Six Rules of Product Roadmaps

Below is a presentation that I first gave to the Cambridge Product Management Network at their February 2010 meeting.

Summary:

• definition
• six rules of roadmaps
• disclosure and trust

See more presentations by arthur2020 | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

If this embed doesn't load properly, please see this presentation on authorSTREAM's site.

Fitting Products to Markets (and vice versa)

Introduction

I frequently get asked to review other people's product ideas, concepts and businesses. As my background is software and internet businesses, this blog post looks at the five areas which often get overlooked:

1. Getting the Job Done
   
2. Competitive Analysis
   
3. Supply Chain Analysis
   
4. Routes to Market and Market Entry
   
5. Sustainable Revenue

Let's look at each one in turn, but quickly you'll appreciate how they are all interrelated.

Getting the Job Done

Your Value Proposition is the offering that you make to your marketplace. Your value to the person that uses or pays for your product or service indicates the price you can charge. ALWAYS, the value of your product is based on the pain that your potential customer has.


I quote from SHAKESPEARE from Richard III, Act 5. Scene IV. As Richard II is fighting in the Battle of Bosworth, his horse is killed.

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Great value is placed on a solution to a great pain.

The best thinking in my opinion is from Clayton Christensen (a great thinker who sadly passed away in early 2020), a Harvard Business School professor and author of the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution (two excellent books which is why I have linked to them on Amazon!). 

An entrepreneur should evaluate his / her product or service through the perspective of a customer wanting to solve a problem: 'What can I buy (or hire) to get this job done for me?'. These are the problem statements that users need your solutions for. In analysing the pain, you frequently discover that the pain can be solved in a variety of ways (or the pain can be endured).

Question: is the pain significant enough for people to pay for it?

Competitive Analysis

Firstly, it is much, MUCH safer to assume that you have competitors: either you haven't found them (yet) or the competition is just about to appear over the horizon.

Searching for competitors

I recommend you really look hard for your competitors:

1. Using the internet - not just the terms that you use to describe to your product or service, but for words that describe the problem that your potential customers might be enduring. See 'Getting the Job Done' in the previous section.
   
2. Sniff out 'players' in your wider sector. By 'players', I don't mean direct competitors, but participants in closely associated sectors.

Example of Players: You have developed a piece of wizardry that improves images displayed in Microsoft Word. Direct Competitors would be Microsoft itself and companies that provide 3rd party add-ons to Microsoft Word. Other 'players in associated sectors' might be companies that make printers (eg HewlettPackard) or computer screen manufacturers (eg Dell). The key question to ask yourself is 'Will my invention hurt or harm these players?'

Supply Chain Analysis

This leads nicely onto supply chain analysis.

If your new product or service is successful, then other players in the supply chain will react to your success. Some will benefit, some will be negatively impacted. By analysing all the participants that in the supply chain, you may well discover that:

1. there are other cracks in the market that your product/service may be better suited for
   
2. there are other potential partners or distributors who will benefit from your product/service and 'should' support your product's entrance into the market place.

Route to Market

Supply Chain Analysis leads me onto Routes to Market and Market Entry.

Participating with a partner has a number of huge advantages:

1. You can use your partners' or distributors' marketing budge to tell them about your product / service.
   
2. Their endorsement provides credibility to your product / service and can both accelerate sales and shorten the sales cycle.
   
3. Route to revenue and ROI (Return On Investment) should be much faster.
   
4. There are additional financial advantages too: if you're a very young company, your partners may be prepared to invest in your business, if they will significantly benefit from accelerating your product's arrival at the marketplace.

However working with partners does have disadvantages:

1. They might steal your idea.
   
2. You may have to spend considerable amount of time 'selling' your proposition to your partner/distributor. Their offering and how they present the combined offering to the market will have to be modified - all of which takes time. If your solution is any way competitive, these potential partners/distributors will be protective of their markets and customers.
   
3. You will lose some or all of the direct relationship with your end customer - this is a really important relationship with the customer in order to receive unadulterated feedback.
   
4. It will most probably take more time to receive the first revenues from your product or service as the revenue has to turn more cogs and gears in other organisations (which you can't control) before money starts to flow into you.
   
