time does your organisation think about cost reduction versus price refinement? Price is nearly always an afterthought, when it should be front, and centre of a product managers thinking from the start of new product assessment. Price point should be continuously reviewed and refined through the lifecycle of a product.

7. Time to Think

How much time do Product Managers think about the future? Prompted by a post on how we spend our days, I think it’s worth thinking about the risks we run when our days are full of back to back meetings and tactics. Product managers must find time to think forward - trends in their markets, new regulation, changes in customer behaviour etc. They must develop a vision of where they want to take their product based on the trends and market changes they see. The risk of not? Products becomes directionless - we’re busy making tactical changes that in aggregate mean nothing. Eventually our product becomes

irrelevant. Think Blockbuster or HMV.

My advice? Diarise strategic thinking - 30 minutes during the week where you ask yourself “What are the trends and changes happening in my markets that could impact my product” Don’t wait for the trend to hit - it’s too late then.

8. Product Updates in An Agile World

Agile techniques encourage a high frequency delivery model – new updates for customers with each sprint. This is often seen as a good thing, and it often is. But not always.

Think about customer types; a consumer might be happy that the app they bought is being improved almost daily, but if your customer is an organisation in a heavily regulated market (think banking or healthcare), they need stability.

A thirty-day sprint cycle in their world would mean being in a constant cycle of dealing with compliance and regulation. By all means, be agile inside your building, but think about your market needs – just because you can deliver in 30-day sprints does not mean your customers will want updates at that frequency.


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9. When Should Product Managers Engage with Marketing to Get the Message Right?

All too often, product marketing is an afterthought; we see many cases where teams don’t engage with marketing until late in a delivery cycle. And then they’re disappointed when the collateral, the positioning, the imagery and the core message doesn’t hit the mark. My advice? Engage early. Really early. Get the marketing team involved at the ideation stage – at the very least they can help identify USPs, more likely they’ll add real value to the discussion and ultimately help drive a better product to market. Remember, Product Management is a team sport.

10. PALM reading – how to quickly assess an idea

How to quickly assess an idea? Got lots of product ideas to sift through? Try PALM reading:

Problem – Does the new idea solve a problem for a group of customers?

Ability – Do we have the capability to deliver the new idea?

Lasting – Is the problem pervasive? Will it still be a problem in 12 months’ time?

Magnitude – Does it have scale? Are there many customers with the same problem?


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11. User Journey

Some products solve problems, some move problems. What about your product?

I was reminded of this when working with a number of customers recently. Voice over IP (VOIP) uses the internet rather than the traditional phone network to make voice calls, the primary benefit being one of cost saving. It’s a saving that has proven attractive to many companies.

And then we try and use it - 15 minutes of trying to connect, signal quality that makes conversation difficult and a couple of call drops gave me time to think. I’d imagine that somewhere in each business an IT director believes they have solved a problem of escalating telephony costs, but the reality is that they’ve moved the problem to frustrated end users who are wasting many hours dealing with difficult technology.

The product management lesson? Understand the full value chain and build out user journeys so you don’t have frustrated users at the end of the value chain slowing the adoption of your product.

12. Is product management just for commercial teams?

Over the years I’ve worked with many organisations that don’t fit the ‘traditional’ product management model - Think of government bodies, third sector, or internal IT teams.

So, what does Product Management do for a team who are not profit driven? Consider it in this way; product management tries to maximise the value of any spend made on products or services – maximise return on investment. For a commercial team this can translate into sales and profit. But for other types of organisation it translates into

something of equal importance - better value.

• “More for every taxpayer $”

• “The most efficient IT at the lowest cost point”

• “Helping more people with the same funding”

Add in the product management skill of being able to articulate the benefits we offer through value proposition building and it becomes easy to see the benefits that good commercial product management skills bring to sectors that might not seem obvious candidates.

13. Let it Snow!

The UK ground to a halt last winter what many other countries would see as no more than a light dusting of snow and temperatures hovering around freezing point – trains cancelled, flights cancelled, schools closed.

Much of the commentary expresses disbelief or anger that we are so incapable of dealing with relatively benign conditions and we should feel embarrassed by it. I don’t share that viewpoint. We could deal with it but we don’t because it’s a ‘once every few years’ event and the cost of readying our infrastructure far outweighs the national benefit.

In product management terms it’s the same as feature creep; adding stuff that only applies to a small minority of customers in a small number of circumstances, thus making the product more costly and cumbersome for the 99%. The product management lesson? Build for the core and don’t get distracted by the edge cases. For the UK? Rain – that’s the weather we know how to deal with.


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Habit 1 Firstly, stop Firefighting and start strategizing Product Managers need to balance technical and strategic workload. The risk of just being technical? No long-term thinking can mean no long-term business. Think Blockbuster, HMV, Kodak. Don’t be the next.

Habit 2 Making Effective Decisions - Hitting the right date window is hard. Give yourself a fighting chance by limiting the communication of lower value features. That way you can descope and deliver on time without delivering below customer expectation.

Habit 3 Work to a process and a plan - Without process all bets are off in terms of what we will deliver. A lack of process means who shouts loudest wins! We risk delivering products that miss the market need. Be a process advocate, our 5D process has been developed to manage this effectively.

Habit 4 Communication - Clear communication is a critical product management skill - from presentation to value proposition building, a product manager knows this; If you don’t decide what to say about your product or service, someone else will. Lose control of communication and you lose control of the product.

Habit 5 Get the most out of people - Product managers have significant responsibility with very little direct authority – we might be measured on a huge revenue stream, but development, sales, marketing and any other team implicated in our product success do not report to us. What that means is that our role is one of influence rather than control. Influence comes from being credible, reliable, clear and consistent. Influential product managers represent the views of their market and represent them with evidence, clarity and consistency.

Habit 6 Know your market - Let’s not sugar coat this; A product managers opinion is irrelevant. The evidence that they gather from the market they serve is what drives good decision making. There’s no short cut, product managers must step out of their office and into their customers world on a regular basis if they are to truly know their market and represent its needs.

Habit 7 Own your product - Product management is at its best when the product manager owns a go to market proposition, rather than a horizontal piece of technology. Think of it like this. Being the UK Product Manager for the Ford Focus gives you a real product that you can successfully manage. Being the Product Manager of a global 4-cylinder engine removes that direct customer connection.

14. The 7 Habits of Effective Product Managers


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15. Messaging Canvas

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.

I was reminded of this Albert Einstein quote when working with a product team recently. The response to my question “What does your product do?” was half an hour of whiteboard explanation and a sore head!

Here’s a challenge to all product managers; describe your product in 30 seconds or less. Difficult? Yes, you’ll have to choose your words carefully. Valuable? Absolutely – customers aren’t willing to listen to a half hour product ramble as they try and work out what your product does for them. We use this messaging canvas to help get our thoughts in order.

Messaging canvas

Positioning statementFor a defined market, product is the only product category that offers differentiator. This means that benefit

Solution componentsPicture or bulleted list of elements included in the solution

Challenges2-3 paragraphs detailing challenges / pain points clients are facing related to this solution

Key benefits3 statements detailing key benefits that address the challenges stated above

Key features5-7 bullets that link to the benefits

URLTo the web site that describes the solution

Side bar 1This can be a client quotation, call-out of relevance to a specific regulation etc

Side bar 2See side bar 1


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16. Stickiness is about tempting, not imposing

I have been trying to unsubscribe to an on online service. I’m sure many of us have been through it; digging into the depths of a website to try and find how to cancel the service. It felt like I was looking for some secret code “Stand on one leg, rub your head three times and say the magic word to cancel your subscription!”

This is not clever. At the very least it’s sharp practice, but it also makes no long-term commercial sense; It aggravates customers and when they do eventually find the unsubscribe button, they’re going to be hugely difficult to re-engage with your business.

The product management approach? Make your service really easy to leave – it shows confidence and transparency. But spend your time making it compelling to use. Good products have willing customers.

17. Professionalise your Product Management approach

A conversation yesterday reminded me of the importance of the product plan - a document that describes customers, markets, competition, etc, and your product response to that environment. A Senior Manager was feeling frustrated that a product manager had left and there was no written information; nothing describing the what and why for the product over the coming months. He realised that the next incumbent was likely to have to start from scratch - relearn lessons that should have already been learnt and make mistakes that should have been avoided.

Product Management has a responsibility to learn and document - write down their thinking in a product plan so that expensive lessons only need to be learnt once.

18. A good development process doesn’t make a good product

Many teams seem to turn to agile models in the hope that it will fix product problems. And although agile processes are great, they don’t generate great products in isolation. Two points:

1. A bad idea stays a bad idea no matter how well it’s developed - it’s just a well-executed bad idea.

2. Product is more than technology - think naming, pricing, positioning, etc. Agile gives you only a small part of what you need for product success.

The product management lesson? Agile won’t fix your world. It might make one small part a bit more predictable.

19. Coaching a Product Manager

I was coaching a product manager today. They were having a problem getting their leadership team to listen and act on some product issues My question “what issues” was met with a massive list of problems they wanted solved. Two things:

1. There might be 20 issues, but focus on the top 3, otherwise it’s just a big list of noise that overwhelms and gets ignored

2. If you want to be effective with a leadership team, offer solutions. Don’t be the person who is perceived as the problem provider.



20. Want to quickly check if your pricing is in the right ball park?

1. Is the price higher than the unit cost – we don’t want to lose money every time we sell

2. Is the price lower than the (perceived or tangible) delivered customer value? Customers won’t buy if your product doesn’t represent fair value. Is the price broadly equivalent to comparable offers in the market? If price expectations are already set, customers will be unwilling to move far from that price.

3. For the mathematically inclined, this turns into a simple model for sanity checking a price point.

P = Selling price

U = Unit cost

V = Customer value

C = Comparable solution price



21. Where to begin?

A very good product person I know has just taken on a big and exciting new product role. It got me thinking about where to start when you’ve just taken on a new senior role. Here’s my view:

1. Think – spend time understanding your customers, competition, products, regulation, etc. You can’t be credible if you don’t know your environment.

2. Have a process – A simple process and toolset that describes how you build and manage products is foundational. Teams unravel quickly without structure.

3. Define a vision – Work out where you plan to take your products. No vision that sets the direction of travel and you’re likely to go in circles.

4. Align the team – make sure the team have the skills and capabilities to execute the vision.

5. Drive and refine – have a daily 15 minute stand up or conference call to keep the team on track.

What would you focus on?

22. Sweat the small stuff

A new customer I’m working with was feeling very despondent. His product sales have been in free fall whilst a competitor seems to be dominating the market. ‘Should I pack up and go home’ was his question. Not so fast. In a competitive market the distance between success and failure is wafer thin.

My advice - use marginal gain thinking. There’s every chance that making a set of small changes can change the situation. Those changes mean very little in isolation, but in aggregate can be the difference between winning and losing. Want an example? Take

a look at British track cycling and their use of marginal gains to hugely impact their win ratio.

23. If something is free

Worth remembering this old marketing saying as the Facebook storm gathers strength. My understanding of the issue? Allegedly, data was sold and interpreted using algorithms to send more personalised messages/adverts to Facebook users in the hope of persuading individuals of voting a certain way during the US election. Personally, I’m struggling to feel much outrage. “Politicians try to persuade electorate to vote for them by personalising their message” isn’t the catchiest headline, but it just about sums up what’s happened.



