Stream121
A STREAM of commentary on software product management & marketing
29 February, 2024
12 October, 2023
Prioritising the Product Backlog
1. RICE Scoring
Reach | the percentage of users or customers who will be affected by the feature, or initiative. |
Impact | an assessment of the potential value or benefit that the project or feature will bring to the users or the organization. |
Confidence | The team's level of certainty in the Reach and Impact estimates. |
Effort | Effort quantifies the resources, time, and complexity required to implement the project or feature. It considers factors like development time, design work, testing, and any other resources needed. Effort is typically scored numerically, such as assigning a time estimate in hours or days. |
2. MoSCoW Method
Must-Have | User stories that are essential for the project's success. |
Should-Have | Important stories but not critical for the project's immediate success. |
Could-Have | Desirable stories, but not necessary |
Won't-Have | Stories that will not be included in the current iteration. |
3. Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)
CoD (Cost of Delay) | This represents the business value or impact that a particular user story or feature will deliver. It measures how much financial loss or opportunity gain would be associated with delaying the implementation of that item. |
CoR (Cost of the job in Progress) | This factor accounts for the ongoing cost incurred while the job is in progress. It considers aspects such as the operational costs or maintenance expenses that the organization bears until the task is completed. |
Job Size | This refers to the size or effort required to complete the user story or feature. It can be measured in various ways, such as story points in Agile development. |
4. Kano Model
Basic Needs (Must-Have) | The essential features that customers expect as a minimum requirement ie Hygiene Features. Without these features, customer dissatisfaction is almost guaranteed. However, fulfilling these requirements typically does not lead to increased customer satisfaction. |
Performance Needs (Linear) | Features that correlate directly with customer satisfaction. As the performance of these features improves, customer satisfaction increases. These features are often explicitly stated by customers. |
Excitement Needs (Delighters) | unexpected or surprising features that have the potential to delight customers. When these features are present, they can significantly boost customer satisfaction, but their absence doesn't necessarily lead to dissatisfaction. Customers often do not express these desires because they haven't experienced them before. Differentiating Features |
Indifferent Needs (Neutral) | The presence or absence of these features doesn't significantly affect overall satisfaction. |
Reverse Needs (Unwanted) | When present, can lead to customer dissatisfaction. |
5. Value vs Effort Matrix
Conclusion - what do I really use??
- MoSCoW flushes out the hygiene features.
- The time-cost of NOT having a feature is next most important
- Ongoing investment in the Linear Features (from the Kano Model) with due regard to continuously topping up investment in Differentiating Features.
- Use Ring Fence Development (on Page 3 of my Feature Prioritisation article) to make sure you have a reasonable balance between bug fixes, hygiene features, linear development and big innovation bets.
- Once a year, do a product portfolio analysis (using Feature Prioritization and Roadmapping technique) to benchmark all significant future projects against each other. For product enhancements that are requested after the annual review, measure them against a couple of existing projects that have already been benchmarked.
And Why?
MoSCoW
12 April, 2023
The tough end of product management - sunsetting or cannibalising a product
(*) Territory realignments are painful because:
- What happens to deals where the customer is just about to sign?
- What about that tacit knowledge of the customer's business and relationship that the sales team has generated?
- What do you do with commission for deals have been initiated by one sales gal but closed by another? Does credit go to the initiator or the closer or both - and in what ratio?
This becomes harder when sales revenue is recurring as in SaaS businesses.Other scenarios:
- What about pilot or pathfinder deals - deals that prove a concept with the expectation that future business would result?
- When the SaaS revenue is highly variable or seasonal?
- "You haven't finished the product that you sold me X years ago."
- "I can't run my business without features X, Y and Z."
- "What? How much more? Are you mad or am I hard of hearing?"
- Make sure you have the big picture justifications absolutely nailed and bombproof.
- Expressions like "Trust me, it's hard" and "It's been decided - it's very complex" will undermine (product) management in the mid-term, never mind the long-term.
- Understand your customer base - and the outliers. Handle the outliers with great care - the customers themselves and the internal teams that support them.
- Do NOT assume that you will convert every existing customer to the new product.