5. General lack of control! Usually your partners are much bigger than you and their processes are much slower. It is likely that you are one of many partners with whom they operate and being new, you have to demonstrate ability and trustworthiness.

Sustainable Revenue

Good news: by this stage you have done most of the hard work! Revenue MUST be sustainable: investors and partners need to have confidence that you and your product will be around years into the future. A really good analytical technique about profitability in an industry is to use Porter's Five Forces Analysis, a concept devised originally by Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School Professor in the 1979. 

Porter's Five Forces Analysis is not simple, but it is very worthwhile as it gives you a profound understanding of your market and its dynamics. I recommend that you undertake this analysis twice: once as your market / sector/ industry stands today and then a second time, as if in the future, once you have launched your product or service and this is very successful.

Key Questions:

• How will your competitors react?
  
• How do you think the market will react?
  
• Who will own the largest slice of the revenue pie now - who will benefit and who won't?

My own litmus test is to ask: are there any Goliaths in the industry who could simply roll over on morning and squash you?? Phrases like 'We're gonna beat Google hands down' fill me with fear!

SWOT Analysis

Top Tip: In conjunction with your Five Forces Analysis, have scribble pad at hand divided into four quadrants: Strengths and Weaknesses (of your idea), Opportunities and Threats (in the competitive landscape). This is commonly known as a SWOT Analysis.

As you undertake the Five Forces Analysis, you'll see other product opportunities or other partners that you haven't thought of, but don't deviate from your Five Forces Analysis, but return to these ideas later!

The Perfect Cancer Drug - an example of Sustainable Revenue

My own platinum standard for sustainable revenue is the ideal cancer drug with the following characteristics:

• has an immediate beneficial effect and insignificant side effects
  
• and the producers receive much public acclaim and publicity for their breakthrough
  
• is addictive - therefore users become dependent
  
• the human body builds up a tolerance to the drug. As the treatment program continues, users require more and more of the drug. However, the tolerance should be mild and builds up over time, otherwise it may attract too much attention from regulators.
  
• importantly, the drug doesn't eradicate the cancer, but prolongs life.
  
• surrounded by a 'wall' of patents - no-one else can copy the drug.

Can your product or service build in as many sustainable revenue features of the perfect cancer drug??

Finally...

Keep iterating through this process on a regular basis - the market changes: expectations fluctuate and new players enter the market, technology shifts occur which can reset the rules of business competition. Change is the only thing that is guaranteed!

Privacy and Google's Latitude

Google has just released Latitude, a a service that lets you keep track of where your friends are by tracking the whereabouts of their mobile phones. Latitude is available in 27 countries. The following phones are supported: Android-powered devices with Maps v3.0 and above. G1 users in the US will be receiving Maps v3.0 in a system update soon. Most color BlackBerry devices Most Windows Mobile 5.0 and above devices. Note: Some Windows Mobile devices don’t support cell-ID location detection. Most Symbian S60 devices iPhone and iPod touch devices with the Google Mobile App (coming soon in the US) Many Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon) (From Pandia) It is opt-in. Will Google be 'on top' of the privacy issue?

Interesting Stats on Adult Social Networking

Plenty of stats - overall message is the SoSo is spreading significantly outside of 18-25 year olds.

Pew Internet Report on Adult Social Networks

News that I didn't get to tell you

There were a host of stories from 2008 that I was just too busy to tell you about. Here are the links to them.

May

• MySpace announces 'Data Availability' project with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, Twitter


• Google Friend Connect Launches


• Data Portability Smackdown: Google 1, Facebook 0


• The talkification of the web The film and music industries have been turned upside down by the arrival of the internet. Now it's the turn of telecoms.

Comcast acquires Plaxo
Comcast purchases Plaxo for a rumoured $150-175m. Comcast plans on using to integrate community features on TV, broadband data and phone services.


