Today, most businesses rely on cloud-based solutions to operate smoothly and cost-efficiently. Dependence on the cloud is often based on the convenience of software maintenance, the flexibility to adjust licenses based on usage, and the reduced costs of use and operation it provides.However, not every software solution on the market offers these benefits. Take, for instance, Zendesk.When Zendesk introduced its customer service software solution, businesses were drawn to its simple and easy-to-use offerings. A short time later, in 2010, Zendesk announced a price increase, leading to a 300% increase in some users' monthly fees. In response to customer backlash, the CEO grandfathered pricing for existing customers and expressed a commitment to provide "the best product and the best value for all of the additional functionality we roll out in the future." However, the product that once enabled businesses to operate smoothly grew in complexity.Since 2010, Zendesk has undergone several changes, the most significant being its acquisition by an investor group led by Hellman and Friedman, and Permira. A few months after the announcement, there were speculations about employee layoffs, a change in CEO, and a price increase.One by one, these all came to fruition. Are there more changes ahead for Zendesk's customers? Once again, only time will tell.Recently, Zendesk announced a 15% price increase for its service software and a 20% price increase for its other add-on products, citing the same reason they did in 2010: product innovation.While many customers expressed unhappiness, others chose to opt in to multi-year contracts to temporarily save their businesses from increased costs. This workaround meant customers could no longer enjoy the pay-as-you-go subscription model, one of the reasons many opted for a cloud-based solutionin the first place.Now comes an important question: Is increasing prices wrong? Not as long as customers get the value the vendor claims to offer. This is why we decided to dissect Zendesk's current pricing structure against the value it offersto customers.As you may know, this pricing is only for one part of a more complete customer service solution. If you choose Zendesk as your customer service platform, you will need to piece together multiple applications to make it work for you. Essential features, like call, chat, messaging, analytics, and the help center are available as separate products for purchase, and have also seen a 20% price increase.Some basic features are either absent from the application or offered as extensions. Moreover, every time Zendesk acquires a new feature, customers have to pay for the acquired feature as an add-on or as part of a high-priced bundle edition.This means you will be paying for Zendesk's acquisitions, as well as Zendesk's acquisition of $10.2 billion.As a leveraged buyoutwith a history of 10 years of consistent losses,Zendesk and its investors are bound to look for better returns on their investment. With anexorbitantdebtto pay, a history of losses, and an uncertain economic situation at present, will Zendesk be able to continue to innovatethrough acquisitions? And will customers have to continue paying the price for it?At LIKE.TG, we believe that there is a better way. We built our products through years of sustainable research and development to deliver efficient software at the right price. We've been reliable, self-sufficient, and profitable for 26 years.Switch to our customer service software, LIKE.TG. Trusted by companies like Daimler, Godrej, and 100 thousand other businesses around the world to build lasting customer relationships.To learn more about how LIKE.TG's functionality stacks up against Zendesk's, head to this comparison page.Disclaimer: Facts cited are based on our internal research.

Imagine walking into a store to buy a pair of shoes. The salesperson is friendly and helps you find the perfect pair. You're happy with your purchase and you leave the store feeling great.But a few weeks later, the shoes start to fall apart. You return to the store for a refund, but the customer service representative is dismissive and unhelpful. You leave feeling disappointed.Even though the salesperson won you over initially, the bad customer service experience left a lasting impression. You're unlikely to shop at that store again.Now, imagine walking into a different store. The salesperson is friendly, but they don't have the right size or style of shoes for you. You're disappointed, but you understand.However, the customer service representative goes above and beyond to help you find the perfect pair of shoes. They check other stores in their chain and even order them from a different warehouse. You're so impressed with the customer service that you become loyal and enthusiastically recommend the store to everyone.The takeaway from the story? Sales has to win once, but customer service has to win every time. Credits: Shep HykenYou need to cross the finish line first to win the race, and that's similar to how sales need to close a deal to win a customer's business. However, customer service is more like a marathon. You need to keep running and providing excellent service to your customers, even if they don't make a purchase right away. That's because good customer service can turn a one-time sale into a lifelong customer.How can your customer service teams win every time?It’s all too easy to lose customers in a competitive consumer-driven marketplace. And providing poor customer service is one of the fastest ways for that to happen. Here's how you can set your customer service team up for winning.Be present on channels that matter to your customersTo connect with your customers, you must be available on the social media platforms they frequent, the communities they engage in, the forums they seek advice on or even the direct line of instant messaging apps they use. You have to do more than simply exist on these channels: Listen intently to their concerns, participate meaningfully in conversations, and be prepared to address issues publicly and transparently when necessary.Make the experience so smooth that customers won't need to reach outJeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is quoted as having said: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” This perfectly sums up the idea of empowering customers to take control of their own experiences. Today, customers, like you and I, expect a superior standard of self-service from all the brands we interact with. The integration of self-service portals, automation, and artificial intelligence is currently paving the way for continuous improvements in this domain, promising to democratize the self-service experience.Be fast, but uphold qualityIn customer service, you have to find the sweet spot where speed meets quality. Here's how:Prioritize and triage requests to address urgent needs quickly (think about a server outage) while dedicating focused time to complex problems (like refund disputes).Equip your customer support reps with the right tools and resources to solve problems independently. They need clear guidelines, readily accessible information, and the ability to make decisions without lengthy approval procedures.Automate repetitive tasks like password resets or basic order tracking, freeing up time for reps to focus on complex inquiries and personalized interactions.Monitor performance and act on itCustomer service, unlike sales, can be difficult to monitor because the results are not immediately credited to your account. Quantifying customer service can be tricky, but it's far from impossible! Here are a few ways to measure the impact of your customer service efforts:Quantitative metrics:Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Use surveys or post-interaction prompts to gauge immediate satisfaction with specific interactions.Net promoter score (NPS): Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand, providing a strong indicator of overall loyalty.Customer effort score (CES): Measure how easy it was for customers to resolve their issues, revealing potential friction points.First contact resolution rate (FCR): Track the percentage of issues resolved on the first interaction, signifying efficiency and reduced frustration.Average resolution time (ART): Monitor how long it takes to address issues, identifying areas for improvement in speed and efficiency.Customer churn rate (CCR): Calculate the percentage of customers who cease doing business with you, highlighting potential service flaws.Qualitative metrics:Social media sentiment: Gauge overall customer sentiment towards your brand and customer service by analyzing public online conversations.Customer reviews and feedback: Mine reviews and feedback for recurring themes, revealing positive and negative aspects of your service.You are ready to win!While sales seal the deal, it's exceptional customer service that makes customers stay. Sales aim for that one victorious moment, but customer service plays the long game,aiming to score a fresh win with every interaction.To win at customer service, choosing the right tool can make a significant difference. Consider giving LIKE.TG a try and experience how it can improve your customer service game!

Empathy. You’ve heard it’s an essential skill for product managers, marketing managers, and UX teams. But how can you put empathy into practice when engaging with customers and prospects? Empathy is a way of understanding your customers’ underlying needs and motivations. I believe that empathy can lead you to build a better product and then explain to the world why you’re building it. I think of empathy as listening closely but also as a way of asking better questions that matter. Here are a few tips and examples you can use during your customer interviews to arrive at unique insights you wouldn’t have otherwise – and ultimately build great products. Understand How Customers Define Success A good place to start is by asking questions to help understand a customer’s motivation to solve a problem. If your product is B2B, you want to understand what they want to achieve with their business and the metrics they use to measure success. In B2B, it’s important to remember that “customers” are not businesses but people. Here’s an example: When I was helping to validate the product that eventually became AppFolio, we scheduled several long conversations and in-person visits with our target business owners. We wanted to learn about the products they used but also to understand what they wanted to achieve with their business. At first, we assumed that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter. By understanding these motivations through empathetic questioning, we could build a product and compelling value proposition that resonated with our target customer. For your customers, ask the basic questions that illuminate success metrics – for example: “Why did you start this business?” “How did you get into this job?” “How do you know you have had a successful year?” Understand How They are Solving Problems Today When talking with prospects, ask for examples of how they solve their problems today. If they are currently your customer, they may be supplementing your solution with other solutions—this is essential to understand. You can discover great product opportunities when customers are cobbling together multiple solutions (including spreadsheets and paper) to solve the problem. For B2B products, there is no better option than being in their office to see the systems, workflow (and problems) first-hand. You can also see nonverbal cues. Phone interviews are fine, but seeing stacks of paper, wall charts, sticky notes, and other workarounds can give your team inspiration for innovative ways to solve the problem. Uncover the True Motivators As a product manager, you already know it’s crucial to uncover pain. But sometimes, customers and prospects tell you what you want to hear. Or tell you something is important when it’s actually not very high on their priority list. Asking the right questions can help you get to the true motivators. Here’s an example: When researching the concept that became LIKE.TG, we interviewed dozens of product managers to understand their product roadmapping process. As a result, we uncovered a lot of pain and motivation to change an ineffective process dominated by spreadsheets and presentation tools. But we learned that the challenge for them wasn’t only about saving time and getting out from under the burden of Excel and PowerPoint. By asking the right questions and listening closely, we understood that it was also about creating a compelling vision and looking good in front of stakeholders and executives. As a result, our product roadmap software looks beautiful and delivers on speed and ease of use. The best way to uncover true motivators is with open-ended questions. Using “why” and “how” are great tools to use often. Couple that with listening closely, and you are on the right track. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); A Few More Tips for Empathy Listen to their language. Listen closely to the way that customers phrase their problems and their domain space. Then, use that language when talking with them. These descriptions and words can not only provide you with a way of discussing issues in a common language, but you can later use this language to describe your product and build out value propositions that resonate. Debrief after each interview. If you can, interview in pairs or as part of a team. Take notes and have a follow-up discussion to document what each of you heard. I guarantee that you heard things differently. Let customers answer questions themselves. Don’t prompt them with suggested answers. Instead, give them time to answer the question. Sometimes uncomfortable silence is good and will yield responses you might not have gotten otherwise. I’ve seen first-hand how empathetic questioning and listening can help uncover true motivations and provide a path to better products. It’s also great to let customers know that we care enough to truly understand them.

