Why SaaS Marketplaces Are Gaining in Popularity
One of the most exciting aspects of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is the growing number of applications that businesses can readily plug into as new needs emerge. Businesses took advantage of this flexibility during the pandemic, resulting in a surge of adoption of cloud-based solutions. These included solutions for remote working as well as applications for more specific use cases like online learning. The agility offered by SaaS and the ease of access to applications is clear. At the same time, business users tend to purchase these solutions at will. As a result, businesses find themselves with dozens, if not hundreds, of disconnected applications. This issue is known as SaaS sprawl and it can lead to siloed data, increased risk, and a range of other adverse consequences. Global research firm Forrester highlights the issue of SaaS sprawl in a new report, The Forrester New Wave™: SaaS Marketplaces, Q2 2020. The report evaluates top SaaS marketplaces that can help to alleviate SaaS sprawl and bring everything back into line. Here, we look at the advantages of SaaS marketplaces and break down the findings of the report. How SaaS marketplaces provide a better buying experience SaaS marketplaces help to tame SaaS sprawl by providing a centralised approach to finding, purchasing, and managing cloud-based applications. For example, they help businesses to find relevant or ‘add-on’ applications that are pre-vetted and peer reviewed. They also offer features like centralised management consoles to help reduce IT complexity. The LIKE.TG AppExchange is one such marketplace. It features 6,000 solutions that allow businesses to extend the functionality of LIKE.TG across every department and industry. These include low-code and no-code solutions for nearly every business challenge. What’s more, solutions can be integrated with LIKE.TG and can be installed with just a few clicks. What this means is that customers can benefit from all of the leading cloud solutions provided by LIKE.TG Customer 360, and layer on new capabilities from the AppExchange to create connected customer experiences. Eighty-six percent of LIKE.TG users have installed one or more solutions from the AppExchange. Roojai.com is one of those. The online insurance provider was quick to pivot in response to the pandemic and used LIKE.TG and SightCall from the AppExchange to offer customers a video claims service. Roojai.com has also built its own apps that it hopes to package and sell to other insurance companies through the AppExchange. What sets the AppExchange apart from other marketplaces While SaaS marketplaces are not new, Forrester’s report reveals that they’re gaining more attention these days. They’re also being enhanced with chatbots and other new features to support the buying experience. The Forrester report evaluates a total of eight SaaS marketplaces against criteria such as availability of applications and buyer interface. We’re delighted to share that the report says LIKE.TG “leads the pack with a mature marketplace with scale and breadth of SaaS solutions.” The Forrester report states that the LIKE.TG AppExchange “will generally appeal to anyone in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.” It also specifically notes that “LIKE.TG has thousands of applications in its marketplace in a range of categories.” LIKE.TG received the highest possible score of ‘differentiated’ in seven criteria – the most of any vendor evaluated. These include: Availability of applications Buyer interface Due diligence and assurance Management console AI and automation Roadmap, and Market approach In conclusion, the Forrester report acknowledges that, “Despite this being an overall newer market, LIKE.TG has a long history of running the LIKE.TG AppExchange and offers features such as private marketplaces and advanced search.” To learn more, download The Forrester New Wave™: SaaS Marketplaces, Q2 2020 report. Visit the AppExchange to find applications and partners to support your business needs.
Why Slack Is a Sales Team’s Secret Weapon To Growing Revenue
Sales Cloud 360 and Slack open up new ways to sell, helping your sales team to sell faster: driving growth now, and in the future. Ah, that classic knock-brush sound. For many members of the 21st-century workforce, the familiar Slack notification sound has become shorthand for many things. A team member celebrating a major deal closing. A supervisor giving some last-minute encouragement before a make-or-break meeting. Sometimes, just the social committee figuring out where everyone is going for lunch. These days, it represents the future of how we work and how we grow. Many people see Slack as a tool to communicate, and it still is. Now, it’s also a tool to close deals faster. Here are three ways Slack can help you rewrite the rules of sales: 1. Cut out conversation-killing email and talk with customers in a real-time #buyer channel instead What: Slack Connect allows salespeople to move conversations with customers, partners, and vendors out of email and into Slack. You can create a dedicated Slack channel for each buyer, choose the option to share that channel externally, and send the buyer an invite link to join. All of the magic happens in one place instead of in unending email threads. Why: Email is the new snail mail. The immediacy of Slack communication mimics the natural flow of in-person conversation. Similar to texting and instant messaging, it creates more genuine connections according to industry research. There’s also the added benefit of being able to easily share white papers, demo recordings, and other insights right in a chat. With a simple “@” mention, you can address concerns right away and lessen overall response time. This shortens the sales cycle. An IDC study revealed businesses that implemented Slack as a sales tool were able to respond to a sales lead 21% faster. That ease of communication can make the difference between struggling to book a meeting and finally closing that deal. How: Let’s say a buyer has a question about implementation time. Instead of playing a game of email tennis with a bunch of different stakeholders — an asynchronous way of communicating that eats up time — you can loop in the right technical expert in Slack within minutes. Need someone who can provide more detailed answers on use cases? Tag a product expert. Just needing to strengthen rapport? Tag an executive sponsor. No “just circling back on my previous email” required. Slack Connect brings customers and partners into the sales cycle so you can easily check on progress, catch potential blockers, and stay ahead of upcoming renewals. Slack bots can even scale your customer outreach, allowing you to do them en masse for smaller accounts. In a work-from-anywhere world, tools like Slack become indispensable. Forty-six percent of salespeople in a recent LIKE.TG survey stated they’ll be working virtually from now forward. To maintain a quality customer experience, sellers need collaborative software. Influx is the world’s largest on-demand support provider, and relies on being able to quickly react to clients’ seasonal needs. “Within 30 seconds of a lead arriving on our website, our app sends a notification to a dedicated Slack channel,” says Alex Holmes, Chief Growth Officer. “Those leads get actioned by the inbound sales team to let everyone know when they followed up – with a timestamp – and whether it was successful or if there was an issue. Every lead turns into a learning event.” 2. Make onboarding new team members a breeze with #new-hire tools What: Before a rep’s first day, invite them to join a #new-hire Slack channel where they can use the chat for all onboarding questions instead of email. If your company is large, you can even create different Slack channels for cohorts onboarding on different dates (e.g. #new-hire-November2021). Ask them to write a brief introduction and get acquainted with other newbies. Most importantly, provide all onboarding info in this channel. Need day one materials? Want an onboarding buddy? Don’t know how to enroll in benefits? Another benefit is new reps can see the entire history of an account in one place. All conversations, decisions and documents are available, not locked away in their predecessor’s inbox. Everything can be found in Slack. Why: Imagine you’re a sales development representative (SDR). It’s your first day on the job and you’re just getting started. The onboarding process is spread across documents on different platforms, resources in different inboxes, and known only to specific people. In short, it’s siloed and utterly overwhelming. With a single workspace for all onboarding materials, you can ramp up people faster. Not to mention that creating a channel for new hires gives everyone the benefit of seeing other people’s questions and saves HR teams the extra workload of answering repeat queries. Once new salespeople are up to speed and ready to venture out onto the virtual sales floor, they’ll find everything they need to do their jobs within Slack. They’ll also have visibility into historical account activity, so they’ll know what they’re walking into when they inherit accounts. You can even use a customer relationship management (CRM) integration to sync sales data. That way, salespeople no longer have to switch back and forth between systems. This makes early training a cinch. The threat of the productivity-killing “frankenstack,” where various project systems are haphazardly sewn together, is eliminated. Slack alerts can help you prioritise the right deals as you prep for meetings by providing insights from Sales Cloud. The less time you spend digging for information, the quicker you can land your very first sale. Companies with a Slack integration had a 15% faster sales cycle on average and 13% more deals closed. How: Slack can optimise and, frankly, humanise the employee experience, leading to less turnover and more well-prepared sellers. New team members can learn how to be successful based on others’ wins, benefitting from peer-to-peer learning. They’ll also build rapport with their teammates, establishing a company culture even virtually. “What’s great about Slack channels is, you have context for every message, and messages don’t get lost. That allows us to come up with solutions to problems faster and train people and figure out what’s really going on,” says Holmes. Slack with Sales Cloud can even boost effectiveness in small ways that aren’t always obvious. “Often it’s as simple as an emoji system, where I can really quickly see which leads may be worth following up on or not,” says Holmes. “If they’re unqualified leads, why are they not qualified? If there are leads where we don’t have enough information, I can see whether someone is actively following that up. Similarly, if any leads are a repeat lead, that information is clear to us as well.” 3. Create specific #opportunity Slack spaces so you can close deals as a team What: Selling is a team sport, so use Slack channels to collaborate with cross-functional team members on important opportunities. These digital “deal rooms” allow team members to swarm around customer needs in order to drive more deals forward, faster. Now, it’s easy for everyone to stay up to date on a deal’s stage and activity, and to work together on next steps to keep things on track. Winning deals is now a team orchestration instead of a solo effort. Plus, you can create a #winning channel where employees gather to pop (emoji) bottles and congratulate each other after a major close. Slack recently launched a new Huddles feature that allows group audio within a channel. People can quickly hop in and out of an audio conversation without having to schedule a formal video chat while still sharing files and screens. This aligns with research from Yale that shows phone calls create an even stronger empathetic response than video calling. The screen-sharing capabilities also allow everyone to feel like they’re in the office standing over a monitor, hashing out last-minute decisions. Why: Selling is a team sport – no rep closes a deal on their own. If a seller is facing a hurdle and they’re not able to pull in the right person quickly, it negatively impacts credibility, delays decision-making, and ultimately slows down the sales cycle. When teams are able to move as a unit, revenue grows. Slack enables sellers to not just talk to each other better but to talk to other departments better. Slack tears down the walls that exist between sales and marketing, engineering, finance, legal, product, or customer success — all the key players needed to get the deal done! This empowers sales organisations to act on customer feedback faster, passing along valuable input to the product teams. One hundred percent of sales leaders surveyed in an IDC study agreed that Slack helped them better understand and work with non-sales teams. How: Slack allows immediate collaboration between teams, even if the salesperson is on a call with a potential customer at that moment. If a prospect raises an objection, the speed of Slack allows the salesperson to contact the right person within their organisation, get an answer, and go right back to the client without leaving the call. Slack is there to help share the joy of winning a new contract, too. “When we acquire a new client, that information automatically goes into the general channel that the entire company sees,” says Holmes. “It’s a nice way for the people working on that deal: from the salesperson to the person onboarding the deal, and the team leader, to get credit for their contribution.” So, are you ready for #next-steps? Slack is a bridge builder. It closes the gaps between sellers and buyers, sellers and marketers, and sellers and other sellers. Slack helps to transform a CRM system from just the place where you keep information to the place where you engage, learn, and ultimately win. On virtual sales floors where salespeople are moving with ever-increasing agility, Slack positions teams to drive growth from anywhere. Try Slack for free. This post originally appeared in the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Why Website Personalisation is Your Best Friend in a Changing Economy
When the economy shows signs of slowing down, marketing budgets are often the earliest casualties. However, not all marketing investments are created equal, and website personalisation will help you regardless of the economic climate. There are several reasons why your business should focus on website personalisation. The first is customers now expect personalised experiences from nearly every brand they engage with. Over the last decade, companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have shown how technology and data can create seamless and often delightful customer experiences. It’s not just that Netflix has thousands of shows and movies for us to watch. It’s that the streaming service’s homepage is curated and ever-evolving with our tastes. That’s website personalisation at its best and something we come back for (and expect). According to LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Consumer report, customers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Customers are less forgiving about a disjointed experience or having to make a big effort to find what they want. And since websites have become the most essential digital experience for many businesses, they are among the first places where customers will form impressions about your brand. Customers are using their high standards for experience to judge whether to do business with you. So personalising that experience should seem like a no-brainer for most organisations, right? Not always. Here are three more reasons why website personalisation is important in a shifting economic climate. 1. Website personalisation can make up for stagnant advertising budgets For most brands, the biggest percentage of marketing spend is allocated to top-of-the-funnel activities, which centre on boosting brand or product awareness to new customers. This includes advertising or sponsorship campaigns. These often are the first marketing cuts during slow economic periods. Many executives believe that if customers aren’t currently in the mindset to spend, it’s better to reduce the outbound marketing used to acquire them until the storm passes. This is an effective cost-saving measure when economic growth slows, but the cuts reduce the number of prospects seeking out your brand and going to your website. Since there are fewer visitors to your site, each one increases in value. Simple maths says you need to convert more of these customers to make up for the drop you’re experiencing in overall site visits. Personalisation will help you improve your site’s overall conversion rate and overcome the traffic drop by giving those users more reason to come back. 2. Website personalisation automates a shorter path to conversion Leaner times result in leaner marketing teams. Companies will ask their marketers to do more with less. Efficiency and streamlining processes should be your business priorities. There’s no better way for marketers to address this new directive than by automating how we engage with every customer. Creating an automated website personalisation experience is a highly visible way to show your commitment to efficiency. And it’s way better than making frequent updates to pages and design templates. Automation is a more efficient path to conversion and upsell in a single site visit versus waiting for conversion across several visits or never experiencing it at all. For example, LIKE.TG uses personalisation to create a tailored experience for every customer who visits our website. Visitors are shown content based on their interests. The experience is relevant and appropriate, designed to meet their expectations each time they come back. 3. Website personalisation helps you build better relationships When budgets for new customer acquisition are trimmed, there’s more value in deepening relationships with your current customers. You probably already have good relationships with many of these people. Now you should be doing all you can to extend them. The best way to show your current customers that you’re invested in the relationship is demonstrating your understanding of them. This can be as simple as showing relevant content and offers whenever they arrive on your site. Providing a personalised experience to returning customers is the modern equivalent of saying “welcome back” in a bricks-and-mortar store. This goes a long way in driving up each customer’s total lifetime value. To go even deeper, ensure that this personalised experience stretches across all customer touchpoints, including service and sales. Sharing this critical customer experience data across your organisation is a bridge to building long-lasting relationships. Keep these website personalisation points as you drive forward in stiff economic headwinds. Your organisation will see fiscal and relationship benefits in the short term and in the years ahead. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
World Tour Essentials Asia is Here!