- List out the customers that are most likely to flee and make sure that EVERYONE understands that these accounts are at risk and assume that you'll lose some. 100% conversion is simply naïve.
- Make sure that execs are fully onboard if these customers threaten to flee - and they are briefed when they get calls from furious customers (and colleagues).
- If it is obvious that the outlier customers might flee, then is the company OK with it? (I mean really???)
- Make sure that someone (it may not be product management) has done the analysis of which colleagues might leave (that the company actually needs).
- This is super difficult, as some of the reasoning behind sunsetting a product might be associated with technology and skills sets.
- There is an implicit assumption that colleagues will blindly follow an executive decision. The very people that you want to retain for their business knowledge may flee because their product / technology has been jettisoned.
- If you think that product managers should communicate (and they should!), then DOUBLE OVER-COMMUNICATE when sunsetting a product.
- Herein lies the hard part of sunsetting a product - a decision to cull a product may require a rapid execution in order that the process doesn't spiral out of control. However, the very people that you need to consult to make a competent decision may be sufficiently ill-informed to advise you.
24 January, 2023
Product Management for Corporate Glue AND Lubricating Oil
- Engineering develops the product
- QA assures that the product
- Sales converts a product into justifiable business value for each customer
- Marketing communicates the product proposition to a market of similar users / buyers
- Product managers are frequently the glue that keeps the rest of the business functions inside a technology organisation stuck together. They fill in the cracks in between all these business functions.
- And they are the corporate 'oil' that lubricates other business functions within the company, making each function more efficient and in better harmony with each other.
09 January, 2023
ChatGPT for product management
Broad Use Cases | Use Cases for Product Management |
Summarisation of a long body of text | Summarising large amount of texts for requirements analysis chatGPT is surprisingly competent at summarising text eg for condensing a whole list of free-form product requests from customers into a couple of pithy themes. |
And the inverse, extrapolation of short body of text. | Writing product descriptions for product marketing. a. Reinterpreting features to benefits b. Rewriting product marketing copy for particular audiences |
Variation of an existing body of text | Wearing your product marketing hat, you have written some descriptive words, but they need some help or the body of text needs to be shorter to fit into a text box on the website or on your PowerPoint. |
Initial research into a topic or industry | As Product Managers, we spend a lot of time trying to make sense of a market / customer / technology / product / service. I can see myself using chatGPT as a great start to understanding the four walls of a market. Market research: what do I need to know about XYZ? What’s new and important in the XYZ sector? Who has the competitive advantage and why in XYZ sector? It’s great a high-level summaries, but not good enough for the details that matter. |
One great advantage is that it can create consistency when you have review or compare work from multiple teams. By getting your teams to start with ChatGPT's output, then at least all the teams have started from the same point with their use case (not using a template).
What it won't do effectively?
Some have claimed that it could be used to write product requirements. Nope – well, not to a meaningful level and certainly not good enough to give to a developer.
Cute Use Cases
- There’s one elegant use case of writing a Value Model Canvas.
- I Interviewed ChatGPT for a PM role, and it almost got the job
- Who are their investors - it's always useful to know where the money flows.
- Y Combinator
- Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal)
- Reid Hoffman Foundation (founder of LinkedIn)
- Khosla Ventures
- Elon Musk did invest, but has now sold off his stake
- Microsoft Ventures ($1bn investment in 2019 + MS has built a supercomputer in Azure to support OpenAI ML research)
06 June, 2022
Product Management in big companies vs small companies
Startup PM | Big Company PM | |
Optimise for speed, learning and reuse | ⭢ | Optimise for quality, impact and completeness |
Define the product culture and processes | ⭢ | Optimise the product culture and processes |
Validate (or not!) the excitement of foamy-mouthed CEOs / innovators yourself | ⭢ | Get others to fill-out a business requirement specification and to follow the process |
Justify the product roadmap to others | ⭢ | Successfully navigate the business process that slots engineering time to work effort |
Optimise processes in other business functions | ⭢ | Stick to the knitting in your own department (or escalate the problem up the org structure!) |
Beat the drum for the whole organisation | ⭢ | Follow the beat determined by the corporate strategy |
Dream of some stability in the product creative process | ⭢ | Crave some innovative time to fix stuff without constant justification |
Spend your day saying, "No, sorry because...." | ⭢ | Spend your day reviewing other people's proposed product enhancements |
14 December, 2021
Requirements are like meteorites
OR it gets knocked out of its static orbit and accelerates at speed towards the organisation (eg as a result of some action by a competitor or a positive reaction from a key customer after years of talking about it)
OR perhaps it become super-charged (eg demanded by influential customer or CEO after a conversation with a key investor / board member / conference / brain wave).