“We’re agile, so why do we need a long-term product roadmap?”I hear this question regularly. At first blush, the termsagileandproduct roadmap seem like a contradiction, but they’re not. In fact, you should have an agile product roadmap. In most agile product development organizations, the backlog is used by the development team to track what’s coming next, at least for the next few sprints or iterations. Many agile teams rely heavily on the backlog, as it maps out short-term initiatives. But the backlog in itself is not the roadmap. This post explains why you need both. Product Roadmap vs. Backlog A product roadmap is different from a backlog. The product roadmap defines a strategic view of where the product is headed over the mid to long term, whereas the backlog defines the product features and initiatives for the near term. The roadmap is tied to the organization’s vision and long-term strategic goals, often for the next 12 or more months. In an agile organization, the roadmap provides guidance rather than a strict project plan. It’s Hard to Communicate Strategy in a Backlog An agile product roadmap communicates to the organization the big picture – the initiatives that move the needle, expand markets, address competition, and create customer value.That big-picture thinking can’t be distilled in the backlog. It’s challenging to communicate strategy in a list that’s 200 items long, especially to executives and other stakeholders who may not think in terms of iterations or sprints. Even agile organizations need this strategic view. At LIKE.TG we’vediscovered our customers are sharing product roadmaps with the engineers to give perspective to the backlog. It helps the development organization understand how the next few sprints fit into the big picture. An agile product roadmap speaks in terms ofepics and themes, while the backlog is the detailed features and other tasks that deliver the product.In a sense, the backlog is a translation of how your team will deliver the vision outlined on an agile product roadmap. Get Strategic Project Alignment ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Why an Agile Product Roadmap Makes Sense A roadmap should be agile and thought of as a living document rather than a plan set in stone. Like the backlog, the product roadmap should be regularly discussed, prioritized, estimated, updated, and shared. Because an agile product roadmap will inevitably change, it’s important to set expectations with your stakeholders that the roadmap is not a promise. Many of our customers keep the roadmap dates at a monthly or quarterly level, or leave the dates off altogether to avoid setting the impression that features will be delivered by a specific date. Product owners need to regularly communicate where the product is heading so that everyone is on the same page, especially to stakeholders who make final decisions, control the budget, or influence the direction of the company.Your agile product roadmap, therefore, should be a visual, easy-to-digest document that your stakeholders can understand and that gives perspective to your backlog. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

If your product team is like most, you have software for capturing issues, managing requirements, and tracking projects. After all, it’s essential to manage the details and deliver quality product releases. But we hear regularly from product managers who tell us it’s too hard to use the information in these tools to plan and create a high-level product roadmap for communicating with executives and other stakeholders. Here’s the problem: the current tools often develop the roadmap from the bottom-up details, not the top-down big picture. Product managers are looking to flip their process around – they want an easy way to create a high-level product roadmap without first entering the low-level details. And those details are often not defined or fuzzy at best, especially if they’re more than a couple of quarters in the future. Even though most product managers are using sophisticated product management software, the irony is that it simply takes too long to create a decent product roadmap that executives understand. As a result, far too many product managers turn to dated tools like PowerPoint and spreadsheets for planning and communicating their high-level strategy. Just this week a VP of Product summarized it nicely for me. She said “I need to find something that my executive team likes. Every year we seem to argue over templates. I want to get out of the line of fire and get some part of my weekend back.” What we’ve found through dozens of conversations with customers is that product managers and product executives want a simpler way to do top-down strategic planning and communication. They want to have productive discussions about future big initiatives, themes, or epics that move the needle for the company. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Several product managers have told us their executive team simply doesn’t care much about the details—what they really care about is whether the proposed roadmap fits with the strategic direction of the company. Successful product managers tap into this by keeping the roadmapping process high-level and collaborative. We found that by helping product managers easily create and then share their high-level product vision, they can get the executive team, marketing, engineering management and the rest of the organization on board with the strategy. We built LIKE.TG as an elegant way to quickly create a beautiful top-down product roadmap and then present the strategy to the executive team and management. It provides product teams a way to do high-level strategic planning, entering details about business value, development effort, and other information only at the point when it’s better defined. Through this process, the product team minimizes disconnects and gets everyone on the same page earlier in the process. Is it time to turn your product roadmap process upside down? photo credit: Margaret Killjoy cc

Recently I spoke to a class at the UCSB Technology Management Program about market validation and failure testing – the process of testing whether customers will buy your product before you build it. I was part of a startup several years ago that raised millions – we spent about$10 million of it developing and launching a product that no one wanted. It was a mistake that was avoidable. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); Through that failure, I learned how to first validate product concepts before building andscaling them. I’m a believer in the process and have used it successfully for many products and services, including GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. Here are seven best-practices I outlined in my talk that you can use in your market validation and failure testing efforts. 7 Steps for Testing if Your Product Will Fail 1. Adopt the philosophy of market validation. “My assumptions may be wrong.” For me, this approach underlies everything about market validation and customer development. Too many entrepreneurs and product managers are too rigid in their belief that they know what’s best for the customer – this only increases the risk of failure. 2. Write a testable hypothesis. Write a testable hypothesis for the market segment, problem, product, and business model. You can document your hypothesis in several different ways, whether that’s the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Canvas, a simple document, or sticky notes. 3. Focus first on the problem, not the product. Understand the problem thoroughly by first conducting 10 problem discovery interviews. I find that by focusing on the problem first, the product concept falls into place much more rapidly. 4. Ask open-ended questions. Make sure you understand your customers and are nailing the real customer pain. I wrote about this in 10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask. 5. Pitch your solutionto 20 customers after you have nailed the problem. An ideal pitch tells them their problem and how your solution solves that problem. It also describes what your product won’t do and potentially tests pricing. 6. Iterate your hypothesis as you learn. In the spirit of agile, you should iterate as you learn. However, unlike many Lean Startups, you are iterating on a concept or prototype rather than an actual product. 7. Track your interviews. I use a template for tracking customer problems, value propositions for our product, must-have features, objections, probability of buying, and interesting quotes. Keeping good track of interview notes isessential when conducting dozens of interviews. The notesalso serve as great customer evidence for justifying product initiatives to stakeholders. I then summarize what I’m hearing into a spreadsheet to make it easier to digest the massive amount of qualitative information I’ve gathered.

Deciding which initiatives to include in your futureproduct releases can be daunting. Product prioritization is even more difficult when there are too many opportunities to choose from and too many stakeholders to satisfy. Often these all-important decisions are disconnected from a company’s strategic goals, with product prioritization discussions dominated by opinion, a knee-jerk reaction to the latest lost sale, or the influence of a, particularly vocal executive. By using a scoring method to guide your product prioritization discussions, product managers can facilitate a more productive conversation about what to include on the product roadmap. While there are many inputs that ultimately go into a product decision, a scoring model can help the team have an objective conversation about product prioritization. One way to work through the process is withLIKE.TG’s Planning Board, a framework to help prioritize product opportunities. Based on product management best practices, the Planning Board helps you and your team objectively score new initiatives.More importantly, the Planning Board gives you a process to guide your strategic discussions. Whether you use a spreadsheet or the Planning Board, this method can make the product planningprocess more productive and help you get buy-in from key stakeholders. Think Benefit versus Cost Every potential initiative has two major considerations: the business Benefit and the associated Cost of implementing it. Product managers implicitly or explicitly use this calculation when prioritizing. The priority of an initiative is a composite of Benefit versus Cost (clearly, items with high Benefit and low Cost get higher priority). Benefits can be described as customer value, strategic value, revenue potential, cost reduction, or any other strategic objective your company may have. Costs often include implementation or development effort as one of the key categories. You may also want to include the impact on ongoing operational costs, or even an initiative’s risk factor. With the Planning Board you prioritize opportunities based on a customized set of Benefit and Cost categories. For example: Your company’s specific Benefit and Cost categories will be different – some companies based their categories on an ever-evolving set of criteria, while others use the company’s strategic initiatives as a basis. Whatever categories you choose, thePlanning Board is customizable. The Planning Board takes into account the relative weighting of each category that you assign (the weight can add up to any number you choose). Discussing the weighting of each category in your planning meetings is a great way to get an agreement on what’s important to the organization. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {}); The Scoring Discussion: It’s All Relative Once you have an agreement on the Benefit and Cost categories, you can begin scoring the initiatives. The Planning Board uses ascale of 1-5 to rank each opportunity in a category: One (1) is low Benefit or low Cost. Five (5) is high Benefit or high Cost. It’s important that you score items relative to other items. In other words, an initiative’s score only matters when you compare it to another initiative. And because business objectives can change, scores can change as well. Once you have a score for each item, you can have a fact-based, objective discussion with the team about what to include on the product roadmap. Of course, simply because an item has a high score doesn’t mean you add it to the roadmap. You still need to practice good product management, and that includes assessing many more variables than could be included in a product prioritization framework. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); The total score and rank is a composite of Benefit versus Cost and takes into account each column’s weighting. For example, an item with 5’s on the Benefit side and 1’s on the Cost side will calculate the maximum score. Which initiatives should you score? At LIKE.TG we recommend you use this model for only big features, themes, epics, and strategic initiatives rather than smaller features. In other words, use the framework for evaluating the needle movers that make an impact on the strategic goals. We’ve made the Planning Board flexible enough that you can pull in opportunities from the backlog (Table Layout) or items that are already on the roadmap. LIKE.TG is a web-based product roadmap software. If you haven’t already, feel free to sign up for a 30-dayfree trial.

A few days agoI had lunchwith the product team of a mid-sized software company, and one of the product managers had a conundrum: “Sometimes I hear the same feature request over and over, but when we finally release it customers barely use it.” Does that sound familiar? How can we as product managers avoid these dead-weight product features? How can we determine whether to 1.) implement a feature exactly as customers request, 2.) defer it, or 3.)deliver something that is completely different than requested but solves the core problem? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); In my experience, good product managersoften combine all three (especially the deferring part). But for the product features you decide to includeon the roadmap, there is one practice that can help you make sure they will add value and get used: Set aside the feature request andfirst understand the job that customers need to accomplish. I’m assuming you’ve already nailed the basics: You have a process for validating prototypes with customers, and once you release a feature, you have the metrics to measure the success of the feature. “I need the following product features…” Before LIKE.TG I worked fora SaaScompany developing business software for vertical markets. The software was complex, including accounting, CRM, and marketing. Everycustomer came to our solution from another solution, and they often came to us with a pre-conceived mindset about what features the softwareneeded to have. We routinely gotrequests for product features and reports that (surprise) mirrored exactly what they were using in their previous solution. Sure, it would have probably satisfied the customers to simply add the button, feature, or report they asked for. But through understanding the job they were trying to accomplish we were able to imagine solutions that they were not able to imagine themselves and deliver product features that completely revolutionized their workflow. Download Building Your First Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {}); Case Study: Eliminating Hours of Work with a Few Clicks Withtheir previous solution, our customers would print out reports that needed to be producedevery month. In some cases this process would last for days; printing hundreds of reports, collating them,attaching checks, and stuffing it all into manila envelopes to be mailed. It was a cumbersome, horrible process. Some even had family and children join them for “stuffing parties” because it was so time-consuming. But this was a part of their life and they expected our software to support this workflow with the appropriate reports, printing, and buttons, and so on. Before building our solution, we spent hours onsite at the offices ofour earlyprospects to understand their workflow, hear their pain points, see the stacks of paper on their desk, and internalizewhat they were really trying to accomplish. We watched over their shoulder, asked a lot of open-ended questions, shot hours of video, and ate (too many) donuts with them in the break room. We thoroughly understoodthe job they needed to accomplish: delivering reliable information and payments to their customers (to be clear, the job was not printing reports and mailing checks). We envisioned how their life could be different by using the latesttechnology to optimize their workflow. We knew how it could improve their business and how much money they would be saving if we could shave hours off their process by moving the information and payments electronically. Once we understoodthat, we were able to release innovative product features that our customershadn’t considered or thought possible. For our customers, what previously took hours or days could now be accomplished in a few clicks. The results were wildly successful features that contributed to ourcustomers becoming hugepromoters of the software. Not every feature needs to be re-imagined. Sometimes there is low-hanging fruit you can deliver that happens to match exactly what customers request. But there are often product features that warrant further digging to really understand the job the customer is trying to accomplish, and get the right initiatives onto your product roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {});

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.