Trailblazers from all over the region came together with local and global leaders to celebrate the latest in innovation, and to focus on the major drivers for business success this year — AI, data and CRM. It was inspiring to gather so many industry leaders together, but if you weren’t able to attend, don’t worry. We have curated the highlights of the event for a virtual broadcast — join us on Thursday 25 May at 10am (Singapore time) for a recap of the best sessions, including the keynote address, led by Sujith Abraham, LIKE.TG Senior Vice President and General Manager of ASEAN. The future of business — AI + Data + CRM Kicking off the event, the keynote address put laser focus on how artificial intelligence (AI), data and customer relationship management (CRM) will be the foundation of business in the years to come. The power of AI to drive business growth is already being seen, and Generative AI is taking the world by storm. From marketing to sales, AI is becoming an important part of many businesses’ tech stack. It has the power to automate personalised service interactions, create hyper-targeted marketing messages, and accelerate your sales pipeline. We recently announced Einstein GPT — the world’s first generative AI for CRM. See it in action in an inspiring demo in the World Tour Essentials Asia keynote, and watch the broadcast to see Clara Shih, EVP and GM, Service Cloud who outlined what Einstein GPT will bring to your business We heard from Alison Olsson, Regional Vice President, who shared our new Customer Company Playbook, including how Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and more, can help any company become a customer company. AI skills for the future Amidst the discussions around the potential of AI, we also explored how ready the workforce is to use these innovations. We unveiled the results of our AI Digital Skills Survey, revealing that 72% of knowledge workers in Singapore are excited about the use of generative AI for their job. Yet, many are not equipped with the right skills, highlighting the need to accelerate the workforce’s digital readiness and aptitude for AI. Currently only 15% of employees in Singapore are using AI in their day-to-day role. Upskilling will be the way forward to address the AI skills gap. In fact, nearly all (98%) of respondents in Singapore believe that businesses should prioritise digital skills development for their employees. Sujith spoke to Poh Cheng Pang, Group Director, Business Technology Group at SkillsFuture Singapore, about the importance of lifelong learning, and the company’s vision for enhanced customer experiences. Pang Poh Cheng, SkillsFuture Singapore + Sujith Abraham Incredible Trailblazers We took a look at how Formula 1 creates incredible fan experiences using LIKE.TG Customer 360. Using Data Cloud, a global organisation like F1 can deliver personalised content to each of its 500 million fans worldwide. Watch the demo and the mesmerising Formula 1 film in the World Tour Essentials Asia broadcast. And we heard from Chia I Mun, APAC Commercial Excellence Lead at Johnson & Johnson Vision, who shared how the company is improving customer engagement, the skills needed for success, and the metrics that Johnson & Johnson Vision uses to measure success. Tune in for those words of wisdom in the keynote where I Mun speaks to Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer, LIKE.TG. Chia I Mun, Johnson & Johnson Vision + Polly Sumner Inspirational sessions The virtual broadcast will also showcase many of the sessions from the live event. Here’s a breakdown of what you can look forward to: Your Sales Playbook for Cost Efficient Growth Eighty-two percent of sales reps say they’ve had to adapt quickly to new ways of selling. Empowering your teams to sell smarter not harder, is top of mind, and we explore how features currently available in Sales Cloud help your teams maximise this digital first, automated CRM, powered by AI, to work more productively and reduce costs. Choon Soon Gan, Head of Business Process at ShopBack, shared how Sales Cloud helps their business scale fast across the region and work more effectively and productively across teams. Choon Soon Gan, ShopBack How To Generate Lifelong Loyalty with Service A loyal customer is a lucrative customer — 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services — up from 80% in 2020. To nurture the kinds of relationships that lead to customer loyalty, you need to provide a consistent experience across your channels — especially as 83% of customers expect to resolve complex problems through one person. Clara Shih, EVP & GM, Service Cloud demonstrated the power of Service Cloud when it comes to delivering excellent customer experiences that keep your customers coming back for more. We were also joined by Shilash Sharma, Senior Manager, Business & Digital Transformation at Anantara Vacation Club, who shared how they can scale at pace with customer growth, and drive loyalty through excellent service and personalised customer engagement. Shilash Sharma, Anantara Vacation Club Marketing Moments That Count: Maximise First-Party Data to Drive Conversions, Growth and Customer Loyalty The latest State of Marketing report contained at least one wake-up moment — 75% of marketers say they still rely at least in part on third-party data. With the ongoing changes to the way that platforms are handling third-party cookie data, it is becoming increasingly important that marketers have a robust first-party data strategy — something that only 54% of marketing professionals have done so far. In this session, see how Marketing Cloud can help you achieve business growth and deliver impactful customer experiences using a first-party data strategy. LIKE.TG experts guide you through the demos, and an extra special guest — Golden Hoodie winner Shibu Abraham, APAC Head, LIKE.TG Practice at UST, shares how businesses can leverage Marketing Cloud to get closer engagement with their customers. Shibu Abraham, UST Unlock Your Productivity With Slack and Generative AI Slack is the engagement layer for Customer 360, powered by automation, knowledge sharing, and connection. It enables you to bring together your teams to boost performance with improved decision making and increase efficiency with automated workflows. In this session Shweta Verma, Regional Vice President for Slack Sales, demonstrates how a new generative-AI-powered Slack will transform the way you work. We spoke to Michael Brady, Group Director Operations at Cebu Pacific Air, ASEAN winners of the Slack Award for Unlocking Productivity. Michael will reveal how Slack has empowered their business — saving time, improving customer experiences, and streamlining internal communications. Michael Brady, Cebu Pacific Air Stream it to believe it — World Tour Essentials Asia 2023. Learn about the apps the help you create a Customer 360 in your business the platform that lets you innovate how to leverage your data so you see and understand every customer Tune in from anywhere and discover how the future of business is AI + Data + CRM with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Get inspired by Einstein GPT in our keynote, hear from industry experts, soak up demos, and tune in to Trailblazer stories as we invigorate you on your journey to become a Customer Company with the #1 CRM. Experience the magic of Einstein GPT with live demos! Register Now for the virtual broadcast of LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia!
World Tour Essentials Singapore: Transform Your Customer Experiences with the #1 AI CRM
We’re living in a pivotal era where digital transformation is not just an option but a necessity. LIKE.TG continues to pave the way for AI innovation, bringing together CRM with trusted AI and data on one integrated platform, so our customers are prepared to lead in the AI revolution. World Tour Essentials Singapore will help you unlock your AI potential with the transformative capabilities of our latest Data Cloud and Einstein innovations. Register and join us on Wednesday 8 May, 8:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre to learn from customer Trailblazers, visionary AI experts and thought leaders. Read on to catch a glimpse of the sessions you can see. Everyone’s an Einstein with CRM + AI + Data + Trust At the heart of World Tour Essentials Singapore is our main keynote session featuring the inspiring Trailblazer FairPrice Group. Here, we’ll unveil how LIKE.TG is revolutionising CRM by integrating it with AI, data, and trust. This session will not only provide insights into our latest AI innovations but also demonstrate how these technologies are accessible to all – empowering every business to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Stick around after the keynote for the ‘Unlock All of Your Trapped Data with Data Cloud’ session to learn how Data Cloud is designed to enhance, not replace, systems like data warehouses and data lakes, and how it helps solve for the “last mile” of data activation. Explore the full agenda here and mark your calendar. AI for Everyone: From Sales to Service to Marketing Dive into the transformative power of AI across all business functions with our comprehensive session lineup. Discover how AI is reshaping sales with smarter insights for lead scoring and customer engagement, transforming service by predicting customer needs and automating responses, and helping marketing teams personalise interactions and craft powerful campaigns at scale. Featured sessions will include case studies from leading organisations including Philippine Airlines and Siam Commercial Bank, showcasing their AI success stories and helping you build a business case for AI in your sector. Here are some of the industry-specific sessions that you won’t want to miss: LIKE.TG for Financial Services: Empower Customer Success Learn how to leverage the #1 Trusted AI CRM to unlock financial insights that deliver better outcomes, responsibly, for your clients, members, and policyholders. Hear from Siam Commercial Bank on how they’re embracing digital transformation to deliver personalised customer experiences. Revolutionise Marketing Excellence with Marketing Cloud and AI Learn about the latest innovations in Marketing Cloud and how to harness the power of AI. Hear our customer Trailblazer discuss how to deliver personalised experiences and drive business growth with data and AI. The Future of Sales: Supercharge Selling with Trusted AI Are you looking for the smartest path forward in today’s fast-changing environment? AI can give sellers superpowers to drive efficient growth. Join us to learn how your entire sales organisation can boost productivity, leverage data, and increase revenue with the #1 AI CRM for sales. Reimagine Service with Trusted AI Learn how to activate AI to scale service, increase team productivity and save costs using the #1 AI platform for service. And hear from Trailblazer Mark Anthony Munsayac, Head of Customer Experience at Philippine Airlines on how they are redefining customer service and engagement with LIKE.TG. Trailblazers Who Are Blazing Ahead with AI Hear from inspiring Trailblazers like FairPrice Group, Siam Commercial Bank, Philippine Airlines, and Grab, and see how they’ve successfully integrated LIKE.TG’s AI-powered CRM into their operations. Their stories will provide a blueprint for transforming your business with AI and help you understand the tangible benefits of CRM + Data + AI + Trust. Notably, the ‘Transform How Your Teams Get Work Done with the Einstein 1 Platform in Slack’ session with Southeast Asian super-app company Grab will showcase how it has increased productivity by bringing its operations into the place where its Grabbers work – Slack. Attend this session in the keynote room and see how Slack can empower your teams, putting customer data and insights at their fingertips. Putting AI in the Hands of Everyone with Slack With a full day of sessions and demos at the Slack Theatre, you can see all the ways LIKE.TG is making AI more accessible than ever with Slack. Slack puts AI tools directly into the flow of work, where real-time data and insights can lead to immediate and impactful decisions. Sessions will demonstrate how integrating LIKE.TG with Slack allows teams to act quickly, collaborate efficiently, and leverage AI-driven data without ever leaving the platform where they work. Make sure you review the agenda and mark your calendar to attend sessions including: Put AI into the Hands of Everyone with Slack AI Bring Your CRM Data Right into the Flow of Work with Sales Cloud and Slack Discover How Automation Can Transform Your Work with Slack Delight Customers and Drive Service Team Efficiency with Slack Super Demo: Unlock Sales Productivity with Team Selling in Slack Explore the Latest in AI-Powered CRM at World Tour Essentials Singapore As the digital landscape continues to evolve it’s essential to stay up-to-date with the latest tools and technologies at your fingertips. At World Tour Essentials Singapore, you’ll discover how integrating AI with CRM is not just enhancing business processes but is also essential for driving growth and maintaining a competitive edge. Don’t miss this opportunity to see firsthand how you can transform your customer experiences with trusted AI. Register to attend World Tour Essentials Singapore, Wednesday 8 May at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre and propel your business forward with CRM + AI + Data + Trust.
