Perceptions of exactly what constitutes strategy can vary greatly, even among a single management team. A single question about strategy can produce multiple perspectives that you must resolve before making any meaningful strategy decisions. The following story helps illustrate this point.

“In this year’s strategic plan, I want to reexamine our sales compensation structure and understand why we spend so much on system demonstrations. I also want a new deal-approval process in place.”

That’s the answer I got from a capital equipment company senior manager in response to the question, “What are the most important things to address in this year’s strategy-development effort?”

Continuing my senior-management interviews, I met with the senior vice president of marketing and asked the same question.

His response: “That’s easy. In two years, our customers will be manufacturing their next-generation devices. The requirements for these new devices will make our current product obsolete. We will have a hole in our portfolio if we don’t do something.”

The marketing executive had a very different perspective on strategy development. The first executive looked internally to find the most important issues. However, the marketing vice president looked externally for emerging threats to the business.

A third executive answered the question this way:

“We’re not going to do anything strategic this year. We need to work on our current business before we think about another acquisition.”

With this third executive came yet a third perspective. In his view, an issue wasn’t strategic unless it involved an acquisition, implying that any issues in the existing business must be tactical.

Why are there three completely different perspectives on the same question? It’s simple. I asked the management team to identify strategic issues before they had a common definition of strategy.

Strategy Defined

An effective strategy definition should clearly distinguish between strategy and tactics. To that end, consider the following:

Strategy is the big decisions that senior managers make to respond to or anticipate changes in the market or the competitive environment. Everything else is tactics.

Notice that this definition lays out a much clearer concept of strategy than the typical “strategy is long term, and tactics are short term” paradigm. It sets strategy apart from tactics on two key dimensions:

1. Decisions vs. actions
2. External vs. internal perspective

A definition like this fosters a strategic mindset. When used as a filter, it will help keep tactical, internal issues from distracting your strategy-development efforts.

Portfolio versus Product Strategy

Portfolio strategy seeks to answer the question, “What business should I be in?” Whereas product strategy seeks to answer the question, “How will I compete in my business?” See the figure below.

Portfolio strategy (also sometimes called corporate strategy) defines the scope of a company. Decisions to:

• Start a company,
• Acquire or develop a new product line or business unit,
• Increase or decrease investment in an existing business, and
• Shut down or sell a business

are all examples of portfolio strategy decisions.  Commitments to individual lines of businesses and the financial objectives for each are the output of portfolio strategy. This output serves as an input to product strategy, which is also sometimes called business-unit strategy. Decisions to

• Segment the business’ market,
• Include or exclude market segments,
• Select vectors of differentiation,
• Establish market positions, plus
• Develop, market, and retire products

are all examples of product-strategy decisions.

Portfolio decisions require broad exposure to market opportunities plus awareness of the capabilities across your entire company.  The responsibility for determining which businesses to pursue typically belongs to someone at the enterprise level with a corporate development or strategy title.

On the other hand, product-strategy decisions require relentless focus and attention to the market and competitive environment in which the business unit operates.  The responsibility for determining how to compete is usually assigned to a business unit’s product management team. 

What Makes a Strategy Value-Based?

Put your management team in a room. Hand them each a small piece of paper. Then, ask them to write down what they want out of a value-based strategy.

What do you think you’ll get?

Most likely, you’ll get a chorus of something like, “More customers at higher prices.” It’s no surprise that everyone seems to know exactly what they want from a value-based strategy.

Now imagine that same exercise. Only this time, you ask them, “What is a value-based strategy?”

Now, what do you think you’ll get?

This time, the harmony is not so obvious. On those sheets of paper, you’ll probably get a cacophony of ideas like those shown below.

What may sound like noise is actually a great start. All these are part of a value-based strategy. But what you’re looking for is a clear, holistic definition that you can use to guide the organization’s value-based strategy decision-making and implementation.

If you were to ask the group to summarize these ideas into key themes, you’d be looking at something like these four:

1. Economic value for the customer
2. More value than the competition
3. Fair, profitable compensation
4. Deliberate

Now you’re getting somewhere. These themes tell you a lot about what a value-based strategy entails. Let’s take a closer look at each and then try to tie it all together.

Economic Value for the Customer

This value-strategy theme tells you that the customer defines value. Therefore, you’ll need to define that customer very clearly. Market segmentation will not be an off-the-cuff decision.

Also, capital equipment buyers buy only to make a profit. Profitability is the lens through which they define value. If you intend to pursue a value-based strategy, you’ll need to understand how your equipment affects your customers’ economics.

More Value than the Competition

Your customers measure your value relative to the alternatives in the market. A value-based strategy seeks to create more value than those alternatives.

Your competitive intelligence efforts will need to go beyond reading competitors’ websites and reviewing stale win-loss reports. You must develop an understanding of your competitors’ ability to create value that rivals your understanding of your own.

Fair, Profitable Compensation

As an equipment supplier, you’re entitled to a portion of the value that you provide your customers. Your fair compensation is defined as the maximum that the market will bear in the context of your competitive environment.

A value-based strategy is interesting only if it enables you to make more profit. Therefore, your products must produce acceptable profitability when they are sold for fair compensation.

Deliberate

Consistently achieving the returns promised by a value-based strategy isn’t an ad hoc endeavor. It’s a deliberate decision to make defining, creating, and marketing customer value a core competency. The decision to adopt a value-based strategy is going to affect the way you

• Define and select customers,
• Define and develop products, and
• Market, price, and sell those products.

There’s nothing casual about it.

Bringing It All Together

Put these four themes together, and you get your clear, holistic, value-based strategy definition.

Value-based strategy is a product strategy that deliberately creates more economic value for the target customer than alternative offerings and then extracts fair, profitable compensation for that value.

It’s only twenty-nine words. But it contains everything you need to guide your quest for more customers at higher prices.

Supporting Strategies

For supporting strategies, the fundamental question is ‘How will I support the portfolio and product strategies?” See the figure below.