24. Retirement Canvas

Knowing when it is time to exit the market is as critical as knowing when to enter it. Prolonging the decision costs money and can impact the goodwill of your customers. Product managers look for signals that indicate retirement should be considered:

Customer Indicators:

•The product or service has become irrelevant,

•The addressable market is no longer strategic or desirable.

•Some customers are migrating to new solutions.

Financial indicators:

• Market share or sales are diminishing

•Costs are escalating

•The product is not profitable.

•There is no marketing or selling activities taking place.

•Minimal product team resources are focused on the product.

We then use a retirement canvas to assess the risks and opportunities.



25. Market Sizing

A report out today suggests that 30% of us will “never be willing to buy an electric car”. This stat, produced to sway regulators in some way, should never shock a Product Manager. I’m teaching a market sizing masterclass today and this one slide tells us all we need to know. The lifecycle model suggests that when you’re in an innovator market (e.g. the electric car) laggards and late majority are in no way ready to buy and may well not relate to your product at all. So at least 30% will say ‘no’. Just like they would have done to questions such as ‘will you ever own a pc’ or even ‘will you ever own a car!’. The Product Management lesson? Be careful what you infer from snapshot stats.

26. Product Opinion

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the products we try to deliver; opinions on features, dates, design, pricing, etc. This can be frustrating. Worse, it can mean that nothing gets done as contrary opinions challenge your plan and slow things down. The key word here is opinion. How should we deal with this? Evidence. Opinions lose power when evidence shows up.

27. What’s your point of difference?

How do you find a point of difference when your product doesn’t have one? This is a problem in regulated and reseller markets where lack of differentiation can lead to a price war - when no other points of difference exist, customers choose the cheapest. The trick is to look outside the product; think service, support, reputation, range, reach, brand. Truth is customers rarely buy on a single factor. The surrounding eco system really counts. I was reminded of this using Amazon OneClick; the major factor in my buying decision wasn’t price, it was ease of purchase.

The Product Management lesson? To be successful we need to think bigger than our product and look at the eco system that surrounds it. We use a tool called the value curve to address this.



28. Setting Goals

It’s great to set your team or yourself a challenge; it can motivate, give focus and generate energy. But if the challenge is too big, unrealistic or just plain unachievable it will have the opposite effect. I was working with a team recently where this happened; team working well, manager sets impossible target, heads drop, team moral plummets. Think of it like this; If we took an average person off the street and set them a fitness challenge of completing a 5-kilometre run in the next 6 months then we might see them being nudged towards fitness. Take that same person and set them a fitness challenge of completing an ironman and their running shoes will never leave the house, but multiple small challenges might see an ironman performance eventually. The proof? The picture is of me completing ironman UK (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, marathon run). A challenge I was nudged towards over an eighteen-month period.

The product management lesson? Set multiple small challenges that nudge you and your team in the right direction.



29. Dealing with obstacles

Navigating obstacles is a daily part of Product Management – dealing with product issues, pressures from other teams, workload, worrying about product performance….

Some Product Managers become so overwhelmed that they can’t see anything but obstacles. Their performance suffers, their product suffers, they suffer! Here’s a tip from the world of cycling; instead of looking at the obstacles, look beyond them at where you want to go. Look through the trees and around the rocks. By focusing on where you want to go instead of what you want to miss, the obstacles shrink, and that good path becomes clear.

30. Who is your customer?

As product managers, we often think of our customer as the person or business that uses our product – the end user. But it’s often more complex than that. Reaching that end user often means working with other teams – sales, support, third party resellers, etc. The point is this; If those intermediary teams do not see the value in your product, you’ll never get to the end user. It’s best considered as a value chain – you’re at one end, the end user is at the other. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If the sales team don’t understand it or the third-party reseller wont stock it then the end user won’t even see your product.

So, who is your customer? Everyone in the value chain. Try and address their needs and motivations, and the chain will be strong.

31. Is your price right?

We know that setting a price for a new product in a new market is based upon perceived or actual value, but what about price points when

you’re taking upgrades into existing markets? Here’s a five-step process to check if your price point makes sense:

Product Name:

1. Target - Write down the target price point

2. Expectation - How does the target price point compare with pricing over the last three years in the market?

3. Difference – What does your product or service offer as a point of difference? Are these differences tangible and valuable to your target market?

4. Brand – How does your brand impact perceived value? Don’t dismiss the power of the brand!

5. Costs – Does the price point deliver against financial goals Evidence: Describe where you gathered your evidence

32. Leading product management

What are the most important tasks for a leader of a product management team? I’d argue that top of the list is setting out a clear direction of travel. A product vision. Think about it; you could build the perfect team with a perfect set of processes and a perfect execution model, but without vision the team will be directionless. A bit like owning the world’s fastest race horse and then forgetting to point it towards the finishing line. At least show your team the finishing line you’re trying to get to!



33. Value proposition canvas

Albert Einstein said that the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple. This really resonates when some product managers try to describe their product - they struggle to take a complex product and make it understandable. Can you make your product understandable? Try using this value proposition canvas to make your value statement resonate and be one step closer to a genius product manager!

34. What makes a segment attractive?

When segmenting a market, product managers look for attractive segments to operate in. But what makes a segment attractive? Size is often perceived as the most important quality, but is this really true? I’d argue that whilst size matters (we don’t want a segment of one!) there are a couple of issues to consider:

1. There might not really be a big market

Big markets don’t remain intact. That £10Bn opportunity you’ve uncovered might really be a multitude of heterogeneous products.

2. If there is big market, are you big enough?

Big markets attract big players with deep pockets. A smaller organisation can find themselves invisible in a large segment with a marketing budget orders of magnitude less than their competitor

So, what makes a segment attractive? I’d put two factors near the top of my list:

1. Targetability

A segment is really attractive if it’s reachable. i.e. people within the segment do something in common that means you can message them efficiently (they are in the same venue, part of the same trade body, at the same conference)

2. Problem/goals coherency

A segment becomes even more attractive if the target group share common problems/goals that your product addresses.



35. How do you get the sales team on message with your product?

Product teams get frustrated believing that the sales team are untrainable when it comes to product and start thinking things like “They don’t listen”, “They sell something different to our product” “They need constant support”, “They need the PM to do the pitch”. Step into the other persons shoes and you’ll see a different perspective. Sales people are often busy, managing multiple accounts and huge product ranges. They don’t have time to become an expert in our product. We also make it worse by making it hard to understand our product (e.g. a PM with the 60 slide deck of deep technical content and no speaker notes) and impossible to learn about our product at the right time (who has presented their slide deck at the annual sales meeting and are surprised that the sales team can’t pick up that unannotated deck six months later and use it?).I’m not saying sales teams are blameless, but give them a chance of success.

Try this:

• A 20-page slide deck at a level they can deliver

• Speaker notes on each page giving key points and likely questions

• An FAQ sheet

• Record yourself delivering the 20-minute presentation so they can learn and review when it suits them It will also make your life easier too!



36. Innovation

STRUGGLING TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATIVE THINKING? A question that often arises - “How do I get Product Management to generate new ideas?” Certainly, for those in B to B markets the best way of dealing with this is not to think about shiny new products but think of difficult customer problems. Customers buy products that solve problems, so encourage the team to uncover those problems. ‘What keeps that key customer awake at night?’ Is a much better start point than ‘What shiny things can we build?’ We use a tool called the innovation canvas to help - 10 questions to qualify an idea into the investigation funnel – is it worth taking this idea further?

Take a look at the following page to see how you could approach these questions ...

Innovation Canvas

What is it?

How is the problem being solved today?

Is it a growing market? What does the opportunity look like three years ahead?

What are the key risks? How large is the opportunity?

What problem does it solve?

Who else competes in this market and how are we different?

Who does it solve the problem for?

Does it fit with our business model?

P R O D U C T M A N A G E M E N T

© 2017 Tarigo Ltd Need help ? Ask an expert: [email protected]



Innovation Canvas Step OneTell us about your new idea. Just a few words that explain it in the language of your target customer. “The innovation canvas is a tool that helps product teams assess new ideas in a consistent way. It checks the business rational of the idea”

Innovation Canvas Step TwoWhat problem does it solve? If it doesn’t solve a problem or open an opportunity, then where is the value. Think of this from a customer perspective. “Product managers have to handle many ideas from many sources. This tool solves the issue of consistency, transparency, and response-speed for idea management”

Innovation Canvas Step ThreeWho does it solve the problem for? Does it solve for a customer group you already sell to? Targeting new markets is harder and much more expensive. “it solves for product managers by helping them manage ideas consistently and for other stakeholders by offering a transparent model for idea review”

Innovation Canvas Step FourHow is the problem being solved today? If it really is a problem, your target customer will be trying to solve it. Perhaps in a clunky, expensive, error prone way. If your customer isn’t trying to solve the problem today? Ask if the problem is significant to them. “Mostly in an ad-hoc manner - some ideas just pass through without due diligence, some get lost in email chains, most teams have no mechanism for consistently and coherently responding to new ideas”

Innovation Canvas Step FiveWho else competes and how are we different? If there are alternate solutions, we need to think what our USP is. It’s worth remembering that the difference might be outside the product (service, range, reach, brand, etc) No USP? Price becomes the last point of difference.

“The Innovation Canvas encourages consistency and collaboration. It makes innovation part of the product management process”

Innovation Canvas Step SixDoes it fit with our business model? Does the idea fit with your sales channel (is it at a price point your channel can support), vision (does it fit with your three-year view), and portfolio (does it cannibalise an existing offer)? It might be a great product idea, just not for your business. “The innovation canvas is a great extension to our existing canvas suite”

Innovation Canvas Step SevenIs it a growing market? Sometimes we take new technology to an existing market, sometimes we build brand new markets for new markets. It’s worth understanding if you’re in a growth market or not - stage of life cycle will partly define the risk profile for your product - innovation ends to be high risk and high reward. “Innovation management is a branch of Product Management with significant momentum. We see 65% of customers requesting innovation management as part of their training program”

Innovation Canvas Step EightWhat does the opportunity look like three years ahead? This reaffirms the opportunity has long term potential how will your product and market develop in 3 years. “Digital version on iPad and Tablet”

Innovation Canvas Step NineWhat are the key risks? Every new product idea has risk, but don’t get overwhelmed with small issues. What are the big risks that could derail your product - Regulation, innovation, etc “ Some people mightobject to it (the innovation canvas) being a printedpiece”.

Innovation Canvas Step TenHow large is the opportunity? This step is where we look at the size of the available market for the product - how many customers could buy? It gives a backstop number for your product.



37. Managing a product portfolioHow do Product Managers make the right investment decisions so that the portfolio is performing well today and will continue to perform well in the future? We use a dashboard so that Product Managers can make sure the tactical balance is correct (The BCG matrix), the Lifecycle mix is right (ideally, we don’t want a portfolio all at the same stage of Lifecycle), and the fit to longer term strategy is correct (the GE tool) This gives a balanced view of portfolio.

38. Why Product Managers should sweatthe small stuffYou’re in a market with some fierce and strong competitors. The temptation is to think big “we need a new GUI, we need new features, we need a new product!”. Before going big, think about going small. To win a new deal, you don’t need to be massively ahead of the competition, you need to be marginally better in areas that matter. And being marginally better most of the time turns into market dominance. So, step into your customers shoes and think small – what are those little things we could do that might get us across the line first? In isolation they feel inconsequential, but in aggregate they count. Welcome to the world of Marginal gain.