You Can Build Customer Trust With Values-Based Marketing – Here’s How
Trust is the connective tissue between a brand and its customers. As marketers, we play a special role in building trusted relationships with our customers. In many ways, we are the face and voice of the brand. Everything we say and do can build or destroy trust. This is why values-based marketing is important. As customers navigate a rapidly-shifting world, values-based marketing is more crucial than ever. In LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Customer report, we found that 74% of customers say a brand communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic. Our research also finds that customers trust companies to act responsibly. Seventy-one percent of customers in Singapore and 83% of customers in Thailand trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind. LIKE.TG’s marketing team is now prioritising values along with products. We are communicating what we stand for and the actions we’re taking to live our values. That helps people understand who we fundamentally are as a company and what we’re like as a partner. With that, here are five ways we lead with values in our marketing. We hope you can find these strategies useful in your own communications as well. 1. We publicly hold ourselves accountable for living our values You may have seen our high-profile Team Earth campaign featuring Matthew McConaughey. By discussing our values on big stages at LIKE.TG events such as Dreamforce and LIKE.TG Live, we invite others to hold us accountable for truly living our beliefs in trust, equality, and sustainability. 2. We strive to communicate with integrity, authenticity, and transparency We share our values with the world because we know they are important to our stakeholders. We build trust by being honest, helpful, and relevant, providing information our customers and others need to make the right decisions for their company and community. 3. We practise inclusive marketing That means our storytelling reflects the diverse communities that we serve. It includes people of all backgrounds, regardless their race, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, or religion. We challenge stereotypes and inspire people to be the best they can be. We use a method called counter-stereotyping that portrays people in roles that challenge prejudices. We want to dispel incorrect perceptions and showcase our belief that anyone can do anything. We keep accessibility top of mind for how our content is consumed, too. For example, all images in our content must meet accessibility standards, which include acceptable colours and fonts, plus alt text for images and closed captioning for videos. 4. We lead with sustainable marketing Our events marketing team uses QR codes that direct to downloadable schedules and content (instead of handing out paper programs). We give eco-conscious gifts. And recipients must opt in to direct mail (less paper, more digital). 5. We’re building a safe future for consumer data The technology world is changing at breakneck speed, and while innovation is great, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. That can turn into unfair and even risky situations. We are taking all possible steps to eliminate algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence, and we’re also protecting user privacy. Our values-based marketing also prepares our community for the industry and technology shifts that are happening now and coming our way. These include privacy changes, the new era of marketing analytics that focus on consumer privacy, and more. We want our customers and partners to know what steps to take to be successful and safe. The bottom line is that relationships built on values and trust benefit everyone and lead to progress toward the sustainable and fair world we all want. We can live our highest purpose as marketers by building trust through communicating our values with integrity and building values into everything we do. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Your First-Party Data Strategy Matters — Especially During Tough Times
As budgets tighten, marketing departments may shift their focus toward efficiency. Here’s how a smart customer data-led strategy can hit both targets. When businesses see signs of economic uncertainty, the natural reaction is to cut costs and try to do more with less. However, there’s one area where your marketing team shouldn’t look to trim: harnessing the first-party data you collect directly from customers. This information gained through call center interactions, mobile app behaviour, and loyalty programs, among others, can be very helpful during lean times. Let’s take a look at three areas where these data assets offer a boost: 1. You can reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) economic uncertainty With an unpredictable economic future, limiting the CPA for new customers only becomes more important. Focusing on marketing campaigns fuelled by that first-party data can reduce your CPA — improving cost efficiency and growth. CPA is calculated by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers (or conversion events) that you can attribute to that spending. But for many organisations, optimising this formula has felt like a never-ending quest. So what does first-party data have to do with reducing a company’s overall CPA? A lot. When you have a better understanding of your current customers — with data, you’ll know how to speak to future ones. This first-party data comes directly from your customers, going right into channels you own. Tapping into this data means understanding which channels, campaigns, and offers work for your customer base as a whole and across key segments. And in the (almost) post-cookie age of limited online tracking, these insights are even more valuable. Anyone who has unlocked the power of lookalike audiences within advertising platforms can attest to the value of first-party data. The improved performance on your advertising campaigns can be dramatic. But even a small increase in the number of customers acquired per dollar spent is a powerful way to drive efficiency during economic uncertainty. 2. You can increase customer lifetime value Many times the quickest path to greater overall growth and efficiency is deepening the relationship with your current customers. Facing slowing economic growth, CFOs and investors focus on maintaining current levels of profit or operating margin. This means keeping costs in line with slower revenue growth. But an effective way to maintain cost discipline without sacrificing growth is enticing your current customers to spend more. The additional revenue generated from increasing the lifetime value and average order value of your current customers costs less than acquiring new customers. That’s because you’ve already paid to acquire these customers. Look for ways to offer greater value to your current customers, such as targeted messages and interactive email forms to provide real-time feedback. Engaging customers you already have a relationship with — and using personalisation to give them exactly what they want — is the ultimate efficiency. And you’ll likely get more business from them in the short and long term. 3. You have an always-on focus group There’s one more important benefit of focusing on first-party customer data assets: the ability to test and learn from your customers efficiently. The marketing examples around things like message testing and discount offers might be obvious, but there’s also a giant opportunity for the entire organisation to learn and improve. For example, imagine allowing your product team to A/B test versions of a new concept with your customers before a launch. They could gain valuable feedback on things like pricing, packaging, and design. And this can also give your marketing team a better view into how campaigns might perform. Just because you’re facing economic uncertainty doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice growth for efficiency. If your organisation pushes for cuts because the economy starts to slow, know that investments in customer data capabilities are not at odds with discipline and efficiency. They are indeed a big part of it. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Your Sales Tech Stack Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
In September 2023, Dreamforce hosted the largest gathering of Salesblazers ever. Our goal was simple: Reveal the potential of data and AI to accelerate faster, smarter, and more efficient business growth across every sales role and industry. In every conversation with customers, partners, and industry analysts, I am hearing how excited sales teams are to embrace the new era of data and AI. They’re so eager that sales ops teams are even reinventing their role as AI ops. One common thread across all of these discussions? Tech stack consolidation. This consolidation isn’t just about trimming costs. It’s about speeding productivity and unleashing growth. With the proliferation of data, AI, CRM, and trust, there’s never been a better opportunity for this innovation. Data As businesses look to stay competitive, the leaders who have an edge are the ones who have figured out how to harness the power of new innovations to drive down costs and increase revenue. We know that our AI outputs are only as good as our data. Similar to the move from on-premise software to cloud, this next evolution of generative AI will rely on real-time connected, harmonised, and trusted data from within and external to CRM. Point solutions that create siloed data pockets increase risk and prevent the implementation of great AI. AI A solid data foundation built in your CRM ensures that predictive and generative AI brings real productivity gains to your sellers. That AI can automate emails, take actions, and create account summaries based on CRM context. Or tell your sellers which products are ripe for cross-sell opportunities. Or share common competitive challenges across the entire sales team. The possibilities are just beginning to be understood. When AI impacts every sales leader, seller, sales operations manager, and channel seller, companies see their enablement, sales planning, and partner relationship management transformed. Get articles selected just for you, in your inbox Sign up now CRM Many of LIKE.TG’s customers tell us that in order to fully leverage AI, they need and want a single platform. Point solutions on top of the CRM lead to siloed data, duplicated capabilities, reduced seller productivity, and increased costs. Case in point: Grubhub made the decision to consolidate point solutions and saved over $1 million. They even won one of the first Salesblazer Sales Excellence Awards as a result. Trust Trust is our number one value at LIKE.TG. When you use Sales Cloud, you’re not only using AI that’s grounded in rich CRM data, you’re activating all this in a trusted and responsible way thanks to our unique zero-data retention policy and data masking within our Einstein Trust Layer. Trust, relentless customer focus, and continuous innovations are why so many Salesblazers live by Sales Cloud and why we continue to be rated a leader by Gartner and G2. The LIKE.TG solution to sales tech consolidation Over the past 20 years, LIKE.TG has had the privilege of helping businesses of all sizes, in all industries reach previously unimaginable heights. We refuse to let our foot off the gas now. We’re committed to making it easier for customers to grow their business with our offerings. With our UE+ offering that we revealed at Dreamforce, customers can get the best of LIKE.TG for Sales so they can get ahead of sales tech consolidation and get greater value. With UE+, you get all the AI capabilities included in Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition and Sales Planning, Maps, Enablement, Revenue Intelligence, Slack — plus Einstein credits and Data Cloud. With Sales Cloud, sales organizations have their full tech stack — all on a single platform. And every sales leader, sales rep, and sales operations leader can unleash growth now.
#prodmgmt: 2017’s Most Interesting Product Management Tweets
At LIKE.TG, we’re lucky to work with product managers on a regular basis. One thing we’ve noticed is that product managers are pretty avid consumers of content: books, blogs, podcasts, etc. Often, they’ll distill their learnings and insights from all these sources into 140 (or 280!) characters and tweet it out to the product community. We put together a handful of our favorite product-focused tweets from the past year and included some commentary below. Check them out and let us know which tweets you liked or retweeted this past year! From @johncutlefish: We really appreciated this perspective from John Cutler. It offers a great reminder of the unique dynamics of a product manager’s role. Product managers exist in a position where they’re expected to propel the product forward and facilitate progress, but they often don’t have any direct authority over the members of the various teams required to do this kind of work. But product managers are still part of the team. They facilitate. They strategize. These aren’t “pure management” roles and most product managers aren’t writing code or building prototypes themselves, but they produce “the big picture,” the strategy around which the rest of the team can contextualize their work and align their efforts. It’s a unique role, and one that’s worth thinking about from this perspective. From @ttorres: This tweet from Teresa Torres really rang true for us this past year. In 2017, a common theme in product management discussions was the idea of bias, assumptions, and misconceptions about the market. Teresa puts it really succinctly here, suggesting that, as a product manager, it’s extremely important to try and check your own bias when you take on your customer’s perspective. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have your own individual thoughts and feelings or instincts. These are, after all, some of the best tools a product manager has to make those tough-to-call decisions when the data, customer interviews, etc., aren’t offering a clear strategic direction. What Teresa is suggesting, rather, is to stand back and take stock of your own personal biases, or your organization’s biases and assumptions, and approach the development of your customer’s perspectives as objectively as possible. Sure, you might have a hunch about how your customer interacts with the world in their profession, but why not approach an interview or market problem with an open mind. It’s highly likely your customer knows their day-to-day life better than you do and making too many assumptions about it will prevent you from discovering genuinely new insights. From @lissijean: Story points are a valuable part of modern software development. They’re a helpful tool to express the estimated complexity and time involved in taking a backlog item from to-do item to usable feature. But, as Melissa Perri points out in this great tweet, story points are not the final product or feature. Your customers aren’t concerned with story points. They’re concerned with how your product helps them move seamlessly through their work and delivering that experience should be your primary focus as a product manager. At LIKE.TG, we often discuss and write about metrics. With all the metrics and tracking available to you throughout the product development process, it’s easy to keep your head down and stay focused on the data. This tweet helps remind us that you’re building products for users, and part of the estimation process for features should involve not just story points (complexity, risk, effort), but also the amount of perceived value item will deliver to your customer. From @destraynor: These types of process-oriented questions always present a great opportunity to examine your product management approach. Though it’s obvious there’s a lot of complexity that’s being boiled down here to just two choices, it’s a powerful question: Is your process so risk averse it’s preventing innovation, or is it flexible enough to encourage experiments that might not always pan out but potentially deliver great results? It seems pretty clear that the tweet’s author seems to be leaning toward option B, but it’s also likely that option A will feel familiar to lots of product managers. It’s important to think about the balance between getting good work done, avoiding waste, etc., and holding enough space for discovery, experimentation, and true innovation. This is a great prompt to think about the way we generally define success and waste, and reminds us that product management is a long-term, strategic process. There will be some short-term ups and downs, bets that pay off and bets that don’t, but product management is about delivering long-term value to customers. Sometimes delivering something truly new and delightful to customers involves taking chances and re-thinking your product process. From @christianism: We thought this was a great sentiment. Smart product managers know that their product’s success (as well as their personal professional success) hinges on their ability to work with other teams: designers, engineers, business stakeholders, marketing, sales, etc. As we think more and more about the product in terms of the entire customer experience, this becomes even more crucial. Christian’s tweet boils this complex point about working cross-functionally down to a very practical piece of advice. As a bonus, the part about speaking to designers and engineers to figure out how to attract great designers and engineers also reminds us of a similar point: we should get out of the office and talk to customers about customer goals, desires, etc. Just like it doesn’t make sense to ask other product managers about how to hire a great UX designer, you’re going to have a difficult time solving your customers problems if you never talk to them directly. From @jefflash: “Random acts of enhancements” has to be one of the pithier lines of the year for the #prodmgmt hashtag. Jeff’s tweet does an excellent job of articulating the link between work, strategy, and your product roadmap. Any one of these things on their own is not entirely helpful. If you don’t have a strategy, you’ve got nothing to put on your roadmap and you’re likely going to waste a lot of resources on work that’s not furthering any particular goal. If you have work and strategy, but no roadmap, you’re going to have a difficult time communicating that strategy to your stakeholders and getting their buy-in on how you plan to allocate resources. Bottom line: you need all three. We also loved the nod to agile, and to the frequency with which the methodology is misunderstood, sometimes even by very experienced product folks. If agile is all about moving frequently, working lean, and regularly shipping new code, then you definitely need a product strategy and a roadmap, otherwise you’re going to be “committing random acts of enhancements” at a faster or more frequent rate than you would in traditional waterfall. From @jimsemick: This one’s mostly just for fun. But it’s actually a really interesting prompt to think about product management as a profession, especially as we really break into 2018. It may be that product management is hitting a milestone on its maturation curve as a discipline, but we’re seeing more and more interest in the product manager career path, topics around interviewing, advancing, changing roles, so much so that we recently published a book-length Career Guide for Product Managers. Though it’s kind of funny to imagine how you explain product management (or UX design or QA engineering) to your in-laws, Jim’s tweet is also a good prompt to think about how you define it for yourself, for your stakeholders, and for the other teams involved in your product process. Which parts of the role do you emphasize the most? Strategy? Metrics? Delivering the product itself? However you explain it to others, take some time this year to reflect and consider how you define product management for yourself. What were some of your favorite #prodmgmt tweets from 2017? Share them in the comments section below!