Supporting strategies include

• Sales strategy,
• Marketing strategy,
• Engineering strategy,
• Manufacturing strategy,
• Supply-chain strategy,
• Service strategy,
• Information-system strategy,
• Human-resources strategy, and
• Financing strategy.

Each of these functional strategies is in support of the portfolio and product strategies. Therefore, they cannot be developed until portfolio and product strategies have been completed. It’s the connection to portfolio and product strategies that give supporting strategies an outside-in perspective.

This is a copy of the original source: https://tekcess.com/lessons/what-is-strategy/

I agree on many points from Andy Jones in his article (below) where he made a good point in the end about somewhat decoupling product management from one very defined role – instead, perhaps taking this more inclusive as a broader culture and a team approach.

Andy Jones about what makes a good Product Manager. (Source)

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on product at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, and have advised dozens of other companies on the role of growth and product. Now, as an investor at Unusual Ventures, I get exposure to an even broader collection of companies, and the product cultures within them. Despite that exposure, there is a lot about the role of product that I still don’t understand. But what I can say for sure is that there are as many philosophies on the role of a product manager (PM) as there are letters in the alphabet. And we’re nowhere near getting to a point of agreement on the basic question of, “What makes for a great product manager?”

The confusion surrounding expectations has always stood out to me as one of the most unique and challenging aspects about this role. If you ask an engineer what they want from a product manager, they’ll give you an answer from their perspective. Some might say, “I want them to do all the stuff I don’t want to do, like take meeting notes.” Others might say, “I want them to be proficient with SQL, so that they can pull data.” Or, “I want somebody with good design sense.” Then, if you ask a designer what they want in a PM, you’ll probably get a different set of answers. Same thing when asking marketing or an executive of the company. If you ask the PM themselves (or Twitter for that matter) what they think a PM’s job is, you’ll get yet another set of perspectives.

These completely different expectations make the PM job very difficult relative to most other positions because what makes for a great PM can’t be narrowed down to one or two objective measures. PMs have a broader set of definitions and expectations to live up to. If you view each of these expectations as a set of circles, the world’s greatest PMs are those who are very good at a combination of these overlapping expectations. For example, you may have a PM who’s really great at writing SQL queries, which might earn them the respect of an engineer. But they also need to be excellent at conducting customer interviews and reflecting the voice of the customer to really impress designers. Ideally, you’d find somebody with an overlap of these skills. A baseline set of expectations for a junior to mid level product manager might look like this:

 

To make things even more complicated, these expectations can also vary from company to company. Some companies don’t even want to have product managers. That’s how conflicted the industry feels about the product management role. However, at the risk of being too prescriptive, I’ve laid out my framework for PM skills development below.

Foundational Skills

In my opinion, below are the most basic set of skills that a Product Manager should master in order to establish their role within a team:

• Create Requirements — They can create clear product requirements that satisfy the preferences of the engineers and designers they work with (i.e. it unblocks design and engineering). There are many different approaches to product requirements, so there shouldn’t be a religion around a particular style. What matters most is that design and engineering feel enabled by the requirements a PM produces.
• Customer feedback — They can bring together basic customer insights through customer interviews, reading customer service tickets, etc. They do an adequate job of reflecting the baseline expectations of the customer they’re building the product for based on an explicit set of requests from the customer (e.g. the customer says a part of the product is broken).
• Data insights– They have some basic data proficiency where they can look at the data related to their product and potentially use that data to make decisions. They will have working knowledge of data languages like SQL and know how to use popular business intelligence tools like Looker, Google Analytics, and so on.
• Run Meetings — They can run effective meetings with the team. That includes setting the agenda and tracking action items. For foundational abilities, this does not include driving decisions within the context of product meetings as driving decisions is more common amongst senior product leaders. I’ll touch on this more in a moment.

 

From what I’ve seen, having this baseline set of skills means you can be average-to-good and generally command some reasonable amount of respect from cross-functional peers in engineering and design. Then there are the additional skills that separate a beginner PM with foundational skills from a more experienced PM with intermediate capabilities.

Intermediate PM

To be an intermediate PM, you also need to layer on the following skills on top of the prior set:

• Customer insights. Beyond collecting the plainly stated forms of customer feedback, this means deeply understanding the problems/needs of a customer and how that customer has historically solved those problems or met their needs. This PM can then diagnose how the product he/she is building will solve the customer’s unmet needs.
• Basic design knowledge. Good PMs have working design knowledge so that they can distinguish between bad, mediocre, and good design. This predominantly comes down to UX fundamentals and not advanced topics like color theory. Does it require too many taps/clicks? Is the product copy unclear? Does it meet the stipulated customer needs? Is the cognitive load too high? Is the information hierarchy correct? These are the sorts of questions that a good product manager will ask when working through prototypes.

 

Exceptional PM

To be an exceptional PM, you must combine the previously mentioned skills with a few more skills. This person can operate at the executive level or be the product lead on the biggest, most important product initiatives within a company.

• Customer Innovation. This PM not only knows the explicit customer requests and has intimate knowledge of the customer’s needs, but can introduce new products or features that exceeds the customer’s expectations and innovates on the customer’s behalf.
• Vision and Strategy. Exceptional PMs can also internalize founder-level vision for the company and turn that vision into an actionable strategy. They have the most keen line of sight into the series of products/features that need to be built to achieve the founder’s vision. And once they have the vision and strategy clearly understood and explained to their team, they can enforce great execution against the vision and strategy.
• Broker hard decisions. The best product managers are those that can also drive a team toward making a high quality decision in a world of uncertainty. Foundational and intermediate PMs can arrange and run the meeting, but aren’t necessarily great at driving a product team towards a decision in difficult situations. The best PMs are those that everyone else in the room looks to when making a hard decision and they typically make the best tradeoff decisions given the circumstances.

 

As you can see, the requirements for becoming an exceptional product manager are high and numerous. Going back to the original venn diagram analogy, exceptional product managers need to have a lot of overlapping skills and each function within the company places particular emphasis on some of those skills. Engineers might assess a PM based on data proficiency and quality of requirements, design might assess based on customer-centricity and some degree of design thinking, while executives may assess a PM based on the ability to lead a product team through complex initiatives and fidelity of vision and strategy. Across the board, everyone is expecting a PM to be a good decision maker.