OR a substantial requirement but it doesn't match our strategic intentions / won't impact our market(s) / unsuitable for our technologies - broadly an opportunity that's not suitable for us. These sail on passed us and can be classed as a 'near miss'.
- What are the resources needed to capitalise on it?
- Does it fit into our portfolio - should it?
- How big is the market for the solution? And can we validate this assessment this quickly?
09 December, 2021
Kim Cameron and the Seven Laws of Identity
Title | Description | |
1 | User Control and Consent | Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent. |
2 | Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use | The solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long term solution. |
3 | Justifiable Parties | Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in agiven identity relationship. |
4 | Directed Identity | A universal identity system must support both “omni-directional”identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers foruse by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles. |
5 | Pluralism of Operators and Technologies | A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-workingof multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers. |
6 | Human Integration | The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks |
7 | Consistent Experience Across Contexts | The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple,consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies. |
26 November, 2021
Product Stack - all the tools for today's Product Manager
26 October, 2021
A Zoo of Management Acronyms
image from DeanOnDelivery.com
You may well have heard of HiPPO, the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. If everybody in the room has an opinion, it’s the HiPPOs opinion that will win.
Just because it makes us chuckle, it isn't totally invalid. As Jim
Barksdale (Netscape CEO, FedEx COO, AT&T CEO) said, "If we have
data, let's look at data. If all we have opinions, let's go with mine."
And certainly, I would happily surrender my opinion for his his, if we
ever went head to head!
Product Focus list other animals in the management menagerie. UPDATE: see their infographic.
RHINO | Really Here In Name Only |
ZEBRA | Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant |
WOLF | Working On the Latest Fire |
SEAGULL | Senior Executive that Always Glides in, Unloads, and Leaves Loudly |
VIPER | Vindictive Individual’s Plans Endangering Results |
MuMMY |
Muddying the waters and Micro Managing You |
DODO | Dangerously Out-dated Deciders Opinion |
SCAREDY CAT | Says Clear Argument, Roadmap, Execution, and Direction, Yet Changes All the Time |
MOUSE | Manager’s Opinion Usually Swayed Easily |
OWL | Old Wise Leader |
PARROT | Pretty Annoying and Ridiculously Repeating Others |
DONKEY | Data Only, No Knowledge, Expertise or whY |
Got any suggestions yourself?
We’re currently working on some content that will take this a step
further with advice on how to handle each persona. If you can come up
with any others – please let us know. If we include yours in our
content, then we’d be happy to say thanks with both an acknowledgement
and a £100 Amazon voucher.
17 May, 2021
The huge challenge of Consumption Pricing
Perhaps the most important challenge when considering a consumption pricing model is to align the use metric to the value the customer derives from your solution, which can evolve over time.
12 May, 2021
Alternative business models: open-source, crowd funding and tokenisation
10 March, 2021
Product Management Tube Map
But Mind the Gap. In many companies, the focus is on Agile and Product Owners, and the strategic & leadership role of product management is missing
Possible extension to the infographic - 'Ticket to Ride'
- Business Savvy
- Empathy
- Communication skills: listening and clarity in written and vocal transmission
- 'Spidey' sense of what's doing to happen next
- Leadership (vision and direction) and Trust
02 March, 2021
Signs that your Product Pricing Strategy isn’t Working
1. A customer base littered with bespoke deals.
The main problem usually encountered is that there isn't (much of) a discounting policy or it isn't adhered to. When I worked at NeuStar, there was a solid discounting policy AND a robust methodology to go beyond it.