June

• Who uses the Web on their mobile phone?
• Nokia acquires Symbian and will open source it

July

• Mobile web reaches critical mass

September

• Google's Android mobile unveiled

November

• Mobile internet usage on the rise
• Google adds voice and video chat to gmail

December

• OpenID - Socialising all over the web? Facebook Connect and Single Sign-on using OpenID
• Wireless turns iPod into a phone (from Truphone) Truphone's software turns itouch in a phone usuing wi-fi and software from Truphone.
  
• Dictionary of project management lingo
  

NeoMedia's patents, New CEO and fund-raising

U.S. Patent Office Rejects All Ninety-Five NeoMedia Patent Claims.

Neomedia, you may remember, owns a large patent portfolio in the field of connecting to internet content using the mobile phone (amongst others). I have taken a dim view of their patents and the impact to the use of QR codes, particularly outside of Japan. See this post which generated some interesting discussion in the comments.

The Electronic Frontier put together a patent busting initiative which overturned the decision in July. See report on their site. (Thanks to Dean Collins for alerting me to this news.)

Other machinations at NeoMedia

An avid follower of this sector, the Pondering Primate noted:

On October 15, 2007, the day before the Patent Office ordered the re-examination, the Chairman and member of NeoMedia's Board resignation became effective.

I noticed that NeoMedia appointed Iain McCready as CEO in May (see announcement). Ian was one of the early folks at Mobiqua in the Scotland who were doing nicely in the mobile ticketing field with their own 2D bar code solution for an excellent niche vertical (nice one!).

Then I noticed that Ian has got off to a flying start by raising $8.7million for NeoMedia (see annoucement) last week. Clearly, someone has a lot of confidence in the new approach - I am told that NeoMedia have been fractious organization in the past.

Service interruption

Yep, no posts for ages.
I've been busy with my company, Webmetrics, being acquired by NeuStar (announcement) in January, birth of a baby girl in April and relocation from San Diego back to the UK / Ireland in June.

BBC's iPlayer traffic swamps UK's ISPs

Following my previous post about the demise of Mobile TV - due to the broadcasters enabling downloads of their shows (such as BBC's iPlayer), then the UK's ISPs have gone bleating to the BBC saying that their iPlayer is generating too much traffic on their networks.

Silly ISPs are demanding that the BBC pays for the network upgrades. Here's some of the statistics being throwing around:

• In its first three months more than 42m programmes have been accessed via the catch-up TV service.
• According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.
• iPlayer usage now accounts for approximately 5% of our network capacity. (see this story on http://community.plus.net/
  

I'm very surprised at the reaction of the ISPs - surely this is a perfect method to segment the market into light users and heavy downloaders... surely??!?

It appears the key point is that iPlayer streaming outnumbers downloads by 8 to 1, which, I interpret, wasn't anticipated.

Note: I originally read this story on the BBC, so the reporting may be biased.

The future dims for Mobile TV

I've been back in the UK recently and I have seen the future of Mobile TV and it doesn't involve the live streaming of content to handsets. Oh no, that looks antiquated – like crappy portable FM radios in comparison to an iPod.

So what prompted this? Two things:

• Using BBC iPlayer – the ability to view high quality broadcasts downloaded to a laptop.
• BBC’s announcement that iPlayer would work on iPods and iPhones shortly.

Those that know we well will tell you how much I detest television – I despise it.

However if you combine the very high quality of the BBC’s content with flexibility of the BBC’s iPlayer:

Features of the iPlayer

• You can download content that has been screened within the last 7 days.
• The content is viewable for 30 days
  
• Once you have started watching a programme, you have 7 days to finish it.
• Big catch: You can only download the content if you are in the UK. No doubt there are pirate sites or proxy servers that can assist you here.
• It’s a peer-to-peer service (technology from Kontiki) – and works delightfully well.

Those brilliant David Attenborough nature programmes (what a national treasure!) that you missed? And interesting documentary that you missed that everyone’s discussing? Not a problem.

Incidentally, after the launch of iPlayer, UK consumers noticed that they had exceeded their monthly broadband capacities for the first time. See article. In the UK, Broadband is usually capped, started at 1GB / month.