39. Winning & LosingWinning and losing is part of product management but the way we handle wins and losses can make a difference. Take two extremes:

1. You win a huge new deal and feel unbeatable or.2. You lose an important deal and feel your producthas no hope.

Before opening the Champagne or looking for another job reflect on this; the difference between winning and losing can be wafer thin – one feature, a better reference visit, a slicker sales pitch…. So, the product management reaction to winning and losing is not to celebrate or commiserate but investigate. In simple words ‘FIND OUT

WHY’. If you won, look for the reason and reinforce. For losses, look at how to mitigate. It’s a learning opportunity.

40. Keeping the visionThe Product Management lesson comes courtesy of South Pacific. We’re midway through the year and those good intentions in January can seem long gone. Tactics and day-to-day interrupts have diluted your strategic thinking to near zero. Remember this; if you don’t have a product vision there’s every chance you’ll start to drift – engaging in activity that gets you no nearer your goal. Now is a good time to restate that vision and make sure you and your team are at least spending some of the day tracking towards it.

41. Keeping your business case up todateProduct managers understand the need for a business case when they are looking for investment in a new product. It tells stakeholders about customers, markets, competition, and the solution needed to capture those markets. But what about post launch - should the business case be filed and forgotten? The short answer is no – the business case needs to reflect current market conditions to enable good decisions throughout the product lifecycle. Here’s our tip on making this happen; When you launch your product, file a copy of the business case. But also take a second copy and spend a few minutes at the end of each week updating it with new insights “What have I learnt about my business over the last few days”. Every three months file the updated copy and continue with the process. The net result? A business case that describes why you went to market and a set of incremental updates that describe current market conditions.



42. Product Management is a team sport The FIFA world cup kicks off today and in a few short weeks one team will be crowned world cup winners. But will the winning team be the best players? Not necessarily. What they will be is the best team; playing in the correct position, working as a unit, understanding their role. I see this in product management way too often; the outstanding prod-uct manager ‘played’ in the wrong position (e.g. the launch expert tasked with building an ROI model), the team not knowing who does what in terms of roles and responsibilities, cross-team communication being almost non-existent. Remember, great product management is not just about the individual, but about the team. Think of it as complete product management.

43. Big business vs small business Product Management We train product management in some of the biggest and smallest companies – Last year our biggest client employed over 4,000 people in product roles and our smallest had a product management team of one. So, what’s the differ-ence? What does product management look like at these extremes? I’d characterise it like this; DOING VS GLUING. In a big team, the product manager has marketeers, pricing experts, launch managers, research teams, etc. Their job is to use those extensive resources to build out the perfect product. They GLUE. In a small team, the product manager doesn’t have that extensive team and need to figure out most things for themselves. They DO.

The core discipline remains the same, the daily activity can look very different. When we train teams, we pay atten-tion to this - it’s one of the ways we can be effective in very big and very small teams.

44. How do you retire a product? It’s easy to dismiss product retirement as unimportant. You’re retiring the product so why worry? Two reasons:

1. Customers - Do it badly and customers aren’t going to be knocking at your door for your next product. You lost their trust.

2. Competition - Get it wrong and you leave the door wide open for competitors to enter and build their position.

Think of retirement as the mirror of market entry - do your research, build your plan, and communicate your position clearly and frequently.

45. Mega Trends Mega trends are substantial changes that can impact any aspect of our business. Once upon a time the internet was a potential mega trend, out on the horizon, gathering strength. Some businesses saw it, built or modified their products to accommodate it, and rode the internet wave. Others weren’t so visionary and floundered as the world moved online.

How do we identify mega trends? product managers must constantly look for trends in four broad categories:

• Technology – today we see trends such as A.I or the Internet of Things gathering momentum.

• Social – think of trends such as the ageing population or urbanization

• Economic – the gig economy and peer-to-peer networks are relevant examples

• Political – trends could be border security or environmental controls.

Once we’ve identified the trends, we need to think of what they mean to our business. For example, IoT presents risk and opportunity around cybersecurity. There will be an estimated 26 billion connected devices by 2020 – some sharing sensitive data and payment information. Hacking into that network could cause widespread disruption.

So what mega trends present opportunity or risk to your product? Product Managers should be thinking about this regularly.



46. What does a great market researchsession look like?

I was reminded of this with a team I’m working with. They’re in a B2B market and are conducting early stage research on a new concept. A couple of product managers reported back that their customer visit had gone well. A deeper dive and it was clear that what they really meant was that the customer hadn’t asked any tough questions and so the meeting had been a breeze. This is bad news for the product; interested customers always ask difficult questions (date, price, detail). Think of these as buying signals – if they don’t ask “how much” or “when” they’re really not that interested.

47. What’s in a name.

My kids have recently started requesting biscuits for breakfast. They saw a product called “Breakfast Biscuits” and no amount of talking will convince them that these are plain and simple biscuits. They could be called “Bedtime cook-ies” or “sports snacks” and they’d still be biscuits. Got me thinking about how important a product name is in giving context and meaning to your audience. Anyone for some cold, dead, wet fish? Thought not, but some of us like Sushi. The name is often the first point of connection with your product or service. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

48. Presenting Product Financials.

I’ve just sat through a review of product financials – an hour I’m not going to get back! There was nothing wrong with the data (in this case, a decent P&L), and everything wrong with the presentation. We sat looking at an excel spread-sheet in 8-point font as the presenter walked us through it. The audience was a mix of asleep, confused and grumpy. This is a

classic presentation problem; the data is great; the narrative is missing.

My advice? Give the audience the highlights (perhaps ROI, Break Even and total investment), tell them what decision you’re looking for, and then give some data insights to demonstrate your highlights and your ask. Great presentations always have a point and purpose, not an hour of rambling through some numbers until your audience lose the will to live!

49. Product Owners and ProductManagers in a team?

Just off a call with a team working through this issue; how do you structure Product Owners and Product Managers in a team?

It’s a dilemma for many – we often work with teams where there really is no role clarity and often one person is trying to do both jobs. Typically, the urgency of Product Owner duties overwhelms the importance of Product Management duties with the net result of very little commercial and strategic thinking taking place – the individual becomes tech-nical, tactical and faces in to the organisation.

Short term this isn’t a problem but look out over a longer horizon and the impact can be huge; limited vision, little market connection, and incremental product enhancement that exposes the business to risks from disruptive tech-nology. Product Managers need time to be strategic, commercial, outbound and market-connected.



50. What’s the narrative for your product? Here’s a quick question. What are Donald Trump’s key messages? Love him or hate him, we all know those narratives (make America great again, build a wall, etc). My point is this; Trump’s brand is very good at building and driving the narrative (again, for clarity I make no opinion on those narratives, other than they’re clear). This makes the Trump proposition clear to the target market. Second question; what’s your product narrative? If there is no narrative then confusion ensues!

51. How do you react to losing a deal? ’ll admit that I react badly, but how should a Product Manager really react? After a couple of months of not putting a foot wrong (we’ve just recorded our best month and will record our best quarter – go team!) we missed a deal. We’ll deal with this using GRIT.

Grieve – In my opinion good losers tend to be infrequent winners so don’t feel bad about feeling bad. Go for a run, beat a punch bag, relax in a hot bath. Whatever your way of dealing with it, give yourself a bit of time to get it out of your system.

Research - Gather as much data as you can. Gather from all sources and gather without filter or preconception.

Identify - Work out what went wrong. It’s easy to make price or product assumptions, but discount nothing. I recall a deal lost years ago where we worked out that the customer had not even read our proposal. Be aware that the answer might be that the deal was never in your sights.

Translate - Make changes so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes. Remember the lesson of marginal gain - small changes can deliver significant results. So, I need to go and give my punch bag 30 minutes of hell.

52. Product Management and Product Marketing Product Management and Product Marketing Clarity are the roles and responsibilities across the two disciplines vital in any organisation.

For many product managers, the role of product marketing may be undertaken by another group or individual in the organisation. It may be considered part of their own role but is often undertaken with lower levels of knowledge & experience.

In some cases, product marketing may not be practiced at all, and a new or improved product “thrown over the wall” to the rest of the organisation and the market! It is clear to me that the combination of strategies and processes from both disciplines maximises the success of a new or updated product. In many ways it is less about the need for an or-ganisation to have both roles (although this is undoubtedly important as a product scales) but more about the need for an organisation to adopt & integrate both disciplines, perhaps using a collaborative team approach.

In simple terms we could state that Product Management has to define and oversee the build of the product and Product Marketing has to take it to market.



53. Managing your manager

A team I’m working with have an issue with their boss; he is forever coming to them with ‘opportunities’ – ideas and initiatives that might well have merit, but that distract from the current plan and overwhelm the team. Plenty of us have been there, but how can product teams handle this? It’s often impossible just to say “no”, and it’s wrong just to blindly accept the ideas and say “yes”, so try saying “why”. For any and every new idea try to quickly validate it with these questions:

• What problem is it solving?

• Who is it solving for?

• How many have this problem?

• How do they deal with the problem today?

• How could we be better than their existing solution?

• Does it fit with our products and plans?

• Is it something we can build/deliver?

• Is it something our sales channel could sell? A five-minute step through these questions andmany bad ideas are stopped before they start.



54. Themed Roadmap

A themed roadmap is the perfect framework to manage your product along strategic lines. It enables long term objec-tives & product deliverables to be realised but can flex to meet shorter term demands or agreed variations on the im-portance of each product strategy. Moreover, a Themed Roadmap is a single “view” of product strategies and deliver-ables that can be used in all discussion with major stakeholders as you seek to gain alignment and agreement on a complex set of future product deliverables.

55. Communication

Communication is a vital skill for a product manager. It might be a 5-minute elevator pitch or a full technical review. Either way you need to keep your audience engaged and interested in what you saying. Here are a few tips:

1. Tell the audience why they are there

2. Pick three major points you want to talk about and focus on those.

3. Don’t overload your presentation with text and pictures.

4. Keep an eye on time. Use a parking lot to collect points that can be answered later.

5. Don’t just deliver dry facts.

6. Deliver with passion.

7. Banish your nerves.



56. Dealing with discounts

Customers ask for discounts. In the b2b sector it’s pretty unusual for customers not to push the price point down. This is obviously something for sales teams so how does it impact product management?

Firstly, we can help sales teams deal with discount discussions in how we structure the product - a modular approach to pricing means that when a customer asks a £10k solution, we have a £10k product. We can strip out the higher value components and hit the price point with a suitable product offer. But we all know customers often want all the features and the discount. In this case, think of what the sales team can ask for in return for a discount that might benefit your product - reference site visits, a quote to use in some marketing piece, a joint presentation at a confer-ence, access to end users to conduct market research...

The point is this, don’t let discounts be given for ‘free’. It’s much easier to get the quote agreed during a negation than trying to secure it afterwards when the customer wants nothing from you.

57. Market Research

Market research is essential for product managers it centres your business on your consumers and keeps you focused. It allows you to pursue the most lucrative growth opportunities and keeps you relevant and future-oriented it also improves your decision-making capabilities and reduces your risk.

A great example of this - Harper Collins found sales of Agatha Christie novels declining. Quantitative & qualitative re-search was commissioned, and they found that: Readers liked “niceness” of the crimes, but covers were gruesome and bloody.

Result: New cover designs commissioned. Sales rose by 40%.



58. The impact of getting a productwrong

You can get a product wrong in many ways - badly designed, poorly build, doesn’t solve any specific need, too expen-sive etc....