"Special deals" had to be approved not by sales management, but by the product board. This mechanism really did account for the revenue / cost / profitability for the whole customer lifecycle.
2. Purchase options that include unlimited, or “all-you-can-eat” use.
Hmm, unlimited deals should be used when the value of the propositions is too complex for the customer and the vendor to justify, but everyone knows there's significant value. Within reason, as long as costs / burden don't torpedo profit margins, it is entirely valid.
Obviously, it is easier to make this decision when the variable cost of more consumption is tiny.
Fair use policies (whether formal or informal) need to be implemented so that costly abuse of unlimited can be contained. For example, 'burst usage' when greater utilisation is permitted but within reason (eg to a limit or within a period).
3. Prices that don’t account for customers’ varied budget cycles.
Simple statement, but the ripple back of this issue can be massive.
Let's say your customers get paid on a project-basis ie on completion of milestones. As a customer, you'd like to pay your suppliers when you get paid. As a vendor, if income can be guaranteed, this may be acceptable.
If however, the revenue is exposed to risk, this may not be acceptable to either party. For example, the construction industry is prone to delays or changes. As a concrete vendor, payment on project completion is unlikely to be acceptable.
In the software sector, does this change how your product is priced (yes!) or delivered (likely) or built (possibly)?
4. Enacting pricing changes without modeling the impact on legacy and net new revenues.
Oh, SO important!
A company releases a new product version that is supposed to cannibalise the existing product. They anticipate that all existing customers will diligently glide over to the new product without churn.
Oh, how wrong! Any change in product or pricing can lead to re-evaluation of the proposition and the possibility of churn. Please see my work for CDK Global for exactly this problem/
5. Complex or confusing pricing
Value-based pricing is great in theory, but if your product has multiple and diverse use cases, then the complexity of pricing appropriately becomes far too difficult to support. As a result of the practical decision to simplify pricing models, your target market may be sliced to a smaller size – never a palatable proposition, but sometimes mandatory to simplify all sorts of problems, not just in sales, but in product development and delivery and branding.
26 October, 2020
Product Metrics Spikes
A friend pointed me to How to crack product metric questions in PM interviews. In essence, it discusses how does a service provider respond to a change in a metric or KPI (Key Performance Indicator).
A definition from the article:
Metric interview questions test if candidates can perform data analysis and select key metrics that matter most to the success of a product. Employers like Facebook and Google use these questions to evaluate critical thinking and communication skills.
There are two types of metric questions - one builds on the other
Metric definition questions | Metric change questions |
|
|
Solving the Metric definition question
The article recommends the use the GAME method
Goals |
|
Actions |
|
Metrics |
|
Evaluation |
|
Solving the Metric Change question
The article provides its own methodology.
Define the metric change | Make sure you fully understand the metric that is being presented
to you:
|
Explore possible root-causes of the change | Use the MECE
framework
|
Conclude | Make sure there aren't any horrible assumptions that you haven't validated / eliminated. |
* For info on MECE:
Escalation and Communication
The article hardly touches on the critical, critical
point of issue escalation and communication.
After you have done your initial assessment, you need to answer
the question: Do I ring the alarm bell and to whom?
Judgement call: Let's assume that (a) the metric isn't a false positive and you've validated to some significant extent (b) the metric matters. So, how high do you escalate the issue?
Factors to consider:
- How many other business functions are impacted by the incident?
- Is that metric important to them?
- Can they do something about it, either to resolve it (eg some root-cause analysis) or to reconfigure their business function to accommodate the impact of the incident?
I recommend using this yard stick:
Level of concern | Action |
Not a concern or quickly solved and implemented |
|
Somewhat concerning, but impact is contained |
|
Very concerning |
|
Ridiculously high |
|
The importance of communicating - and re-communicating
As soon as you communicate outside of your team, make sure that someone
is knowingly and consistently appointed as Incident Manager (ie it could
be you!). Note that if the problem rattles on, then you may need to
appoint a Communications Manager in front of the Incident Manager to
protect the Incident Manager from simply responding to communication
enquiries rather than actually working on the resolution.