So, if you were to combine the BBC's rich content:

• with a 'browse the recent back catalogue and remotely queue for download the next time I am connected' service (nicely designed for a mobile screen of course).
• plus “download this future programme when available” for future scheduling
• plus always download the most recent news broadcast
• plus some brainlessly easy phone synch functionality so that you could synch across all your devices (phone, iPod, Wii etc)
• with a decent recommendation engine that sieved your previously viewed downloads with other people's recommendations

then I would definitely be MUCH more interested in the TV!

I think in-hotel viewing figures would plummet too. Perhaps this is also a fantastic opportunity for the BBC to build a community around its programmes. Nature lovers, sit-com fantatics.

There now, I don't know how many enterpreneurial ventures could be spawned off this little lot!

Yahoo supports OpenID

Yahoo now supports OpenID with the public beta at the end of Jan. (Article)

With 248 million users, Yahoo is the biggest fish in the pond, meaning that 368 million Web users can use the standard.

Google remains out in the cold (even though Blogger permits comments on articles using OpenID), but Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have joined OpenID as board members (see article), so we should anticipate an announcement from Google soon.

Previous announcements:

• Microsoft to back open ID scheme (Feb 07)
• AOL supports OpenID too (Feb 07)

Neomedia's patents in 2D Barcode

Neomedia (for their Gravitec division) have a bunch of patents (all carefully listed on Neomedia's website) in the 2D Bar Code area. Fundamentally, their inability to capitalize on their (pretty weak) patents are holding up the market that has blossomed around QR Codes in Asia (where Denso / Toyoto have the patent, but aren't enforcing it).

There's a comment from StreetStylz (whose blog has lots of commentary on Neomedia) with an analysis of Neomedia patents in this area.

Too many Patent Experts and legal representatives have looked at the core patents (mainly the Huedtz patents) and have not figured out a way around them; Motorola, Symbol, Qualcomm, Digital Convergence's legal team, Cross Pen, etc.

Another comment mentions:

USPTO has principally agreed with the EFF that all 95 of NEOMs claims in the patent need to be reexamined, not just a few of the claims. And this one patent is the core of the other patents. So if this patent is thrown out, the other patents that he claims NEOM holds are pretty much worthless as well, because they all use a similar process for their core operation.

Sprint (in US) promoting 2D Bar Codes

On page 35 of Jan '08's Wired Magazine, Sprint has a full page ad called "The Captivating Future Of The Bar Code".

It uses ScanBuy's ScanLife mobile bar code reading application (so it's not QR Codes) for camera phones. (They are the first company to sign up a carrier, as reported by the Pondering Primate.)

Great to see this stuff coming to market outside of Japan & Korea etc.

I have a nagging doubt about Neomedia's patents in this area though. See my next post.

Operators share 3G masts in UK

3 and T-Mobile intend to share their 3G cell towers. They expect to save GBP2 billion (USD4 billion) over ten years, by decommissioning over 5000 duplicate base stations.

Analysys, in this insightful report, applauds the decision. (Note: for some time after 3G licenses were sold in the UK, sharing of infrastructure was illegal. This requirement has since been relaxed.)

Voice remains the mainstay of ARPU with SMS being the primary source of non-voice ARPU. The demand for heavy data hasn't been apparent enough. AND that requirement is threatened by substitutes such as Wi-fi and Wi-Max, which means that operators need to invest in alternative technologies (examples below), which reduces the investment that they can make in their traditional cellular infrastructure.

• fixed broadband ie triple plays and quadruple plays
• Mobile TV
• Femtocell - indoor base stations

Analysys also sees this as indicative of how operators will make future investments (such HSPA+ & LTE) - a strategy that led to the dominance of GSM.

Analysys calls this a 'major shift by mobile network operators' - and I agree.

Rebtel - perfect for international calls

I've had a Rebtel account for at least 18 months, but I have recently introduced my wife to the service.... and she's loving it.

Here's how it works:

1. Configure your account / telephone numbers / address book appropriately. (Yep, there's some set-up required at Rebtel's website.)
2. Then the Rebtel User (eg in US) calls their international contact (eg in Ireland) on a local (ie US) number.
3. Rebtel takes the incoming call and, matches it with the directory in your account, connects to your contact's number in Ireland (ie their ordinary landline).