More product teams are taking advantage of the Minimum Viable Product concept—deploying products early to customers in order to learn and iterate. MVP is a fantastic approach for releasing products and features faster with less waste, and one that is often utilized in agile product management. But I’ve consistently found that it’s essentialtocombine the MVP with features or value propositions that directly relate to the customer’s biggest pain point. When you do this, it’s possible to release successful newproducts thatare evenless thanthe “minimum.” You might call this the 80% MVP. I base this 80% concept from releasing many minimumproducts over the years, including GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. Here are a couple of my observations: The MVP is subjective, and only byreleasing can we learn what the real minimum is. Even after conducting dozens of customer validation interviews for a product,I consistently discoverthatone or twofeatures I thought were necessary to include in the MVP could have been released later. I learn that there are otherthingsthat would have added evengreatervalue. The MVP must tie back to high priority customer problems that were discovered during validation. Delivering acompellingproduct thatrelieves pain candelight customers, even if it’s lacking features. Customers are forgiving if you show them you are focusing on high-value items for them rather than striving for the “perfect” feature set. My advice to you:Skip perfection and get a minimum compellingproductinto the hands of real customers.Tweet this Look, you still need to deliveronthe basics: products with features that are valuable,easy to use, and thatdelight customers. I’m not advocating releasing crap. But in my experience, to create successful products you need to combine MVP with unique and compellingvalue. This is how youcan make your product apurple cow. Does Your Minimum Viable Product ProvideEnoughValue? Compelling productsaren’t necessarily limited to features – it can beyour pricing, packaging, or anything that solves a top customer problem. For example, with GoToMeeting, our initial product lacked many features that were availablein competitive products such as video. However, our “all you can meet” pricing was a unique differentiator that solved multiplefrustrations customers had with the current solutions. This philosophy works wellfor new products as well as future initiatives you are adding to your product roadmap. Here is my high-level process for defining a compelling MVP: First, engage customers by conducting problem discovery interviews. Define your proposed features, making sure that features tie back to problems you discovered. Validate the productin subsequent interviews. After validation, cut features further, making sure to retain one or two valuablefeaturesthat hit the biggest pain points uncovered during problem discovery interviews. Cut the MVP to less than you are comfortable with. AtLIKE.TG, we released the original product and continue releasing features based around this philosophy. We have several in-depth interviews with customers to understand the pain, the value, review prototypes, and understand the minimum feature set. We then ruthlessly prioritize and cut the MVP but make sure to include features that are highly compelling and differentiated. For example, our product includes aprioritization frameworkfor making product decisions. We interviewed dozens of product managers to understand how they were prioritizing features and their challenges with prioritization. Our first release of this feature was a mere shadow of the feature we ultimately envisioned. But there were several compelling elementsthat made it superior toanything our customers had: It was collaborative and shareable. It was integrated with the visual product roadmap. It provided transparency. It was based on industry best practices. After releasing our MVP for the prioritization feature 1.) customers used the feature and 2.) got value out of it (or rather, they gotenoughvalue out of it). Because we solved painwith ourinitial release,our customerswerepatient and engaged as wecontinued to enhancethe feature based on their input. We still have far to go torealize our full visionfor the feature, but the stage isset for success. All product managers at one point have wondered whether they’ve prioritized the right features beforereleasing a new product. Sometimes deciding that your feature or product is ready for release is tough.The bottom line is to first fully understand customer problems before deciding your MVP and compelling value. Then pull the trigger faster to get your product out the door.

Pricing SaaS products presents unique challenges—and opportunities—for product and marketing teams. In the past few years, I’ve had a hand in setting pricing for several successful SaaS products, including GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. In the next few articles, I’ll review lessons for how to price a product that I’ve learned along the way. This first article is about what I consider to be the #1 mostimportant element for pricing SaaS products: customer value. Understanding customer value is essentialfor pricing all software products, but even more so with SaaS. Read the Power of SaaS Pricing Experiments ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c948d259-0fb9-457e-aece-634799b48e6d', {}); Because mostSaaS products are priced witha recurring subscription, every month or year your customers reevaluate whether they want to continue subscribing. This makes it even more critical to ensure pricing is in line with the value your customers receive. Let me define what I mean by “value.” First, a value can be quantitative, such as time saved or additional revenue earned. Measuring this is straightforward, and is the basis of Return on Investment calculations. If your product is B2B SaaS, you are likely already factoring this into your pricing decision. But here is the tricky part: Value can also be qualitative, such as pain relief or lifestyle benefits your product provides. By thoroughly understanding and documenting this sometimes nebulous qualitative value through customer interviews, you can begin to narrow in on possible pricing models and a price range. It’s understanding this qualitative value that can help product managers set theirproduct apart from the competition. I believe that customervalue should be the primary consideration for your price and pricing model. Notfeatures. Not what competitors charge. And definitely not your costs. Pricing SaaS Products: A Case Study When we were determining pricing for GoToMeeting, I interviewed dozens of potential customers to gain a deep understanding of customer pain and the value they might receive from conducting online meetings with our concept. We discovered: Cost and time savings from reduced or eliminated travel (quantitative value) Cost savings from switching to our solution versus expensive per-minute pricing of existing solutions (quantitative value) Increasedusageof online meeting technology because users were no longer tied toper-minute charges (quantitative value) Lifestyle benefits from conducting meetings remotely (high qualitative value) Reduced frustration by eliminatingcomplicated online meeting solutions (high qualitative value) By understanding thesequantitative and qualitative values, we developed GoToMeeting’s unique $49 “All You Can Meet” flat-rate pricing (an industry-leading innovation at the time). Pricing and your customers The pricing model directly relates to the pain and frustration we heard from prospective customers in our interviews – the current solutions were difficult to budget because the per-minute charges varied so widely. The buyer experienced sticker shock every month. Therefore, peace of mind wasanother qualitative value we could provide customers with our pricing model. While it’s hard to assign a dollar amount to qualitative values, these are the benefits that ultimately made GoToMeeting a no-brainer for millions of customers. Because the product was SaaS, we had the flexibility to price our product differently from the competition and create a unique product in the market. In a sense, we made pricing a part of the product. It became a differentiating feature that marketing promoted heavily. Most product managers already know that finding the right price is more art than science. However, if you thoroughly understand the value of your SaaS product, you can delight customers, provide competitive differentiation and ultimately launch a more profitable product. In the next articles, I’ll describe other lessons for pricing SaaS products including how to develop unique pricing models and several tips for setting the right price.

Most product people are familiar with the sticky problem of feature bloat. You may also recognize the issue by its other uncomfortable names: feature fatigue, feature creep, or feature overload. It’s the thing that happens when, for instance, the machine you bought to make the world’s best, quickest espresso also tells you the weather and time, is equipped with an AM and FM radio, has ten settings for temperature, bonus options for froth consistency (thin to thick), and comes equipped with iPhone-integrated alarm tones that tell you when your espresso is done (that part admittedly sounds sort of neat). While the makers of this espresso machine may have listened to user wants, the inevitable loss of frustrated and confused current and potential users would indicate that the creators didn’t focus on user needs. Yeah, a handful of users may have asked for bells and whistles, but fundamentally what they wanted was a damn good, quick espresso. Put another way, the espresso machine makers prioritized capability over usability and ignored real customer needs. As MSI.org wrote in a study of the feature fatigue problem over a decade ago: “Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability when they evaluate products prior to use than they do when they evaluate products after use, consumers tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction, resulting in ‘feature fatigue.’” Echoes Rian Van Der Merwe in his more recent article How to Avoid Building Products That Fail: “…more isn’t necessarily better.” Touché. While loading up features in the beginning may buy you some early users, the high cost of alienated, churning customers, the expense of accruing and paying down additional technical/engineering debt, the potential confusion regarding your product and brand identity, and frustration from engineering and product teams (complete with a loss of organizational trust in your decisions) can lead to catastrophe. Of course, the espresso machine is a simplified example. In reality, your product-bloating features may initially seem essential but turn out in time to be unnecessary — at which point it may be too late. Your challenge, then, is to decide which features your product and customers actually need and which you can realistically afford and to avoid the others like the plague. So how to avoid falling into the tempting trap of feature overload? With the laser-focused ammo of a four-tiered process: be informed, mindful, selective, and cutthroat with your feature decisions. 1. Make More Informed Decisions by Validating Feature Requests Considering all customer feedback does not mean taking all customer feedback. This means you must separate the signals — the worthwhile feedback — from the noise. You can do so by asking validating questions about the quality and significance of customer feedback before acting on it. Primary indicators of “valid” feedback include volume, frequency, request source, and intent. Is a feature request high-volume or limited to a few customers? Does it come up with some frequency? If you say “no” to one or both of these questions, it may be a sign that the request is noise. Additionally, the source of the feature request matters: you should know how long the person behind a request has been a customer, their use case, account plan/level/type, their industry, and — depending on your company — how satisfied they are with your product overall (NPS). This will give you a greater measure of the request’s relevance. If the feature seems actionable, then dig a little deeper to ask what the intent of the request is: What is the underlying pain behind the request? Is there an underlying pain that justifies the feature request? It is your job to use the product management resources at your disposal — from usability tests to field studies to surveys — to uncover your customers’ true needs. Ensure that you only build things that solve actual, real problems, or you may find yourself sagging under the weight of unnecessary features. 2. Make More Mindful Decisions By Considering Complexity Costs and Technical Debt You know the old saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?” That adage applies to features, too. Development and support costs are just the beginning of a feature’s expense. But woe to the product manager who does not consider the complexity costs and technical debt a given feature adds to their product. As Kris Gale, VP of Engineering of Yammer put it to First Round Review: “Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer.” What may take two weeks of coding to develop, for instance, may take much more work and time to maintain down the road. You must decide whether or not a feature’s complexity cost is necessary or unduly burdensome. A potent mix of common sense, intel from engineering, and data testing that evaluates the feature’s usability and usage can help drive this interrogation. If you do decide to move forward, make sure to continuously check that customers are using and getting value from the feature (see: that it’s meeting your customers’ needs). Have you accidentally made their experience unnecessarily complex? If so, take stock, pivot, and be more mindful moving forward. 3. Make More Selective Decisions By Considering What Matters and Saying NO “Yes” sounds good, doesn’t it? We tend to equate “yes” with positive, happy things, and “no,” with negative, bad things. But it isn’t that simple. Oftentimes a “no” to a feature request can actually mean a yes — a yes to remaining aligned with your product vision, your overall product strategy, and other business goals. These are the things that really matter and can be forgotten when in the weeds of product and feature development. Feature doesn’t solve an actual problem? No. Doesn’t align with your company’s core purpose? No. Not enough demand for a feature (as you’ve discovered when validating it)? No way, José. If you’re doing your job, “no” should be the answer to the majority of your feature requests. That way, the features that get a “yes” are the ones you, your team, and your customers know have real value. Being more selective also has the added, crucial effect of making you a more trustworthy product manager, which means you can more effectively make decisions that combat the feature bloat that make your team and customers feel, well, sick. 4. Make More Cutthroat Decisions by Removing Bad Features Saying no to proposed features is often not enough. Sometimes you’ll need to be even more brutal by doing away with poor product features entirely. These are vampire features — learn to recognize them, and then kill them before they kill your product. If a feature’s complexity cost outweighs its benefits, if it doesn’t meet real customer needs, if only a handful of customers use it, if it’s outdated or irrelevant, etc. etc. — take a deep breath and cut it. Yes — you (and your engineers… and others) have given this feature life, nurtured it, and even made sure it’s easy on the eyes. But what has it done in return? It’s harmed your business and the integrity of your product. Make like a mob boss and whack it. In Sum Feature bloat can cost you precious resources, weigh down your team, and harm the integrity of your product. By making informed, mindful, selective, and cutthroat feature decisions, you can ensure that you’re building a focused, manageable product that meets a true customer need. About the Guest Author: Sara Aboulafia is a member of the marketing team at UserVoice. Outside of work, Sara writes and performs music, binge-watches comedy, and spends an unhealthy amount of time futzing with technology before happily retreating to the woods.