10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers
A few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic customer insights. But knowing the right questions to ask during customer conversations and win-loss interviews takes a lot of practice and a healthy dose of curiosity. Here are ten open-ended customer interview questions I have in my arsenal that have worked well for me over the years when engaging with prospects and customers on products including ProductPlan. Asking a few of these questions can make a difference in the features you decide to include on your product roadmap. Download My Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 1. Why? This is by far the most powerful question you can ask, so ask it often. Product managers should rarely accept a customer’s initial response; promptly moving onto the next point without pressing further can cheat your own understanding. By asking “why” as a follow-up question you can often extract a more enlightening response and get to the crux of their issue. For example, when I interviewed people about the product concept that became Citrix GoToMyPC we spent less time talking about remote access features and more time asking why their life would be better with our solution. As a result, we uncovered a stronger value proposition for the product. 2. How do you do that today? This is a great question when a customer asks you for a specific feature. Rather than taking their feature request at face value, dig in to really understand how they are accomplishing the job today. If you can, have them show you their process or how they are using their current product. This line of questioning proved particularly useful for LIKE.TG when we interviewed product managers to understand how they were building and communicating their product roadmap. 3. How do you know you’ve had a successful year/month/day? This is a valuable question for business products where you are trying to uncover metrics and customer goals. If your product can help your customers achieve their goals or help make them more successful, you are well on your way to a valuable product. 4. How do you feel about your current solution? This one is good for understanding opportunities to differentiate your product from competitors, especially during win-loss interviews. A good follow-up question might be “Where does your current solution provide the most benefit? What do you like best about it?” These questions make it clear that you are searching for opportunities to understand the motivations behind their choice; not judge the chosen solution. 5. What is the most frustrating thing about your current solution? This is a multi-purpose, open-ended question that you can use to open up the conversation flow and to discover pain points. If the solution you are validating doesn’t solve a real pain point, it might not be valuable enough for your target users. 6. What do you wish you could do that you can’t do today? This is a variation on the “If you could wave a magic wand…” question asked by many product managers. I’ve found that questions like these work well for very specific features or use cases. Be careful about asking this question in too general a fashion or too early, as it can lead to ambiguous results or a blank stare. 7. How would your day/job/task be different if you had this? I use variations of this question depending on the circumstances, but the objective is the same: understanding how your solution or feature solves a problem and what type of value a customer would place on solving that problem. Download the Customer-Centricity Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18e41c50-6f24-4828-9f8d-c263df079a5e', {}); 8. Can you give me an example? This is another great general-purpose question that can give you a goldmine of supporting evidence for your new product or feature. In customer interviews, especially for early-stage market validation, it can be easy for conversations to stay high level. Asking for specific examples lets your interviewee know that you are willing to dive into the details, which will provide you with much more information than a higher-level discussion. 9. If this were available today, would you buy/use it? This question in itself may not result in an accurate answer (and can often lead to false positives). It’s what you do after this question that counts: Ask this question and then be quiet. Listening to their response for 60 seconds can give you insight into their decision process and the value they place on your product or feature. Make sure to follow-up with detailed questions such as “Would you walk me through the purchase process?” 10. Why would you recommend our solution to others? You can use variations of this “ultimate question” to gauge satisfaction with your solution and then ask follow-up questions. Try a few of these questions with customers or prospects during your next interviews. Some are better suited for new product development, but most will work well for your ongoing feature validation and win-loss interviews. Of course, great questions aren’t worth much unless you listen closely, read between the lines and then ask deeper follow-up questions. If you’re interested in more information on customer interviews, check out our Customer Interview Tool Box. It’s packed with tips and best practices for product managers looking to get the most out of their conversations with customers.
10 Lessons for Pricing SaaS Products
Pricing is such a core part of a SaaS product’s business model that you need to get it right. In this series, I’m writing about SaaS pricing lessons I’ve learned from launching several SaaS products including GoToMeeting, AppFolio, and ProductPlan. In the first part of our series, we reviewed why pricing based on customer value is key to a great product strategy. In the second part, I described how SaaS gives product managers flexibility to be creative with pricing models. We cover the art of subscription pricing in our webinar below: Here are 10 tips for how to price your SaaS product that you can use. While many of these apply to SaaS products, the lessons overall apply to software product pricing in general. Read the Power of SaaS Pricing Experiments ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c948d259-0fb9-457e-aece-634799b48e6d', {}); 10 Lessons for Pricing SaaS Products Pricing must be a part of early validation. While you may not nail your final pricing until later, the earlier you can zone in on your SaaS pricing model, the better off you will be. This gives you a greater chance of building your pricing model into the value proposition. At a minimum, during the product conceptualization stage, actively interview potential decision-makers about their purchase process, how they purchased their current solution, and frustrations with the current solution’s pricing. Ballpark LTV as early as possible. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is so critical to a SaaS business model that you need to estimate it as early as possible – well before you have customers and revenue. LTV influences the sales model and what you can afford to spend to acquire customers. While there are lots of ways to calculate LTV, I recommend keeping it as a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation with input from customer interviews and similar products. LTV > CAC. The formula for success is simple in the SaaS world: LTV overtime must be significantly greater than customer acquisition cost (CAC). SaaS companies with a recurring revenue stream like Salesforce.com have LTV multiples that are three to five times the cost to acquire that customer. Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations on CAC will help you avoid surprises down the road. Your sales model influences your pricing. Conversely, SaaS pricing constrains the sales model options available to you. For example, if you have an expensive field sales force, you need to ensure that your customer LTV is high enough to support that model. You’ll struggle if your average customer purchases $50/month over a two-year lifetime. Ultimately, your buyer persona determines your sales model, so make sure you understand the expected purchase process. Create upsell opportunities within your pricing model. One of the advantages of SaaS is the ability to offer upgrades and services that drive additional revenue. Consider these within your SaaS pricing model, as they can make a substantial difference in long-term product revenue. This is the model we used with great success at AppFolio. Use caution when offering annual prepurchase discounts. Many SaaS products that license on a monthly basis will offer a discount for annual prepurchasing. However, with SaaS pricing, use this with discretion. Analysis shows that over the long term, you leave significant revenue on the table. Consider free trials. If your acquisition and activation model is simple enough, providing a limited free trial is a great way to increase your sales conversions. It’s common to offer 15- and 30-day trial options. Service is key. Because SaaS is typically licensed as a subscription, your customers are at risk of churning every renewal period. Service and support are even more critical than with traditional software. For this reason, many SaaS products build support and regular upgrades into the standard licensing fee. Consider whether your customers will be receptive to additional fees for support and maintenance for a product that they expect to work flawlessly. Customers don’t care about your costs. I’m not suggesting you ignore your costs, but don’t price your product working backward from cost. This is not how your customers will think about the pricing. Sure, the cost of goods sold needs to be a factor for you to be viable, but this is not related to how customers value your product. Pricing perception doesn’t follow economic rules. Customers often buy products for reasons that seem disconnected from the Return on Investment calculation. Pricing, specifically SaaS pricing, is highly psychological. For this reason, the demand curve is not linear – a lower price doesn’t necessarily equate to more customers and revenue. Take this into account by thoroughly understanding the qualitative value that your product provides. Takeaways With web-based SaaS products, it’s easier than ever to conduct A/B tests to gauge buyer behavior, pricing, and acquisition costs (before and after launch). As you test the user interface, I encourage you to test your pricing with equal fervor. Use qualitative customer interviews to get enough data points to make good decisions. Get it right for SaaS pricing, and you have a recurring revenue stream that places your product’s portfolio value well above traditional software products. Pragmatic Marketing Webinar: Missed Jim Semick from LIKE.TG for the Pragmatic Marketing Webinar? Watch the recording to learn more about pricing software products. Learn why LIKE.TG is the easiest way to plan and communicate your product roadmap. Try it free today.