It's best also to alert other business functions how you will update them
on progress and frequency of updates (even if there is no progress).
Use of incident support tools
There is a great danger in over-engineering the use of incident support
tools. Over-engineering = it is too clumsy or laborious at the point of
the crisis. If others aren't familiar with the tools, then they will still
ask for email / telephone / instant messenger updates anyway!
Next step: Deep Dive into Root-Cause Analysis
Once you have done your initial assessment and then communicated your initial findings to relevant business function, it's time to dive deep to separate symptoms from root-cause. You may need access to multiple test and near-production systems(*) to validate theories.So do make sure these are functional before the crisis hits.
Do ask around your team (DevOps, Release Management, Testing,
Engineering) for their input into symptoms and route cause. In many
circumstances, something similar has been seen before.
Cycle back with colleagues and partners based on status and resolution -
instant messenger is fab here!
(*) Near-production = an environment that mostly closely replicates your live or production environment
Multiple resolutions
There may be several resolutions available: there's a matrix of time horizon vs cost-benefit.
Multiple resolutions might be appropriate - and that's absolutely appropriate to pursue several simultaneously. eg roll-back recent enhancement; test proposed partial fix; kick back to engineering for a rework with new testing scenarios etc.
12 June, 2020
Product Managers: Now, Next, Future
Steve Johnson, one of the respected voices in Product Management, cleans up some of the confusion about product roles and titles in Product Management. He admits that he (like me) is fan of the “product management triad” - a product or portfolio team responsible for strategic planning, release planning, and launch planning. Here's the link to the particular post and full description of these roles.
Title | Scope | Comment |
Product Strategy Manager | Future | Evaluates and prioritizes future products and the portfolio |
Product Owner1 | Next | Focuses on what’s next in terms of features and product options |
Product Marketing Manager2 | Now | Focuses on products that are currently available |
1 Steve prefers Product Planning Manager - yuk!
2 Steve prefers Product Growth Manager - yuk!
I do like the time box approach to the focus of each of these roles. Of course, this is simplified. It's not as if the Product Strategy Manager slurps espressos all day and pays no attention to the last quarter's sales figures or the Product Marketing Manager isn't constantly assessing the competition's capabilities and figuring out how to 'out-product' their offerings.
I would also recommend studying this Product Taxonomy from Product Focus (providers of product management training and resources - and one of the sponsors of the Cambridge Product Management Network).
Here's my take on 'Who owns what' which dovetails with Product Strategy vs Product Owner vs Product Marketing
Portfolio - owned by Product Strategy Manager
Responsible for managing the portfolio. He / She isn't the only decision maker. This is best managed by Product Investment Committee - this is a beast in its own right - but this has representation from Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Research plus some financial modelling expertise.
The Strategy Manager often takes on the long-term management of the core platform, as moving the platform forward requires care and evaluation, because key decisions may negatively impact capability of the products that are built on top of the core platform. ie mods to the core platform are expensive and time-consuming to get right.
Propositions - owned by Product Marketing
This is the realm of product marketing. Product Strategy may be involved if there is cross-subsidisation of prices between products (or product lines) and platforms.
This area gets super complicated when propositions vary between countries / region of the world. Different countries may provide functionality for free (or charge for free functionality!) for a whole variety of valid reasons (local commercial agreements, tax or legal reasons, history & politics, how core product development costs are charged to territories). This is matter is worthy of another blog post or even a book!
Products - owned by Product Owners
When considered in a portfolio, this is the domain of product owners or,
if the product is significant enough, a manager in their own right.
19 May, 2020
How everyone else views the first-in-post product manager
CEO mutters that maybe it is time to hire a product manager.
Everyone else wonders, "Err, and how will they help?" And they get that
uneasy feeling that the company is going to be less fun and more
restrictive and more "NO!" Perhaps the first publication of the Employee
Handbook had the same reaction - mildly menacing, but necessary for some
(other) slightly dysfunctional part of the business, but not
for me.
Below I augment the great story that Product Focus (a well-regarded provider of product management training) tell
in their Product Leadership Workshops and, to some extent, is outlined in
their publication, "What is the point of Product Management?"