The Definition of the Key Responsibilities of Product Managers In most cases, your core role as a product manager will be two-fold: First, to set the long-term vision and strategy for your company’s products. To communicate this strategy to all of the relevant participants and stakeholders. Typically, the primary tool you will use to accomplish your key roles will be a product roadmap, a strategic, high-level visual document conveying the “why” behind the products you’re building. The product manager’s job description is often not well defined for such a vital and pivotal position within many companies. In addition, product manager responsibilities often vary from company to company, and at first glance, it seems like no two product manager jobs are identical. Case in point: The three statements below come from three very different (and accurate) product manager job descriptions and the key responsibilities of product managers. Example Job Descriptions of the Key Product Manager Responsibilities: Manage from concept to design, sample production, testing, forecast, cost, mass production, promotion, support, and finally, product end of life. Delivers the operating plan: the achievement of growth objectives, including market share, revenue, profit, and return on investment for all the channels/categories of business and key customers. Responsible for managing and implementing marketing activities through research, strategic planning, and implementation. That’s quite a variety of skills. Whether we look at three or ten job descriptions, you can see that each product management role is varied and unique. I’ve seen the role and influence each product manager has depending on many dynamics—the company’s size, the type of company, the type of product, and the stage of the product. We recently reported the key skills for the role, metrics, and challenges between large and small companies differ significantly. So, what are the key responsibilities of a product manager? What do they all have in common? Moreover, how can you use the role most effectively to usher successful products into the world? 4 Key Responsibilities of Outstanding Product Managers As a product manager, it is essential to understand that you are a central hub within your company for a lot of critical information about your products, market, competitors, customers, prospects, fundamental industry analysts, and many other constituencies. To succeed, you will need to continually gather and analyze data and business intelligence from all of these sources (as well as your internal sources like sales and customer service). Then, use this data to inform the creation of your roadmap strategy. You will interact with a broad range of departments to ensure your products’ success. You will also translate the input and data you gather to build a case for many decisions you present in your roadmap. As such, there are several vital skills you’ll need to bring to your role as a product manager. 1. Be transparent about your prioritization and roadmap process. Remember, much of your role as a product manager will be explaining “why” to various stakeholders and constituents. Why you’re prioritizing one feature or theme over another in a release; why you’ve chosen to focus more on one particular goal for the next two quarters versus another goal. The best way to get the relevant constituencies — sales, marketing, engineering, your executives — on board with your strategic thinking is to be clear and open with them about why and how you are making decisions. 2. Be able to say “no,” but explain why in terms that stakeholders understand. There will be plenty of times when an executive will ask for a new feature his gut tells him will be great… when an engineer will suggest tabling the development of a feature set to save time on the next sprint… and when a sales rep will ask (even beg) you to add a specific tool to the next release because a prospect has promised to buy if it’s included. But if those requests will undermine your strategic objectives for the product, you will often have to say no. The key will be in your ability to articulate why (that all-important word in a successful product manager’s vocabulary) you cannot accommodate the request. Again, the more strategic and backed by evidence you can make your roadmap, your constituents’ more likely to understand when you need to say no. 3. Be a ruthless prioritizer while balancing the needs of customers and stakeholders. Regardless of your company’s size or budget, you will always face limited resources for your product development. That means you will always need to prioritize and continually weigh the competing factors of your products, your company’s limited resources, and demands from various stakeholders. If you’re unsure how to set priorities or weigh various factors in developing your roadmap, several great models canhelp you get started — such as weighted scoring and the Kano model. 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Download the Prioritization Guide for Product ManagersFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Phone Number*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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Bring evidence-based decision-making to your communication. As I’ve stated previously, one key trait of successful product managers is their ability to answer “why” to the many questions they must field from stakeholders throughout their organizations. One of the most effective ways to answer why is with evidence. It’s much more compelling than your opinion — or anyone else’s. If you have real-world user data, customer feedback, and metrics on your product, then you already have an excellent source of business intelligence to inform how best to build your product roadmap. So let your analytics help guide your decisions. If you don’t have real-world user data on your products yet, don’t worry. There are plenty of other ways to gather useful intelligence about your product, customers, and market. Ask your customers directly. Study your competitors’ products. Read online communities or comments on your company’s blog where your prospects or customers discuss your products or your competitors’ products—study research reports from the analysts who cover your industry. When an executive or sales rep asks why you’ve selected one direction over another for the next iteration of your product, your ability to present a compelling explanation backed by real data will go a long way toward earning their buy-in. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '95beb659-8ca3-4c13-b7a2-32365cbd3900', {}); Because you play a central role in your organization — always gathering valuable intelligence from various stakeholders, customers, and your market — you are in a unique position to define the success of your product. Your role as the product’s strategist and evangelist will be central to your success and the success of your products. Ready to put these skills into practice? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e29c8e8c-234d-44fc-985b-67a542504810', {});

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 modelintothe 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. BallparkLTV as early as possible. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is socritical to a SaaS business model that you need to estimate it as early as possible – wellbefore 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 similarproducts. 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 expectto 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 fromLIKE.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 freetoday.

No doubt you’ve heard of the coming Internet of Things (IoT) and how it’s going to change our lives through billions of Internet-connected devices and sensors. But is IoT mostly hype? And if it’s not, how can product teams prepare? Preparing for the Internet of Things Last monthI moderated a panel discussion for the MIT Enterprise Forumto discuss IoT opportunities and challenges. Our panelincluded device, data, and security experts as well as representatives from companies launching IoT products. To be honest, before I began preparing for the event I wasn’t convincedabout the impact of IoT. I thought that products like Nest, Dropcam, and pill bottles that remind us to take our medicine are cool, but wondered if a world of Internet-connected washing machines was really all that special. But after talking with the experts and moderating the event, I have come to realize that over the next few years there is a huge opportunity for companies providing hardware, software, data, and services for customers in almost every industry. My takeaway is this: product managers and product teams need to be prepared to capitalize on IoT – it will eventually deserve a place on your product roadmap. Product teams will want to consider these areas for the future: Prepare forthe data. Each device will create immense amounts of data. There will be challenges with processing the data and connecting different data sources together. Business intelligence and data discovery systems will become more important to organizations. There will also be opportunities to make innovative connections between data and devices that weren’t previously possible. Interaction design will be more important than ever. Every device will need an interface. While there are efforts to create standards, today each device interface is often a separate ecosystem. This will create opportunities for UX and interaction teams to provide innovative interfaces that include visual, audio and tactile feedback. Security and privacy will be challenging. Any new technology introduces security and privacy concerns, and IoT presents special challenges. Devices can give access to our homes. Databases contain confidential information about our health. Companies will need to give cybersecurity and privacy high priority as they introduce new products and services. Low-priced sensors will spur innovation. There already is a growing array of sensors and the price is dropping rapidly. Sensors that can measure light, humidity, sound, location, movement, temperature and other items will give product teams incredible opportunities to innovate. Whether you are in the consumer, automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, or another industry, IoT will affect your products and services. Teams willneed to have a strategy to innovate and rework legacy products to fit into this new world. Image credit: Nest Labs

Henry Schein, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to dental, animal health and medical practitioners.Teams at Henry Schein rely onLIKE.TG for strategic planning and roadmap communication. We chatted with product manager Dan Larsen about how he’s using LIKE.TG: What are you using LIKE.TG for? “We share alive version of the roadmap with teams in remote offices. We also use the Planning Board to conduct benefit versus cost weighting.” How has LIKE.TG helped you? “We’ve saved a huge chunk of time. LIKE.TG has helped us improve the business by giving us back our time to think strategically about the business, and not tactically about how to share information.” What is your favorite feature? “What I immediately liked about LIKE.TG is that it was super simple to start using.One of the first times I had one of those ‘Oh wow, this is cool’ moments was when I started using the Planning Board for scoring.” Read the full Henry Schein customer story. Read more about teams doing great things with LIKE.TG.