10 Tips for New Product Research and Discovery
A blank page, much like the one I’m using to write this article, used to scare me. A new product can feel the same way. There’s nothing to build on and so many more risks. There is a place between nothing and a great product that’s full of uncertainty. Earlier in my career, this was nerve-wracking. Now, after a decade of managing products and advising, I find it exciting. These days I look forward to starting research and discovery with nothing but a hypothesis. Throughout my experience, I’ve used many frameworks and tools to support the research and discovery process. I may not know exactly what I’ll uncover in the discovery process, but I know how I’ll get there. I look forward to becoming smarter every day and knowledge unfolding at a rapid pace. And I just want to pinch myself because I’ll never learn as rapidly as when I’m starting out not knowing much at all. With the launch of Launch Management at LIKE.TG, I’d like to walk you through what research and discovery looked like for us and share the lessons we learned along the way. So if you are looking to launch a new product or feature, you are prepared with some tips to reduce that blank page anxiety. 1. Start with your company and product mission and vision. LIKE.TG is the product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. To fully realize this and empower product teams to change the world through their products and the people they serve, LIKE.TG is more than roadmapping. With our vision in mind, we stepped back and asked, “What can we do for customers in addition to roadmapping to achieve our vision?” Understanding (or defining) your vision is important because the journey ahead is not easy, and you’ll need something to reflect on to help you remember what you are trying to accomplish and why. To be a product management platform that operationalizes product strategy and execution best practices and drives innovation, trust, and accountability. 2. Understand your customer outside of why they use your product. Focusing on how and why customers use your product is incredibly valuable for increasing the depth of your product offering but less valuable for increasing the breadth. When you understand your customer outside of why and how they use your product, you can uncover customer jobs and opportunities that your customer may not ask you to solve. It’s possible there isn’t a solution to these problems on the market today. What you learn is your opportunity to surprise and delight your customers. I approached this through customer interviews, spending time in groups and forums where my customers are, and looking for gaps in the product stack my customers use in their larger workflow outside of just how they use ProductPlan. This work led me to dig into the product team’s role in launching products. There seemed to be a lot of pain and no solutions for launching a product or feature from the product manager’s perspective. There was so much pain that I found improving launches is one of the first tasks a new product operations team is responsible for. Bonus Tip: When a customer shows up late to a meeting (happens all the time, right?) and says, “Sorry that I’m late. It’s been a crazy week.”, ask them, “Sorry to hear that, what’s going on?”. You’ll learn what’s causing them stress. And that can give you incredible insight. 3. Refine the problem early, even if you are uncertain. The challenges with launching a product are immense. It would have been easy for me to take on the whole domain in my research. It also would have been easy to move to analysis paralysis and thoroughly research every opportunity within the domain. Instead, I chose to refine the problem to a high-level report or dashboard of upcoming launches, so that product managers and stakeholders could get a quick glimpse at upcoming launches and whether they needed attention. Early research into where this and other opportunities would sit in the market and its impact on customer pain around managing launches informed the decision. Researching outside of customer interviews can be incredibly valuable, but there’s nothing quite like talking to customers to learn quickly whether a problem or opportunity has potential. 4. Be prepared to be wrong. If you don’t prepare yourself to be wrong, you might miss noticing when something isn’t right! When we get too invested in a solution early, we’re more likely to see all the ways that the solution is the right solution. Bias is really strong and can cloud your judgment when it comes to recognizing errors. For this reason, I celebrate when I find out I’m wrong through research since it’s a sign that I didn’t let bias cloud my vision. You’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s far less costly to find out sooner. The opportunity around managing launches was appreciated and validated by customers, but why and how was different than I expected. Instead of being most interested in the higher-level dashboard, the customers we talked to were most interested in managing launches at a lower level. They wanted something that would reduce the time they spent project managing the launch and would be a tool to support co-ownership and accountability for cross-functional colleagues contributing to launching deliverables. This led to us keeping the scope and design of our Launch Management dashboard very lean and instead investing more in the checklist. 5. Embrace the shitty first draft. As a writer, I’m a big fan of Ann Lammot’s Bird by Bird, where she encourages writers to write a shitty first draft. If your intention is for the first draft to be shitty and not perfect, then you free your mind from the burdens of perfection. It allows you to move faster and be more creative, even if some of the creativity results in more bad ideas! I’ve embraced this in many areas of my life and work life, including Launch Management. The first visual designs for Launch Management took a lot of time and had a lot of emotion tied to them, especially when we received initial feedback from customers that we didn’t quite understand their problems. When the product designer and I discussed the feedback, we revisited the job of those early designs. We didn’t need those early designs to test usability or guide our engineering team in what to build. Since we were working on a greenfield product, the primary job of those early designs was to take the stories and words customers shared with us and reflect our understanding in the form of a picture. The picture didn’t need to be pretty. Customers just needed to see themselves in it. With this in mind, I asked the product designer to create an “ugly table” so we could see if this would better show customers the solution to the problems they were facing. Tables are relatively uninteresting aesthetically, but we went with something functional first. When this got the validation from customers we needed, and they communicated that what they were looking at would be a good solution, we started improving the functionality and aesthetics. That imperfect and frankly ugly table was perfect for the conversations because it was relatively quick to produce, and our customers felt comfortable giving us critical feedback on something that was far from finished. 6. Your customer is the expert, even if they don’t know the answers. Because Launch Management was the first solution that helps product managers launch products and features, there wasn’t anything on the market we could reference. Also, our customers didn’t have experience using anything to solve this problem either. We asked questions about launches and how to measure the success of launches. As a result, we got a fair amount of “I don’t know” answers from our customers. While managing a launch created all sorts of challenges, our customers didn’t have expectations that this problem could be solved. So they hadn’t thought deeply about it. Instead of gathering our customers’ direct feedback, we focused on the pain they were facing and understanding the cost of not solving the problem, where our customers were the experts. As these stories started to come together, themes started to emerge, and the solution of Launch Management developed. 7. Look for your customers to take ownership and action. When your customers assume ownership of what you are showing them and start talking about how they’ll use it with their team, you’ll know you truly understand the problem enough to solve it. When you can move your customers to action, you’ll know you have a good solution. As we iterated on a solution through designs and prototypes and listened to customers, we got to a point where we could talk about the problems we were solving with Launch Management with product leaders the validation was clear. A customer asked, “When can I use this?” as they peered through the screen. They then asked, “Are you in my Slack?” and excitedly pumped their fist. Their language shifted from asking us how it would work to telling us how they would use Launch Management. They even shared how it would help them with their challenges. Similarly excited, people who weren’t customers yet wanted to talk to our sales team. This is when the research and discovery team at LIKE.TG looked at each other and said, “It’s real now. It isn’t built yet, but it definitely feels real.” 8. Use your beta wisely. While customer betas shouldn’t be about finding bugs, getting feedback before everything is polished and perfect is ideal. Beta feedback can help you figure out what to build next through enhancement requests, but I really love beta feedback to understand if I’ve effectively solved the problems I intended to solve. I used LIKE.TG to create a list of jobs necessary to accomplish the Launch Management vision. I put the jobs in the order I expected us to accomplish them. As our fantastic customer success managers talked to customers and gathered feedback, they added it to the board. The feedback created this beautiful curve on the board that showed enhancement requests for the jobs we were working on. The feedback was validation (in addition to the customer interviews) that customers recognized the problem we were trying to solve. It was a good signal that we were moving toward product-market fit. 9. Rely on the experts on your team. Launching a new product is not a one-person endeavor. Even the most skilled among us need colleagues with different expertise to help. Similar to when launching products, when discovering a new product, product managers can take too much on. By focusing on where each of your team members is an expert, including yourself, you can work together more effectively. In researching Launch Management, I relied on the expertise of product design to create a great customer experience. I looked to product marketing to craft a message and test it with our customers before enabling our customer-facing teams. And I trusted engineering’s expertise to build a right-sized solution that would help us learn quickly and scale. Since I trusted that my colleagues owned their expertise, I could focus on my own expertise. This was amplified during our launch. We eventually got to the point where we could use Launch Management ourselves. Which meant I wasn’t the one keeping track of all the launch deliverables. 10. Know that what you launch with won’t be done. Launch Management is far from done. Our first priority was to visualize what was happening in a launch alongside the roadmap strategy. So, the launch manager and launch team could easily see the launch. Rather than having the launch live in the launch manager’s head. Once we have the launch visualized, we want to help customers standardize their launches. By doing so, they become more predictable and ultimately more successful. Our enterprise customers really value standardization as it helps operationalize best practices and creates predictability in teams across the company. As much as I want all of this to be possible in our general availability launch, I’m launching with less. And instead, I’m focusing on learning from customers to refine the Launch Management strategy. Research and discovery for a new product is a big challenge. It requires relishing ambiguity on the path from turning that blank page to a product your customers love. Once you’ve got that figured out, then LIKE.TG will help you make launching it easy. Learn more about Launch Management when you schedule a 45-minute demo with us!
12 Product Managers Lessons You Can Learn from Kids
You’ve carefully curated your product management career trajectory. You’re a full-grown professional with valuable life experience. You know what makes a great product manager and you’ve carefully studied product management strategies and insights from industry thought leaders. But there’s one group of product management gurus you’ve overlooked: Kids! Many adults will humbly admit that kids can teach us so much about life, like how to slow down and enjoy a moment, how to find beauty in simplicity, and just how loud mom can yell when she really makes an effort. Truth be told, there’s a vast amount of knowledge to be gained from kids on the product management side of things, too. Here are 12 valuable lessons kids can teach you about being a better product manager. Product Manager Lesson #1: Be curious. Kids are naturally curious. Spend five minutes around one and the barrage of questions will literally make your head spin. They want to know how things work and why they work that way. As a product manager, you’ve got to rekindle that long-suppressed desire to know everything about everything and really get to the heart of who, what, when, where, and why. Lesson 2: Don’t get stuck in the past. Kids aren’t stuck in the past. How could they be? Their past consists of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich they ate for lunch. As a result, they don’t get tangled up in the dangerous “this is how we’ve always done things” creativity killers. Sure, product managers should look to the past to learn from past product failures, but not to create a narrow view of the future. Lesson 3: Find creative solutions. Being a kid is a tough job. They have no personal experience to fall back on. And despite the fact that adults were once kids, too, it’s sometimes hard to help because most of us have forgotten what it’s really like to be a kid. Yet, kids bravely tackle challenges by immediately seeking creative solutions that aren’t bogged down by rules. Tweet This: “Product managers, take a cue from kids! Seek creative solutions and don’t be afraid to fail.” The solutions don’t always make sense to adults and, yes, the solutions might even defy logic and gravity or break a few basic safety rules, but they are nothing if not creative. Kids take their ideas and run with them full throttle. Product managers don’t have quite the same level of creative freedom, but you should still be brave and flex those creative muscles. Lesson 4: Don’t be afraid to fail. Imagine if kids were afraid of failure. They’d never grow up. Kids learn to do almost everything by failing (or falling) first. And when they are very young, they aren’t embarrassed about failure either. What a blissful period of life. As they grow, they continue to build a skillset born of bruises and skinned knees. Focused and determined, they keep trying until they get it right. Sitting up. Crawling. Walking. Running. Riding a bike. Holding a pencil. Writing their name for the first time, shaky letters floating across the page. The list goes on and on. Kids might cry real tears in a frustrated heap on the ground, but they get back up, dust themselves off, and try again. Be fearless in the face of failure (and of learning). You were once that child who looked failure and fear in the face and pushed forward to stand tall on wobbly legs. Lesson 5: Observe the world. Kids are keen observers. From an early age, they carefully watch and study the people and activities in their environment. First, it’s to create a blueprint for their own development; later it’s a form of espionage to hold adults accountable for the occasional salty word muttered during a hectic morning commute. Product managers need to practice this art of observation to understand how their people (aka product users) navigate their products. Lesson 6: Leave your mark. Kids are intrigued by the impact they have on the world around them. From moments as simple as walking through a puddle and leaving wet shoe prints on the sidewalk to more complex social situations like knocking over another kid on the playground and then seeing him or her cry, kids marvel at their own power to leave their mark. Product managers have the power to impact and change the world, too, in significant ways. Marvel in and take advantage of that opportunity. Be mystified by your ability to leave your mark. Lesson 7: Get a little obsessed. Dinosaurs. LEGOs. Captain Underpants. Kids can get really obsessed. And they like to talk about their obsessions ad nauseum. In the product world, you might call this process evangelizing an idea. Kids talk about and explore their latest obsessions with anyone and everyone who qualifies as a lifeform: you (even if you’re not in the same room, haven’t had coffee yet, are sleeping), cashiers, librarians, the neighbor’s dog. It really doesn’t matter who the idea is shared with. The point is to share the latest obsession with the entire world. If you’re a passionate product manager, this shouldn’t be a problem. Lesson 8: Unify the masses. In-laws, spouses, great aunts, and second cousins once removed don’t always see eye to eye on family matters, but despite sometimes complicated family dynamics, kids have a way of bringing everyone together. Think of the school play that runs a little long. Or a soccer game in the rain. If the kid is there, there’s no better reason for everyone else to be there too—unified and focused on the same goal. Relationships within companies can be similarly complex, and product managers have the power to bring everyone together, working towards a unified goal. Lesson 9: Be optimistic. Kids sometimes have a hard time taking no for answer. To kids, no almost always means maybe. This ability to see possibility, however remote, is key for product managers—especially when facing stakeholder pushback or an idea that just isn’t quite polished. Lesson 10: Don’t limit yourself. Give a kid an option or two, and she’ll think up three or four more on the spot. Kids are idea generators, and their creative minds aren’t limited by much of anything, which means ideas just spill out, often in the moment. Peel away constraints like common sense, hard-earned experience, and your collection of filters and internal sensors, and see what happens to your ability to think of new ideas on the spot. Lesson 11: Never stop learning. From birth onward, kids are students of life. They have to be for their own survival. But somewhere along the way we adults lose this sense of curiosity about the world around us and the insatiable drive to learn more. Once we establish ourselves as functional adults in the world, our pace of learning can slow down. Product managers need to resuscitate that hunger for knowledge and reawaken their craving for greater understanding. Lesson 12: Make connections. Last but not least in our product manager lessons, kids learn through connections and do best when interacting with others—parents, teachers, and friends. Product managers, too, do best when connecting and collaborating with others. Your ability to do your job effectively depends heavily on your ability to bring people and ideas together and move things forward. Kids have a lot to teach adults about the fundamentals of product management. Put these 12 lessons to use and see what happens. And don’t forget: You were once a kid, too. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); What valuable product manager lessons have kids taught you about product management? What other unexpected sources have been helpful throughout your product management journey? Share them in the comments!