We often think of the cost of the mistake in relation to the product - x million in development effort has been wasted, but the cost is much bigger than that. Think of it from a brand perspective. If a company delivers a bad product then customers don’t just reject the product, but they become wary of brand. An example from two brands- Alfa Romeo and Porsche; Alfa have a history of highs and lows. Sometimes they delight, sometimes not. Porsche have consisten-cy. Now imagine both companies announce a new sports car for 2019 that you can place a deposit on today. Guess who would have the fuller order book? Brand confidence is a war that products battle to win.

59. Maintenance vs innovation

How do product managers balance the needs of their current product versus investing in new ideas? We’re working with a company where about 80% of development effort is directed towards product maintenance, some towards enhancements and the little bit that’s left goes to innovation. The result? A very frustrated senior management team who see a huge spend and nothing new to sell. There can be many reasons behind this (badly architected product, fixed sized dev teams, etc) but it clearly can’t be sustained. Our fix? Set a target maintenance spend (say 20%) and a target date to hit that spend (say 3 years) and then ratchet spend down each quarter. This gives teams the time to ad-dress the fundamentals, get a plan in place and move towards a more appropriate spending level.

60. What does a product manager do?

Our role can be quite complex and difficult to describe. But if we don’t have a clear purpose then we run the risk of being misplaced in our business (step forward all those product managers who are really sales support or project managers, ....).

Here’s a definition that might help. “Product managers reduce the risk of launching a product flop and increase the success of products in market”. So, what does that mean? Well, product failure occurs in every sector. By using a pro-fessional pm framework, a product manager reduces the risk of a potential product flop getting to market (we assess before we launch) and then by using the same pm framework, they ensure that existing products remain successful for longer (we continuously improve products). If there’s a 25% product failure rate in your industry and your pm skills have reduced that to 5% in your business, then that’s great product management.

61. Find the 3 A.M. problem

We work with many teams who want to innovate more – Find the next big thing that will propel their business for-ward. Often these conversations focus on the product “What new shiny thing can we take to market?”. This is not the right place to start. In the B2B world, great products are built on solving real world problems. The bigger the prob-lem, the more motivation there is to fix it. Obvious really but missed by so many teams on their quest to uncover a winning idea. So, next time you’re looking to innovate, start with this question “What problems are keeping our cus-tomers awake at night?”. Problems that wake someone at 3am, are problems they’re motivated to solve



62. How do you interpret market research?

I’m currently doing some market research for a new B2B product and trying to answer the most basic question “should we build it” by gathering customer feedback on the problem that the new product solves. So far, the feed-back has mostly been along the lines of “We’re mildly interested”. So, what does that mean? It could mean a number of things (they’re the wrong audience, they don’t understand the problem statement, etc), but fundamentally it means that the research group we’ve spoken to are not going to be knocking our door down to get to the new prod-uct. “Mildly interested” does not get them awake in the night worrying about the problem you solve or rushing to get that PO in place to buy your product. When conducting B2B market research look for three indicators of interest:

1. “How much will it be”

2. “When is it coming to market”

3. “Give me the details about how it works” These are true signals of interest.

63. Process

Process. Some Product Managers love it, whilst most of us begrudgingly accept it as something we should do. It’s like eating your greens or walking your 10k steps a day. But skip the process and, just like regular exercise or healthy eating, you’ll soon start to find out why it’s important. Without process we introduce randomness – ideas get selected, products get built, and prices get set without clear, consistent and coherent rationale. We end up with an incoherent product set that can confuse our customers. And once a process is broken then everyone feels justified in breaking it a

little more. So, eat your greens, walk every day, and follow your PM process. They’re all good habits!

64. What is a product plan and why is it so important?

For Product Managers, building an evidenced-based assessment of your customers, markets, competition, product, pricing, financials, plan and vision is critical when we want to get funding for a new initiative. But once funded, we often forget this – we charge headlong into delivery and stop reflecting on the fundamentals of why we’ve built our product. But think of it like this; your market is not static – every aspect from customers through to competition is changing. The product plan is where we document those changes. Fifteen minutes per week reflecting on “what is changing in my market” and captured in the product plan means you keep an up-to-date view of market conditions



65. What’s your point of difference?

I’m working with a company whose strategy for domination is to build a multitude of similar products so that one of their offers is bound to grab your attention if you are in their market. At first glance, it might seem a strange strategy (vs focusing energies on builing one world class product), but with the right infrastructure it can work well – think how the VW Audi group offer a range of cars from the Skoda to the Bugatti with a shared platform approach across many products. The key to making this approach work is two-fold:

1. Each product needs a different purpose (e.g.we see skoda as different to audi)

2. Sharing common components make themodel efficient.

66. Presentation skills

It feels like some have them and some don’t! But for a product manager, being able to present with clarity and con-viction is a skill worth working on. Your bright new product idea could fall at the first hurdle if the review team simp-ly don’t understand it or pay enough attention because of how you present. But many product managers fall at the first hurdle – their presentation unravels from slide one asthey fail to get the introduction right.

So, how should your presentation start? The key is structure; your audience want to know some basics. “Why am I here?”, “How long will I be here?”, “What decisions will I need to make?” So, tell them! Whoever the audience, take the lead from word one, slide one. You give the audience confidence that you’re in control.

67. A question from a product manager

“I understand the lifecycle model, but how do I know what stage of the lifecycle my product is at?” Here’s my 50,000-foot view:

You’re in the introductory phase if the majority of your target market has just about heard of your product, and a very small percentage would actually buy “What the hell is an autonomous car?”

You’re in the growth phase if the majority of you target market understands your product and think of it that might be something to consider whilst a significant minority want to buy “I’m going to take a look at the electric car”

You’re in the maturity phase if the majority of your market see your product as a normal choice “It’s either petrol or diesel for me”

You’re in the decline phase when the majority of your market think your product is old “You’re buying a horse!!”



68. A quick tip on market research

With all research techniques we should remember that what customers do and say, and think is not always con-sistent. I may LIKE the yellow car. It might be my FAVOURITE colour, but I might BUY the blue car – it stays looking clean, it’s easier to sell, it’s less a risky choice. So, remember to ask the same question from many angles and look for consistency:

What is your favourite colour?

Which colour would you choose?

Which will be most popular?

Which colour would your partner choose?

Which colour would you buy?

69. Level of competition

I was talking to a team who describe their product as having “no competition”. Great news? Perhaps, but think about it like this. We should think about levels of competition.

1. We might face products similar to ours from competitors that look a lot like us. These are direct competitive threats - think Audi vs BMW vs Mercedes.

2. Sometimes the competition is less obvious. Its other ways that our customers can solve the problem that we help them solve. The-se are indirect competitive threats – think car vs plane vs video conferencing

3. Occasionally we see our product having no competition. This sounds great, but we should be cautious. No competition might mean you’re first to market, but it might also mean that there really no market. Even being first to market isn’t without risk. History is lit-tered with examples of products and businesses that got there first but didn’t thrive – think Palm in the PDA market, the Betamax format in the video market or Atari in the games console market. All three were first to market. All three failed to capitalise on first mover advantage.

70. Preparing for market launch

Preparing for market launch is a complex task. Product managers should make this task a little easier with the use of launch checklists. These focus on five main areas:

1) Is the product ready?

2) Does it satisfy a true market need?

3) Are all processes required to support it in place? (e.g. operational support and pricing)

4) Is the market or channel ready to receive the product? These are the sales and marketing teams who are willing and able to handle this product and have an effective delivery plan.

5) Are our customers ready? Do our consumers have all that they need to be able to access and successfully use the new product? Keep in mind, that a product launch is not a short-duration, high-intensity event that is concentrated near the end of product development; instead, it’s a long-term activity that starts during product planning and grad-ually ramps up to a successful, on-time launch, based on full readiness of many disparate elements, systems and cross-functional organizations.



71. Rush to launch

In their rush to launch many product managers don’t consider how the market will shape and grow. Expectation runs high on launch day. But a few weeks later those highs often feel like a distant memory as sales don’t meet projections and the product runs the risk of being perceived as a flop. An understanding of the introductory phase can save lots of heartache!! There are a couple of critical learnings:

1. Most customers wait for others to try new products – When a product comes to market, mostcustomers see risk – Will it work? Does it add value? Do I really need it? Will it be a fad? So, theywait; let others take the risk whilst they see if something of real substance materialises. The risktakers, known as ‘innovators’ buy in. They are likely to have more pain around the problem yourproduct solves, so find themselves willing to try out your solution – their risk/reward threshold wascrossed.

2. As a consequence the full market is not available – The innovator sector is typically seen asabout 5% of the total market. Think about the consequences of this; a new product with a totalmarket size of $100M typically only has access to $5M of that market at first. Miss this and pointand revenue forecasting will at best be ambitious!



72. Research techniques

Technique 1 - Experimental

In experimental research, we observe the results of changing one or more marketing variables while keeping certain other variables constant. I.e. groupings of features. They describe the value that a customer can gain from using the features within a theme.

A theme describes the core value and each feature is a proof point of how that value is being delivered.

Technique 2 - Observational

In observational research actions of people are watched either by cameras or observers, typically in a natural envi-ronment. Using this technique, product managers can see how clients respond to different stimuli and situations. The benefit is that clients are more likely to demonstrate typical behaviour in a natural setting rather than ‘ideal’ be-haviour in a simulated or artificial environment. However, what it cannot show is why customers behave in a certain way – their attitudes or motivations.

Technique 3 – Focus Group

In focus group research, 6 to 12 people are brought together by researchers to discuss a specific situation or reactions to a product. Questions are asked to the group, who are free to discuss the topics with each other. One key issue is that the research is reliant on the interpretation of group discussion. This can raise questions about observer de-pendency and validity.

variables while keeping certain other variables



Technique 5 - Surveys

Postal, phone and Internet surveys have the greatest potential for causing resentment on the part of those surveyed. And very low (less than 1%) response rates. Additionally, respondents may not be representative of the market and can misdirect you.

Technique 6 – Test Marketing

And finally, there’s test marketing. The product and its marketing plan are exposed to a carefully chosen sample of the population before its full-scale launch. It’s conducted in real-life buying situations and can last from few weeks to several months. Due to its high cost, however, test marketing is more suitable for fast moving packaged goods.

Technique 4 – Personal Interview

Personal Interview research is a face-to-face meeting. People are more willing to respond in person but can often tell you what they think you want to hear. Participants tend to say the first thing that comes to mind or what they think they want. Once you look deeper into it you notice that there’s a lot more that must be uncovered, sometimes what they think they want or why they think they choose a product or service isn’t always the true motivation.



73. Start with the problem

So many product managers start at the wrong end of ideation- they start with a solution and then look for the market problem. Think about like this; if you were presented with a new product idea right now and were asked if you’d spend your own money developing it, what questions would you ask? Here are my starter questions:

• “What is it?”

• “What problem does it solve?”

• “Who it is solving that problem for?”

• “How is it being solved today?”.

Let’s pause for a moment on those four questions. They’re powerful. Think of products that have failed – the reason for their failure will at least in part sit within those questions. These questions are also great to push back out to idea originators. It helps you test their thinking before the idea gathers momentum and becomes yet another product for you to deliver. Remember to START WITH THE PROBLEM.



74. Forecasting

How many clients will use a new product or service? It’s a difficult question to answer, but if we can’t put an estimate on product demand then we cannot scale our delivery or support teams. Forecasting for a new product or service is challenging when we have no historic or foundation data to work from.

