Isn’t it about time, Bond? Your license to win in product management

* Image courtesy of Omega

Rumours are rife that the next James Bond film, “No Time To Die”, is set to be delayed again from April to autumn this year. If so, that will be the third delay to the release, a scenario that would be a nightmare for a product manager. I’m sure it’s also a nightmare for EON Productions, the makers, and MGM and Universal Pictures, the distributors, but in a different way given that the product is finished. For them, it’s the go-to-market channels that are the stumbling block. Personally, I can’t wait to be able to experience a Bond film again in a large-screen, surround sound, cinema environment, but isn’t it about time we were given the option to pay to see it on-demand? How much of a premium would you pay to see it now? Apparently the streaming services weren’t prepared to pay $600 million for the privilege…

Continuous re-invention

All this got me thinking about the parallels between James Bond films and product management. OK, it’s tenuous, but maybe a bit of fun. The franchise will be 60 years’ old next year, and has had to constantly re-invent itself to remain popular. Sometimes not always that successfully, but it has learnt from its mistakes, and as product managers, we need to do the same. We don’t want our product to be the George Lazenby of Bond films, do we? If we make a hash of a release, like the user experience fail of the Lazenby movie, then best to quickly pivot, learn from our mistake, and maybe restore the previously tried and tested Sean Connery experience until we figure the right way forward.

http://www.mgm.com/movies/the-world-is-not-enough

Another great thing about Bond films is the gadgets that are constantly pushing technology boundaries (and often credibility boundaries too!). As product managers, we are always having to keep up and make calls on the impact the latest technologies may or may not have. Like the micro cameras embedded in jewellery, the scanners in mobile phones, and the endlessly versatile watches and cars in the Bond films, some we get right or simply love, but some you know should never had made it past the drawing board. The bagpipe flamethrower, the radioactive lint, the shower scrub radio… hopefully you don’t have one of those types of product in your portfolio!

How to win 

Which brings me to the whole area of feature and product prioritisation—how do you decide what is the right thing to do next? I’ve successfully used the Kano model to make sure we always prioritise something that will delight our customers alongside baseline work we know needs to be done, and when discussing this with one of my team, he nicely summarised it as analysing along 3 dimensions:

• License to operate
• License to compete
• License to win

In the current market, does your proposed set of product features fulfil the need to be operational, to perform successfully and be competitive, and to excite and win over new customers? Just like a Bond film, being operational and competitive may not be enough, you need that extra wow-factor to be really successful, and that can be more important than something else you think you need to compete. These are tough decisions to make, and need to be aligned with your product and business motivations, but don’t underestimate the importance of creating delightful, winning experiences to be successful.

When to kill

This also made me think about the Bond film “License to Kill”, and how as product managers, we need to know when to kill off a product. Again, this is never an easy decision, especially when the product is apparently profitable—for example, when you have only a few developers maintaining it. Customers will suffer if you end-of-life the product, and it’s paying its way, so why try to move customers onto a newer product? Some things to consider that are often missed or overlooked:

• Will your development resource move on because they are dissatisfied with just doing maintenance, leaving your customers in the lurch with a product you can’t support?
• How many hidden costs are there to maintaining the product, such as hosting and infrastructure overhead, support overhead, management time overhead?
• What are the opportunities lost by having developers work on a product with no growth versus a newer product that could bring much higher long-term revenues?

With end-of-life decisions, good communications and careful timing are critical to success. Announcing end-of-life too early will drive customers to look at competitors, but leaving it too late could be damaging to the revenue growth and profitability prospects of your business. As with “No Time To Die”, timing is everything.

Which Bond are you?

Which makes me think, what fun could we have with Bond film titles in a product management context, and how do the different types of product managers align with the different styles of Bond actors?

• Does “Dr No” describe you as a product manager, or maybe “Never Say Never Again” would be better?
• How about “For Your Eyes Only” to represent your key stakeholder program?
• Or perhaps “The World is Not Enough” for your product ambitions?

One final thought: perhaps “Live And Let Die” represents asymptomatic anti-vaxxers? All I know is, I can’t wait to have this virus defeated and be able to see “No Time To Die”!