2017 in Review: LIKE.TG’s Top 10 Blog Posts of the Year
This has been quite a year for the LIKE.TG blog. We’ve published more than 100 articles on a variety of product management-related topics like roadmapping, product strategy, agile development, and more! As the year comes to a close and the holidays approach—and many of us get stuck in airports—we thought we’d offer up a useful roundup of our ten most popular blog posts of the year. Tweet This: “Check out LIKE.TG’s roundup of their 10 most popular articles of the year!” 1. 14 Must-Read Books for Product Managers This blog post is a great place to start. It compiles an excellent list of books we think are relevant to product managers. Not all of the books are laser-focused on product management itself, but many of them are full of insights all product folks could benefit from. The books cover topics like entrepreneurship, productivity, research methods, and even presentation skills! Bonus: we recently published a follow-up list of books for product managers based on recommendations our readers left in the comments section of the original post. Check out both of these lists and start building out your reading schedule for 2018. 2. 5 Things You Should Never Say to Your Customers As a product manager, you are your product’s primary spokesperson both to internal audiences and to the general public. What you say to customers and how you manage that relationship is as much a part of your product as its user interface. As the title suggests, this blog post lists five things you should never say to customers and explains why you should avoid each one. 3. What is the Product Manager Career Path? This has been one of the most popular blog posts of the year. We regularly receive questions from product managers about all manner of career-related topics. In fact, we have an entire blog category dedicated to career-focused articles. We also recently published a free (140 page!) Career Guide for Product Managers to distill some of the insights we’ve collected over the years. This specific article focuses on the different stops along the product manager career path, outlining each role—Associate Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Director of Product, VP, CPO, and so on—and its goals and responsibilities. This article also offers some insight into how a product person might know it’s time to step up to the next level. 4. 3 Things All Product Managers Wish They Could Say Out Loud Product managers are often characterized as having a lot of responsibility without much direct authority. You’re expected to work with other teams, answer to stakeholders, and interface with customers on a regular basis, all while reconciling your product’s usability with business goals and customer requests. It’s a great job, but it’s not always easy. This blog post is a fun one and imagines some of the things product managers wish they could say (but never actually would) to these different groups. 5. How Product Managers Can Better Tie Metrics to Product Strategy Almost all product managers agree that metrics are critical to effectively managing a product. But there are a lot of metrics out there and not all product managers know which metrics to track, or why, or how to connect those metrics (and data points and charts and spreadsheets!) to their product and their broader strategy. This article outlines some tips for effectively tying specific metrics to your product strategy. Rather than offering a glossary of acronyms from MRR to ARR to LTV to CAC, this post instead outlines a couple of different business goals and then suggests ways to link metrics and product strategy to those business goals. It’s a helpful reminder that product managers are tracking metrics to inform a strategy and ultimately accomplish a set of business goals. 6. Product Managers: Don’t Waste Your Time On These 6 Things Product management consists of a lot of different activities: talking to and interviewing customers, planning and prioritizing product features, tracking metrics, presenting your roadmap to stakeholders, etc. There are a lot of interesting discussions to be had around how much time product managers should spend on each of those activities, but there are definitely some time-wasting activities product managers (and pretty much everyone) should avoid. This post describes six such activities and explains why they’re detrimental to your productivity and long-term effectiveness. 7. Why Your Minimum Viable Product Sucks As a product manager, you’re under a lot of pressure from stakeholders, customers, and the market to develop excellent products that differentiate your organization, delight customers and send profits through the roof. You’re also under pressure to do this quickly and under budget. Agile development and the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) have made this easier in some ways but also riskier. This blog post explains why your MVP might not be living up to your expectations. Read it to find out why there are many ways to interpret and misinterpret the notion of an MVP. 8. Product Manager Career Paths: 3 Myths Debunked Whereas the third entry on this list outlines the product manager career path, starting with Associate Product Manager, this blog post is focused on how people arrive at the field of product management in general. We’ve received a lot of questions from smart individuals in engineering, marketing, user experience, data analysis, and other roles adjacent to product management that want to know how to break into the field. This post outlines three common misconceptions about how people become product managers and explains some of the broader personality and character traits that product leaders look for in job candidates. 9. Product Launch Checklists: From the Oscars to a Software Product Release, They’re Necessary Launching a product involves managing several parallel timelines and product launch checklists help you ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. We suspect this article was popular because it offers a useful product launch checklist to help product managers prepare for the unexpected. Product launch checklists help you think through all of the processes, steps, and assets you and your team will need to prepare for and complete prior to your product launch. Use it as a starting point and adapt it to fit your own launch routine. 10. 10 Great Podcasts for Product Managers Product managers are busy. But they also love to learn. Podcasts (and audiobooks) are entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking, and they let you keep your hands free! These podcasts represent a sample of what’s out there and cover topics ranging from entrepreneurship and marketing to sales, optimization, time management, and more. Some of them are product-focused, while others are full of insights from adjacent fields that product folks should still find quite useful. Some of them are just fun! Check out our list, download a couple of sample episodes, and enjoy! _____ We hope you enjoy the articles on this list and that you make your flight! Did we miss one of your favorite posts? Leave us a comment and let us know!
2017 Product Planning Survey: The Results are In!
LIKE.TG asked product managers from hundreds of companies about their product planning process. We collected their responses and crunched the numbers to give you an exciting glimpse into the current state of product planning with our 2017 Product Planning Report. The full report is broken down into five detailed chapters covering everything from planning and prioritizing product initiatives to communicating them on your product roadmap. We thought it would be helpful to cover some of the highlights here on the LIKE.TG blog. Download the full report below to get even more product planning insights! Overall Trends One of the themes we noticed was a shift toward a more agile approach to product management. The days of massive requirements docs and static roadmaps are gone. A majority of the product managers we heard from update their roadmaps on a monthly basis—a far cry from a fixed, annual plan. Regardless of company size, industry, etc., product managers are changing and sharing their roadmaps more frequently. Beyond dealing with faster product development cycles, product managers identified staying aligned with other teams, most notably UX/UI, as a major challenge. This makes sense, given the cross-functional nature of their role—part product owner, part consensus builder, part communicator, etc. It’s hard to keep everyone on the same page, but roadmaps can help! “Keeping internal teams on the same page is our biggest challenge.” — Product Manager at a medium-sized software company with 2-5 years of experience Here at LIKE.TG, we were happy to see that many product managers are adopting dedicated product roadmap software. For the 2017 Product Planning Survey, specialized roadmapping software surpassed PowerPoint, Excel, and other tools, as the primary way product managers are creating their roadmaps. As product managers continue to face the challenges involved in managing a constantly growing backlog, faster development cycles, and an increasing number of stakeholders, the benefits of roadmapping software are becoming more obvious. Planning & Prioritizing For product managers, planning and prioritization is as critical a part of the product development process as ever. Our survey findings indicated that companies that utilized some dedicated model, whether that was value vs. effort, the Kano Model, opportunity scoring, etc., were more likely to accomplish their strategic goals. This would suggest that it’s less about the specific planning and prioritization methodology used, and more about the team making these activities a critical part of their workflow. Tweet This: “Companies that use a dedicated roadmap prioritization model are more likely to accomplish their strategic goals.” Our survey indicated that strategy is primarily set at the top of the organization, with 85% of companies stating that the executive team is responsible for setting strategic goals. Goals become more granular as they trickle down to functional teams, moving from executives, to product teams, and finally to sales, marketing, engineering, and finance. Though strategy starts at the top, we found that teams at all levels are more likely to meet their goals when they allot the time and resources required for effective planning and prioritization. Another interesting detail around planning was that most teams used a 3-12 month timeline for strategic planning, signaling the need for more frequent roadmap updates and more dynamic product management tools. In short, product teams need flexible tools that can keep up with their organization’s pace of innovation. Crafting the Plan Part of our report focused on the methods, tools, and timelines companies are using to build and maintain their product plans and roadmaps. As mentioned above, the use of dedicated roadmapping software has doubled compared to our 2016 survey. Roadmapping-specific applications have overtaken PowerPoint as the primary way companies build and manage their product roadmaps, driven by the need to update and share their roadmaps more frequently. On the other hand, our survey found that teams that use drawing tools to create roadmaps are more likely to be unsuccessful at meeting their goals compared to companies using other tools. In terms of timing, significantly fewer roadmap owners updated their roadmaps on an annual basis, compared to 2016. The most popular cadence for updating roadmaps in 2017 was monthly, followed by quarterly, then weekly. We found that product managers who plan with timelines less than 6 months are more likely to meet their organizational goals. With this faster cadence for strategic updates, it’s not surprising that product managers are adopting more specialized, product-oriented apps. Communicating the Plan Beyond planning and prioritization, we asked our survey participants to let us know how they’re approaching the communication of their product strategy. For product managers, roadmaps ensure that teams within an organization are in alignment with high-level strategy. Many participants emphasized the importance of having a roadmap that is easily and quickly understood by non-product stakeholders. Interestingly, the primary goals for roadmaps shift a bit depending on company size. According to our survey respondents, small and mid-market companies are mainly using product roadmaps as a means of prioritizing features and initiatives. Enterprise companies, on the other hand, are typically using roadmaps to communicate high-level strategy. With more functional teams and stakeholders, communication across Enterprise organizations becomes more challenging and more critical. Despite their differing use cases, all three market segments—78% of respondents—identified the executive team as the primary audience for roadmaps. Looking Forward Product managers face a significant set of challenges moving forward. Faster and faster product cycles. Continuous development. Competition. Market shifts. Looking ahead, success seems to hinge on adopting a more dynamic and adaptive approach to product management. At the Enterprise level specifically, product managers face more stakeholders, geographically distributed teams, and other concerns for security, seamless integration, etc. These factors, coupled with multiple product lines, makes having a single, standardized process around product strategy and communication crucial. Thank you to all of our survey respondents for their participation. Stay tuned for the next survey participation request in the coming months! Click here to view and download the full 2017 Product Planning Report. How do our findings compare to your day-to-day experience as a Product Manager? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
2022 Product Management Trends