Like you, we have now seen a dozen articles predicting the top trends for product managers in 2016. Yes, we know that better communication is on the rise. But what is really happening in the product management world? At LIKE.TG we have the opportunity to engage with hundreds of PMs every month. We’ve identified some long-term trends that will take place not just in 2016, but in the coming years. If you are looking for a new product management job, here are five trends that should be on your radar. 1. It’s time to boost your skills: More training choices than ever We’ve noticed a proliferation of training and other opportunities to learn the skills that product managers need. This includes training classes, both through traditional organizations such as Pragmatic Marketing and newer entrants such as General Assembly. Even academia is getting involved, with several universities offering continuing education and specialized programs for product management and software product management. We expect that this trend will continue with grassroots events such as ProductCamp, meetup groups, and other informal learning opportunities that appear for product managers. 2. Lean startup methods will continue to be in demand Companies — even large enterprises — are continuing to embrace lean startup and customer development processes. As a product manager, it’s important to continue to read up and practice these skills in your role. These skills include rapid prototyping, engaging early with customers, iterating rapidly, and killing bad ideas. 3.Product Managers will have access to more data than ever With so many data and analytics tools coming on the market in the last few years, product managers have more metrics-driven data for making decisions. But with the good comes the bad — there is a firehose of data. As a product manager, you’re at the intersection of so many data streams from support, finance, sales, IT, and other departments. Product managers are needing to deal with more complexity than ever. Luckily these tools continue to become more mainstream and refined. And the best practices around metrics-driven product management are becoming more well known and written about. Many of these tools such as Pendo.io, Kissmetrics, Intercom are specifically geared towards product and customer engagement. 4. Proliferation of product management tools In 2016, vendors will continue to fill software gaps and product managers will have a stronger set of purpose-built tools at their disposal. With specialized tools for roadmapping, customer engagement, analytics, project management, and more, product teams will be able to work more efficiently than ever. For example, our 2015 product roadmap survey revealed that most product managers are still using and are frustrated by presentation software (PowerPoint) and spreadsheets (Excel) to manage their roadmaps. PMs are hungry for new solutions that let them engage with stakeholders in a more productive way. 5. Living roadmaps will become more predominant A roadmap should be agile and thought of as a living document rather than a plan set in stone. Unlike the product roadmaps of a few years ago, today’s roadmaps, at least in the longer term, are now fluid. This is partly the result of agile development techniques, but also because of a growing awareness that decisions made in the executive conference room may not be the right answer once customers are engaged in the validation of new ideas. Like the backlog, the product roadmap should be regularly discussed, prioritized, estimated, updated, and shared. And product roadmap software or other web-based tools enable the roadmap to adapt quickly as decisions are made. [Free book] Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {});

Orion Health develops software solutions for healthcare organizations worldwide, helping to improve the care of 35 million patients. Founded in New Zealand in 1993, Orion Health now has 27 offices in nearly every region of the world. Orion Health uses LIKE.TG to create roadmaps that easily communicate vision and strategy to stakeholders across the company’s many teams and regions. We chatted with Mark Robertson, Strategic Project Manager, to learn more. Here are some highlights from the conversation. What do you like most about LIKE.TG? Mark: “Most tools claiming to do roadmaps were cumbersome, hard to set up, and complicated to manage. I knew we’d end up not using them. But LIKE.TG was a clean, visual roadmap tool — and it was so intuitive that you could start using it in minutes.” What are you using LIKE.TG for? Mark: “The product roadmaps we’ve created with LIKE.TG make it so much easier to quickly communicate information across teams. LIKE.TG gives any of us in the company — no matter what team or part of the world — a common place to start a conversation about a project.” How has LIKE.TG saved you time? Mark: “We were using highly detailed tools like JIRA, Excel® and an internal wiki to track everything. Sure, if a salesperson in the US or an executive in New Zealand knew exactly where to look, they could figure out what was going on. But otherwise, we really had no way of quickly communicating the high-level view of our ongoing projects” How has LIKE.TG helped your organization? Mark: “Here’s an example of what we were up against our old approach. Our security team wanted to propose a new process, and we needed management buy-in. So they built a 12-column Excel spreadsheet to present the idea. When the steering committee saw it, their eyes glazed over, and they assumed we had no plan — because we weren’t visually depicting it for them. This time, [with LIKE.TG], the stakeholders got it right away. We haven’t gone back to our old Excel model since!” Read the Full Orion Health Customer Story:Visual Product Roadmaps Improve Communication

It’s a brave new world for pricing software-as-a-service products. Gone are the days of simply setting a per-seat fee and launching. How can you choose the best SaaS pricing model for your product? In this SaaS pricing series, I review lessons I’ve learned from helping set pricing for several successful SaaS products. In my first article, I reviewed why pricing based on customer value is so important. This second articlereviews why SaaS gives product and marketing managers unprecedented flexibility to chooseunique pricing models. Models that can differentiate your product in the marketplace. Models that ideallyalign with your customers’ goals. SaaS Pricing Flexibility One of the exciting advantages of SaaS is that youcan think differently about pricing models. Unlike traditional software, customers licensing SaaS products pay for your product on a recurring basis. Your product is no longer tied to a one-time purchase. And because the product is centrally hosted, you have additional flexibility for offering your product in unique packages. Read the Power of SaaS Pricing Experiments ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c948d259-0fb9-457e-aece-634799b48e6d', {}); SaaS Pricing Models: a Short List SaaS gives you the ability to consider revenue models that weren’t previously possible. Here’s a short (and by no means exhaustive) list of SaaS pricing models used today. Many products use a combination of these models: Per-user(many SaaS products) Per-user with free participants (GoToMeeting, LIKE.TG) Storage (Dropbox) Features(plans based on feature tiers) Project (Basecamp) Freemium (LinkedIn) Per item/contact (AppFolio, Hubspot) Per Node/Server (Hadoop) Per Visitor/Traffic(AdRoll) Processor time/Data transferred (Amazon Web Services) Open Source (free with paid services) Advertising (Facebook) Broker fee (AirBnB) Feel free to add to this list in the comments. My point is that with so many options, you now have the ability to discover a pricing model that aligns with your customers’ goals. To learn how to make subscription pricing work for you, watch our webinar: Success-Based SaaS Pricing Model Example For AppFolio’s property-management software, we developed a unique pricing model based on the number of rental units managed by a property manager. Because we charged a flat $1 per rental unit per month, the pricing was simple and easy to understand. This SaaS pricing model resonated with customers because it aligned with their business goals. They paid more for our product only if they grew their business by adding rental units to their portfolio. If they were more successful, we were more successful. Don’t be Tempted by Competitive Pricing When pricing a new product, there is a temptation to set your pricing relative to the competition. It’s common for new products to price using the same model as competitors, but slightly lower. Sure, you can price your product the same way as your competitors, and perhaps that’s what your customers expect. But with SaaS, there are so many ways to price the product that you have the ability to stand out in the market by thinking differently. Capitalize on the approaches that your competitors haven’t considered. In my previous article, I described how we launched GoToMeeting with innovative pricing that disrupted the competitors. Keep it Simple Don’t overly-complicate pricing. With so much flexibility in SaaS pricing model options, there is a temptation to offer various flavors and packages. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for doing so. For example, it’scommon to have three packages based on features. Studies show that this approach anchors customers, and can be an effective technique for driving customers to your best-performing package. That’s fine if this is your goal. However, creating an overly complicated pricing scheme has the potential to confuse customers and create a nightmare for your finance team. Keeping it simple reduces headaches and may even provide more revenue over the long term. For example, atLIKE.TG (product roadmap software), we saw that products in our space had complicated licensing options. Many required a paid license for every software user. Several offered complicated pricing tiers based on packages. We took a different approach to simplify pricing. We charged only for editors of roadmap data and offered free licenses to other collaborators. Rather than offering complicated pricing tiers based on features, we offered unlimited use of all features for one price. Because the product managers want to widely distribute the product roadmap to stakeholders, this SaaS pricing model benefits the customer. It’s aligned with their goals. In addition, this model gives our product more exposure within the organization, so ultimately we sell more licenses when other departments ask to use the software. In the next article, I’ll review several tips for successful pricing, including estimating lifetime value.

New product managers will find themselves asking this question a lot: “How do we build a prioritized product roadmap so that we have the best chance of making something people want?” Purposeful Prioritization of Features In order to achieve our goals, we need to be clear about what the purpose of prioritizing product features is. There are two approaches to prioritizing product features: You prioritize the features and initiatives that you, your team, or your stakeholders think would be a good idea—and hope that it works out. You start by figuring out which features have the highest engagement and which ones don’t get used. Then you identify which steps in your workflow cause the biggest drop-offs—where users are getting stuck. And finally, seek to understand your users’ needs, their sources of hesitation, and the conversations going on in their minds. This should be a no-brainer. You have a much better chance of making things people want if you understand what the market needs are, and if you focus on fixing the areas where your product has the biggest leaks. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {}); Prioritization struggles of teams But many product teams still operate using the first approach—they make decisions based on their own opinions, rather than data-informed, educated hypotheses. LIKE.TG’s co-founder Jim Semick talks to a lot of product leaders in his line of work. And in one of his recent webinars, he mentions that even large, well-known companies struggle with: Decisions not being tied to strategic goals Stakeholders questioning prioritization Priorities being driven by the loudest executives or the latest sales prospects Clearly these organizations are doing something well, otherwise, they wouldn’t be well-known. But the wasted opportunity is huge. Companies that build products based on internal opinions will eventually get beaten by the competition. So how do you make sure you’re newly prioritized product roadmap includes features and initiatives that will really move the needle? What you need is a process for generating ideas, prioritizing which ones to focus on, and getting buy-in from key stakeholders. In the following sections, I’m going to break down a step-by-step framework—originally pioneered by conversion optimization expert Peep Laja—to help you do just that. Step 1: Gather Actionable Data Like we talked about earlier, rather than creating a prioritized product roadmap based solely on our opinion, we’re going to use a data-informed approach. So how do we go about gathering data? There are 5 steps (followed by creating a master list of all the issues you found that we will then turn into potential product features, fixes, and action items): Product analytics — Identify specific steps in your product workflow where users are getting stuck and leaving instead of taking the action you want them to take. Mouse tracking analysis — This lets you record what people do with their mouse, and this can give you insights into where users are paying attention to your product. On-page surveys — If you want to find out what’s stopping people from performing a specific action, put Qualaroo on your page and ask them. Support transcripts — Dig into your customer support transcripts to find out why people are reaching out and asking for help. They usually reach out with frustrations and confusion, and that can give you insight into things you can fix. User testing — Observe current users and potential users as they interact with your product while they speak their thought process out loud. User session is also great because they anonymously record videos of your users as they use your product, allowing you to see everything they do. As you analyze the results of your research, make a list of all the places where users get stuck or frustrated, where people aren’t doing what you want them to do, and where you see things that need to be improved. If you want a more detailed explanation of how to execute each of these research methods, go check out this article. Step 2: Identify the Highest Value Initiatives Okay, so you’ve generated all of this quantitative and qualitative data… what now? Well, at this point you’ll have identified a big list of product issues and feature ideas. The next step is to figure out which initiatives are worth working on, and weeding out the ones that aren’t. First, start by thinking through each of these potential opportunities and plotting them on the matrix below. The y-axis represents the value that each initiative delivers to either the company (e.g. gets you more sign-ups) or the customer (e.g. saves them time). And the x-axis represents how much effort, time, money, and other resources each initiative will take to implement (e.g. development hours). For example, let’s say ‘Item B’ is a redesign of one of your current features. It’s not going to take much effort, and it’s going to deliver high business value. Once you’ve plotted all the initiatives you identified in your initial research, the next step is to prioritize the highest value items and figure out which ones to say “no” to. To help you make this decision, start by overlaying this grid on your matrix: As you can see, the initiatives in the upper-left side of this graph provide high business value and require low effort—this is the low-hanging fruit that you want to start with. The items that fall into the upper-right quadrant will also deliver a lot of value, but they’re more complex and require more effort to implement. These are important but should get done after the items from the first quadrant. Some of the ideas in the lower-left section may be able to deliver some quick wins, but since they provide low business value you need to seriously question whether they’re worth prioritizing. And finally, you definitely shouldn’t consider any of the ideas that are high-effort low-value. Step 3: Score Your Initiatives Now that you’ve weeded out all the potential opportunities that don’t provide strategic value, the next step is to score your remaining initiatives. Think through the benefits that your organization will receive and costs it will require to implement, and then rank each factor on a scale of 1 – 5 (1 being low benefit/cost and 5 being high benefit/cost). You can either use tools like LIKE.TG for your scoring model, or you can create your own process using a spreadsheet. And of course, this scoring model isn’t the only factor that goes into deciding which features to prioritize—you also need to take your competition, market, and customers into consideration. But this analysis can be critical for getting stakeholder buy-in. Step 4: Get Stakeholder Buy-In on Your Newly Prioritized Product Roadmap Creating alignment with your product strategy and getting buy-in from executives and managers can be tricky. But you can make it less of a challenge by proactively addressing a few of their key concerns. Our first recommendation is that you walk your stakeholders through the process you used to create your prioritized product roadmap. Demonstrating that you used a structured thought process to evaluate opportunities—rather than just going by your gut or your opinion—is an effective way to get stakeholders on board. Second, bring customer evidence to the table. This is where the data you gathered in step 1 comes into play. You’ve gathered real evidence about your product from both existing and potential customers, and this sort of data is more compelling to executives and managers than your opinion. So back up your decision with hard data. Use the metrics you gathered from your analytics tool to show them what users are doing. And then use video clips of users interacting with your product, and direct quotes from your customers to explain why. And finally, always tie your priorities back to the organization’s strategic business goals. Doing this right off the bat will help answer the question in everyone’s mind of “Why are you doing this instead of something else?” Rather than just talking about what a new feature will do, tell them how it’s going to impact the bottom line and move the needle on the KPIs that your stakeholders care about most. For example, the data shows that we’re killing it when it comes to user acquisition, but we struggle to get those users to come back over the long-term. So we’re implementing this initiative in order to improve our retention rate. Takeaways Whether you’re using a scoring model or some other kind of model to evaluate and prioritize opportunities, the technique you’re using is ultimately less important than the conversation that you’re having with your stakeholders. Regardless of the tools and techniques you use, it’s important that you’re transparent with your stakeholders, and that you give them some insight into the process you used to create your prioritized product roadmap. By addressing their concerns and objections proactively, you make it much less likely that you’ll get pushback. And the best way to do that is to show them that you used a systematic process, you based your decisions on hard data (not your opinion), and that your priorities are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. What do you think? What process do you use to make sure you’re prioritizing the right initiatives and building things people want? Share your thoughts on building a prioritized product roadmap in the comments below! About the Guest Author: Spencer Lanoue is a marketer at UserTesting, where he helps UX designers, PMs, and marketers create great experiences. Follow him at @slanoue.