Motivational leadership: from knowing you’re shit to knowing your shit

I was asked this week for my thoughts on leadership styles and how to get the best out of a team. Given the challenging times in which we live, I thought I would share some of the guiding principles and lessons I have learned over many years of developing high-performance product and marketing teams. Being a good manager is challenging, particularly in product management when there are so many diverse personalities and skills. In summary, I have used situational leadership coupled with Dan Pink’s autonomy, mastery and purpose framework as my guiding principles.

Situational leadership

A key responsibility you have as a manager is to develop and nurture the talent in your team, and this is often broadly labelled as coaching. There are, however, four different leadership styles: directing, coaching, supporting and delegating. These are described in more detail in this article by Becky Leighton, which includes this informative graphic.

The four different leadership styles

When helping a team member develop a new skill, the first leadership style may be directing, because they do not yet have the necessary skills and you need to provide guidance and direction. As they build up knowledge and expertise, you can apply a coaching style that still involves directive behaviour but also highly supportive behaviour as they take on many aspects themselves. The more capable they become the more you can shift your style to supporting, with little directive behaviour but still progress checking and reporting to make sure the team member is doing the right things. Ultimately, you move to delegating when you are able to delegate the task in full, with little or no direction or support needed.

A key point here, which is missed by Becky Leighton, is that you should not think of your leadership style in the context of an individual. Instead, you need to think about it in the context of the skill the individual is trying to develop. Team members are at different levels of competency for many different skills, and so you need to vary your style of leadership depending on the skill, not depending on the individual. The same individual needs a different style for different situations, and this changes over time as they develop.

Good grammar and good leadership!

An important aspect here is self-awareness, for both you and your team member. Everyone should be prepared to have an open dialogue about skill levels, and this applies to both managers and team members. In some ways, this is summed up nicely by a mantra I have on a postcard on my desk, which says “Grammar: The difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit”.

Don’t try and use a directing style to a team member that already has the skills, and equally, don’t delegate something to someone who doesn’t have the skills. Having an open conversation about skill levels and how to develop these is a very healthy way to improve performance and motivate your team.

The science of motivation

Talking about motivation, I love the 11 minute RSA animate version of Dan Pink’s TED talk on the science of motivation. Dan Pink talks about how there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance: autonomy, mastery and purpose. I’ve interpreted this as recognition, challenge and vision: give people recognition for their self-directed achievements, give them challenges to help them master new skills, and give them purpose through a common vision.

Motivational leadership

For me, the real power comes in the combination of situational leadership and the science of motivation. As your team members develop from knowing they’re shit to knowing their shit, through your informed transition of leadership styles from directing through coaching to supporting and then delegating, you’ll be giving them challenging tasks from which they can learn, and recognition for their achievements. If this is all aligned with a common vision, you’ll have motivated team members who deliver better performance with high degrees of personal satisfaction.

Recognition, challenge and vision

While it is (relatively) easy to write about techniques such as these in a blog, it is a lot harder to actually apply these consistently in the workplace with your team and colleagues. I believe I have successfully used these techniques to motivate and develop high-performance product and marketing teams… maybe people who have worked for me in the past might comment on how successful I have been!

Let me leave you with a great example of motivational leadership, which illustrates really well the power of recognition, and maybe to a lesser extent, challenge and vision. It is a very entertaining 5 minutes of James Corden talking about team selection at his school: enjoy!

Goals, objective and strategy… same same but different?

If you’ve ever been to Thailand, you will have probably heard the phrase “Same same but different”, which loosely means something is similar to something else, but different. I remember it well as the name of a fabulous restaurant on Koh Lanta Yai, and I was reminded of the phrase and that wonderful place by a recent blog post.

Spice up your strategic planning

For a long time, I’ve bemoaned the misuse of the word strategy, where having one is so often considered the key to success and lacking one the obvious reason for failure. How often have you been asked “what’s your strategy?” or been told “what we need is a good strategy”. A strategy is the “how”, so unless you know the “what”, it’s pretty pointless.

I recently saw this post by Brian de Haaff at Aha! that spends nearly 1000 words explaining the difference between strategic thinking and strategic planning, which makes you wonder, why do we need so many words to explain something same same but different like this? The post makes a very important point right at the start: Goal first. But that introduces another word that is open to multiple same same but different interpretations. Should a goal be measurable, or aspirational?