Step 1 of 6 Find the total available market

The first step is to work out how many customers could use your product or service – the maximum number of clients across yourmarkets if there was 100% take up (knownas the total available market). Using thistechnique, we calcu-late the back-stop number- a number that represents 100% marketsaturation. We can break this down by regions,sectors, customer types, etc.

Step 2 of 6 Identify key segments to do your research.

Research is expensive and time consuming. Almost always, it’s better to identify two or three groups within the total available market and focus our research efforts with them. Research group candidates should include groups with the most pressing need for the solution.

Step 3 of 6 Understand the lifecycle component Understand

where the product or service sits on a lifecycle or adoption curve. This will hugely influence demand. For example, think of the electric car – the Total Available Market is all car owners, but because it’s new and innovative technology, we know that only a 5% innovator group is likely to be interested in buying this product initially. In contrast, a car such as a Diesel-powered SUV is in decline in European markets because of new emissions legislation, so we wouldn’t plan to launch in a declining market.

Step 4 of 6 Triangulate with qualitative research

There’s no substitute for direct market research. Test the proposition with a minimum of three client groups in your target market and also with other relevant stakeholders such as support functions or other product teams. Get an-swers to questions such as: If we supply it, will they use it? Why would they use it? How often would they use it? How are they solving the issue today? What are the barriers to adoption and use? From this, make an estimate – how many of my target market are likely toadopt.

Step 5 of 6 Underpin with quantitative research

Test your research findings with surveys. Look for proof points and anomalies – feedback that either supports your qualitative research or challenges it. Essentially, try and get to a point where you can say: “Three client groups said this solution will speed up processing time by 30% and, when surveyed, an additional 200 clients supported these findings.

Step 6 of 6 Build an estimate

The final step is: Step 6 - Build an estimate. And finally, you can calculate your market estimate. Do this by overlaying the total available market figure with the life cycle stage and your initial target market to estimate your market size at launch. Then double-check that your research findings support this estimate.



75. The Product Plan

You’ve built your product plan; done the hard research, built a financial model, and you’re ready to present. But all your hard work could be for nothing if you cannot get your message across. Your bright new product idea could fall at the first hurdle if the review team simply don’t understand it or pay enough attention because of how you present. Being able to present with clarity and conviction is a critical skill. A skill worth working on to truly do justice to the hard effort in building your product plan. We will walk you through how to get the best out of delivering your prod-uct plan.

1. Start with structure

2. Pick your talking points

3. CORE CONTENT

4. THE CLOSE

Step 1 - Start with structure

The foundation to a great product plan presentation is structure; your audience want to know some basics. Think about it from their perspective:

Why am I here? How long will I be here? What decisions will I need to make? So, tell them!

We can think of that basic structure as a template we use at the start of any presentation. For example:

“The purpose of this presentation is to discuss a new Product Plan. We need 15 minutes of your time We’re looking for you to get on board and help us” Deliver this well and you’re heading in the right direction.



Step 2 - Pick your talking points

The next major hurdle is the content – what do you want to talk to the team about? We often have complex product ideas to discuss and can quickly get lost as we try and explain them.

So, here’s a simple tip. Pick the three major points you want to talk about and focus on those. It will give your con-tent some structure and direction.

For example, we might say “There’s lots we can talk about around this new product today, but the three major points I want to focus on are:

Revenue is forecast for $10M by end of year New regulation presents a risk Two new features promise to lift us above the competition

So, you’ve now let the team know why they’re there, what you need them to decide, how long you’ll present for and the major points you’ll cover. We’re under way, now let’s think about the core of the presentation.

Step 3 – Core Content

Product Managers often present complex content. Imagine presenting a Product Plan at a peer review with a 50-slide deck full of 10-point writing. How do you think your audience would respond?

It’s better to adopt a “less is more” approach. If we take the product plan example, a great way to present it is to build the content into an eight-slide deck. Each slide has a heading (the section name) one image (a graph, or picture) and three bullet points. You can then present from it rather than read it.

You’ll get questions as you go, some easy to handle others requiring more thought. For those questions, think of us-ing a “parking lot” – a board where we write questions and comments we’ll address after the meeting.

And one other tip – keep an eye on the time. You don’t want to ruin your big finale because the clock beat you!

Step 4 – The Close

It’s almost identical to the start – re-state your major points, what you’d like the team to do next, and thank them for their time. Nothing guarantees success but using this type of structure irons out a few bumps in the road.



76. Minimum viable product

Commonly known as the MVP, and how it helps prod-uct managers deliver products faster to market with less risk. MVPs…

• …increase speed to market and generate revenue sooner.

• …reduce risk with a test-and-learn approach.

• …are market and persona-focused.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Start-up, first used the term, he described it as follows: “A minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about cus-tomers with the least effort.

” Later, more commercially focused, definitions include: “A minimum viable product is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development.

” To be clear, we define the MVP as a live product that is capable of bringing in revenue because our target group of customers see enough value in the product to pay for it. An MVP is not the finished version, it is an early iteration of our final product that appeals to a small sub-set of our market. An MVP approach has to be supported by rapid itera-tions and improvements to give our customers confidence that we are working towards a much richer, more mature version.

77. Part 2 - Why do we use minimal viable product?

Why do we use it? Building the final product takes a long time and is expensive and high risk. Rather than trying to be all things to all segments at the outset, we use the MVP approach to help us prioritize our development roadmap. The MVP approach helps us to:

• Identify our addressable market.

• Identify and prioritize our segments.

• Identify and prioritize our personas in that segment.

• Identify and prioritize our user stories for our personas. Careful prioritisation means we can manage the capacity of our development team while still meeting the needs of our customers.

Some recent high-profile success stories include Dropbox, Airbnb, Groupon, Spotify and Twitter.

So, before development, we prioritize our markets and then we prioritise our personas, then the features and then we develop user stories so that we can develop our product in a controlled and carefully prioritized sequence.



78. Part 3 – The attribute map

The attribute map One of the tools we can use to design our MVP and iterations is called an attribute map and we de-scribe our features in terms of user stories. As a reminder, a user story is a development requirement that is expressed as follows:

As a <target persona>

I want to <action>

So that <outcome>.

This example focuses on the Nespresso coffee machine:

• Our target segment is for personal use in thehome environment.

• Our primary persona is a busy workingprofessional.

• And our priority feature is making a cup ofcoffee in less than 60 seconds.

• The user story reads: As a busy workingprofessional I want to go from turning on myNespresso machine to a cup of coffee in under60 seconds so that I can start my journey towork without delay.

We then complete all the priority stories for our primary persona. This gives us a clear view of which features to prioritize.

79. Part 4 - Building out the roadmap

Now we have identified our initial product offer we review our second priority persona and ask the question “What additional user stories need to be developed to build product acceptance with this group?” For example, if a user story required the coffee to be delivered at 85 degrees, a build-on story might request that the coffee machine could keep the coffee heated to 85 degrees for five minutes post brewing.

We repeat this with lower value personas to build out the attribute map, giving us a view of what we need to initially deliver and how we can increase the reach and value of the product with incremental stories being added along the way.



80. Turning vision into action

Building a vision is great. But Product managers need to turn that vision into action – work out how to deliver cus-tomer value in incremental as we work towards that vision. We use this vision template to help:

1. Describe the core value you plan to offer (your vision)

2. Work out what the annual goal needs to be that help move towards that vision

3. Describe the incremental customer value you deliver each quarter that move towards your annual goal.

81. How should product management approach a big idea versus a small idea?

The answer is pretty simple; the process remains the same, but the depth and detail is different. We assess, define and deliver all ideas, but we might do that work in a day or a week or a month depending on the scale, the effort, and the risk. And the business case? Its scale is appropriate to risk and reward - no management team wants a 100-page doc-ument for a trivial upgrade or a single paragraph when they’re taking a huge risk.

82. Can you describe the core value of your product?

Sounds simple, but some product managers struggle to get to a clear, coherent and concise statement. We use a structure, shown here for a Nespresso coffee maker – replace the black text with your words and you’ve got a first-pass value proposition statement.



83. Market research is a core product management discipline

It helps us build an evidenced-based view of our market, meaning we’re more likely to make the right decisions more often. So, what do we mean by market research? There are many techniques/methods we can use but which is the right one?

Technique 1 of 4

Experimental market research is a useful refinement and validation technique. Take two market research groups and change one single variable within the 7 P’s model. For example, the same product is presented, but the price point is changed. We then gauge reaction to this change.

Technique 2 of 4

Observational market research is a technique which involves directly observing consumers or another target audi-ence in their natural environment - for instance, watching how shoppers stop outside a fashion retailer, what they are drawn to in a window display and which direction they go after entering the store. But be aware, OBSERVING is not the same as UNDERSTANDING.

Technique 3 of 4

A one-on-one either in face-to-face or virtual form is a great way of conducting market research. People are more will-ing to respond in more depth, detail and honesty outside of a group dynamic. But focus groups also fall into this cat-egory – a group of 6 to 12 people who are brought together by researchers to discuss a particular situation or reac-tions to a product.

More than any other technique, the researcher can impact the outcome. Individuals can build a view of the research-er’s opinion and modify their response based on that. For example, if interviewees believe the researcher has strong concerns about the environment then some of the cohort will modify their views in an attempt to cause less offence to the researcher.

Technique 4 of 4

Finally, we can use surveys to build a quantitative view of our market. These could be online, over the ‘phone or even postal, but we need to be aware that these types of surveys have the greatest potential for causing resentment on the part of those surveyed and can have very low (less than 1%) response rates. Additionally, respondents may not be rep-resentative of the market with just the extremes feeling motivated to complete the survey.



Next we have a collection of ten papers to follow these blogs, these are much more detailed documents and cover the following topics:

Paper 1 – Turning strategy into action with the Market Map

Paper 2 – Are your team ready for the year ahead?

Paper 3 – Whats your vision?

Paper 4 – In an Agile world

Paper 5 – The product plan

Paper 6 - Theming product release to deliver impact

Paper 7 – Getting market validation for your plan

Paper 8 – Presenting your product plan

Paper 9 – Start with the problem

Paper 10 – Scoping a new idea

Turning strategy into action with the Market Map

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“Strategy can be described in a few words – it’sabout setting the direction of a business to reach a goal.”

Product Management Excellence | Paper 1


mailto:[email protected]



Having a strategy is critical. A business without one is like a rudderless ship; with no

clear direction it drifts, never reaching its goals. Recognising this, leadership teams

work hard to articulate strategy at many levels – corporate, regional, functional,

product, etc. But, all that strategy work is for nothing if it’s not brought to life -

turned in to a tangible, measurable, actionable plan that shows how to deliver

against the strategic intent.

For many teams this link is missing – strategy is set, and tactical plans are

documented, but there’s no connection between the two. In this paper we’ll look

at how we might solve that problem.

The problem with strategy….

Let’s not sugar-coat this - many Product Managers have problems with strategy. Pick your adjectives; it’s too ambiguous, vague, changeable, impenetrable, ambitious, etc. It could be all or any of these things, but we work in an imperfect world, and our role is to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in. So, the first step to action is a simple one; accept and embrace the strategy as it’s defined. Think “How

shall I turn this strategy into action?” rather than “How would I rewrite a better

strategy?”