 

A needle in a haystack?

That said, it’s no surprise to me that I often hear founders gripe about how they can’t find great product managers. They often say they only come across average PMs. As part of that, I arm them with the above framework so that they can be more specific when it comes to critiquing the caliber of their product managers, in particular once they’ve adjusted their expectations for the level of seniority.

When I dig in more deeply, what they are really saying is that it’s very hard for them to find product managers with the exceptional PM qualities of customer innovation, clarity of vision and strategy, and ability to make hard decisions. Unfortunately for PMs, most founders expect them to have the skillset of an exceptional PM, regardless of their level of experience. This triumvirate of skills (customer innovation, vision and strategy, and ability to make hard decisions) is what I call “Founder’s Feel”.

For example, when Facebook was working on Messenger, it first started out as an integrated messaging app as part of the web client. One day, Mark Zuckerberg declared that it must be made a standalone mobile app and that Facebook users would be required to download it if they wanted to chat directly with one another. That wasn’t an obvious decision at the time, certainly to most of the rank and file employees, yet it was the correct decision given the pressure Facebook was feeling amongst a growing collection of competing messaging apps. Facebook was being unbundled by competing products so they decided to get ahead of it and unbundle themselves. This is the sort of decision-making that great founders make and, sometimes, exceptional product managers can make as well.

I’ll give you another example from my time at Wealthfront. We had just launched our mobile app and the number one source of customer feedback we were getting was that customers wanted to see their daily returns front and center in the mobile app. In other words, customers wanted to be able to log in and see whether their account was up or down relative to the previous day, and they wanted that front and center in the app. I remember telling our product manager at the time that we were never going to do that. The PM looked at me like I was an alien and kept repeating that customers were asking for the feature.

I explained that customers were asking for that feature based on what they thought Wealthfront was at that point in time, which was a tool to manage their investments. But what we were going to be a few years into the future would be their holistic money manager where we would handle their financial planning, banking, investing and so on. Holistic money management is not about showing daily returns because whether the market goes up or down 1% per day does not matter in the long run. Most customers were investing and planning for something several years or even decades down the road. I pointed out earlier that a great product manager understands customer feedback first and foremost. But an exceptional PM knows how to contextualize that customer need within the broader company vision and strategy, and then decide whether or not to implement what the customer is asking for.

Fast forward a couple years, we took daily returns and relegated it to a lower position within the app and put long-term financial planning front and center for the customer. Eventually, we saw that the savings of customers who engaged in that long-term financial planning feature went up by a double digit percentage. Sometimes, listening to explicit requests from the customer can lead you in the wrong direction, as would have been the case here.

Developing “Founder’s Feel”

So what does it take to develop “Founder’s Feel” in order to become an exceptional product manager? How does one go about building strong instincts around customer innovation, a vision for the future, and a knack for making high quality decisions that others don’t necessarily see? The bedrock of it is in knowing the customer better than anyone else.

The way I think of it is that you’re collecting unstructured data every time you have a conversation with a customer. It’s not structured like the data you retrieve from a database. Rather, you’re looking for structure (i.e. patterns) in the data that only becomes apparent once you’ve had enough customer conversations. For example, imagine that an insight from a customer conversation is a data point that you plotted on some nebulous graph, like I’ve shown below. Each time you have a conversation you collect insights and start plotting them into groups based on similarities/themes. Once you’ve had enough conversations, the themes start to cluster around common insights or customer needs.

 

Once you hone in on the clusters they start to make sense to you and “feel” obvious, especially after you’ve had enough conversations with a customer. In the below example, each cluster outlined in red could lead to a meaningful product decision.

 

Each time you talk to a customer, you capture unstructured data. If you have enough conversations with customers, that unstructured data starts to take shape in the form of extremely strong instincts around potential for customer innovation and product vision that seems less intuitive to others. That’s what “Founder’s Feel” is.

The founders of Wealthfront talked to hundreds of initial customers face-to-face and read most customer service tickets from the first couple thousand customers. Several years after founding the company, the founders continue to read customer service tickets and talk to customers face-to-face. When you compare their ability to make a decision in an uncertain environment vs. a product manager who hasn’t talked to any customers, there’s no comparison to be made. They have a “feel” for what to build (and not build) for Wealthfront customers that is unmatched due in large part to the sheer volume of unstructured information they have collected over many years while building the company.

Closing Thoughts

Returning to the original question: What makes for a good PM? The answer is it’s really complicated.

To start with, good PMs can navigate ambiguous expectations and can apply their skills based on the team’s needs. They know the different levers to pull depending on who they’re working with and can adapt accordingly. One thing that can’t be sacrificed is knowing what the customer needs better than anyone else. This means doing customer research, design testing, and diving into customer support tickets, spending time sitting with the customer support team, and so on.

If you’re just getting started as a PM, focus on building the foundational skills I outlined above. That’ll be the foundation through which your cross-functional peers see the value you add. With time and practice, you can hone the additional skill set I’ve outlined that can make you an intermediate or exceptional PM. But if you’re not good at the fundamentals to begin with, you’ll lose the respect and trust of your team and they might wonder, “What is this person’s job exactly?”

For senior PMs, you have to have the ability to broker decisions in situations where it’s hard to make the right call and drive alignment around the vision and strategy. In addition to that, you can weigh in on product decisions using some working design knowledge. I’m not talking about weighing in on square corners versus rounded corners. I’m talking about the overall flow of products, if the experience is clear or cumbersome, and if it meets or exceeds customer’s needs or expectations.

Finally, the rarest of PMs develop their own “Founder’s Feel” — i.e. a knack for making the best strategic decision that’s informed by a top rate understanding of the business, customer, and the market. They know how to work under uncertain conditions and get a sense of the bigger picture. Those exceptional PMs can translate the founder or CEO’s vision into a clear execution plan.