Ah, I hear you say, objectives are measurable, as defined by the well-known SMART acronym. But many objectives are subjective, with no specific measures, and are perfectly acceptable as objectives, such as “be more customer centric” or “carry out rigorous performance reviews”. According to Paul Marsh at Personnel Today, SMART objective setting is not working and 86% of performance objectives are not SMART.

A lot of the problem, I think, is the same same but different meanings we associate with the words goal, objective and strategy. We all have our own interpretations and so you either end up with misunderstandings, or having to spend 1000 words explaining things. How can we overcome this?

Knowing your words’ worth

In my experience, you can achieve much greater clarity and understanding by changing the choice of words. It might seem trivial, but it isn’t, as using the right words to communicate, with clarity and precision, what you need to achieve, is invaluable. As a side note, I’m a stickler for using words correctly, summarised succinctly by the observation on my desk which says “Good grammar: the difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you’re shit” and incidentally, a topic I intend to write more on shortly.

I think it’s incredibly important to know your words’ worth. So instead of goals, think about motivations. Doing that immediately makes it clear you are striving for something to aspire to without a need to be specific and quantifiable, although of course, motivations can have also those attributes.

Instead of objectives, simplify it to just measures. That old adage, if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, holds true, and so by talking about the measures you want in place that will be motivational if achieved, you drive people to really think about what matters, whether for them or for the organisation.

And instead of strategy? How about methods, which is a much less confusing and misinterpreted word than strategy. Document the methods you will use to achieve the measures to support your motivations.

Motivations, measures and methods

OK, documenting your motivations, measures and methods doesn’t sound as exciting as having a new corporate strategy, or using strategic thinking to come up with strategic objectives and a strategic plan to achieve your goals. However, I’ve used this approach successfully, both for performance reviews and for creating business plans, and it really helps to crystallise your thinking. So when you are next asked to come up with your new strategy, perhaps following the Covid-19 crisis, take a step back and think about your motivations, your measures for success, and the methods you will use to achieve that success. And this applies whether you are doing this individually or for an organisation, whether in work or seeking a new challenge.

Am I over-thinking this by trying not to be same same, by being a bit different instead? I welcome your thoughts!

From good to great in product management

Building a high-performing product management team is not easy, because finding good product managers is hard. Some skills are coachable, but some are harder to acquire and for some personalities, the product manager role is just not a good fit. So if you are looking to recruit product managers, or looking to transition into product management, or wanting to improve as a product manager, here’s some advice and guidance based on my experiences.

Some product manager skills are polar opposites

The product manager role is a varied mix of functions that require very different skills, some of which seem polar opposites that would be difficult to find in one person. A good product manager will be able to perform some of these functions very well–a great product manager will be able to adapt behaviour to the many different situations he or she is faced with and excel in each one.

I tried to narrow down the varied functions into a shortlist of roles, but my list didn’t end up very short. So below are my 9 different personalities that I’d look for in the ideal product manager, in no particular order.

The Analyst

• Gathers and analyses product data, such as usage and revenue, across different market sectors and segments
• Gathers and analyses market, customer and employee feedback data as a driver for product decisions

The Businessperson

• He or she loves building business cases and delivering commercial innovation in pricing and/or go-to-market models, and understands the trade-offs between different sales models
• Knows when to bundle versus charge for new functionality, know how customer and partner contracts work

The Counsellor

• Good at empathising with customers, analysts, sales, services, support and R&D, listening attentively
• Proactive in seeking solutions that work best for all stakeholders across customers, sales, services, support, R&D

The Demo Demon

• Completely comfortable in the product, knows how to quickly wow prospective customers with unique value
• Focuses on showing the business outcomes that the software can deliver for the key personas in the customer

The Evangelist

• Is engaging, passionate, and inspirational about solving customer problems with innovative solutions
• Can communicate internally and externally with confidence, and is perceived as knowledgeable and trustworthy

The Geek

• Is in touch with latest tech trends, an early adopter for new technologies and excited by new tech innovations
• Constantly thinking about how new tech innovations can be applied to solving customer problems

The Guru

• A go-to person for difficult problems that need in-depth business and technical knowledge to solve
• Strong technology architecture knowledge

The Organiser

• Process-oriented, manages workload well, is good at keeping track of many different initiatives across product development, product management, product marketing, etc.
• Is adept at ensuring agile processes are followed, and ensuring all tasks are rigorously completed

The Visionary

• Sees emerging trends early and understands how they can solve new and existing business problems
• Good at out-of-the-box thinking on the opportunities for new technologies, new business models and new go-to-market strategies

You might want to rate yourself in each of these, on a scale of 1 to 10. How do you fare, and where do you perceive you can develop and improve? No one person can be all of the above, so if you are building a team, you should look to balance the personalities across the team to ensure that you have a good mix of different skills to call on.