Normalising strategy

Strategy can be described in a few words – it’s about setting the direction of a

business to reach a goal. It tells us what we’re trying to achieve and

where we should focus in order to make that happen. It can be presented to us in ways that can blur the key message, so it’s important to ‘normalise’

it – i.e. get it in a format that makes it simpler to action. Think of this as the strategy canvas:

Let’s take the example of a training

company. The leader of that company might say “I want to grow revenues by 30% over the next three years. I see building our online offer as foundational to this. Additionally, we need to get better at upselling to our existing customers and confirm ourselves as thought leaders. Finally, opportunities for us to reach further into new geographies exist, that could help us reach our 30% growth goal. This can be transformed into

What we want to achieve

Areas of focus to help

reach our goal

What we want to achieve

Areas of focus to help

reach our goal

a strategy canvas. It’s worth noting that strategy often

has a set of goals. Each goal should be considered a strategy strand and described on its own strategy canvas.

Grow revenues by 30% over the next three years

Build out online offer Upselling current suite Establish thought leadership position Explore new geographies

Area of focus to achieve the goal

The Goal




Building the market map

Taking the strategy canvas, we now start to build in into our market map. Starting in lower left quadrant (Existing markets, existing products), we ask the question “What action can I take to help grow

revenues by 30% over the next three years in the areas of focus that have been identified?”.

We then move through the market map, answering the same question through the lens of each quadrant. The diagram below explains this a little more:

The Market Map - training Company 2018

Strategy Goal: Grow revenues by 30% over next 3 years

New markets Extended products

New markets New products

Existing markets Existing markets Existing markets Existing products Extended products New products

START POINT




And the result? A market map that takes a strategy, and delivers a set of actions, showing how each action links back to the strategy and how we plan to deliver against the strategic intent of our leadership team.

Get involved We appreciate your feedback and thoughts. Join or start a discussion on market mapping. Share your examples, ask for feedback, let us know how it made a difference to your business.

Grow revenues by 30% over the next three years

Build out online offer

Upselling current suite

Establish thought leadership position Explore new geographies

The Market Map - training Company 2018

Strategy Goal: Grow revenues by 30% over next 3 years

New markets Extended products • Market and deliver 4x

training sessions inIndia

• Partner with training providersto access theircustomer base

New markets New products

• Explore skills management andonline proposition outside coremarket.

Existing markets Existing markets Extended products • Build out

masterclass series to market to existing customerbase

• Build out‘consultancy as a product’ offer

• Certification programme

Existing markets New products • Deliver completeonline training suite as alternate to face to face• Deliver three

referenceableonline customers

• Build out skillsmanagementoffer

Existing products • Build bundles to

upsell • Deliver annual

customer reviewand upsell

• Build white paperseries

• Build out daily blog• Present at three

conferences

• Define and socialise anew tool per quarter



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More support Want some more advice? Contact us on [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help





Product Management Paper 2Are your team ready for the year ahead?

Managing skills and capabilities in your product management team.


Are your team ready for the year ahead?


Introduction

There are many skills that make up the complete product manager; market research, requirements definition, launch planning and retiring to name just a few. In fact, the skillset is so broad that finding all those skills in one person is unlikely and training the team across the full skillset is expensive and time consuming.

Sounds almost impossible to ready your team for the year ahead? Not quite. Think of it like this; the product management skillset might be broad, but a business only requires a subset of the skills – those that will enable the organisation to achieve its objectives.

Getting your team prepared for the year ahead isn’t about upskilling

generally, it’s about defining the business priorities and ensuring

that the team has the skills to address the opportunities that those business priorities present.




Setting team priorities

Before trying to answer the question “Are my team ready?”, we need to answer a more basic question; “What do they need to be ready for?”.

Clearly, we can’t predict every detail of the year ahead, but we can

make some reasonable assumptions. Assumptions such as the need for launch skills if you’re launching a new product, or market sizing

skills if you’re planning to assess the opportunities in new segments.

So, step one on readying your team for the year ahead is to think through your plans and priorities, and then list the skills you’ll need

to address those plans and priorities.




Building the skills curve

We now have a sense of the skills we’ll most likely need over the coming year.

But we also need to think about think about surprises – issues and opportunities that appear from nowhere. Whilst we can’t plan for

every eventuality, we can ensure our team has ‘basic fitness’ –

enough capability to tackle the range of problems we might come across. We do this by building a skills curve - starting with the skills we know we’ll

most likely need over the coming year, we then prioritise the complete skill set in order of likely importance.

We can then plot our ideal skills curve. Remember, there’s limited value in having skills that your unlikely to need in the coming year. This should be reflected in the skill level requirement of those lower priority skills.




Plotting the team skill level

Now we know what ideal looks like, we compare it to reality. Rating each team member, we score them on scale of 1 (no skill) to 10 (great skills) against each element of our skills curve.

How do we rate team members? There are three broad questions we’re trying to answer:

1. Do they have skill knowledge?

For example, if we wanted to know about their knowledge in sizing a market, we might ask some broad, open questions:

Talk me through market

sizing Why is market

sizing important? When

would you size a

market?

What’s the basic method for sizing a market?

2. Have they used the skill?

Taking the market sizing example further, we might

ask: Tell me about a market you sized

What three lessons did you learn?

3. Do they have deep experience?

This is simply looking for recent and regular use of the skill. Typically

demonstrated with examples that show deep familiarity with the topic




We then get our team skills curve by calculating the team average per skill

The skills curve allows us to visualise our team capability. We can see in this example that there’s a gap between our current and our ideal

capability within our priority skills (the skills gap). We can also see three skills (messaging, product retirement and competitor analysis) where our skill level falls way below a basic capability level, leaving us exposed if we need to deal with risk or opportunities that pertain to those skills.

Taking action

We’re now in good shape to answer the question posed right at the

start; “Are my team ready for the year ahead?”. In our example we

can see that there’s some work to do to close the gap on our five

priority skills, plus some effort required to reduce our skill exposure around messaging, product retirement and competitor analysis.




So now we need to close those skills gaps. There are three main options:

• Training – Individuals in the team could take classes, consumeonline content or read around the topic to improve theirknowledge

• Exposure – Individuals in the team could buddy up with moreexperienced team members and learn through practice

• Hire – New recruits could be brought in to fill the skills gap.Remember – its not about hiring a great product manager, buta product manager with great skills in the areas you need.


What’s your vision?


Product Management Paper 3What’s your vision?

Linking megatrends to product roadmaps




Introduction

Why is product vision so important?

Having a vision helps us keep moving our product on the right path. Setting out a clear direction of travel that we keep at the front of mind. Its means that we’remore likely to add features and functions that build and compliment the core product, the net result being a product that continues to deliver increasing value to our customers.

Product management teams use the concept of “mega trending” to build their vision– looking at the changes that are likely to impact their market over the next five years and planning the perfect product to capitalise on those changes.




And the risk of not building a vision? Think of Kodak. Digital photography was a mega trend in their market – one they should have seen because they inventedthe digital camera! However, because of perceivedthreats to the revenue stream from their traditional35mm business, Kodak withdrew their digital camera,a strategy that eventually led them to file forbankruptcy protection in 2012 as the digital megatrend washed over them. But how do we turn visioninto action? This paper will explore the link between amegatrend vision and a product roadmap.

The mega trend roadmap

Let’s start with a quick review of the megatrend roadmap. Building a megatrend view of your world can be described in three major steps:

1. Identify trendsWhat are the trends that could significantly change the dynamics of your markets? These could be market trends that apply directly to your market – think of virtual currency or big data. They can also include adjacent trends that at first sight don’t seem relevant but have the potential to change how your market operates. The sharing economy is a direct trend for air bnb, but an adjacent one for BMW, who see an impact as customers move from buy, to lease. to hire.

2. Describe current offerWhat are the products and services we offer to the market today? This is as simple as listing our current propositions. If we’re looking at a new market, then this might be blank.




3. Define the stepsWhat are the major steps we need to take to ensure our products are ready to address the mega tends we’ve identified? We think of these steps in terms of technology, communication and regulation - small increments that give a view of the initiatives we’ll need to deliver if we are to reach our goal. This isn’ta detailed plan, its more the high-level milestones along the way.

And the issue with mega trending….

The problem with a megatrend roadmap is this; it presents the market problem and the potential solution in broad brush strokes, making it a great presentation tool to engage leadership team with, but far too abstract to be useful for development and delivery teams. The risk is that we build one, present it, and then forget it, meaning we completely disconnect what we deliver from the vision we laid down to leadership. Let’s look at how to solve this disconnect.

Unbundling the megatrend roadmap

The first step in building the connection from megatrend to product roadmap is to unbundle the megatrend view i.e. break it down into smaller, more manageable components.

It’s easier to visualise this with an example. So, let’s take a training company

who see a trend in their market around online learning.




Define the major steps

They could build a vision around online learning and then, using the megatrend roadmap, define the three key steps they would need to address.

STEPS:

1. Develop online content

2. Deliver that content in a platform

3. Build a certification model

Identify points of value

Next, they take each step and break it down into points of customer value. For example, the step “deliver online content” breaks down into topics, each offering clear value to a customer:

POINTS OF VALUE:

• Financials for product managers

• Building agile requirements

• Product launch

• Lifecycle management

• Sizing an existing market

• Marginal gains

• Beating commoditisation

• Retiring and replacing a product




• Presenting with clarity

• Negotiating internally

• Dynamics of an effective team

• Influencing skills

Describe the delivery plan

Finally, they need to think through the delivery – each point of value needs a delivery plan that describes the steps required to build it. As an example, the plan the “Influencing skills” value might be:

DELIVERY STAGES

• Define learning need

• Storyboard

• Draft script

• Review and sign off script

• Draft animation with non-pro voiceover

• Review and sign off draft

• Build final version




• Snag

• Sign off


In an agile world


PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PAPER 4

IN AN AGILE WORLD.

A Framework for Product Success

A Paper For

Software Product Managers, Product Directors, Product Owners and all involved in Agile Product Delivery


In an agile world


Contents

Situation Analysis An evaluation of the current situation where the roles of Product Management and Agile Delivery teams can often be ill-defined or operate together in a sub optimal environment.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities How the two functions could best be aligned for product success. How to use clear high-level definitions as the foundation for a successful partnership.

The Product Life Cycle Collaboration Model: How to structure the product life cycle to include clear and unambiguous clarity on responsibilities, manage any overlap of roles and enable a collaborative working environment.

From Product Strategies to Continuous Releases Using a framework which aligns business & product strategies with themed roadmaps, and agile delivery methodologies.


In an agile world


Situation Analysis

Agile Delivery is widely seen as a positive force for good in the world of software product delivery but as the folk at Tarigo work with product management teams across the world, we see differing levels of success with its adoption within the overall Product Life Cycle.

Typical issues we encounter include:

• A lack of knowledge or agreed understandingabout the basic disciplines of ProductManagement & Agile Delivery

• Lack of clarity on the roles andresponsibilities across ProductManagement and Agile ProductDelivery teams.

• The need for improved collaborationacross the teams as well as a processthat accommodates strategicproduct objectives with the flexibleneed to react to customer needs.

• No agreed framework for managingthe Product Life Cycle toaccommodate key product strategies and commercial objectives through to a continuous agile delivery of products.


In an agile world


• The risks associated with purelycustomer driven developmentwhich can often result in productsbecoming overtaken by marketmegatrends, emerging technologyenvironments and new prospectneeds.

• Strongly held views thateither Agile or Waterfalldelivery methodologies arethe only choices whereashybrid approaches may beviable.

• An ill-defined or a missingprocess that enables thehandover from productmanagement to Agileproduct owner.

As we have continued our engagement with clients, we have encouraged approaching the issues in a number of ways. Organisation

laid out in the rest of this paper and many have built them into a continuous improvement process.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities

In any organisation that has both Product Management and Agile Delivery teams, confusion can often occur simply because there is insufficient clarity and agreement on what the respective functions, roles and objectives are.