Here's the history of a B2B software company and the welcome emergence of product management.
The small company was founded on technical innovation and good customer
service to its early customers. Initial Product Management is executed by
the CEO. The company continues to thrive, and the CEO's time gets further
and further sub-divided, but the technology and the product remain his/her passion.
But a new Sales Director joins the company and complains, "We’re a technical-led company. We need to become customer-driven." And that
sounded fine except every new contract required custom work. Contracts were signed with a dozen clients from a dozen market segments.
Soon the costs to support all these different products started to
escalate. The latest customer’s voice always dominated the product plans. The CEO concludes that “customer-driven” meant “being driven by the latest
customer”, and this created short-termism to the frustration of Engineering with the creation of massive technical debt and the sense of favouritism
towards particular Sales team(s) creating lots of subversive backdoors to
decision-makers. The price list becomes a joke, as the Sales team somehow
manages to get colossal discounts on big deals using the mantra of 'a
strategic customer deal,' without regard to profit margin.
When a board member declares, “We’ve become a sales-led company. We really
need to start being market-driven,” a brand specialist is head-hunted away
from a big consumer product company to be your VP of Marketing. As part of
a re-branding initiative, she designs a new corporate logo with a new
colour scheme for the web site, new collateral, and an updated trade show
booth and a big expense budget for conferences. Hundreds of thousands of
dollars are spent without any change in revenue.
Soon the CFO whispers to the CEO, “Don’t you think it’s time we started
controlling costs?” So, the company becomes cost-driven and started cutting out all the luxuries like travel, technical support,
bonuses, and employee appreciation. Everything had to be justified with a business
case and the CFO was tough on any assumptions – the only
things that got past him were small evolutions of existing products. Account
management was lauded for winning incremental business, usually with small
but exotic customisations which started to build technical debt and make
upgrades to new product releases more and more painful. And, innovation
stalls, engineering resignations escalates!
At this point, when Finance has gone too far, margins have suffered, and the
future product pipeline looks thin and also-ran. The CEO steps back in and
is sorely tempted to take the company back to its technology roots but he/she knows that this needs to be tempered with supporting existing
customers and protecting existing revenue streams. So, a new, hybrid
approach is required – so the company recruits a product manager.
The CTO and the Head of Engineering welcome the idea. Finally, the
Product Manager is the go-to person to make sure his/her team
build the right stuff and have a solid, defensible product strategy. This prevents his team/technology from being yanked around all the time OR
working on the latest, crazy C-suite initiatives OR brainless product
customisations for the big customers, that don't make sense and will become a mill stone around the neck of Customer Support in the future.
But the Head of Sales is also keen. Her team can’t answer the tough
questions customers are asking. Finally, someone with lots of product
expertise can answer technical questions without murdering customers currently in pre-sales with infinite complexities and CLOSE SALES! The
perfect PM should answer customer RFPs (Request for Proposals); AND come out
on sales trips whenever they’re needed; AND be the demo jockey; AND talk authoritatively about future product releases and when they will
occur. They should also be able to write some technical whitepapers and do some decent competitive analysis.
Marketing, who if you’ll remember lost a lot of credibility with their
splurge on branding, are also having problems with their collateral. Their vague product brochures and website content don’t seem to hold customers' interest and come in for a lot of criticism from prospects and internally. The Product Manager can explain the product once
and for all, providing decent product messaging and propositions for the collateral. A product roadmap with some realistic dates would allow her to
plan marketing spend, rather than a knee-jerk reaction to product releases
or to cancel events sponsorship at the last minute due to another slippage in the product release date.
Finance is relieved to hear about Product Management arriving. Finally,
there’ll be someone to hold accountable for whether each product is making any money. The CFO immediately starts working on a new,
complex, business case spreadsheet that the Product Manager will be tasked
with completing and comes up with detailed KPIs that the new product
managers will measure for him!
By this stage, Account Management & Customer Support have almost lost
the will to live. Every day, they writhe in agony trying to solve exotic
customer problems which Testing and Engineering struggle to recreate,
never mind solve. They see the new Product Management team as the last
hope to solve the Sales madness of selling solutions that are further away from the core product offering and hanging Customer Support out to dry
AGAIN. Otherwise, they are definitely throwing in the towel and quitting.