With all this in mind, though,my default position is that the vast majority of product teams are better off being led by a small group of cross-functional owners as opposed to the outdated notion of “the PM as the CEO of the product”. The most effective product teams are those where the leads on Product, Design, and Engineering (and sometimes other functions like marketing, customer service, and data science) are all mutually bought in to being experts at understanding the vision, the customer, and have shared ownership of the outcome. This means that a Product Manager should often defer to Engineering or Design when key decisions need to be made, specifically when those other functions are better fit to make those decisions. And that’s often the case! I would argue that a great PM also shows “Founder’s Feel” by referring to the right person in the room to make the decision.

In my experience, small group decision making typically leads to vastly better outcomes and if you have a true product leader, that person emerges naturally just like any leader does. There’s no explicit conversation about “who is in charge” of the group. Rather, they do such a good job that the peers around them see it, they know it, and there’s not a discussion about it. That person simply rises to the occasion. It’s the person that everyone in the room naturally turns to for the hard decisions and the mark of an exceptional PM.

I believe frameworks are not the silver bullet we hope they are, however, they do help to be structured and help to be sure you think about the major factors. 

Below is a collection of my top  16 Frameworks I found useful for Product Managers. 

1. Story Telling

Storytelling is actually the oldest way to deliver a message – or to explain the world. Ancient people used storytelling. The Bible uses storytelling. Your uncle uses storytelling. Product Managers use storytelling. You’re using storytelling for yourself and your business, even if you don’t call it exactly that. Its is the foundation for effective communication in general and a solid foundation for a couple of the frameworks listed below as well.

Storytelling at it’s most basic structure is about a Situation / Problem (Hero and Enemy), Needs (Conflict and Painpoints) and a Solution. Well, that’s right there 3 integral elements to be managed by Product Managers.

If we follow this structure it makes it easy for the listener to follow.  Story is “a thing that does” rather than “a thing that is”. It is a tool with measurable utility rather than an object for aesthetic admiration.

See also:

TEDx: Storytelling: The Secret Key To Leadership

The Basics Of Leadership Storytelling

Why Leadership Storytelling Is Important

In its basic form these are the Steps:

Step 1: You — What, Who is this story about? 

Step 2: Need — Problems, painpoints, Needs, Issues, Challenges

Step 3: Go — Cross the threshold into ‘the upside down’

Step 4: Search and Alternatives — How can “you” achieve your goal?

Step 5: Find a Solution — The meeting with the Goddess

Step 6: Take / Apply

Step 7: Return  (How does this relate to the Goal)

Step 8: Wrapping up

more details 

2 Product Design: CIRCLES Method by Lewis Lin

In my mind the Circles Method is based on the above storytelling concept. Very similar to DIGS, just adapted for it’s purpose.

The CIRCLES Method is a framework on what makes a complete, thoughtful response to any product design. It’s an aid that prevents us from forgetting a step. You can also think of it as a checklist or guideline.

The 5W’s & H also help product manager in asking a right question in the Comprehend Situation stage and gather information about the problem before jumping into solution or some conclusion.

• What is it?
• Who is it for?
• Why do they need it?
• When is it available?
• Where is it available?
• How does it work?”

Here is a walkthrough of one example about: How would you design a feature for Amazon Echo?.

3: Metrics AARRR: Startup Metrics for Pirates

A very helpful framework by Dave McClure, 500 Startups for product managers who need to define success metrics for any product or feature. 

• Acquisition — How users find you / where or what channels do users come from? E.G Tracking customer signups for a service.
• Activation — An initial experience great experience?
• Retention — Do they come back and re-visit over time?
• Revenue — Can you monetize any of this behavior?
• Referral — Do they like it enough to tell their friends?

Lewis C. Lin  way to explain this framework is similar, just shorter without the Referral part. AARM Method

4: Metrics for UX design:  HEART

The HEART framework designed by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team.

The details are here

5: 4 Quadrants Time Management: Matrix

by Stephen Covey

We live in a time pressured world where it is common to have multiple overlapping commitments that all require immediate attention now. Urgency is no long reserved for special occasions, they are an everyday occurrences. Missing deadlines is not the path to advancement or even good job reviews. So how can one manage the flood of responsibilities, do excellent work and maintain a positive frame of mind? The Covey time management grid is a simple yet effective method of organizing your priorities. As you can see from the grid below, there are four quadrants organized by urgency and importance. 

Before responding to any request, filter them through the  Matrix.

• Quadrant I – important deadlines with high urgency
  The first quadrant contains tasks and responsibilities that need immediate attention.
• Quadrant II – long-term development and strategizing
  The second quadrant is for items that are important without requiring immediate action. Covey points out that this quadrant should be used for long-term strategizing.
• Quadrant III – distractions with high urgency
  The third quadrant is reserved for tasks that are urgent, without being important. Covey recommends minimizing or even eliminating these tasks as they do not contribute to your output. Delegation is also an option here.
• Quadrant IV – activities with little to no value
  The fourth and last quadrant focuses on tasks and responsibilities that do not yield any value—items that are unimportant and not urgent. These time wasters should be eliminated at any costs.

The Bottom Line: Do Important things first!

Using The Matrix

The matrix has many applications, two will be suggested here. The first and most obvious use of the matrix is to take your current ‘to-do’ list and sort all the activities into the appropriate grid. Then, assess the amount of time you have to accomplish the lists and, if necessary, reallocate activities.

The second approach is a one week assessment strategy. Make six copies of the matrix  and use one matrix for each day of the week, listing all activities and time spent. At the end of the week, Combine the five individual day data onto one summary matrix (number 6) and calculate the percent of time in each matrix. Then evaluate how well your time is spent and whether you work load needs to be reorganized.

6: 5 Why’s Framework

How to get requirement right? What is the exact problem? Are you solving the right problem? This 5 Why’s framework helps product manager to get to the root cause easier.