In an agile world


In our experience if you ask members of any software orientated organisation “What does

Product Management do?” Or “What is Agile

Delivery?” you will get many different answers.

The best performing software product organisation’s have clarified these roles and responsibilities and ensured they are agreed and well known across the business. Furthermore, we have seen that the following definitions have been successfully adopted by many organisation’s as a core

framework to achieve clarity.

Product Management

One definition of product management that we have found to work well in an organisation is as the Product Custodian and CEO for a product or product line. The role of custodian is to be “responsible for holding or looking after valuable

property on behalf of a company or another

person”.

By “looking after” we mean that product management must have broad responsibility for creating & growing the product, and if necessary, taking a product to the end of its life.

The term “valuable property” emphasises that the product

has a commercial value and that such a commercial consideration has a major part to play in the decisions that


In an agile world


product management must drive or significantly influence.

And the term of CEO is used to identify the role of Product Management being responsible to stakeholders for the product strategies, execution of plans and meeting commercial targets. We find this analogy relevant as all products do have many stakeholders and Product Management has to accommodate those stakeholders from a position of leadership and not as the only owner!

In the broadest sense, Product Management has a wide remit. It must analyse and lead or recommend product strategies and releases based on.

• Fundamental markettrends such as growth,value, geographies andsectors.

• Technology trends in terms ofmarket adoption, potentialintegration challenges, emergingplatforms or eco systems.

• Competitive environmentsfrom existing players in themarket to potential entrantsand the increasing risk ofwell-funded “disruptors” not

just with a competitiveoffering but often with aninnovative business model.

• Well researched insight into requirementsfrom prospective new customers not justexisting customers. Very often theyrepresent a group with differentprioritised requirements.


In an agile world


• The organisations need forspecific measurable metricsincluding such measurements asproduct line P&L, revenues,customer acquisition, customerchurn etc.

In terms of development and delivery we have found that the best performing teams are using the above analysis, always supported with evidence, to manage the entire life cycle of a product alongside a strong collaborative working partnership with the agile delivery teams.

Agile Delivery The fundamental definition for Agile is an approach to make the process of software development lean and effective, and it’s

seen increasing popularity and success.

The agile development methodology and culture according to the Agile Manifesto

At its core, agile is an incremental, iterative approach to delivering high-quality software with frequent deliveries to ensure value throughout the process. It places a high value on individuals, collaboration, and the ability to respond to change.


In an agile world


follows the following principles.

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy thecustomer through early and continuousdelivery of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, evenlate in development. Agile processes harnesschange for the customer’s competitive advantage.

3. Deliver working software frequently,from a couple of weeks to a couple ofmonths, with a preference to the shortertime- scale.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughoutthe project.

5. Build projects around motivatedindividuals. Give them the environmentand support they need and trust them toget the job done.

6. The most efficient and effective method ofconveying information to and within adevelopment team is face-to-face conversation.

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

8. Agile processes promote sustainabledevelopment. The sponsors, developers, andusers should be able to maintain a constantpace indefinitely.


In an agile world


9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good designenhances agility.

10. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--isessential.

11. The best architectures, requirements, anddesigns emerge from self-organising teams.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects onhow to become more effective, then tunes andadjusts its behaviour accordingly.


In an agile world


Delivering Product Management Excellence The Product Plan – why it’s so critical

Paper 5



The Product Plan – why it’s so critical

Introduction

For Product Managers, building an evidenced-based assessment of your customers, markets, competition, product, pricing, financials, plan and vision is critical when we want to get funding for a new initiative. But once funded, we often forget this – we charge headlong into delivery and stop reflecting on the fundamentals of why we’ve built our product. But think of it like this; your

market is not static – every aspect from customers through to competition is changing. The product plan is where we document those changes. Fifteen minutes per week reflecting on “what is changing in my market” and captured in the product plan means you keep an up-to-date view of market conditions.




What is a product plan?

Managing a product is complex. We need to understand our customers, markets, competition, regulation, and more. That’s a lot to remember! To fix

this, product managers keep a document called a product plan – a single document that gives a comprehensive overview of our product and the market it competes in.

The product plan enables the product manager to describe their product and its market in a structured manner. This is the core structure of the product plan:

• The Market• The Product• The Financials• The Metrics• The Vision• The Risks• The Plan

The product plan is then topped and tailed by a product overview and product summary and simply acts as the storehouse for all of our product thinking. It enables the continuity of knowledge and helps with knowledge sharing among product teams.




Why do I need a product plan?

The value of the product plan cannot be overemphasized. The product plan can be, and should be, the nucleus of everything related to your product. It is fundamental to capturing the work efforts of a product team. It delivers huge benefits, particularly to the product manager in helping them understand, clarify and articulate their product to review teams. Some of the key benefits include:

• It enables the continuity of knowledge and helps with knowledge sharingamong product teams

• It helps us keep alignment and focus on achieving project objectives

• It provides a consistent, transparent way to communicate productperformance

• And it serves as a key input to product reviews to evaluate progress andmake decisions




Building the detail into the product plan

Building the core detail of the product plan is made easier with the template. Each section of the Product Plan prompts the product manager to reflect on key questions, populate with information they already have and conduct research to complete the rest. It’s up to the product manager, guided by their

peer review team to build an appropriate level of depth and detail into the document. A product plan is typically 15-25 pages long. Too long and it lacks the focus and brevity to get the key points across.




Updating the plan

A product plan is written by product management before a product is built and it acts as the storehouse for all the evidence gathered to help make the right decision. But what about once the product is launched?

We know market conditions will change, so we keep the product plan updated. The best practice is to make small but regular updates to the plan. Put aside 15 minutes per week, and ask yourself “What have I learnt about my products

and markets over the last seven days?” Using this technique, the product plan

is always up to date, and the amount of time and effort required to keep it updated is small.




Delivering Product Management Excellence Theming your product release to deliver impact

Paper 6


Theming your product release to deliver impact


Introduction

Watching paint dry or being presented with an endless list of features that describes everything a product manager is planning to add to their product over the next twelve months. They compete for the title of “Most boring thing I can

imagine doing”. From a customer or an internal stakeholder perspective, trying

to deduce where the value might be in the list of the 100 features the product manager plans to add is mind-numbing. And the risk? All that hard work from development gets lost as customers simply can’t see the value to them. A better approach is to group features into themes – each theme conveying the core value and most features demonstrating delivery of that value. It builds a more interesting, more engaging, more valuable story for our customers.




What is a Theme?

Themes are groupings of features. They describe the value that a customer can gain from using the features within a theme.


The feature and the theme rely on each other; No theme = no message and no feature = no proof point. For example, in light of recent breaches Facebook has a theme of “Put privacy first”. A raft of new features has been added such as

“privacy shortcuts”. The “Put privacy first” theme lacks credibility without

features to support it and the “privacy shortcuts” feature would get no attention without a theme to message it.




Building Themes

Like features, themes can come from anywhere, but they must resonate with your target market. For example, a theme of “Enabling mobile working” would

be irrelevant if your target market is office based and has no plans or desire for mobile working.

Themes can relate to feedback your get from your user community “Improving

usability”, to regulatory themes “Meeting GDPR 2018”, through to technology

themes “IoT ready”. There are two critical validations for a theme:

1. Does it resonate with our target customers?

2. Can we credibly add value for the theme?

If the theme cannot realistically address both of those points, then the chances of success are vanishingly small.




Building a themed roadmap

So where do you start with a themed roadmap? These are the building blocks

1. Start with a vision

If you don’t start with a vision, then your roadmap runs the risk of

meandering – going nowhere useful simply because you haven’t set an

end goal. Think 2 – 5 years out into the future and describe where youwant to take the product.

2. Break it into key streams

Think of key streams such as technology “What are we delivering”,

communication “What are we going to say” and architecture “What do

we need in place to deliver”

3. Build in iterative steps

For each stream describe what you plan to do in three-month steps andthe value it delivers.




4. Test it

Review your roadmap with selected customers (ensure appropriateconfidentiality is in place) and make sure its credible, coherent andcompelling.




Get involved

We appreciate your feedback and thoughts. Join or start a discussion on market mapping. Share

your examples, ask for feedback, let us know how it made a difference to your business.

More support

Want some more advice? Contact us on [email protected] and we’ll be

happy to help.





Delivering Product Management Excellence Getting market validation for your plan

Paper 7




Getting market validation for your plan

Introduction

You’re in the process of writing a product plan. It reads great and you’re looking forward to presenting it at a peer review. But how confident are you that customers want and need your product? Without market research, you’re

simply guessing as we take product to market.

Market research offers a way of qualifying our ideas, pricing, strategy, features and so much more. It helps ensure we know what our customers want and why they want it, rather guessing at their needs. It gives MasterCard confidence in the product plan and avoids wasting time and effort building solutions our customers have no interest in.




Getting market validation

There are four main models for validating your plan:

Qualitative research is about finding out not just what people think but why they think it. It’s about getting people to talk about their opinions, so you can

understand their motivations and feelings. We’d typically conduct this type of

research in focus groups or face to face meetings.

Quantitative research is about asking people for their opinions in a structured way so that you can produce hard facts and statistics to guide you. To get reliable statistical results, it’s important to survey people in numbers and to make sure

they are a representative sample of your target market.

Primary research is information that comes directly from potential customers. You can compile this information yourself or hire someone else to gather it for you via surveys, focus groups and other methods.

Secondary research is already compiled and organized for you. Examples of secondary information include reports and studies by government agencies, trade associations or other businesses within your industry.




We can conduct quantitative or qualitative primary or secondary research.

Under this framework there eight techniques we can use outlined in the next section.

Market validation techniques

EXPERIMENTAL

In experimental research, we observe the results of changing one or more marketing variables while keeping certain other variable constant.

are groupings of features. They describe the value that a customer can gain from using the features within a theme.


OBSERVATIONAL

In observational research actions of people are watched either by cameras or observers. It can include activities such as mystery shopping

However, it cannot measure attitudes or motivations




FOCUS GROUP

In focus group research, 6 to 12 people are brought together by researchers to discuss a specific situation or reactions to a product.

PERSONAL INTERVIEWS

Personal Interview research is a face-to-face meeting. People are more willing to respond in person, but can often tell you what they think you want to hear.




POSTAL SURVEYS, PHONE INTERVIEWS, INTERNET SURVEYS

Postal, phone and Internet surveys have the greatest potential for causing resentment on the part of those surveyed. And very low (less than 1%) response rates.

Additionally, respondents may not be representative of the market and can misdirect you.




TEST MARKETING

And finally, there’s test marketing. The product and its marketing plan are

exposed to a carefully chosen sample of the population before its full-scale launch. It’s conducted in real-life buying situations and can last from few weeks to several months. Due to its high cost, however, test marketing is more suitable for fast moving packaged goods.




And the most common mistake…

With all research techniques we should remember that what customers do and say, and think is not always consistent. I may LIKE the yellow car. It might be my FAVOURITE colour, but I might BUY the blue car – it stays looking clean, it’s easier to sell, it’s less risky. So whatever techniques and methods you use, make sure you ask the same questions in different ways and look for different responses.



Delivering Product Management Excellence Presenting your product plan

Paper 8


Presenting your product plan


Introduction

You’ve built your product plan; done the hard research, built a financial model,

and you’re ready to present. But all your hard work could be for nothing if you

cannot get your message across. Your bright new product idea could fall at the first hurdle if the review team simply don’t understand it or pay enough

attention because of how you present.

