⋒ “The Double Intersection” ⋒
Amongst product management, product chops & product marketing what’s more important for a product’s success?
Great products aren’t easy!
If you think this statement is debatable / argumentative, then it is either that you have been seeing and building it all wrong or you perhaps are from the current era of NoCode / LowCode tools and Web3 where you could set up your backend, define your workflow, build an UI with the best part being – “The UX is already taken care of”, ramping up your operations and setting up everything you’d need over running your business smoothly.
But technically, are you building anything over using NoCode / LowCode tools?
Certainly not!
You’re just employing features that are built for reuse by some other organization that could carry out some due diligence over implementing some pretty basic functionality over features that generically seem befitting to a domain or operations given a certain business vertical.
That’s similar to ordering a mobile device from one of those online shopping sites, receiving it, unboxing it, setting up your phone post inserting your SIM card (as applicable), switching it on and using it.
Which is mostly “Plug and Play”.
But, what have you built from scratch?
Nothing!!
ZERO!
Now, take a step back and think about what those organizations would have gone through over conducting research extensively, discovering, analyzing, validating, designing, building a product, testing, perfecting it over the feedback received from user groups / users to be.
When that’s the hardest part and what wholly constitutes product management, there are few participatory internal teams in there that collaborate, combine forces (“product chops”) carrying everything out diligently so as to unilaterally put the product in the path of achieving great success.
Product chops & how it fits in?
From time immemorial / what dates back to such a time in the past that has been documented and passed on over the years as knowledge of the universe, the one thing that’s common and still holds good to the world around us today in the 2020s is “Evolution”.
And in a similar vein, products and the manner in which they are built have been undergoing constant changes and still are as we speak. Earlier it started with concentrating deeply on planning over what’s to be built via a feasible roadmap, adhering to it and executing the build thereof.
As of today, the concept of delivering the best possible UX by leveraging an understanding of the user’s motivations so that the adoption is smoother leading to better conversion & retention is more of a default, at least to speak of the product world.
So, a closer term representing that could be “UX-led Growth”.
Here’s my tweet trying to evoke the concept of UXLG.
How do product chops fit in to all of this?
Product chops is indicative of the manner in which internal teams come together over designing, building, testing the product and deals with leveraging the understanding of the market, users and the best of technology effectively employing them as a tool so as to provide a seamless user experience (UX) and finally marketing to build awareness amongst those user groups gradually converting them across stages of the funnel ultimately translating to growth.
Ok. So how do you put product chops to effective use?
You’d do well to consider and sort out a few prerequisites here before you could start off: -
Users
Do we have a detailed understanding of the user’s needs / pain points?
What are their motivations behind wanting a product?
Are the users approachable to chat about & float mocks, part solutions over iterations and gain constant feedback so as to let the product course correct?
Technology
Which Tech is the best to employ given the circumstance?
How is Technology going to be leveraged?
What’s it going to cost us?
Do we have the capability to build it? If not, what’s it going to take to get us there?
Could we build something that could be hard to copy?
Schedule & Timelines
How much time do we have running into our first product release?
Are we prepared to handle multiple iterations to evolve the product incrementally?
Marketing
How are we going to position the product so as to resonate well and attract users?
How do we ensure consistent conversions over a period of time?
Remember, at the end of the day, product could simply be about doing the right things that would help you fit into a given market and a segment ultimately finding your way into the user’s product ecosystem and consistently add value so as to gun for customer loyalty & increase long-term customer value adding up to brand equity.
But truth be told, that’s also the most difficult part as you have to ensure quite a few things go right for you from the start all the way up to the growth stages and beyond.
The Double Intersection
Before we get to understand this let’s dive into a short story first.
There was a qualified engineer in the 1900s who had spent over 10 years working in a textile factory and happened to quit his job to begin his research on making a super fine fabric that he wanted to brand and call “climate controlled”. The secret sauce he used was triacetate cellulose fibers that had the inherent capability to adjust to the properties of the skin like dry, sweaty etc.
And after years of hardcore research he was successful in producing it which he extensively tested for performance, stress conditions, wear & tear before he went into producing it large scale. But after that is when the whole problem protracted into something unimaginable for him.
He simply didn’t get orders, his produce started to pile up in his factory.
That was some time in the distant past and then there was another instance dating back to more recently times like the early 2000s – pre-2010 era where Marketing was perceived to be imperative alright but it was thought to be essential when the product reaches / enters the growth stages which was comfortably post-build and after the organization gets to experience what they could term a wave of growth / culmination of a sales cycle – the so called “SINGLE INTERSECTION” / “THE ONLY INTERSECTION” as shown in the figure below.
But extrapolating it over today’s product organizations largely and referring to passages from Geoffrey Moore's - Crossing the Chasm and talking in his language, those first set of users who get onto using the product as it releases may just be early adopters and common-sense dictates one starts looking beyond that group of users and getting onto thinking seriously about capturing the beachhead and marching ahead from there, so to speak.
And, one way to achieve that would be to have marketing work as an integral part of the entire process as the product is taking shape and have it strategically interspersed along with the other phases of the PLC as shown here.
Let’s go stepwise over this now:
Moving away from the waterfall model has been a great leap forward barring the adherence to a few archaic methods across the PLC.
For ex: "where" & "how" does marketing fit in to the PLC?
Here's my follow-up thread:
https://typefully.com/BgpInv/iXdMRZe
#productmarketing #marketing #productmanagement #collaboration #PLC