7: Prioritization

Once you decide the list of features or request which you plan to work, but wondering which one to pick or test first, below prioritization frameworks help you in that:

• Weighted Scoring
• Impact vs Effort
• Weighted scoring
• Kano Model

Your good product management skills will come into play during the process.  Suggestions regardless of the prioritization method you choose:

• Approach prioritization as a team activity; not only is does it create buy-in on the team, you get different perspectives. It’s also a lot more fun.
• Limit the number of items you are prioritizing – focus on the biggest items rather than the details.
• Categorize and group initiatives together into strategic themes (for example, “improving satisfaction” for a particular persona would be a good way to group).
• Before you begin prioritizing, it’s helpful if you understand the customer value for each initiative. The customer value should be rooted in evidence that you’ve gathered from customers rather than your opinions.
• Before you begin, have a rough estimate of cost. Even T-shirt sizing of “small” “medium” and “large” will be helpful during the process.

Read more https://www.productplan.com/strategies-prioritize-product-features/

8: The Four Ps Model / 4P’s of Marketing 

4 P’s framework helps in putting the right product at the right price in the right place at the right time.

• Product – The first of the Four Ps of marketing is a product. A product can be either a tangible good or an intangible service that fulfills a need or want of consumers. Whether you sell custom pallets and wood products or provide luxury accommodations, it’s imperative that you have a clear grasp of exactly what your product is and what makes it unique before you can successfully market it.
• Price – Once a concrete understanding of the product offering is established we can start making some pricing decisions. Price determinations will impact profit margins, supply, demand, and marketing strategy. Similar (in concept) products and brands may need to be positioned differently based on varying price points, while price elasticity considerations may influence our next two Ps.
• Promotion – We’ve got a product and a price now it’s time to promote it. Promotion looks at the many ways marketing agencies disseminate relevant product information to consumers and differentiate a particular product or service. Promotion includes elements like advertising, public relations, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, video marketing and more. Each touch point must be supported by a well-positioned brand to truly maximize return on investment.
• Place – Often you will hear marketers saying that marketing is about putting the right product, at the right price, at the right place, at the right time. It’s critical then, to evaluate what the ideal locations are to convert potential clients into actual clients. Today, even in situations where the actual transaction doesn’t happen on the web, the initial place potential clients are engaged and converted is online.

9: 5 C’s of Product Pricing

What is the best price for your products or services? This 5 C’s framework helps to determine the optimum price tag for your product.

• Cost
  • This is the most obvious component of pricing decisions. You obviously cannot begin to price effectively until you know your cost 
• Compatibility / Company objective
  • Is your pricing approach compatible with your marketing and sales objectives? 
• Customer
  • The ultimate judge of whether your price delivers a superior value is the customer. 
• Competitor
  • Think about the buyers point of view
• Channel: Distribution Channel
  • Think about the “middlemen”, margins to motivate, value-add they bring.

more details here

10: REAN : Digital Marketing Strategy Model

The question behind this model:  “How am I going to reach/engage/activate/nurture my potential or current customers?

What should your digital strategy look like? How should you market your product? Are you using the right channels? The REAN model, popularised by Steve Jackson helps product manager or product marketers to answers those questions easier.

Download a free guide on how to run the perfect REAN workshop.

11: AIDA(R) Framework

The AIDA framework is also popularly used to optimize marketing channel and communication. It describes the effect of advertising media and helps to explain how an advertisement or marketing communications message engages and involves consumers in brand choice.

• Awareness: creating brand awareness or affiliation with your product or service.
• Interest: generating interest in the benefits of your product or service, and sufficient interest to encourage the buyer to start to research further.
• Desire: for your product or service through an ’emotional connection’, showing your brand personality. Move the consumer from ‘liking’ it to ‘wanting it’.
• Action: CTA – Move the buyer to interact with your company and taking the next step ie. downloading a brochure, making the phone call, joining your newsletter, or engaging in live chat etc.
• Retention: We all know that this is key to upsell, cross-sell, referrals, Advocacy, and the list goes on.. as companies are also focussing on LTV.

The additional “R” is sometimes added by some Marketers to show the importance of ongoing relationship building.

More details here

12: RFM : Customer Segmentation Model

The term RFM stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value and it describes a marketing approach for analyzing customer value which is becoming increasingly popular in the e-commerce industry where businesses are starting to focus more on retention strategies. It’s a good customer segmentation technique based on user behavior. It groups customers based on their history how recently, how often and how much.

• Recency
• Frequency
• Monetization

more detail here.

13: Porter 5 Forces

Porter’s Five Forces is a simple but powerful tool for understanding the competitiveness of your product, and for identifying your strategy’s potential profitability.  It helps you for product strategy & roadmap planning.

• Threat of New Entry. Your position can be affected by people’s ability to enter your market. So, think about how easily this could be done.
• Threat of Substitution. This refers to the likelihood of your customers finding a different way of doing what you do.
• Supplier Power. This is determined by how easy it is for your suppliers to increase their prices. 
• Buyer Power. How easy it is for buyers to drive your prices down.
• Competitive Rivalry: This looks at the number and strength of your competitors.

By thinking about how each force affects you, and by identifying its strength and direction, you can quickly assess your product position in the market. You can then look at what strategic changes you need to make to deliver long-term profit.

more details on how to use it here.

14: Business Model Canvas

The business model canvas is a great tool to help you understand a business model in a straightforward, structured way. Using this canvas will lead to insights about the customers you serve, what value propositions are offered through what channels, and how your company makes money.  It can be applied perfectly well for a product where it provides a high-level, comprehensive view of the various strategic details required to successfully bring a product to market. The exact ingredients may vary, but these are some of the typical components included:

• Customer segments—Who is going to use this product?
• Product value propositions—What is this going to do for the customer to make their life/job better?
• Revenue streams—How will the company make money from this product?
• Channels—How will the product be sold or distributed?
• Customer relationships—What is the success and support strategy for new customers?
• Key partners—What other companies or individuals are part of the development and go-to-market strategy?
• Key activities—What must happen internally to release this product?
• Key resources—What people, materials and budget are required to pull this off?
• Cost structure—How much will it cost to develop, manufacture, distribute, and support the product?