Being able to present with clarity and conviction is a critical skill. A skill worth working on to truly do justice to the hard effort in building your product plan.

Start with structure

The foundation to a great product plan presentation is structure; your audience want to know some basics. Think about it from their perspective:

● Why am I here?

● How long will I be here?

● What decisions will I need to make?

So tell them!

We can think of that basic structure as a template we use at the start of any presentation. For example:

“The purpose of this presentation is to discuss a new Product Plan.

We need 15 minutes of your time.

We’re looking for you to get on board and help us”.




Deliver this well and you’re heading in the right direction.




Pick your talking points The next major hurdle is the content – what do you want to talk to the team about? We often have complex product ideas to discuss and can quickly get lost as we try and explain them.

So, here’s a simple tip. Pick the three major points you want to talk about and focus on those. It will give your content some structure and direction.

For example, we might say “There’s lots we can talk about around this new

product today, but the three major points I want to focus on are:

● Revenue is forecast for $10M by end of year● New regulation presents a risk● Two new features promise to lift us above the competition

So, you’ve now let the team know why they’re there, what you need them to

decide, how long you’ll present for and the major points you’ll cover. We’re

under way, now let’s think about the core of the presentation




CORE CONTENT Product Managers often present complex content. Imagine presenting a Product Plan at a peer review with a 50-slide deck full of 10-point writing. How do you think your audience would respond?

It’s better to adopt a “less is more” approach. If we take the product plan example, a great way to present it is to build the content into an eight-slide deck. Each slide has a heading (the section name) one image (a graph, or picture) and three bullet points. You can then present from it rather than read it.

You’ll get questions as you go, some easy to handle others requiring more

thought. For those questions, think of using a “parking lot” – a board where we write questions and comments we’ll address after the meeting.

And one other tip – keep an eye on the time. You don’t want to ruin your big finale because the clock beat you!




THE CLOSE And so, we approach the end of the presentation. It’s almost identical to the start – restate your major points, what you’d like the team to do next, and thank themfor their time.Nothing guarantees success but using this type of structure irons out a fewbumps in the road.




DELIVERY STYLE

But that’s not quite the end. Before we finish let’s think about three tips on

delivery style.

● Bring your content to life. Make sure you don’t just repeat dry facts and

figures. Give insights and anecdotes: talk about customers you’ve met

and the stories they told. Bring your content to life!● Deliver with passion. The mood you take in front of the whiteboard

infects the room. Be happy, front footed, positive, engaging and watchthe room join you.

. Banish those nerves. We’re not all born presenters. For those that feel nervous

there’s no substitute for practice. Take every chance you can with friends,

colleagues or family to present, rinse & repeat. In no time you’ll lose those

nerves.


Start with the problem


Delivering Product Management ExcellenceStart with the problem Building ideation energy in your team

Paper 9




INTRODUCTION

How should product managers approach new ideas? This sounds like a really simple question. But making a wrong decision could cost dearly; we try to take products to market that just don’t fit, or simply don’t add enough value to our

business. In this paper, we’re going to look at a simple way to test new product

concepts before they turn in to product clunkers!




IDEAS ARE GOOD, RIGHT?

Large companies, such as MasterCard, generate huge numbers of ideas; new products, new initiatives, new features, new markets. They’re a creative bunch!

Let’s think about those ideas; some will be game changing and open new

opportunities (Think of Master Pass or Apple Pay), some will be table-stakes; things that need doing to remain relevant. But some will be just plain bad ideas; overlapping with current products, offering limited customer value, or simply too small an opportunity to be relevant. And even if every single idea was great, we haven’t got the capacity to define, deliver, sell and support them all. So, pick the winners; the ideas that show most likelihood of being able drive our business forward.




PICKING WINNING IDEAS

So how do we do manage all of these ideas? The best way to think about it is that Product Management acts like a filter – all new ideas land with us and before too much effort is expended, we assess each idea to work out whether it’s a good commercial fit.

In some organisations, this filtering process is severe – as many as 80% of new ideas fail at this first gate. That may sound like a high number, but think of it like this; are we better as a team trying to deliver on many ideas poorly, or are we better focusing our efforts on delivering a smaller number of high value ideas incredibly well?




THE FILTER QUESTIONS

At the heart of great concept assessment is a set of commercially relevant questions that help us understand the risks and rewards associated with an idea.

Think about like this; if you were presented with a new product idea right now and were asked if you’d spend $10,000 of your own money developing it, what

questions would you ask?

You might start with the obvious. “What is it?”, “What problem does it solve?”,

“Who it is solving that problem for?”, “How is it being solved today?”.

Let’s pause for a moment on those four questions. They’re powerful. Think of

products that have failed – the reason for their failure will at least in part sit within those questions.

These questions are also great to push back out to idea originators. It helps you test their thinking before the idea gathers momentum and becomes yet another product for you to deliver.




Now let’s now drop into some deeper questions:

• “Is the market growing” This helps us reflect on whether the idea has

potential over the longer term.

• “Who else competes and how are we different” Encourages to think about

our unique selling points or USPs as soon as possible – if we get to marketwith no USP then price becomes the only differentiator.

• “What are the key risks?” Ensures we consider big picture issues – thingsregulation, timelines, and market acceptance.




We might also filter ideas on business suitability: “Does this fit with our business model?” Breaking that down we might think about that question in three ways:

• Portfolio fit – Does it fit with the products and service we offer today?Does it overlap and risk cannibalising sales from the existing offer or doesit sit so distant that it makes no sense in the portfolio?

• Price or channel fit – Does it fit within the price bands our channel sell at?A team selling multi-million-dollar solutions are unlikely to have desire tosell a product at a low price point. Conversely, a business selling $100products online is unlikely to find success with a $50,000 product throughthe same channel

• Strategy fit – Does it fit with the strategic direction of the business?




Finally, we want to ask something about the financials. It’s tempting to go

straight to a three-year revenue model, but this is way too detailed at this stage. A better question is “How big is the opportunity?” In product management

speak we think of this as the Total Available Market – a quick metric to measure product potential by estimating the size of the market with no competition. A count of how much you could theoretically sell if everyone chose your solution.

It’s a great number to know because it acts as a backstop – if the Total Available Market is $100m, then no matter what you do you won’t sell $110m.




SUMMARY

So there we have it; Ten questions we rigorously apply to all new ideas to check if they’re worth more time and more effort.




Delivering Product Management Excellence Scoping a new idea

Paper 10


Scoping a new idea


INTRODUCTION

How many clients will use a new product or service? It’s a difficult question to

answer. It’s also a critical question. If we can’t put an estimate on product demand, then we cannot scale our delivery or support teams. We also need to understand the impact the new service might have on the rest of our infrastructure. Forecasting demand can be summed up as follows:

1. Incredibly difficult to get right and;

2. Critical to do.

So how do we tackle it?


Scoping a new idea


THE SIX STEP SCOPING PROCESS

Forecasting for a new product or service is challenging when we have no historic or foundation data to work from. Therefore, we must approach the problem from first principles. Think of it as a 6-step process:

1. Find the total available market

The first step is to work out how many customers could use your product or service – the maximum number of clients across your markets if there was 100% take up. Using this technique, we calculate the back-stop number - a number that represents 100% market saturation. We then break this down by regions and sectors.


Scoping a new idea


2. Identify key segments to do your research

Research is expensive and time consuming. Almost always, it’s better to identify

two or three groups within the total available market and focus our research efforts with them. Research group candidates should include groups with the most pressing need for the solution.

3. Understand the lifecycle component

Understand where the product or service sits on a lifecycle or adoption curve. This will hugely influence demand. For example, think of the electric car – the Total Available Market is all car owners, but because it’s new and innovative

technology, we know that only a 5% innovator group is likely to be interested in buying this product initially. In contrast, a car such as a Diesel-powered SUV is in decline in European markets because of new emissions legislation, so we wouldn’t plan to launch in a declining market.


Scoping a new idea


4. Triangulate with qualitative research

There’s no substitute for direct market research. Test the proposition with a

minimum of three client groups in your target market and also with other relevant stakeholders such as support functions or other product teams.

Get answers to questions such as:

If we supply it, will they use it?

Why would they use it?

How often would they use it?

How are they solving the issue today?

What are the barriers to adoption and use?

From this, make an estimate – how many of my target market are likely to adopt.


Scoping a new idea


5. Underpin with quantitative research

Test your research findings with surveys. Look for proof points and anomalies – feedback that either supports your qualitative research or challenges it. Essentially, try and get to a point where you can say:

“Three client groups said this solution will speed up processing time by 30% and,

when surveyed, an additional 200 clients supported these findings.”


Scoping a new idea


6. Build an estimate

And finally, you can calculate your market estimate. Do this by overlaying the total available market figure with the lifecycle stage and your initial target market to estimate your market size at launch. Then double-check that your research findings support this estimate.


Scoping a new idea


A WORKED EXAMPLE

Let’s look at this method through a worked example. Take the market of Product

Management and imagine we want to build a new online learning tool for them.

Using our six-step process:

1. Find the total available market

There are 1,000,000 product managers across the globe, making our Total Available Market.

2. Identify key segments to do your research

100,000 reside in the UK. This is our local and first target market.

3. Understand the lifecycle component

Our market has never had a dedicated online learning resource, so we are in an innovator market. This means 5% of our UK product managers are targets, giving us 5,000 potential product managers.

4. Triangulate with qualitative research

We’ve researched 32 teams across the UK, focusing on teams who have new product management functions potentially with high training needs if they take a traditional face to face route. Of those teams, we estimate 40% would buy our online solution. That means 40% of our 5,000 potential product managers are likely to adopt, giving an estimate of 2,000 product managers.

5. Underpin with quantitative research

We researched 350 customers using Qualtrics and found strong support for our face to face research findings.

6. Build an estimate

So, from 1m product managers worldwide, to 100,000 in the UK, taking into account the innovator market status and our research findings, we estimate a take up of 2,000 product managers in the first year. To give us some flexibility, we will plan for take-up of between 1,500 and 2,500.


Scoping a new idea


GET INVOLVEDWe appreciate your feedback and thoughts. Join or start a discussion on

market mapping. Share your examples, ask for feedback, let us know how it made a difference to your business.

MORE SUPPORT Want some more advice? Contact us on [email protected] and we’ll be

happy to help.




What’s Coming Next?

2018 has been a great year for Tarigo. We have seen record numbers booking

on our public courses and 2019 is already looking very busy.

We get great feedback from our public training. But understand that it is

important to top up your knowledge surrounding our content, to be able to

continue achieving the best results.

2019 will bring the exciting launch of – Product Management Central

P.M.C aims to provide you, a working product manager, with all the tools,

templates and resources you need to effectively manage your product suite

with a maximum possible success rate. You’ll be able to access:

• Bite-size modules - Cover all our training content, refresh your

knowledge and revise or learn new methods of managing your product.

• Resources – i.e. blogs, papers, webinars and expert consultancy.

• Community – Troubleshoot issues with other product managers and use

our peer review example worksheets for support.

• Tools and worksheet templates – Instantly implement our product

management process with access to all the interactive tools and

downloadable worksheets you need to get on with the job at hand.

Have

a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! From all of us at



Public Training for

2019


Documents

2018 Ltd - Product Management Training and …...1. Marginal Gains How can we as Product Managers use marginal gain to ensure we always stay ahead of our competitors? First gaining