What skills or personalities am I missing? Is the above valuable to you as you look to improve your skills, or the skills of your team?

Customer Experience: Turning good intentions into great execution

For quite a while, I’ve been intending to write about motivation and customer experience, but never quite got to it. Why write now? More on that later.

With customer experience, there has been much research that has highlighted a mismatch between what companies believe they deliver and what customers think they get. And other research has shown a mismatch between how customer-focused we believe we are as individuals versus how customer-focused we believe our company is. The common thread is that while we believe being customer-focused is critically important, we are not sufficiently motivated to invest enough in improving the customer experience.

Megan Burns at Forrester highlighted this in her blog article at the end of last year. This neatly frames the problem as being like eating healthily and taking exercise: we know it is good for us, but we still don’t manage to do enough of it. The answer from Megan is to look at making it easier to take action, by addressing the problem in smaller, more digestible chunks. This addresses the how, but not the underlying motivational problem.

Dan Pink highlights the intrinsic drivers for motivation in his excellent presentation “The surprising truth about what motivates us”, nicely brought to life in this RSA Animation. In essence, there are three pillars to motivation: Autonomy (the desire to be self-directing), Mastery (the desire to take on new challenges) and Purpose. Why are your executives not motivated enough to put the right level of focus on customer experience? Why am I not eating healthily enough or doing enough exercise? As Dan Pink points out, the stick approach (for example, you will die or your business will die if you don’t invest time in this) will probably not work. Nor will the carrot, as monetary rewards for resolving complex issues actually drive down performance.

There needs to be a strong sense of purpose alongside challenges that will be fulfilling. Perhaps your business should see the challenges of mastering new ways of reaching and reacting to customers, using new technologies such as mobile and social, as key motivators for delivering a better customer experience. And alongside this, you will need to have and to communicate a clear sense of purpose for improving the customer experience. Not a profit motive, as Dan Pink warns, but a purpose that has real meaning for your executives, your employees and your customers.

As I am about to embark on a new role heading product management at voice-of-the-customer specialist Confirmit, I personally have a new sense of purpose to communicate and seek feedback on my thoughts and observations from over 30 years in technology businesses. I think aligning everyone with the same sense of purpose has real power, and is key to delivering an improved customer experience. Do you agree?

The machine translation debate: enough is enough

How many experts over the years have proclaimed that, because of the latest advances, the time has now arrived to invest in MT? Full disclosure… I include myself in this, as I launched SDL’s integrated MT solution nearly ten years ago. And it’s still happening today, as Lingo24’s recent press release highlights.

How many times have you read about how machine translation will revolutionise communications by translating everything we need between languages? And how many times have translation industry watchers declared that the end is nigh for the human translator?

Well, my view is, enough is enough! There should be no need for further debate, because it is clear that:

• MT will never be good enough to remove the need for human translation
• MT is often good enough to add value to existing human translation processes
• MT is often good enough by itself to deliver useful translations

As SDL is putting it, now is the time to talk strategy. You need to focus on how you will get the most out of MT. And here I think you need to focus on doing just enough translation. What do I mean by this? You need to do:

• Just enough human translation where you need the guaranteed high quality
• Just enough post-edited MT where you need consistency from your translation process
• Just enough pure MT where consistency and quality are luxuries over utility

By adopting a just enough approach, you will deliver a better customer experience, faster, at lower cost. Get these parameters wrong, and you will damage your customer experience, slow down your time-to-market and spend too much on translation. The focus now should be on how you build flexible and dynamic translation processes that will always route content through the right translation path.

No more debate, just enough is enough!