A detailed guide can be found here: https://www.businessmodelsinc.com/about-bmi/tools/business-model-canvas/

15: STAR / SOAR (Storytelling)

STAR or SOAR is a popular method to tell stories about accomplishments in general and of course also during interviews.

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

I do like the SOAR framework which is very similar, however, it follows the storytelling methodology better. It is more engaging.

• Situation
• Objective and Obstacles
• Action
• Result

Situation

This is where you set the scene. You’re telling a story and it also pays to know your audience. What are the relevant details that make the story pop and what does your audience care about? Consider similar situations your audience finds themselves in today. They’re listening to you because they need someone or something to be the solution to a challenge, so they’ll imagine you know the solution if you solved a similar problem in the past.

“Our 2020 was plagued with unsuccessful product launches. We were way off on the demand and our go-to-market strategy was too rigid, which made changes too costly, so our launches fell short of our goals.”

Objective and Obstacles

What was your objective and what was in the way? Again, you want this to align with your audience.

“Doing more of the same was a recipe for failure, but it’s not easy to make changes in a large organization. As a Product Director accountable for successful launches, I needed to convince my VP of what I knew we needed- more agile software and a different set of market indicators to guide the product.”

Action

What action was taken? Dramatizing what it took to get this result is critical, make sure they understand what it took. For interviews elaborate on the combination of hard work and skill it took to make this happen, to convince your audience about past changes needed for a product elaborate on what tasks and resources were needed to overcome the obstacle.

“So I conducted market research and contracted with a data scientist to identify the most accurate market indicators of the last 5 years, then I demoed 5 different tools to see which software gave us the flexibility we needed. I pitched my VP and she gave me the go-ahead to retrain my team, then we got to work.”

Result

For interviews, you can refer back to the result on your resume and expand on it. This is where you can talk about the impact of that result on the company, team members, etc. 

“The team was excited about the new challenge and I was right about the new market indicators. Our product ended up 8x more profitable than any other product that year. While I led the effort I can’t take all the credit- my VP went out on a limb for me and my team executed flawlessly. I’m really proud of what we accomplished.”

16:  DIGS

A slightly adapted version to STAR is the DIGS framework by Lewis C. Lin which also helps to answer the behavioral question in a structured and impactful way. It is closer to the storytelling methodology and emphasis on creating “higher” stakes.

• Dramatize the situation
• Indicate the alternative
• Go through what you did
• Summarize your project

17: 5Es Framework

Used for building the different stages of the customer experience. It can be used to help uncover product improvement opportunities easily.

Entice: What event triggers a user to enter the UX funnel?

Enter: What are the first few steps in the UX funnel?

Engage: What task(s) is the user trying to accomplish?

Exit: How does the user complete the task?

Extend: What follow-up actions occur after the user completes the task?

This applies not only to people but also to the tangible results of what e.g Product Managers say “yes” to. Every second of every work day, a Product Manager is saying “yes” to something affecting results.

Effective product management often comes down to making the best choices possible with the limited resources we have. To be successful, a product manager will often have to say no — to ideas, to suggestions, and to requests or even urgent demands from both internal stakeholders and external customers. This may sound very familiar: “This super important customer needs that feature.”

No customer can be more important than a good product.  The road to consulting-ware is signposted by “Just this one for just this customer”. It leads to the perfect product, for just one customer, provided you keep doing what they say. The problem is: Delivering extra value to one customer comes at the cost of taking value away from many others. Saying yes to one has an opportunity cost.

Every decision a product manager makes has a result on the product. Whether we say yes or no to something has important implications. To highlight the other and probably even more important reason to say no, I copied a fantastic article below, because I believe this is the basis to be more productive and with better products as a result:

 This is an original Article from Medium (source link below)

MindTheProduct 2018 – Roadmaps Relaunched by C. Todd Lombardo
C. Todd has been tinkering and doodling since he was four years old. Originally trained as a scientist, he’s had job titles ranging from scientist, to engineer, to product manager, to designer, and even professor.
Part1

Part2

MindTheProduct 2018 – Product Market Fit by DanOlsen
Dan wrote the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook and he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product.

MindTheProduct 2018 Find The Product Innovation by TomCoates
Tom is the co-founder of Thington, a concierge for your smart home or office, which was recently acquired by Eero.

How to be Indistractable? by Nir Eyal
Nir founded two tech companies and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the bestselling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

MindTheProduct 2018 When Innovation Programs fail by BrantCooper
Brant Cooper helps organizations big and small innovate. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur and has over 20 years experience helping companies bring high-growth products to market. His startup career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure. Brant previously authored The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, the first purpose-written book to discuss Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts

MindTheProduct 2018 – Ethics in Product Management by Mariha Hay
Mariah leads eight cross functional domestic and international product teams at Pluralsight. Under her leadership Pluralsight successfully launched its technology learning platform which today serves more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies which has led to a recent IPO. Mariah has spent her career teaching and advocating human-centered design. In 2017 she was awarded the Excellence in Product award by the Women Tech Council for her outstanding product leadership and success in promoting practices coupled with organizational and philosophy design for measurable business impact.

MindTheProduct 2018 – Evaluate Product by Sarah Tavel
At Benchmark, Sarah invests in consumer businesses and the consumerization of IT. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, and a Product Lead for search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality at Pinterest.

Below Article is from here

What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2018

BY EMILY TATE ON JULY 19, 2018

This year #mtpcon San Francisco brought together 1,600 product people from 33 countries and 37 states across the US to learn, share, and connect over our craft. After a day of workshops and leadership discussions, the main conference presented 10 amazing speakers who shared their insights and gave the crowd new ideas to think about and new techniques to apply when they got home.

Embrace the Awkward

Kicking off the day with his annual opening remarks, Martin Eriksson reminded us of his 20-plus years of product management credentials before admitting that, despite the success the rest of us see, he still feels like an impostor. Over half the room said they feel the same way and Martin says this is because we are generalists in a specialists’ world. And while this can make us feel like impostors, it can actually be our superpower! We know that we don’t know everything, and that lets us ask the right questions and connect the dots within our teams.