Most product managers know the product roadmap can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare. When used in the right way, the roadmap can help explain how you’ll achieve your vision. And when used in the wrong way, the roadmap can sink you with endless PowerPoint updates, meaningless features, and commitments that can never be delivered. At a recent meetup, I sat with a diverse group of product managers, to get to the heart of the roadmap issue. The folks in the room came from corporate and startup and had a range of experience. Most were working locally in Sydney, Australia, but we were also joined by an expat who was on sabbatical from Silicon Valley. In two hours, five key insights emerged around the problems that can make roadmaps ineffective and troublesome. 1. Your Organization Has Too Many Priorities One participant shared with us that his startup had seven KPIs they were tracking, essentially seven priorities… as you can imagine, this was making his job as product manager incredibly difficult. How can you prioritize development when you’re trying to move the dial on seven things at once? In situations like these, it can be easy to fall into the trap of building a little bit of everything, to somewhat satisfy each of the KPIs. But it’s also easy to fall short on every single one of those priorities and create a Frankenstein product in the process. The hard road is to push back and work with the team to identify a single clear priority, whether that be revenue, user acquisition, learning goals, or something else. This is a potentially confrontational discussion to have, but one that will pay off in terms of being able to get traction on that single goal. 2. Your Roadmap Isn’t Visually Attractive This one may cause some debate. One of our participants recounted that his CPO claimed he’d never known an ugly roadmap to be successful. Roadmaps are communication tools, so if good design results in the roadmap being easy to understand, that’s obviously an essential requirement. But of course aesthetics can go much further than that, and represent real beauty, design and style. There’s a strong argument that aesthetics lend credibility. They give your document the sense of being crafted with care and attention. They suggest to the audience that you’re a professional who can be trusted to deliver on the vision. When the audience has that level of faith in you and the roadmap, it helps drive their future behavior to support those outcomes. The keyword, of course, is audience. It’s common to create different versions of a roadmap for different audiences – a practice often focused on the content of the roadmap, but sometimes design too. Some personalities will value aesthetics, while others won’t. A product manager can deduce the preferences of the audience and consider the context to hit the right note on visual appeal. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 3. Your Roadmap Was Created in a Vacuum Stakeholder management is the bread and butter of product management. And I have a theory that the skill of being a universal translator is what lands many people in the product management field. (That means I think you’re pretty good at it already). But sometimes, the need to own the roadmap drives product managers to produce it alone, or without the input of some parts of the wider organization. This mistake is avoided with a balance of ego and humility. Product managers have to be humble enough to recognize the best ideas, even when they aren’t their own. They also have to be strong enough to push back on ideas that have no links to strategic objectives or the target customers. By walking this balance, product managers can own the roadmap, while keeping stakeholders involved in the process. Ultimately this provides the foundation for the organization to deliver on the roadmap together. Alignment like that is a powerful force. 4. Your Roadmap Lacks Links to The Product Vision A roadmap should describe how the product is going to move the product toward the vision. I hear this mantra a lot and our meetup group spent some time discussing this concept. It’s not that product managers disagree with this one, it’s just sometimes hard to bring to life in the roadmap document. Some say we never see good examples from real companies, while others aren’t sure links to strategic goals can be concisely communicated. Think of it this way. Your roadmap is not a list of features and functionality and it’s not a project plan. It’s the document that shows how your organization will get from where you are today to the product objective. Tell your product story in a compelling way. This story will include people (your users), the journey the product is going on (the roadmap), and why it’s important (the link to the vision). hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); 5. Your Roadmap Changes Every Other Week One of our meetup participants shared that his roadmap was changing on a fairly regular basis. This creates a lot of busy-work to keep the roadmap up-to-date, but more importantly, when the roadmap changes constantly it’s unlikely you’re getting any closer to those strategic goals. Roadmaps can change, in fact they should change, in response to learning, shifts in the market, and sometimes competitor activities. But too many changes suggest indecision. They suggest the organization isn’t sure how to achieve its strategic goals. If that’s the case, then it’s time to take action around that indecision. Dig into what’s driving it and set learning goals designed to reduce risks and doubts. Ruined Roadmaps Saved… There is no magic wand. Like our products, we need to iterate ourselves, constantly observing our successes and failures to improve the roadmaps we present. Many of the senior product professionals I meet say their on the job experience provides the most powerful learning opportunity, but talking with peers about the challenges they face also figures strongly in the way they build their capabilities. Meetups – or getting the perspective of another product manager – can provide an alternate view on the roadmap, which just might help reveal you’ve fallen into one of these traps. We’ve all done at least one of these at some point in our careers (Yep, I admit to it!) And we’d probably like to avoid making the same mistake again. About the Guest Author: Jen Marshall is CEO at Brainmates, the Australian Product Management Training and Consulting company that organizes the Leading the Product conference in Sydney and Melbourne. In her spare time, Jen practices Vinyasa Yoga, dabbles in philosophy and listens to crime and mystery audiobooks.