Lists of business trends tend to fall into two types – those that look into the future and those that survey the past. Predictions about future trends are tricky because of the uncertainty of them coming to pass. Lists of trends that survey the past should be easier by definition, right? After all, what’s happened has happened. Let’s look at some of the biggest trends we identified in 2022. Trends (still) impacting the newly converted Organizations that have more recently recognized the importance of product management to the success of their business are those that are transitioning from being “sales-led” or “customer-led” to “product-led.” Agile vs. agile “Are you Agile, or are you agile?” Adopting Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming, or some combination of the above has been a trend, or some might say a craze, affecting digital product management for many years. The process has been going on long enough to spawn backlashes proclaiming its demise. As others have said, the idea that Agile methodologies are a thing of the past is a gross exaggeration. Still, the problem that this discussion raises is a real one with which many organizations continue to struggle. At issue is the difference between Agile (capital “A”) methodologies and an agile (small “a”) mindset. Yet many organizations continue to jump head-first into the adoption of Agile practices. And they do this without an understanding of why these practices work. Organizations that fail at Agile practice adoption often haven’t taken the time to embrace the agile mindset. Unfortunately, this trend is likely to be with us for a while. Fortunately, many companies do eventually get through botched implementations and false starts. Failure is a great teacher. Download the Product Planning Workbook➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bec1bbd5-4b4f-480c-ab3c-2ee61623a20d', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Data-driven decision-making Another persistent trend is the continued growth of an appreciation for grounding decisions in data – both quantitative and qualitative. This trend has supported the emergence of the Data Product Manager as a role on the product team dedicated to the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and sharing data within an organization. At the time of writing this post, there were 525 postings on LinkedIn for positions in the U.S. with this focus. When broadening the scope to include data scientists and data analysts, who often work closely with product managers to answer questions with data, the open positions swell to almost 7,000. Outcome-driven vs. feature-based roadmaps If you are unfamiliar with the difference between these two types of roadmaps and why it matters, let’s quickly unpack that. They showed a list of features on a release timeline: this quarter, we will ship features a, b, and c. The next quarter will feature d, e, and f. There are several problems with this type of roadmap: Feature-based roadmaps are often inaccurate because forecasting the completion date for a new feature is imprecise. They don’t typically reflect the reasons why any feature ships. Little attention is paid to whether the shipment of a specific feature led to a profitable outcome. The act of shipping a feature is celebrated rather than the achievement of a measurable result. On the other hand, outcome-driven roadmaps are very different. They focus on the results that the team is looking for. Either way, they recognize that the product changes are more hypotheses than guarantees. Moreover, they embrace the uncertainty of the timeline. Finally, they accept the agile (small “a”) reality that priorities change. In full disclosure, placing this trend on the list of those affecting organizations early in their product management journey reflects a bit of a bias to which some may object. The bias is based on the judgment that those still using feature-based roadmaps fall low on the product management maturity scale. Although some companies have been on their product management journey for many years and still use feature-based roadmaps, their reluctance to accept the limitations of this approach and embrace an outcome-driven approach is holding them back. Trends for product management leaders While the list of trends above is relevant to those who are further along their product management journey, they are no longer top of mind. Whichever side of the ongoing debates these organizations fall on, the companies in this group have picked a position and are now looking at a different set of concerns. Optimizing data pipelines Product Ops: hero or villain? The extent and limits of product management authority A warehouse-first approach to data The next step after recognizing and embracing the importance of using data throughout the organization is to figure out how to deal with the pitfalls many companies fall into when they first embrace data-driven decision-making. As many product managers learn, it’s not enough to have the data; you have to be able to put it to use. The inability to perform analyses that require combining account data with usage data is a frustrating roadblock. Learning about an incompatibility between systems initially chosen as point solutions is a common facepalm moment as product leaders mature in their organizational data requirements. One solution to this problem that is growing in popularity is to take a “warehouse-first” approach to data collection. In other words, the data warehouse is the source of truth and the central node in the data pipeline strategy. Account, app usage, clickstream, and marketing data are all stored in a data warehouse where it is cleansed and transformed as necessary before being pushed out to other tools like marketing automation. The advantages of a warehouse-first approach to data are compelling, especially considering the ability to avoid vendor lock-in resulting from key data being imprisoned in a proprietary database. The challenges, however, are also significant. Key pieces of the puzzle are lacking, so you may need to adopt a hybrid approach until the tool you need supports the ability to ingest data from an external source. In other cases, the tools exist, but issues can arise for those handling healthcare or other sensitive data that cannot leave the U.S. due to regulatory restrictions. If you find yourself looking into the tools available, be sure to verify whether the vendor can guarantee HIPAA or other relevant compliance before going too deep on an evaluation. Product Ops: hero or villain? In February 2022, product management author, blogger, consultant, and pundit Marty Cagan lit up product management discussion groups and Slack channels with his post, “Product Ops Overview.” In this controversial post, Cagan identified six distinct definitions of the Product Ops role that he describes as “most damaging, to most valuable.” Reincarnated PMO Model Two-in-a-Box PM Model Delegated Product Leader Model Product Operations Rebranded Model Product Marketing Manager Rebranded Model Force Multiplier Model The post generated controversy because his opinions hit close to home for many people. The Product Ops role has been proliferating on product-related job boards for several years, and it has solved a lot of problems for a lot of organizations. Cagan would likely argue that those problems arose from more fundamental problems in product management practices. Regardless, the debate over the role of Product Ops within a product management organization is not over. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a4604351-4f06-47da-aa3f-138c2e4ac806', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); The extent and limits of product management authority A popular product management book on product leaders bookshelves is Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford. This book describes how to use an understanding of what motivates others to achieve mutually beneficial agreements when the ability to control the actions of others through managerial edict doesn’t exist. The idea that a good product manager is the CEO of the product was first articulated more than 20 years ago by Ben Horowitz in his memo, “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.” Horowitz has since added a disclaimer to the top of the document, possibly because of the backlash over some people taking his original concept, that a “good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product,” to an unintended extreme. Some product managers have used this statement to assume authority where none exists. Empowered product teams, another of Cagan’s contributions, are essentially the antithesis of feature teams. The latter is given a list of features and enhancements to implement that are defined and prioritized by stakeholders outside the product team. The former is given problems to solve and trusted to discover, design, build, and implement solutions that solve those problems. None of these concepts are new to 2022, but the discussion is alive and well. At the heart of the debate are challenging decisions about how an organization will be run. As product management teams mature from infancy through growing pains associated with company expansion and possibly bumpy roads, these decisions are inevitably revisited. Trends on everyone’s mind Regardless of where you are on the product management maturity scale, there’s a good chance you spent some part of 2022 considering one of these topics: The impact of artificial intelligence Objectives & key results The great talent shortage The impact of artificial intelligence On the mind of virtually every digital product manager with enough capacity to think ahead a few steps is the question of how artificial intelligence plays into their product strategy. For some, of course, this question is not one for “someday” but for “right now.” The financial product manager who is not at least thinking about how they can leverage AI today is probably already falling behind in the market. AI impacts all stages of the product lifecycle, from design to development and testing to marketing to customer service and support. If you’re not considering how AI will affect how to design, build, market, or operate your product, you can bet your competitors or future disrupters are. Objectives & key results (OKRs) Is there anyone who hasn’t at least dabbled with OKRs yet? This organizational management methodology has been around for decades but has exploded in recent years into one of those “everyone’s doing it” trends. Seemingly every unicorn in Silicon Valley and beyond, not to mention the largest and most successful companies in the world (Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Adobe, Intel, Amazon, Dell, GE), have embraced OKRs to align their people around the corporate strategy. A well-executed OKR implementation promises not just to get everyone in the company paddling in the same direction but also to increase morale and retention by helping every member of the team to understand how their day-to-day work supports the big, strategic goals. The great talent shortage Finally, a growing appreciation for the importance of solid product management has combined with an expansion in the overall jobs market to add product manager to the list of roles that are difficult to fill, along with product designer, software developer, and many others. The candidate shortage has contributed to a rise in wages which has made the ease of changing positions in search of higher pay more common, so positions are difficult not just to fill but to keep filled. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '842368a9-af78-421f-a3cb-4da00ad39f75', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});
3 Questions to Ask About Every Potential Product Feature
If you’re a product manager, then you know that demands for new features come from all directions. Sometimes these demands come from key customers asking for a specific feature to support a workflow unique to them. Other times they might come from your sales team hoping for that one last feature they need to close their next big deal. Still, other times these demands might come from your general user base simply asking for more features in your product. But with all of these new ideas, how are you to decide which is the best investment for your product? Luckily, there’s a simple way to evaluate the impact of adding new potential product features to your product by asking three simple questions. These questions will help you understand not only whether a new feature is worth pursuing, but also how that feature might contribute to your product vision. Are you intrigued? Excellent, then let’s learn what these questions are. 1. Who is this feature for? The first and most important question you should ask about every potential feature is which of your users are most likely to benefit from it? Is the beneficiary a persona known to be a regular user of your product? Or, would this feature appeal to a buyer who is known to influence the purchase of your product? Perhaps the beneficiary is neither a current user or buyer but instead maps to a persona you hope your product will appeal to in the future. For example, imagine that your product is a CRM application designed to help busy sales executives track interactions with prospects more effectively. Your next feature allows sales executives to record notes from interactions with clients using only their voice. This feature likely appeals more to day-to-day users of your product rather than salesforce managers or IT administrators influencing product purchases. On the other hand, if your next feature provides oversight into a salesperson’s daily activities to help managers understand how proactively they are engaging with their prospects, it’s likely to appeal more to salesforce managers who approve the purchase of your product than day-to-day users. In any case, if you can’t articulate exactly which of your personas will benefit from a potential new feature, or if that persona is known not to be a beneficiary of your product, then you should be wary of investing time into bringing that feature to market. 2. What capability will this feature enable? The next question you should ask about each potential feature is what capability it will actually provide. For example, will this feature support a previously-defined initiative that your product is already pursuing, or does this feature clearly map to the desired capability already on your roadmap? While there’s always room for a bit of unexpected inspiration, you should carefully consider any potential product features that don’t directly move your product closer to its stated direction. Generally speaking, users tend to show more affinity to products with a tightly cohesive feature set compared to products with a large set of unrelated features. Products with cohesive feature sets tend to be better able to solve your users’ specific problems in obvious ways. That’s why you should favor features that are more likely to contribute to the direction that you’ve already chosen for your product. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Why are you building this feature? The last question to ask is, why you are building this feature in the first place? Specifically, what benefits does your organization stand to gain from bringing this feature to market? Will bringing this feature to market give your product a competitive edge, potentially opening up new market share? Or will this feature add value to an already strong product offering or generate incremental revenue opportunities? Are the benefits of this feature even more subtle, such as increasing your organization’s operational efficiency or increasing the value of your organization’s brand in the market? Regardless of what benefit a feature stands to bring, if you can’t articulate exactly how your organization stands to benefit from investing in that feature, then you should be wary of doing so in the first place. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3fdc3ac9-84a7-4278-9401-1468475b8db9', {}); Starting with who Odds are, you’ve probably already seen variations of these questions in your career as a product manager. In fact, you may have even asked these same questions about some of your own features, in the past. The difference, however, is that most teams who follow this approach start with what. Starting with what often results in product managers first identifying a feature, and then working backward in an attempt to justify how it might contribute to the product vision. This often results in products bloated with features of dubious value. Or, products lacking a coherent vision or purpose. But by starting with who, you take time first to understand not only who your target users are, but also what problems they are facing. As a result, you’re more likely to create features that will add value to your users’ lives and deeply resonate with the problems they face on a daily basis. However, there’s also another, less obvious advantage. By first focusing your efforts on developing a deep understanding of who your users are and the problems that they face, you increase the likelihood that you’ll also identify additional opportunities to solve similar problems for those same users in the future. Not only does this better position your product to become more entrenched in your users’ daily lives, but it also enables you to grow your product by offering more capabilities to your current user base rather than forcing you to continuously identify new types of users and problems to solve. Putting this to work for you Now that you understand what questions you should be asking about each potential product feature that you’re considering, how do you put this to work with your product? A great place to start is by looking at some of the requests at the top of your product backlog. Ideally, these should be requests that have been made by some of the parties mentioned earlier but that you haven’t yet committed to delivering. Download the free Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters Book➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {}); For each request, evaluate it according to the Who/What/Why framework described here. And then, consider what you learn as a result of doing so. For example, does the priority of any of these features change as a result of being viewed through the lens of this framework, or do some features simply not seem as important to your product’s future as they once did? Whatever the outcome, it’s likely that the Who/What/Why framework will add a new way of evaluating which features will genuinely add the most value to your product, and thus the best return on investment for your organization.