Taking Care of Your Team

Serial author and Stanford lecturer Christina Wodtke started the morning session with an inspiring look at team dynamics, and encouraged us to actively manage our team culture. She walked us through the behaviors of different types of teams (work groups, teams, learning teams, and mindful teams) and gave us ways to level up our team’s effectiveness, regardless of where we currently sit on the ladder. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t take care of our teams, we can’t change the world.

Managing our Cognitive Biases

“This is a room of really smart people,” began Cindy Alvarez of Microsoft. “But it doesn’t really matter because your cognitive biases will mess everything up anyways.” Since we can’t “uncognitive bias” ourselves, we have to work around our biases as we build product. Cindy explained some how some common biases manifest themselves in our research, and then offered alternative ways to approach research to minimize the impact of these biases, by framing questions in different ways. Minimizing our bias allows us to truly understand what our customers need, and lets us strike things off our roadmap that don’t actually need to be there!

Stop Messing up Research

Atlassian’s Leisa Reichelt continued the conversation by asking: “Is bad user research better than no research?” With the trend of “customer obsessed” companies, everyone is talking to users. But it’s not uncommon to make mistakes in our research methods, so we make decisions based on bad information. She walked us through customer interviews, usability testing, and surveys, the common ways that we mess them up, and some better ways to approach them. But more importantly, she had us focus on why we mess up research, and challenged us to really give research its due. She encouraged us to ask our teams one question and hold ourselves accountable: “In the last six weeks, have you personally observed a customer using your product?”

Unlocking Product-Market Fit

Lean Product Playbook author Dan Olsen broke down a concept that tends to be oversimplified – product/market fit. He broke down the layers and said that many product teams spend too much time focused on the top two layers – the solution space. To really find product/market fit, we have to spend more time in the problem space, really understanding what problems our users have and how our value proposition is best placed to solve it. He outlined the Kano Model for mapping your product’s benefits, and gave a framework for evaluating where you want to compete.

Reimagine the Roadmap

“Why do we ship the wrong thing?” asked author and VP of product at Vempathy C. Todd Lombardo. We claim to “build, measure, learn”, but in reality, we “build, ship, build, ship, build, ship”. This phenomenon typically gets attributed to bad roadmaps. C. Todd shared some “letters to roadmaps” that have been written in his workshops, and they clearly show some strong feelings towards roadmapping as it commonly exists today. He encouraged us to rethink how we view roadmaps – not as a list of features and delivery dates, but as a way to communicate our strategy. He outlined the components of a product roadmap, and talked about focusing on themes. He closed by reminding us that product management is not project management – you might finish a project or a sprint, but your product is never done.

Managing Distractions

Behavioral designer Nir Eyal returned to the Mind the Product stage to ask “why are we so distracted these days?”. Is our technology to blame, or is there something deeper going on? When Nir wrote his best-selling book, Hooked, he wanted to help people to build products that were habit-forming in healthy ways. But over the years, distractions have increased, and becoming indistractable is now the superpower we strive for. With distraction and traction on the opposite ends of the spectrum, Nir offered tips on how to be more intentional with how we deal with them. He told us how to manage our internal triggers to distraction, make time for traction, and hack back our external triggers. At the end of the day, distraction is really a symptom of a deeper problem, but it does not happen to us. It is a choice, and we all have the power to fight distraction.

The Product Practitioner’s Oath

Mariah Hay, VP of product at Pluralsight, challenged us to think about ethics in product management. She posited that we have the best jobs in the world – we are problem finders and problem solvers. We also potentially have the most powerful jobs in the world, and if we’re not careful, we can quickly become problem creators. Ethics can be simpler to understand in situations that are life and death, but can be much harder in areas where the consequences aren’t so black and white. The problems we’re creating as an industry for the general public originate from a lack of ethical accountability. Mariah suggested a Product Practitioners Oath, that challenges us to find our blind spots, never weaponize our products, and be 200% accountable for ourselves and those around us.

Improving Innovation

Move The Needle CEO Brant Cooper spoke about the concept of innovation and how we can improve it. He talked about acting like an entrepreneur in the unknown, and using empathy, experimentation, and evidence. We as product managers have already absorbed these things into our work, so how do we improve innovation? Innovation teams are often asked to find breakthrough innovations, but attain the ROI of an existing product. That is not possible. By making some simple fixes to the ways we manage innovation, we can provide space for breakthroughs and propel ourselves toward our real goals.

Building Enduring Products

Benchmark General Partner Sarah Tavel posed the big question for consumer companies: “How do you maximize your chances of building an enduring, consumer product?”. At the core, it comes down to maximizing engagement. Growing users isn’t enough – to get engaged users, you need to grow users who are completing the core action of your product. You then need to retain your users, building your product to create accruing benefits and mounting loss. But to truly build an enduring product, you need to convert your users’ engagement into fuel to power your company forward by creating virtuous loops. When you find the opportunity for virtuous loops, you have to be intentional in maximizing that loop. By building all three levels of engagement, you create the foundation of an enduring product.

How to Find the Product

Making stuff is awesome. Finding bits of the world that are broken and finding ways to fix them is exciting. But many in our industry today don’t get this opportunity. When product designer Tom Coates started in the tech industry 25 years ago (apparently at the age of five, as he insists his age is 30), most everyone was an amateur creator, building from scratch. Today, most people enter the industry building and iterating on someone else’s product, and have the feeling that creating new ideas is something other people do.

Tom ended the day by reminding us that every one of us is capable of creating great ideas. But he also reminded us that while we can all create, ideas are not divine inspiration – they are a lot of hard work. While this may feel disheartening, it is exciting to realize that great ideas are not exclusive to demi-gods or mythical geniuses. He gave us a process to help find the problems we want to solve, and develop our ideas. But remember that this process is the beginning – not the end. Look for the product that opens the most doors, and makes things possible that weren’t possible before. Tom still believes in the future that we can create. Let’s be great. Let’s be good. And let’s have fun!

Thank You!