Much has been written over the last few years on the idea of the featureless roadmap, which challenges product teams to present their plans grounded more in strategic vision – or by themes – rather than a laundry list of specific features. LIKE.TG alone has several articles on the subject that demonstrate the many virtues of this outcome-focused approach. It’s becoming more and more widely adopted by Product Management organizations across the globe. One of the critical considerations in developing your theme framework is to ask what drives the need for this theme? There is a genuine risk that a well-meaning product manager might simply group and categorize the existing feature list as a means for determining the theme. However, the real goal of the themed roadmap is to let the desired outcomes define the features. So how do you zero in on the most meaningful outcomes from which to center your roadmap themes around? How to Decide on Roadmap Themes that Produce Meaningful Outcomes I’ve seen several different approaches, including themes that align with high-level business goals (acquisition, growth, customer satisfaction, etc.) or more granular focus areas like the example in Jim Semick’s article of increasing satisfaction within a user persona group. There are pros and cons to each of these approaches. For example, the business goals approach is static over time, so the themes themselves stay consistent and maintain a pulse on the longer view. But the themes in and of themselves are a bit uninspiring and don’t do much to communicate customer value. In the more granular approach, the focus is more laser-sharp and centered on a specific customer outcome. However, this approach runs the risk of myopia and losing sight of new emergent opportunities that might outweigh the theme’s value. A compelling theme should be centered on the exchange of value between the business and the customer, and the above examples are hyper-focused on one or the other. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {}); One way to achieve this balance is to organize your roadmap themes by each phase of the customer journey. This customer journey approach provides a widely universal framework for both business and customer outcomes and promotes a constant, bird-eye perspective on the end-to-end customer experience. The Customer Journey Framework The customer journey chronicles every customer interaction and touchpoint with your business—from becoming aware that you exist to making a purchase decision, using, and then eventually renewing with your product or service. The journey is depicted in different phases, which are relatively universal (but might be customized by a business that has done the work to map their customers’ journey). Those phases include Become Aware, Evaluate and Buy, Set Up, Happily Use, Get Support, Add Services, and Renew. The Benefits of Defining Product Themes by Customer Journey Phases Breaking down the customer’s end-to-end journey is a highly effective framework that enables an outside-in perspective and customer empathy as a means to drive value that is reciprocal to both customer and the business: Journey maps, then, are highly applicable to the goal of defining product roadmap themes since successful customer outcomes are at the heart of each phase. Besides the apparent value exchange, the customer journey is a universal perspective that transcends organizational silos. Each phase of the journey has pretty clear stakeholders, for example, generating awareness is usually assigned to the marketing team, and the customer success department usually owns the support experience. Focusing your themes on phases of the customer journey enables stronger partnerships between the product team and other functional groups because their goals become less disparate from the product strategy. It changes the conversation from other departments vying for a slot on the product roadmap to one that is much more strategic. Both groups can become collaboratively responsible for goal setting within the shared theme. Another benefit of the journey-based roadmap themes is that it inherently promotes customer empathy. Everyone in the company who looks at your product roadmap can evaluate it, not from just a customer perspective, but a timeline-based customer perspective. The customer journey enables individuals and teams to consider the context of their work within the customer’s end-to-end experience. Leading with this genuine care, curiosity, and perspective of the customer can have profound cultural effects on a business. Customer-centered cultures foster a bottom-up drive for innovation based on the desire to solve customer problems creatively. Problems are fluid, and markets are changing rapidly, so the work of a product manager to effectively prioritize work is a constant challenge effectively. Choosing the right theme altitude is critical to keeping eyes and ears open for emerging opportunities outside of the current focus areas. I like using customer journey phases as themes because, while customer needs may fluctuate, their journey stages are static. Maintaining consistency and continuity in themes provides a clearly defined lens from which to scan the customers, trends, and competition. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Customer Journey Roadmap Themes in Practice Let’s look at some tangible examples of how each theme may be planned and presented from the perspective of a fictitious e-commerce platform company. Phase 1: Become aware Prospects know our product exists, and it has a positive reputation. Generating awareness includes all of the things your marketing department is doing to reach new prospective customers. In this example, the product and marketing teams establish a mission to grow the reputation of the business by addressing issues raised by contributors to software review sites and focusing on a specific feature and usability gaps common among the less-favorable reviews. CUSTOMER KPI: Reach BUSINESS KPI: Reach as a % of Total Addressable Market (TAM) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Marketing Phase 2: Evaluate buy Make it easy for prospects to choose and purchase our product. Reducing friction between a prospect and their willingness to buy is a key concern for sales and product management teams. Having a theme dedicated to this experience drives constant focus in this crucial area, like in this example, where the goal is to reduce sales objections by adding the top payment options prospects are demanding. CUSTOMER KPI: Time to deal close BUSINESS KPI: Maps to sales booking goals STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Sales Phase 3: Set-up New customers can take immediate advantage of our product. Product onboarding encompasses all the activities a customer or user engages in to configure, learn, and start using a product. In this example, the teams at our e-commerce platform are working on ways to do just that by introducing two new, self-guided onboarding flows within the product. CUSTOMER KPI: Time to the first use of the critical feature BUSINESS KPI: Time to goal monthly recurring revenue (MRR) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success and/or Onboarding Teams Phase 4: Happily use Customers get so much value from using the product, and they love it! Naturally, the phase focused on product use is how much of mainstream product management is currently categorizing their work. Given the above examples, one can begin to ascertain the benefits of instead capturing work in terms of the different outcomes defined by the customer journey. Keeping the outcome of this theme narrowly focused on adding value makes it an excellent space for prioritizing feature requests of current customers, usability improvements, addressing technical debt, and, as in this example, improving product engagement of a specific feature set. CUSTOMER KPI: Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), System Usability Score (SUS) BUSINESS KPI: Critical engagement metrics STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Product Development (Product, UX, Engineering) Phase 5: Get support Customers rarely need help, but when problems arise, they are quickly solved. The support phase is focused on making support resources easily accessible, improving resolution speed, building out various support channels, and reducing the need for support in the first place. The product team can have a significant impact on this outcome by doing this, like implementing an in-product support experience or, as in the example below, dedicating focus to address the top product case drivers. CUSTOMER KPI: Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), Time to case resolution BUSINESS KPI: Tracking against operational cost efficiencies STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Support Phase 6: Add services Customers are compelled to upgrade and subscribe to value-add services. The heart of the add services phase is in upgrades, upselling, and the purchase of additional products and services, all tied to a business’s growth initiatives. This theme can capture things like improving the discoverability of value-add services, adding features to be repackaged as a new subscription tier, or, as in this example, building out new features or services that customers would be willing to pay extra for. CUSTOMER KPI: Reach/Conversion BUSINESS KPI: Average Revenue per Unit (ARPU) STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success and/or Sales Phase 7: Renew Customers remain loyal advocates of our product and business. The renew phase looks at every opportunity to keep customers happy coming back to your product or service. Almost all SaaS businesses are looking at churn, and addressing those reasons is perhaps the most apparent epic under this theme. But, similar to some of the other themes, there may be opportunities to reduce effort by integrating account management experiences within the product, such as this example that would introduce a renewal flow and add the ability for SaaS customers to pay their invoice online (instead of sending a check). CUSTOMER KPI: Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores BUSINESS KPI: Churn STAKEHOLDER PARTNER: Customer Success Considerations for Journey-Focused Roadmap Themes A highlighted benefit of having high-level themes that align with phases of the customer journey is that the themes are universally applicable across every department of the business. Sharing goals across business functions create a substantial competitive advantage for consistently delivering high-value, end-to-end experiences. There are, however, some aspects of this approach to be mindful of, which include: Avoid creating silos by phase. People and tactics may be focused on a specific phase. However, Product and Design need to maintain their awareness of their work’s context within the end-to-end journey. Phases require prioritization. While I advocate for having the same consistent themes, I don’t believe that work needs always to be happening equally within each. Certain phases will have a greater need than others. It’s up to the product team to appropriately allocate focus where the greatest needs are. Phases often have embedded journeys of their own. This is especially true for the Add Services phase, where there is a complete cycle of awareness to renew to consider. Keeping customer outcomes at the heart of your roadmap, effectively mapping them to business outcomes, and sharing those outcomes across your organization is an excellent recipe for driving innovation and building reciprocal value between your customers and your business. The phases of the customer journey already have this value exchange baked-in. They can be a highly effective lens through which to view and prioritize the opportunities on your product roadmap. Read the Strategic Roadmap Planning Guide hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e23dbd3d-c389-4aba-b537-43c357b5672a', {});

When you’re new to a product management role, you enter the situation with minimal credibility, name recognition, or trust beyond your hiring manager. When your entire job is to define a direction for the product and convince everyone else it’s the right one, that clean slate isn’t helpful. For this role, it’s essential to grow your sphere of influence. You need to win people over and give your ideas and suggestions a fair shake. Do this by convincing colleagues that your strategic decisions are based on sound data, adequate deliberations, and keen insight. This is why you need to establish allies and supporters early on and before you try to shake things up. 6 Steps to Building Your Sphere of Influence in Your First 90 Days A constant theme for new product managers is managing their sphere of influence. If you are new to the role or new to an organization, your starting months are critical. During a recent webinar hosted by The Product Stack entitled “Your First 90 Days as a New Product Manager,” Roxanne Mustafa, Design Lead at VMware, and Pivotal Tracker provides advice to new product managers. 1. Play the “newcomer card.” You only get to be new once. Don’t miss your chance to let your newness pay dividends. For a few months, you get to ask whatever questions you want. Explore assumptions and delve into the product and organization’s history with honest curiosity. Ask fundamental questions that you won’t be able to later. Probe in a non-confrontational way. Challenge ideas before the legacy of previous PMs clouds you. Learn the history, but don’t resign yourself to relive it. This will help you understand how and why things ended up where they are. Remember, you’re on a fact-finding mission. Your mission is to understand the tribal knowledge and what things were already tried and failed. To understand how failure was defined in the first place. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '8bd83652-2868-48a8-9b9c-ebb8e0b9c945', {}); 2. Utilize one-on-ones. Mustafa says the most important thing you must do is figure out who you must talk to and what conversations you should be having. The best way to do this is to start scheduling intimate meetings withstakeholders across the organization. Starting with the product owners. Stay in listening mode as much as possible, using the various insights you gather to slowly build up your opinions. Be sure to see whose names keep getting dropped. This way you get a sense of where the power centers are and who are the key influencers, then add meetings with those individuals to your calendar. Make sure you get on any relevant email lists, Slack channels, or standing meeting invites. Ask how each stakeholder and team defines “value” and “success.” This may not be consistent across the organization. Knowing which benchmarks and preferences each team has are useful. Particularly in understanding product managers’ views. Keep your one-on-ones on the shorter side to be respectful of their time. Thirty minutes should be plenty for those initial getting-to-know-you sessions. Follow up after the initial round when needed. 3. Demos, demos, and more demos. Any product manager should be familiar with their product and value propositions to give aproduct demo at the drop of a hat. As someone new to the product, demos can play an instrumental role in understanding the product. Seeing what different stakeholders think about it, and emphasize is important. So is showing existing colleagues that you’ve digested what the product has to offer and how to position it. To do this, schedule sessions with multiple people or teams individually. You’ll want to see sales, engineering, and the existing product team demo the product in isolation. This way their commentary and presentation aren’t influenced by whoever else is in the room (or on the Zoom). Each demo will vary in what they show off (versus gloss over) and what language they use. Seeing how sales sell the product versus what engineering believes is essential can be eye-opening. This gives insight into what each group prioritizes. You can document the gaps. Once you’ve witnessed everyone else’s take, it’s your turn. Your demo will not only illustrate that you’re now quite familiar with how the product works and the key talking points. It can also synthesize the different messages you picked up from your colleagues to give a more holistic view of things. 4. Ride shotgun with sales and support. Salespeople and support staff are the folks having the most interactions with actual customers and users. Sitting in on their calls can be very illuminating. Not only will you get a heavy dose of the voice of the customer and reinforce your commitment to customer-centricity, but you’ll also get a sense of your new coworkers. Don’t try to jump in and take over, although you can occasionally interject with a question or clarification. The real opportunity for interaction is when the call is over, and you can debrief with your colleague. These interactions can help build a report with them and show them you’re an inquisitive, thoughtful product manager. Not just some new person with a pile of opinions and assumptions. You’ll also be able to spot low-hanging fruit for some quick wins when the time comes to start prioritizing items. Be sure to ask whether anything that stood out on the call was an outlier or something they encounter. This will help you categorize what you hear as anecdotal or pervasive. 5. Search the archives. Can’t get enough forthcoming team members to talk? Support tickets and the support team can be another great resource. Reviewing these gives you insight into the current state of your customers. From there, you can review the product backlog. Note which stories were accepted in the past, the key milestones used, and how releases were packaged. You can peel back the onion even further by reviewing the conversation logs. This helps your understanding of how decisions were reached. In addition to what variables got a lot of attention, and who were the key players. Retrospectives will give you a sense of morale and feelings. If there were minutes or action items from previous retrospectives, these could be mined for details. If you’re able to attend (or even facilitate) a retrospective of a recent release, you can witness it all in real-time without any prejudices or skin in the game. Just be sure to stay in “listening mode.” hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); 6. Take a holistic approach. When you’re first learning the ropes, it’s natural to stick close to the other product team members. Or devote much of your time to building your relationship with engineering, but Mustafa warns against this. It’s important to expand in order to create your sphere of influence. Instead, she recommends taking a 360-degree view of the organization. Getting input and making connections with every department will help you get a fuller, less-biased picture. This will help you to forge connections with the organization’s broader swath and develop your sphere of influence. You never know when that will pay off, and it will certainly help you build cross-company support down the line. Make sure you also know what you’re accountable for. If the executive team expects a weekly dashboard or monthly update at an all-hands, find out and get ahead of it. Takeaways It can be hard to avoid speaking your mind and fixing obvious flaws as soon as you notice something awry. Reserving your opinions until later in tenure is the right move. You don’t want to suggest new ideas or try to impose any new methodologies until you have a solid baseline of understanding and discretely vet your ideas among a smaller, friendlier audience. If you come out shooting, many of your good ideas will be ignored or forgotten. At least until you’ve built up a stable of allies and established a favorable reputation throughout the organization. While your first 90 days isn’t your only opportunity to build your sphere of influence, it’s a great opportunity can set you up for an easier path to ship great products moving forward. Read the Career Guide for Product Managers hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '51f4627c-aefd-4981-92a8-41fe12455dbe', {});

