The Challenge

As a technology company, trade shows are the ultimate forcing function for all marketing collateral. Once the product is formally launched at the show, all web site content, data sheets, product photos and brochures have to be complete, accurate and ready for customer visibility. The product launch meetings are crucial to getting the core messaging right as it would be the foundation upon which all other content was created.

Product launch meetings were tense. The Product Manager presented the technical features of the product along with the competitive comparison. The Director of Marketing became obviously frustrated as he did not feel he was getting the right answers to his questions. With limited understanding of the technical aspects of the product, Marketing's questions centered around what problem was being solved for the customer. This core understanding was necessary to develop content around the customer benefits of the product. The Product Manager, steeped in technical understanding and submerged for 9 months with an engineering team developing the product, kept returning to the competitive features of why this product was better than the competition. Classic Product Management / Marketing conflict.

It got more tense. It got loud. Some meeting participants walked out of the room.

These meetings had been going on like this for years. Product Managers would provide the overview of the product on a feature by feature basis, comparing the technical features to the competition. The Marketing team wanted to deeply understand who the customer was and why they would care. They would end up yelling at each other. Recurring meetings would go on for weeks until the Marketing team was able to glean enough to piece together a customer value proposition that would act as the basis for marketing content.

Something had to change. Trade shows don't wait for your marketing copy to be finished and this process was not only frustrating, but took a significant amount of valuable time.

What is much worse, however, is missing innovative ways to solve the customer problem because Product Managers were not starting with the customer problem to be solved. The company was developing in spec war against competitive products, and this is no way to truly innovate.

As the new leader of the Product Management team, Shaun observed the friction between Product Management and Marketing during upcoming product launches, and identified that this was only a symptom to a much deeper problem: the lack of customer-centricity in the Product Management team.

The Solution

Transforming Thinking from 'What' is being built to ‘Why’

In the tech space, it is common for Product Managers to have technical backgrounds. In this case, quite a few Product Managers were ‘recovering’ engineers, and tend to naturally think about the product, work extremely close with engineering to create it, and become enamored with new technologies that allow addition of differentiating technical features. This is all well and good until a product is designed with amazing technology that ends up sitting on the shelf because it doesn't solve a customer problem. And when enormous capital and time is spent creating these products, inventory that doesn't move is a failure.

This problem was much deeper than finding a more efficient way to develop solid, customer-centric marketing content. To truly innovate, a complete transformation of thinking was needed with regards to product discovery. Operating in a highly competitive market, the tendency had been to focus on a competitive product and make one that was 'better'. This usually meant more features at the same or lower price. However, this is not innovation. Innovation comes from stepping back and seeking deep understanding of customer’s pain-points first and foremost.

Elevating Customer Centricity

The Product Management team was put through an intense three days of product management training. Two of the three days was spent to develop one sentence: a solid, customer-centric value proposition statement for the product portfolio. As previous engineers, the team was extremely adept at solving problems, and reorienting thinking around the creation of a value statement before solving problems seemed like a huge waste of time. The team was grilled for two days until an effective value statement from the customer’s perspective was created.

And then everything changed. For the better.

The product portfolio value statement became the guiding principle, the core mission, and the brand promise. It became the measuring stick to which all product and feature ideas were compared, and those that did not align were rejected. More importantly, this statement was used at the initiation of new product discovery, and it brought forth key questions:

1.  Who is this product for?

2. What are the customer's biggest pain points with this category of product and why?

3. How will we solve these pain points, and how can we do it better than anyone else?

4. How does this product align with our brand promise?

Then and only then would product requirements be authored.

Embedding Customer-Centricity into Process

To integrate this new way of thinking into process, the product requirement document template was modified to include the key questions listed above, ensuring all Product Managers answered these questions prior to drafting feature requirements. Starting any product or feature development with the clearly-articulated value proposition shifted thinking towards customer pain points and created more innovative ways to solve the customer problem.

In addition, the product launch presentation template was updated to start with answers to these key questions, and as a result, product launch meetings became exponentially more productive, less stressful and even fun. With the Marketing team now armed with the core value proposition up front, and a product that aligned to it, the copy writing process was now much more straight forward.

The Result

New products were now much more aligned to customer needs. Product Managers developed deeper empathy for the customer and their pain points. Product launches became streamlined, efficient and much less stressful as the Product Managers were now speaking in customer-centric language. The flywheel was now in motion, and with each success, started to spin faster.

Beginning with the end in mind and focusing on the customer problem to be solved might seem to be obvious looking back, but to a group of very technical Product Managers steeped in spec war in a highly competitive market that did the same, it was not. Learning about new approaches was the first step, but actually modifying process and continued Product Manager coaching was key to creating lasting change.