As we pack up and return to our offices, we say thank you to everyone who made this conference possible. Thank you to our sponsors, our volunteers, our speakers, and most importantly, our audience! This conference is not just about the content on stage – it is about building a community of people who want to build products that people love. And we couldn’t do that without the 1,600 people who came together to share their experiences and learn from each other.

If you missed out this year, don’t worry! Videos of the full talks will be coming to this site over the next few weeks. In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitterso you can be the first to know when tickets for next year go on sale!

According to Walker Info’s customer experience statistics list of 2017 , customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020.

That screams for how as Product Managers can we make sure that our products also focus on customer experience in order to stay competitive?

Creating memorable moments is equal to customer experience

I listened to the interview from Jordan Harbinger and Dan Heath & Chip Heath and thought that the concept of creating memorable moments is equal to customer experience and therefore can be applied to product experience in general which means this could help to add differentiation and win customers.

The core idea is nicely summarized in this book:

 “The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact”  by Chip and Dan Heath

And of course, there are companies out there who apply this in some way and fashion today. One example: Southwest Airline 

How to create memorable moments

Here an excerpt from the book/interview:

Imagine visiting Disney World with a Fitbit equivalent that counted our level of happiness throughout the day rather than steps.

“If we looked at the data that popped out at the end of your park visit, for the outright majority of those moments, you would have been happier sitting on your couch at home,” says Dan Heath, co-author of The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. “Because parks can be a pain in the butt! There are long lines, it’s inevitably 95 degrees and humid, everything’s expensive, there’s crowds everywhere. There’s a lot of nuisance involved. But then, six months later, you look back on your year, and you’re like, ‘You know that trip to Disney? That was one of the highlights of the year.’”

So how can something that wasn’t so great in the moment be looked back upon as the highlight of one’s experience?

The Peak-End Principle

Psychologists talk about the peak-end principle, which says that when we remember our experiences, ultimately what we remember are moments — not a beginning-to-end, second-to-second playback, but a highlight reel of moments.

There’s a logic to which moments we remember — often the peaks, the end, and the transition points.

“What we remember when we’re remembering Disney is the great adrenaline rush after a roller coaster or that cute moment when Goofy came over to your little boy and patted him on the head and gave him a treat,” says Dan. “Those moments stick to memory, and all that moment-by-moment sweatiness and irritability just fades out.”

Accentuate the Positive

While not all defining moments are positive, Dan (and his brother Chip, the other co-author) accentuate the positive for the purposes of The Power of Moments to teach us how to use these principles of psychology in a way that’s helpful to ourselves and others.

“Nobody in the world is looking to create more of these negative peaks!” says Dan.

The Defining Moment Formula

When categorizing the defining moments we tend to remember, Dan and Chip came up with these four to create the defining moment formula:

Elevation. Moments that lift us above the everyday. They spark positive emotions like joy, delight, and engagement. Think birthday parties, athletic competitions, cocktails with friends at sunset.

Pride. Most of us tend to collect a souvenir or two of moments we associate with pride in our lives. Think certificates, awards, trophies, letters of approval, or things we’ve created — ways of commemorating great work we’ve done or talents we have.

Insight. Moments that rewire our understanding of ourselves or our world. Think epiphanies, realizations, and “ah-hah!” moments.

Connection. Moments that tie us closer with other people. Think personal relationships, or bonding moments like product launches or deep conversations.

We reversed Dan’s presentation of insight and pride to spell out EPIC for ease of remembrance — just in case this part of the podcast doesn’t make it into your long-term roster of memories.

Peak Moments Don’t Create Themselves

“Great experiences hinge on peak moments,” says Dan. “So when we talk about experience, what we’re actually talking about are moments. But peak moments don’t create themselves. We have to invest in them. We have to create them.”

When we’re trying to create these defining moments for ourselves or others, Dan stresses it’s usually something personal that prevails over the flashy and overproduced.

Dan relates how Spanx founder Sara Blakely’s father would ask her and her siblings this question at the dinner table when she was growing up: “What did you guys fail at this week?”

“She said he would be disappointed if they had nothing to tell him,” says Dan. “That seems like a weird question. It’s almost like he’s encouraging failure. But of course the point was he wanted them to try the things they wanted to try and not be paralyzed because they may not be good at it at first or because they may not succeed. So he was trying to, in a sense, inoculate them against the sting of failure.

“A moment like that is, to me, a peak moment for kids. Just a question at the dinner table that gets them to look at the world — to look at the chance of failure in a slightly different way.”

Ritual as a Chapter Divider

Ritual is another powerful way to create peak moments we remember, as grief counselor Kenneth J. Doka demonstrated when giving a widow an elaborate un-marriage in front of an assembly of loved ones as a way for her to move on.

“A lot of the way we make meaning in our lives is precisely these kind of chapter dividers,” says Dan, “these moments that divide the old us from the new us. What was so powerful about the ceremony for her is it provided a specific day — a specific moment — when she could say, ‘Okay. As of this day, I’m ready.’ And that’s a great example of a peak moment that was created from scratch.”

On a larger scale, culture uses rituals to instill a sense of importance to events we want to remember, such as birthday parties, weddings, and funerals.

On a corporate scale, there’s often a conspicuous absence of ritual surrounding what might otherwise be a peak moment — like the first day of work in which the receptionist isn’t expecting us to arrive until the next week and maybe there’s not even a desk set up for us yet. Dan says this is how most companies miss out on an easy way to generate immediate goodwill and loyalty with new employees — and then he tells us how The Motley Fool does things the right way.

There is many examples where new companies in an existing market have better products, but they still don’t win.

Here is a good strategy which allows you to gain market share?

Strategy:

When there is competition in your market (which most likely always is) go for the new customers… Then your new customers convert your existing ones…one by one… not fast but with a good product slowly but surely…

Examples: Uber vs Lyft ; Facebook vs Myspace: New FB users tell their friends to check them out on FB… that’s how they slowly convert Myspace customers…   It’s better when your customers convert existing customers than if you tell you your customers to convert… that rarely works…