I have been a part of two successful startups and product development teams for the past 17 years. The first was acquired and thrives today with products such as GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. The second one, AppFolio, went public and also thrives with its software for property management companies and law firms. The key takeaway from watching each of these companies grow from roughly 10 employees to 600+ each is this: It’s all about building relationships. It is just like exercise. If we exercise regularly, a side effect is that our diet typically improves. If we build relationships and really know and care about the people we work with, everything else comes easier. So how can we build relationships on our product development teams and thrive? Here are five ways. 1. Sit Together At my first startup, engineering and product development teams sat separately, and we all had our own individual offices. As our departments grew, we were spread even farther from each other. As a result, informal interactions between different groups went away, or became more challenging. Our communication would primarily take place over email or on the phone. Our engineering and product groups would only meet weekly or biweekly to review progress. We’d attempt to “be on the same page”, and that “page” was typically a schedule expressed in Microsoft Project. We weren’t exactly “strangers” but we really didn’t “know each other”. We learned — when we don’t see the people we work with on a regular basis, we make assumptions and distance grows — “us” and “them”; and “we” and “they” language emerges. Working together becomes harder. Years later at AppFolio, my second startup, we hired Jason, the product manager I worked with closely at the first startup. At that time, our entire company was in one room with an open floor plan. We’d have casual conversations, and share the antics of pranking people’s desks when they went out on vacation. Once when Jason was out we upgraded his computer with the latest hardware from the 80s as shown below! We were all thrilled when our property manager software was fired up on his screen. It was a fun moment for everyone, including Jason. It felt like we were all on “one team” when we were in the same room. Jason returns from vacation to find a “state-of-the-art” computer setup on his desk. I remember reflecting with Jason about being together with our groups in the same space at AppFolio versus being in different wings of a building when we were at the first startup. From there, we made a pact that our groups — engineering and product — would all sit together in the same open space going forward. It’s now about nine years later, and we still work in open areas and are together as cross-functional teams of engineers, QA, UX, product managers, and agile coaches. Example of a cross-functional team area at AppFolio. Sitting together does not come easy if there are remote teams and offices. Workarounds such as Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting are available to help in such situations. We promote the use of video for our remote friends as it helps to level the playing field and bring us closer. View of our satellite office via Google Hangouts at AppFolio headquarters. View of AppFolio headquarters on screen via Google Hangouts from our LA office. 2. Actively get to Know Each Other and Build Trust Doing activities to help get team members to know each other on a personal basis is an incredible strategy for team-building and raising the level of respect on teams. At AppFolio, when we reteam or change up team membership, we have deliberate discussions about how we want to “be together” as a team. We determine what we want it to be like in our physical team spaces. We elicit team members’ preferences regarding communication and interruptions, and vision out the characteristics for our team in order to flourish. This includes understanding how we will operate when things get difficult. Because they “will” get difficult. This raises the positivity in the environment and makes conflict easier to bear. Examples are: team members’ desire to go together for a walk outside if they have a conflict, or to give “alone time” to someone you overheard having a challenging phone call. The book, Creating Intelligent Teams by Anne Rød and Marita Fridjhon, gets into the specifics of designing “team contracts” like mentioned above. We also do many other activities to deliberately enhance the experience of getting to know one another and build trust. One of them is a modified version of the Market of Skills activity from Lyssa Adkins’s book, Coaching Agile Teams. If you walk through AppFolio today you are likely to find one of these Market of Skills posters hanging on a wall or the side of a desk. Team getting to know each other via Market of Skills activity at AppFolio. We also go on short outings together as a cross-functional team. We are fortunate to be located in Santa Barbara, California. I like to take teams out on hikes and combine it with sharing personal stories to bring us all closer. A favorite activity of mine is a “Fulfillment Hike”, an activity inspired by “Co-Active Coaching”. In this activity, we share with each other a “peak experience” in our lives about something that is personally meaningful to us. At the top of the hike, we stand or sit in a circle, and go around sharing the stories we heard from our partners. Together we derive the values from each of our stories and have a discussion about which values we would like to carry over into our daily work. We put up these values on a poster in our team area as a reminder of what we want. Photo of cross-functional team on a hike up Inspiration Point trail in Santa Barbara. By actively getting to know each other, we can empathize well with each other and can build great trust and camaraderie. 3. Share and own Challenges Together During the early years of my first startup, waterfall-style development was the norm. Unable to predict, product development teams would promise a deadline but deliver late. Discussions about this topic were extremely stressful and difficult. The saving grace of this type of thing was to cut back scope (ideally) in order to get as close to the committed date as possible. Conversations about this topic between engineering and product groups couldn’t just happen on the fly. They needed to be “scheduled” due to the distance between our groups. This took time and elevated tensions among our groups. We learned that our practices prevented us from sharing and owning challenges together. We had to fix that. Fast forward to AppFolio… due to physical proximity and actively getting to know one another, product managers and engineers are more open and honest with each other. Product managers get a daily or even hourly understanding of where things are at. Everyone is present together in their work-area and at regular team events. We can even discuss our work challenges during a team hike while going through a physical challenge. The chance of having negative surprises is greatly reduced. Example of product development teams discussing work visualized on a board in their team area. Cross-functional product development teams can also share the challenge of onboarding new team members. When team members share the mentorship of a new employee, the load is lighter. And, the person being mentored gets more attention, and is exposed to different styles of working. This can include cross-group mentoring. For example, experienced engineers can help out in mentoring new and experienced product managers. In summary, we are stronger when we face challenges together — regardless of what group we are in, or what reporting structure we have. Helping each other succeed helps us realize our goal of delighting our customers with our product development roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '9e6140b2-e382-45fd-ace0-16435228cf7b', {}); 4. Help Each Other Succeed I remember talking to our AppFolio co-founder and CTO Jon Walker about a challenge I was having with a fellow team member. He looked at me and said, “Heidi, how can you make this person successful?” That simple phrase changed everything for me, and I’ve come back to it over and over again as I coach people around me. When we hire people, we want them to thrive and be successful. That’s why we hired them. Helping to educate team members on this simple yet powerful topic can make an incredible impact. When I hear complaints about another person, I even find myself echoing Jon by saying, “How can you help them be successful?” When I mentor people at AppFolio I like to teach them the concept of Net Promoter Score (NPS) applied to us as individuals. We use the concept of NPS with our AppFolio customers on a regular basis. It tells us how likely our customers are to recommend our software to other people, as well as collects qualitative comments that we analyze for improving our products. It comes from the book The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. When applied to people, I encourage people to think about their behavior and actions and how they think others might perceive them in their teams and outside their teams. Are they “creating promoters” for themselves? What are the chances that their behavior will be championed by other people around them? Teaching team members tools and techniques for communication challenges they are experiencing is a great way to support them and to help them grow. In recent days I have been teaching managers techniques to use with people on their team to help prepare them for having what they perceive as “difficult” conversations with others. We do an empathy building exercise based on a modified “3rd entity” activity from Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC). When you reteam at AppFolio, you have the opportunity to work and learn together with different people. But you might be used to the style of a particular team member and expect that the people on your new team will act in the same manner. This is the type of scenario you face with a fast-growing company like ours. Deliberately promoting the attitude to help one another encourages everyone to be “in it” together. This might mean building more patience and helping fellow team members along the way that are new to their roles. It also might mean putting our named “roles” aside and doing whatever to help the endeavor move forward. 5. Have Outings and Learn Together At the first startup, we had the tradition of having annual retreats where our engineering department would go camping, white water rafting or some other trip typically involving the outdoors. The tradition originated, according to our founder Klaus Schauser from an experience he had with a student group that he was a part of at UC Berkeley. AppFolio was co-founded by Klaus, and when we were a startup we continued this tech retreat tradition, starting with our inaugural retreat white water rafting on the Kern river. Photo of AppFolio as a startup after its inaugural tech retreat rafting on the Kern river. Since we had the pact to always sit together with product and engineering, it seemed fitting to continue that vibe by inviting and having our product development teams go with us on every tech retreat. It’s now almost nine years later and the groups have gotten much larger. Still, all of the people who work on building the products together — engineers, QA, UX and product managers go on this annual trip together. It’s nothing short of epic! We have done camping at the Channel Islands together, white water rafting, high ropes, and have even been to Disneyland. Teams have quarterly budgets to do local events together as celebrations to mark milestones, or they can do them just for the sake of bonding and getting to know each other better. This organizational support has helped us thrive, especially for the years in which our engineering and product teams doubled in size. Often different groups also bond by going to conventions together, where we learn together and get to know each other in a setting apart from the office. We’d also plan and organize extra social events while in the corresponding city. Last year we were in Washington DC together, and we visited several sight seeing locations, and even rode a ferris wheel. In the photo below are two engineering directors, two agile coaches, three product managers, one UX engineer and one QA engineer. Having this shared learning and joyful experience brought us closer together and it was just plain fun. Photo of team members after they rode a large ferris wheel in Washington D.C. Summary Reflecting back on the experiences I have shared at both startups, I can tell you that relationship building is critical. As individuals, we are at our jobs to make money and to survive as independent people in the world. We spend more time at work typically than we do with our families. The time we spend with our co-workers, our friends, can include some of the most memorable and incredible times in our lives. We can work together and create incredible products for our customers, and love every minute of the experience together. If you know and care about the people you work with, everything else comes easier. About the Guest Author: Heidi Helfand has 17 years coaching and influencing cross-functional product development teams at pioneering web software companies. At Expertcity, Inc. (acquired by CitrixOnline) she was on the initial team that built GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. She is currently Principal Agile Coach at AppFolio, Inc., a SAAS workflow software company with property management and legal practice management software. Prior to that, Heidi consulted for the State Dept. on website development, and has taught ESL at several US Universities. She has an M.A. in teaching from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and Associate Certified Coach (ACC) through the International Coach Federation (ICF). Follow her on twitter @heidihelfand For more information visit heidihelfand.com Acknowledgements I would like to send out a special thanks to my AppFolio friends Jon Walker, Rahul Sawhney, Regina Rodwell, Jennifer Payne, and Ellie Thomas for their feedback on early drafts of this blog. I’d also like to thank Joshua Kerievsky of Industrial Logic for his thoughtful comments and encouragement. References Rod, Anne Fridjhon, Marita. “Creating Intelligent Teams” KR Publishing, 2016. Adkins, Lyssa. “Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters and Project Managers in Transition” Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn), 2010. Kimsey-House, Henry; Kimsey-House, Karen, Sandahl, Philip, Whitworth, Laura. “Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives.” Nicholas Brealey America, 2011. Reichheld, Fred Markey, Rob. “The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.” Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. CRR Global, Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), http://www.crrglobal.com/coach-courses.html

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.