To reach and react: why mobile and social are so disruptive

Although I would argue that the pace of change is maybe not as fast as some would have us believe, there is no doubt that there are significant disruptive forces at work in the shape of mobile and social. They are disruptive because they are game changers in your ability to reach, and react to, your customers. If you don’t respond to these forces, you will certainly suffer compared to those that do.

The message from Soulseeds Media this morning sums up the challenges quite nicely: “There is little growth in the comfort zone and there is little comfort in the growth zone“. The comfort zone is to keep using traditional methods of reaching and reacting to your customers, with little emphasis on mobile and social. Before you know it, that little shoot of ivy you chose to ignore will have spread everywhere, sapping your strength and constraining your ability to grow. Your competitors will have realised that mobile reaches consumers at all times of the day, wherever they are located, with an immediacy that other channels cannot provide. And they will also be using social to extend reach, by feeding a communication channel that can have explosive growth.

Extending your reach by itself, though, is not enough, as you need to be listening to, and reacting to, your customers. Knowing that your growth has slowed is not sufficient, you need to know why that parasite competitor is being successful, and you need to respond. If you combine the reach of mobile and social with the right analytics, you can gather the market and customer intelligence you need to determine your reaction.

Turning good intentions into great execution is not easy, as there is little comfort in the growth zone. But master mobile and social, and you will be empowered to reach and react to your customers in ways that underpin more profitable growth.

The pace of change is accelerating! Or is it?

How often have you been in a presentation which begins with something like, “The pace of change is accelerating” or similar? I was at the keynote by Google at Technology for Marketing and Advertising last week, and this was one of the key points. But is this really true?

When you have as many grey hairs as me, you remember many a pitch about the increasing pace of innovation. Back in 1999, it was all about massive transactions, tons of content, huge warehouses of customer data, dynamic personalization, etc. Sound familiar? Experience tells me that change generally happens more slowly than we would like people to believe.

In the recent HBR article on Big Bang Disruption, the authors contend that the traditional product lifecycle is being collapsed into just development, deployment and replacement. The driving forces for this are the changes to how products are developed in a world where cloud and SaaS bring customers much closer to the development process. In addition, the speed of communication has changed with the advent of social and mobile technologies.

This is the key point. I don’t think the pace of innovation has changed so much as the pace (and reach) of communications. With social and mobile, communications are getting faster and faster to a broader, more globally diverse audience. This impacts the way markets behave.

So to be competitive and to survive in this new era of socially connected, mobile customers, businesses need to expend much greater energy staying in touch with their customers, markets and competitors than ever before. By keeping pace with and listening to these new communications, you can adapt and innovate faster than your competitors. And that’s what really matters!

If you’re not listening, you can’t learn

No, this is not something my old teacher used to say to me, although it could easily have been. This is something that has become increasingly important with the advent of social media.

That old adage, you’ve got two ears and one mouth, so use them in that ratio, now applies as much to businesses as it does to sales people. Customers have always had a voice, but it used to be much harder for them to have that voice heard. Now they have a myriad of ways to voice their views, and if you are not listening, you will miss critically important intelligence about your products and services, your competitors’ products and services, and the latest market trends.

Implementing a survey, if done correctly, can actually increase your customers’ propensity to buy, according to research quoted in this article: http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-experience/what-questions-should-you-ask-your-customers-survey/162555. And you can use social intelligence to measure customer commitment, according to SDL in this blog article: http://www.sdl.com/community/blog/details/25349/the-limitations-of-traditional-kpis.

A “voice of the customer” initiative needs to embrace all forms of interaction with your customer so that you can ensure you really are listening to them, as this white paper from Confirmit explains http://confirmit.com/Confirmit/media/library/pdfs/Whitepapers/2012_07_06_WP_Are-you-listening_FINAL.pdf. Only then can you make informed decisions about how to respond.

Strategy, planning and motivations

Check out this Harvard Business Review blog post and all the comments. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/dont_let_strategy_become_plann.html

A very interesting collection of thoughts, from which you can deduce that strategy is probably the most over-used word in business, while also being the most misused and misunderstood. I have found that by critically examining the motivations of your business, your customers and your employees, you can take great strides towards understanding how you need to move the business forward. Clarity of thought here makes the subsequent planning process much easier and more productive.