Advantage: Given that local calls are free in the US, then the Rebel User only pays for the international portion of the call - which is priced at VoIP rates not International Mobile rates (ie 2 cents per minute rather than 50+ cents per minute!)

There is an additional twist in it for advanced users. After step 3 above, then if the international contact hangs up, and then immediately dials the last number received, then the call between the two people is re-established. Then Rebtel user is then not paying for the international portion at all! Very cute.

However this last step is usually way too fiddly to be bothered with. And I've had quality problems too with this advanced usage.

Another huge advantage is that my wife now has a number in Ireland. So if anyone rings it, the call will be patched through to her mobile phone or landline. So the initiator of the call pays for the cost of the local call (if applicable) and my wife pays for the international portion of the call. Very useful.

Plaxo for sale

From TechCruch:

The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four rounds, including $9 million last February. The company had over 15 million users as of September 2006, and their recent integration into Google Open Social has led to a further growth spike.

Growth figures to the left.

Private Equity Hub reports:

Social networking site Plaxo has received an unsolicited acquisition offer of around $200 million.

Jeff Nolan evaluates Plaxo on the same basis as Facebook's price (ie per user):

The FB transaction valued each of the company’s 59 million users at $254, which when applied to Plaxo’s reported 15 million users nets the $3.8 billion valuation. So what is interesting about Plaxo reportedly hoping to fetch $100 million is that this valuation implies each user is worth $6.66 (hmmm 666…), which when applied to Facebook suggests not a valuation of $15b but rather $400 million.

Facebook opens up its platform

Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora posted a blog entry:
(We) want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms." A developer page elaborates that "the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.

BTW, Bebo, Friendster have released their own developer platform initiatives, as anticipated. (See previous blog entry)

LinkedIn's Intelligent Application Platform

LinkedIn has arrived that it's permitting third parties build applications for use within its community. (Article from Silicon)

For example, BusinessWeek will integrate LinkedIn onto its news website, allowing people to find out more about individuals or companies mentioned in articles. I can envisage a Snap-type hover over.

We can expect similar announcements from all the companies that are part of Google's Open Social community.

Big feature on QR Codes in major UK newspaper

The Sun, the most read newspaper in the UK (famous for its topless Page 3 girls), had a series of pages promoting QR code last week:

• What is in Keeley's hands?
• How to crack QR smart code
• QR craze started in Japan
• Pet Shop Boys' coded message

Mobile Content News reports that News International, the Sun’s owner, is watching the take-up of the service closely, and may roll it out across all of its titles if it proves successful. Naturally the Sun is looking at the advertising potential and have already signed up Ladbrokes, Sky and Twentieth Century Fox to the service.

Also from mobilestance.com:

Google has stated that Andriod will feature a basic, but functional “format agnostic” QR reader, to be preloaded on all devices shipping with the Android Open OS.

The same link also contains this:

many of the major US carriers are getting behind the technology, giving the downloadable readers some fairly prominent deck placement over the next few quarters (sources confidential).

Obviously, I still haven't researched how the legals in QR Codes outside of Japan have been overcome. Any pointers anyone??

Opera mini over one million downloads in 10 days

Selling like hot cakes!

Opera Mini 4, the newest version of the world's most popular mobile Web browser was released at the start of November. Overall, Opera Mini has already been embraced by more than 26 million cumulative users who view more than one billion Web pages every month.

From Opera's own press pages.

O2 and Nokia test mobile wallet in UK for travel and payments

O2 has launched the UK's first large scale pilot of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology on mobile phones reports MobileMonday.

500 users in London will be able to making purchases in retail outlets and travelling on London's public transport system.

Trialists will also be able to touch the NFC-enabled handset on selected smart posters at the launch and at other locations over the course of the trial. The smart posters contain embedded tags which serve as shortcuts for services enabled through the handset. Once the user taps the poster with the handset, they will automatically dial a number, send a text message or be sent a shortcut to a mobile internet site with more information about the subject on the poster e.g. an event taking place or downloading content.

The trial will also examine mobile payments using the Barclaycard payment application in the O2 Wallet for purchases under £10.