3 Reasons Product Managers Should Care About Content Marketing
Be a hero, follow the money, and market yourself. Got it? Really? On top of everything I am responsible for as a product manager, you’re telling me I should care about content, too? Isn’t that someone else’s job? Yes, you should care. Even if there is a dedicated product marketing manager responsible for messaging, demand generation, and sales enablement, as a product manager, you should contribute content. And if you are responsible for the go-to-market side of product management, you absolutely positively should contribute content. But who has time? If one more person asks me for screenshots, I’m going to scream. Sounds like a software product manager! Screenshots are not content marketing. Not that marketing doesn’t need them to create product assets, but what I’m talking about is providing context around personas, market problems, market stories, and customer successes with your product. Content that leads to your product, not with your product. Content that helps buyers buy and helps move them along their journey to buy and use your category of products. Raw content that can blossom into engaging content that buyers want to consume. The content might spawn an ebook or video or blog entry or infographic or short social media post. And no, I’m not saying you are responsible for producing the content into finished form (more about this later). About screenshots: If you just grab a lot of screenshots without first understanding what story the screenshots should tell, you’re wasting time (yours and marketing’s). Start with the problems you solve and tell the stories of how your product solves those problems within the context of your personas’ lives. Otherwise, why should they care? Seriously, why should I care about content marketing? One more time, three great reasons: 1. Be a Hero Product managers are often compared to superheroes. After all, it takes superhuman strength and superpowers to identify market problems worth solving, get your product funded, guide development to build what the market wants to buy, help marketing tell the world your product exists, help sales figure out how to sell it, and keep the product, marketing, and sales machines fueled, maintained, and operating at full capacity. All good. But even if you are doing a great superhero job, you might still blend into the background at your company. Like Clark Kent. Sometimes you need to put on your cape and tights and let everyone see your heroic activities. Translation: Create some content to help market and sell your product. After all, you can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows about it, who is going to buy it? You need this to have a successful product. Be a hero for the product manager (you). If you’ve been doing your job right, listening to and observing the market, looking for compelling problems to solve, understanding the context of users trying to get their jobs done, and hearing what buyers want and why, you have the basis for content to help buyers buy. Share, share, share your knowledge! I’m freaking out. Are you saying I need to produce all of this amazing, finished content? Breathe. Unless you’re two guys in a garage in pre-startup mode with no money, what you need to provide is the market context, not the finished production-quality content. It’s like working with development. You provide context about what the market needs and they build the product. Which brings us to the second reason you should care about content marketing. 2. Follow the Money If you look at the departments you work with, only one of them seems to have money to spend. Marketing! According to an infographic created by TAMBA (a social media agency), the average marketing organization is spending a sizeable chunk of their marketing budget on content. B2B marketers are spending 28% B2C marketers spend 25% According to TAMBA’s research, the top 2 most outsourced content marketing activities are writing (44%) and design (41%). Cool! Let marketing fund the production of the content while you provide the context. Just like working with development where you create user stories, requirements, or some other form of context so they can build the product, you need to transfer your market knowledge to someone who will manage the production of the content and turn it into tasty, engaging content treats. If done right, some of the context you provide for development may be reusable to educate marketing. The essence of what you need: Problems you are trying to solve for your customers. Describe this as if you were telling a friend or family member what the situation is that causes the problems. If you’ve been spending time in the market like you should, share specific stories about the problems customers face and why they need the problems solved. And the problems are not “need more revenue” and “we’re spending too much”. You need enough context that the resulting content is not so generic (“for everyone”) that it resonates with no one. Buyer and user personas. The better you can profile your personas around the issues they face, how they consume information, where they go for advice, how to find them, what their spending authority is, what their aspirations are, and how they are motivated, the better your content will be. If you don’t know anything about the people who buy and use your products, focus your research efforts on learning about them. How your company can help: Offer advice, resources, survey results of others like them, “how to” tips and tricks, “what’s cool”, “what’s new”, risks and rewards, customer success stories, and how your solutions solve the problems. If you stay close to your market, every time you learn of a new problem they have can be an opportunity to create content that empathizes with them and advises them on how to solve the problem (whether it’s through your product or not). You may be begging marketing to create marketing stuff to generate demand for your product. If you want them to pay attention to you, give them what they need most from you: context to create the finished marketing asset. To create effective marketing programs, marketing needs context about why buyers should care about what you sell, starting with non-product advice about solving their problems. It’s really hard to market without effective, relevant content. It might be impossible. The content is the fuel that drives marketing activities and the marketing machine. You will be a hero to marketing (see reason #1) if you provide the market context that will help the product fly off the shelves, and marketing will be more likely to spend money promoting your product if you give them the delicious raw materials of compelling market stories that engage buyers. 3. Market yourself As product managers we get so busy, we forget to market ourselves. Don’t wait until you need a job to focus on your career. Do a great job for the company you work for, but use your successes to help you reach your career goals. If a job opportunity comes to you next week, what will your potential employer find when they Google your name? By sharing great content on your social media platforms, you can build a presence and reputation that can help you in the future. “Don’t wait to dig the well until the well goes dry.” Too late! Remember that you don’t have to “build” all content yourself. In your product, you should be making “buy, build, or partner” decisions to solve problems, why not do this for content? BUY No money? See #2. And help marketing spread the word about the content by sharing on your social media platforms. BUILD If you want to be considered a thought leader in your category or industry, you need to create some of your own content (not the creative design, but the ideas). Maintain a list of potential topics and carve out time to periodically: Write a post for your company or personal blog Write an update for LinkedIn Post comments on LinkedIn groups Participate in LinkedIn discussions Do a speaking engagement (online or in person) and post the slides on SlideShare Tweet to drive traffic to your content PARTNER Curating content from other sources is a great way to amplify your social media presence. Be thoughtful about what you share, however. If a potential employer or recruiter sees the post, does it help tell the story of who you are and what you care about? And have you added your point of view to the content you are sharing? Always respect copyrights and source the content you’re curating. It’s the right thing to do. But add your point of view to augment what you’re sharing to illustrate your expertise, knowledge, or opinion. So what is content marketing, anyway? One of my favorite marketing bloggers is Jay Acunzo. He wrote the funniest blog at Sorry For Marketing defining what content marketing is (and isn’t). According to his Jargon Monster: “Content marketing is an umbrella term covering a set of strategies, techniques and tactics to fulfill business and customer goals by using content across the customer life cycle and the business functions in a consistent, integrated and continuous way.” Read that again because you may not have really gotten it. What?? Really? If someone can’t get what you write the first time, then maybe it’s gobbledygook. Sadly, this was probably written by a marketer… Shameful. Here’s what Jay’s Naked Little Truth says: “Content marketing is just solving the same customer problems as your product but through media you create and distribute.” (My emphasis.) Imagine that. Solving the same customer problems as your product. That’s when the lightbulb went on for me about why product managers should care about content marketing. You already have the knowledge to create great content. You need the same context to define your products and services. A great example of content that solves the same customer problems as your product is this ebook from LIKE.TG: This ebook is chock full of ideas and content addressing the challenges product managers have. When I first saw this on Twitter, they had me at the title. Click, register, download. If the title isn’t enough for you, what about: How to develop a winning product strategy Best practices for building your roadmap 9 example roadmaps to get you started If none of this resonates with you, you’re not a good prospect for the product anyway. Move on. If you want more examples of great content, check out what my marketing team at Sage Construction did with our Job Ready program. Don’t be intimidated by the depth and breadth of content, however. We built this program agilely, theme by theme, quarter by quarter. Content became the basis of our marketing strategy, fueling the marketing machine throughout the customer journey. I’d love to hear your successes about how your content rocked it. Did content make you a hero? Did marketing embrace your content and create awesome assets leading to lots of business? Did content help your career? About the Guest Author I wasn’t always a marketing executive and consultant. My journey from the trenches to management to the executive suite to becoming an elite member of the Pragmatic Marketing team of instructors and back to the executive suite has given me a unique perspective on technology marketing. Let me apply my expertise and passion to help you unlock your story to engage colleagues, customers, and buyers. From idea to content to visuals to delivery. Contact or follow me: [email protected], @barbaragnelson, LinkedIn.
3 Reasons You Should Hire a Senior Product Manager
Once you’re blessed with the opportunity to expand your product management team with a new hire, you have options to consider. You can hire a senior product manager who will bring their years of real-world experience and savviness to the table, or you can bring on new talent you can mold and mentor yourself. Of course, there’s a little more to this decision. When hiring a senior product manager, their compensation is greater. They are more difficult to find, recruit, and win over. Also, they may have firmly-entrenched ideas about how things should work. Meanwhile, a junior product manager will be a more affordable investment. You might even be able to get two for the same price as one senior PM. But they’ll likely require handholding and closer supervision. They won’t start off with much credibility and could turn out to be the wrong fit for the job. In our 2020 Product Management Report, we found that 23.5% of respondents planned to hire a junior product manager this year. Compared with 48.2% expecting to add a “regular” product manager. Directors of Product and Chief Product Officers were less likely to be hired (at 9.8% and 4.8%, respectively). In our 2021 State of Product Management report, hiring was one of the primary focuses of product leader’s budgets. So why should product team leaders favor experience versus potential? 3 Reasons to Hire a Senior Product Manager 1. You get what you pay for. When you hire a senior product manager, the cost is greater, and there’s no getting around that truth. Someone with years of experience knows their worth and commands a higher salary. A senior product manager can hit the ground running. They won’t be new at being a product manager. They’ll still need to make the rounds getting to know key stakeholders, sit in on some customer interactions, and bone up on the product and its market. They’ve already learned the basics of the job and gone through all the invaluable steps required to take on this role at a new company before. Besides possessing a fundamental grasp of what the role entails, a senior addition to the team brings their specific experiences and expertise. They can begin making keen observations and suggestions predicated on what they’ve dealt with elsewhere. Most importantly, product leaders should start handing off real responsibilities to a new senior hire quickly and with confidence. Their learned experience will shorten the time between their first day on the job and their first days of actually adding value. Getting things off your plate is one of the main perks of expanding your team, so the sooner you can confidently make that happen, the better. 2. Great time investment. Mentoring, coaching, and showing newbies the ropes can be incredibly rewarding. For some managers, it’s their favorite part of the job. But it’s also incredibly time-consuming. Instead of delegating and focusing on something else, you’ve got to keep a close eye on junior staff as they get their sea legs. It’s important to avoid any costly missteps or indirect damage to your own reputation. While building up a bullpen of talent may be a strategic goal for your organization, it’s not expected to come at the expense of delivering fantastic user experiences and increasing revenue and profitability. If you’re spending too much time grooming and nurturing, that means your product’s evolution and growth could suffer. 3. Strong performers elevate teams. Some product leaders worry that bringing on a talented, experienced product professional could come back to haunt them, primarily by outshining their own performance. Bringing on strong performers and positioning them for success is part of being a leader. The benefits these senior staff members bring should raise the profile of the entire product team. There is evidence that the best leaders hire people who are smarter or better than them. Why wouldn’t you want the best players possible on your team? Exceptions To The Rule Are there fresh-faced product professionals that can run circles around established PMs despite their lack of experience? Sure! It’s possible you could luck into an overachieving product savant. One that outperforms their salary and brings incredible value to the organization. But there’s no way to know that before they’re on board until they are in the thick of things. Even then, they’ll need some basic training and additional coaching as they come up to speed. Betting on a promising undiscovered talent can pay massive dividends if they pan out. However, when you only have a small number of hires to make during your tenure, do you want to risk it? This isn’t to say that you should never hire an associate product manager with minimal experience. It’s a longshot; you’ll see the same returns as you would from someone with a proven track record. Addressing Specific Needs Additional headcount is usually intended to serve a specific purpose as few companies add personnel for the heck of it. That’s why it’s important to remember you’re not building an abstractly ideal organization. Instead, you’re actively filling a role that’s desperately needed. The specifics of that need should be the primary driver for the job description and whom you select to bring aboard. Before you stock up on junior product managers to build your mini-empire and celebrate your new staffing budget, take a step back, and consider what will actually be helpful for you and the product organization: Business Analyst Need help with reporting and sorting through reams of data to make informed product decisions? A business analyst could fit the bill, or you could build out a separate analytics team. Product Owner Does the development team need so much attention that there’s no time to think about strategy? Maybe a product owner would be the right fit. They would free staff members to focus on their roles while the product manager deals with the day-to-day issues during implementation. Group Product Manager Are there too many products with their own separate schedules, priorities, and customers to supervise? A group product manager can take some of that load and provide the mentoring and attention to detail required. This would help create a consistent approach to product management processes and a single point-person for senior leadership. Senior Product Manager Launching a new product and want to give it the attention it deserves and requires? Hire a senior product manager. Put them on the project and remain confident they won’t have to learn on the job for this important new initiative. Product Onboarding Manager Are you struggling with your product’s successful adoption (s) and need to shrink the time to value? A product onboarding manager can take on a holistic approach to improving this critical stage in the customer journey. They do this by improving the KPIs the executive team is counting on. Product Operations Manager Maybe the day-to-day processes and operations are becoming overwhelming in their own right. Do you want someone to own those and take the reigns for those issues? Bringing on a product operations manager can manage the tools and processes required to make the product team hum. Invest Wisely in Strategic Staffing You will only have so many opportunities to add headcount to your team, so be sure you’re making the most of each chance you get. Closing gaps in your organization’s collective skill set and bringing on trusted lieutenants will allow you to hit the accelerator and bring better products to the market with fewer missteps and minimal delays. Ask for what you really need, hire the best, and position your team to successfully seize the available opportunities while those windows are still there. In today’s competitive marketplace, you can’t often afford to incubate potential future superstars when you need a solid player today. Watch our webinar, Hiring and Growing a Successful Product Team, to see what product leaders look for when hiring new team members:
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