Conclusion
Everyone has their view of what the perfect product manager should be
doing – it’s helping them do their job! In
truth, Product Management should be greasing the wheels of all these business
functions because they put the product's holistic success at the centre of what
they do..
About Arthur
A Product Manager who enjoys taking new technologies and concepts to market. Fascinated by software, internet and mobile sectors. Start-up and scale-up specialist. Based in Cambridge, UK. For more information, see www.stream121.com.
11 May, 2020
The challenge of beta programmes
In a previous post, I looked at the Product Management & Product Marketing model that Redgate Software (a local Cambridge-based company) uses. In it, I identified a component, that didn't appear to be addressed: beta programmes.
- In the UK, it is pronounced 'Bee-ta'.
- In the US, it is pronounced 'Bay-ta'
What is the purpose of a beta programme?
The build team (Engineering, Testing, Product Management, Implementation, Technical Support) want the beta programme to technically validate the latest functionality - that it works outside the lab, in real customers hands and that bugs are flushed out and those bugs are validated in subsequent releases. The end goal of a solid product should not be compromised by time constraints.
- Marketing and Product Marketing want a case study and a quote for the press release - as soon as possible please.
- Sales, Sales Engineering, the CFO wants a big name brand to do reference case study that ignites the sales pipeline - ASAP as well.
Why should a customer participate in a beta programme?
I'm sure that we have all participated in these CBT (Customer-Based Testing) programmes at some point: buggy software whereby the customer does the testing - seemingly to the shocked surprise of the vendor. This can be immensely damaging to the beta programme, the provider’s brand, the relationship between participant and the provider.And, for the customer, it's a darned good reason not to participate in a beta programme: too much effort for no advantage (or indeed negative advantage).
For this reason, providers need to ensure that, during the beta, they have the Engineering bandwidth to rapidly fix issues that are identified. This, of course, is difficult to estimate exactly how much resource is required, but essential that this remains top priority. Unfortunately, Engineering’s core capability of building beautiful, well thought-out functionality does not match the issue + investigation + quick response cycle of beta programmes – expertise that is embodied in Support or Professional Services.
Valid reasons for customers to participate in a beta programme are:
- Access to latest version - see later for my experience with CDK Global
- High-profile within the vendor's organisation: ie access to Technical resources or insight into the vendor's strategic intentions.
- Cost-reduction in fees, perhaps for a limited period
Which business functions should participate in Beta Programmes?
There are many good and bad reasons why different parts of the organisation should participate in beta programmes.Customers
Err, yeah, of course, but some customers have a different propensity towards beta programs.
Customer whales (ie big ticket customers) that that are currently in pre-sales should definitely not be part of a beta. It may destroy the sale altogether: experience with buggy software may leave a nasty impression in the mouth - even if it is exactly the functionality that they are begging for.
Getting a quote out of a whale's marketing department may take months, if at all.
Beta software is usually provided at a discount - possibly a significant discount - a discount which may never be recovered on full release and therefore full price - and too expensive a margin to surrender.
Existing customers are great for betas - they understand what the previous product does, users and the business buyer have a positive relationship with the beta provider. Technically and financially, the provider has been validated and approved. This certainly makes it easy to draw up a shortlist.
However, there may be enough 'baggage' in the account that existing customers may derail the beta at the outset. They may demand so-called 'fixes' (missing pieces of functionality that they perceive in the existing product) or their environment / use may not match the requirements of the beta functionality. They will want compensation for their participation - and this compensation may be more valuable for them then the business benefits of the beta software.
Some of the best beta programmes I have participated in have been with new business divisions of existing customers. Commercially an existing contract is easy to extend. The vendor sees new business and the customer has the assurance of existing proof elsewhere in their organisation.
New Customers
New, NEW customers can also be really good. They genuinely behave like new customers.
They generally have more operational flexibility - they haven't honed their own processes to your product yet - and recognise that they need to create new processes.
Existing customers may say, "Yes, we'll be on your beta - as long as the product is "better" and nothing changes." Well, if the beta product aims to cannibalise the existing product, then the beta product will be "different" - better in many respects, but different in others. These differences may be negative enough to existing customers that they outweigh the new advantages.
The issue may be become more apparent if the existing customer is now off-centre from the target market with the new product. Existing customers may feel that they are being shoved to one side by the relentless progress of the vendor - and this may give the existing customer on the beta programme a sour taste in the mouth.
Another advantage of new customers is that the beta programme doesn't have to tiptoe around Account Management or Sales and get their buy-in.
Testing
Testing needs to valid the software on its way out and also to validate any issue as reported. For this reason, it is often essential that Testing has access to an environment that has beta code on it - let's call it pre-production - they are interested in isolating the real-world issues in a lab environment. Messing around with the production server is not to be recommended as it may create serious degradation to the service.
Engineering
Well, yes, they created the software and they are responsible for delivering it and fixing it. They are critically interested in technical validation in real-world environmental.
Account Management
If an existing customer is involved, the participation of Account Management (or Sales or Professional Services or whatever function manages existing relationships) is undoubtedly required, particularly at the start and end of the beta programme.
This function is compensated with incremental revenue - quite rightly, they don't want to jeopardise their account with the unknown. So, account management need reassurance that their customers' participation in the beta will help their account.
If the beta programme runs in parallel with existing product, then Account Management and Customer Support continue to support the existing in-life product. If the beta programme cannibalises the existing product, then the beta programme manages and supports the customer.
Customer Support
This function is generally wary of beta programmes, as it is often increases the amount of first-line call handling that they are required to do.
Implementation / Professional Services Team
The participation of ProServe is dependent on the amount of customisation required for the beta customers. Development would like 'vanilla' customers with the least customisation. However, this is dependent on the interest of the existing customer base in the beta programme and, with gritted teeth, the beta programme may be obliged to accept a highly customised account into the beta.
The great hope of vendors is that the new version fixes lots of issues in existing accounts - helping Account Management / Sales (unlocking new revenue), Professional Services (less implementation grief) and Customer Support (fewer issues and better relationship). And yes, it should leapfrog the competition and trample all others in the marketplace.
Special Cases - Saturated Markets
Newly all of my product experience has been in small scale-ups. However, I did have one fascinating experience working for CDK Global (see case study). As the Release Director, I was also involved with the Beta Programme - admittedly at arm's length.
CDK Global's product was the first major release in 12 years. It is worth mentioning because CDK Global dominated their market with 60%+ Total Ownership. Their customers (car dealers) operated in a highly competitive market and any new advantage could significantly tip the market. So, getting on CDK Global's beta programme could be a game changer in the short- and mid-term. When a slot on the beta programme was offered to a shortlist of existing customers, each place was eagerly snapped up.
Conclusion
Beta Programmes are extremely important to software creation teams, but managing these diverse expectations can be equally difficult - particularly when the product launch (with all those expectations!) is dependent on it.11 December, 2019
Product Management and Product Marketing - a perfect union in B2B
Their model (above) is based on the SiriusDecisions Product Marketing and Management Model which is reproduced below for ease of consumption as it is hidden behind a (free) registration wall (too much of an impediment for its value, IMHO).
Redgate's description is an improvement (much clearer and tighter in scope) where as SiriusDecisions diagram is more encompassing by slotting product in between marketing and sales.
Redgate's version shows the division of labour and where they work together.
Beta Programme Management
The only thing I see missing from Redgate's model is a beta programme management - which is referenced in SeriusDecisions model.In my experience, the beta programme can be managed by either party, but best led by Product Marketing initially, who are closer to the customer. However, the lead may change in a small beta programmes, under three circumstances that I can think of:
- The beta programme is very technical in terms of functionality and requires of Engineering's expertise to implement or generate significant value OR
- The latest release uses novel technology which is 'sensitive' (shall we say!) or both the rest of the organisation and the customer don't understand OR
- The beta has significantly more technical issues than anticipated and effectively Engineering has to jump in and effectively resolve and effectively they run the show.