Content Matters

What makes a great product manager?

Most roles at technology companies are pretty easy to define. Software engineers write code. QA analysts test to ensure releases meet requirements. DBA’s set up and manage data schemas. Marketers market and sales reps sell. But ask the typical person to define the product manager role and they’ll struggle.

Perhaps they’ll say something like “they own the roadmap” or “they define the requirements”, which are certainly true, but that’s only a part of the product management role. Or, they’ll confuse it with project management, which can be a part of the role, but isn’t the primary function.

And, because the product management skills are not so clearly defined, almost everyone in a technology company, from CEO to field sales, believes they can define the product. While they’d never say “let me code that feature”, they all think it’s fair game to weigh in with “that button should be larger” or “we need a search by color feature”.

In reality, Product Managers own the full lifecycle of a product, from initial strategy through market adoption and ongoing enhancement.

image credit: Product Manager via OneDesk

By definition, the day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager will vary, depending upon where a product is in its lifecycle. But, regardless of where you are in that lifecycle, there are certain skills required to be a great product manager.

Evangelist: From the early moments of developing a product strategy, you need to get the rest of the organization behind your effort. Throughout the process, you need to communicate what you are doing and why it should be the priority for scarce dev resources to focus on. And when you approach product launch, you’ll need to rally sales and marketing, customer support and others to embrace it.

Listener: Product management is not done inside an office nor a garage. Product management is done in the field, understanding customer workflows, their challenges and their goals.

Business Process Analyst: The ability to fully understand business needs is perhaps the most critical b2b product management skill. A good product manager can explain, in simple terms, the exact customer need behind a feature request. Typically, this is done in the form of user stories. The key challenge is that customers will often try to explain what they want in the context of how they perform the task today (with your product or something else). So, they’ll say “we need a button here that loads the profile” when what they really need is to integrate data from two systems into a single view. The Product Manager’s role is to probe until they understand exactly what a customer really needs and what specific benefit that provides them.

Relationship builder: To successfully bring products to market, you need to build strong relationships with customers, with engineering, with QA, with UX, with sales, presales and training. Product management is about building mutual trust and respect with each of these groups, so you can constantly manage the balance and conflicts between their desires and the needs of the business.

Prioritizer: product management is about focus and prioritization. There will be constant trade-offs in terms of functionality, resources and timing. The product manager needs to be able to say no, or at least “not now” to feature requests from sales, marketing, customers and even the CEO.

Technical knowledge: while I’ve met a few product managers who come from a coding background, that’s not necessary for the job. But you do need to understand the technology stack and have a sense of what it takes to build something as well as understanding of how to scale to meet the needs of the business. If you don’t understand the technology, you’ll never earn the respect of the Engineering team nor will you be able to effectively translate user stories into technical requirements.

Being a great product manager requires all of these skills. You must be effective at cutting to the core of what customers need, while being incredibly focused, constantly reprioritizing and, most importantly, able to influence without authority.

And I wouldn't trade it for any other job I know.

 

(Part 2 of this post will explore the differences between being a product manager for a startup and for an established company)

 

Why the Apple - Beats Deal Makes No Sense

When the news first hit of a potential Apple acquisition of Beats, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. Having given it another day to think about it, it still makes little sense to me.

There are two core parts to the Beats business: hardware (headphones and speakers) and streaming audio. Let's take a look at each.

 

Hardware

Beats hardware products are headphones, earbuds and portable speakers. Their headphones and earbuds are not particularly innovative - they use the same basic design that other manufacturers have used for decades. Their portable speaker, the Beats Pill, is basically a me-too version of the Jawbone Jambox. Beats products are not of particularly high quality. I owned a pair of diddy beats earbuds. They had decent, but unspectacular sound quality. The left channel died about a month after the warranty expired, but that happens with many earbuds. 

 

But the key issue here is that Beats are not particularly innovative.  Some have suggested that the Beats team would be able to help Apple create a great iWatch.

 

This is not a Google - Nest deal, where you're bringing on a team of design engineers who are rethinking everyday items. It's not Square, who have brought point-of-sale to the mobile device. There's no real innovation here. Instead, this is a company that has created a cool brand around decent quality products. Beats does offer a cachet of cool. At least for now.

 

But Apple doesn't need to rely on others to provide coolness to their products. Apple products are already cool. And while Apple's coolness seems to have staying power, Beats are more of a fashion statement for teens, and you can look at brands like Abercrombie to see how fleeting that position can be.

 

Streaming

Beats created what they hoped would be a Spotify killer.

The Beats Music service launched to great hype, but has struggled to gain traction. I have not used the service, so have to rely on reviews that I've read, but in a market crowded with entries, Beats did not particularly stand out. The UI got good marks, but the core functionality was not very different for that of Spotify, Slacker, Rdio or Google Play. It wouldn't seem that difficult for Jony Ive''s team at Apple to build a comparable service. Some tout the existence of contracts with the record companies as an asset, but all of those contracts will need to be reassigned or renegotiated, and I'd guess it wouldn't be too hard for Apple to strike comparable deals on their own.

 

Two days in and I'm still baffled

With $151 billion in the bank, the $3.2 billion deal is not a huge financial strain for Apple, but it is significantly more than they've paid for any other acquisition. And the deal itself still doesn't make much sense to me. Beats hardware is a bit of a fad that could collapse as fashions change. Their streaming service seems OK, but it's hardly unique. But Tim Cook and his team are smart and I'm sure there are things that I've not considered. But for now, this deal makes little sense to me.

Bad Idea of the Day: LinkedUp

From the Guardian comes word of a new app - the cleverly named LinkedUp, which they describe as "Tinder for your professional network".

The app uses the LinkedIn API to access a user's professional contacts, and has a Tinder-like interface to quickly browse pics and profiles.

Let's think for a minute about how bad an idea this truly is. 

For most of us, our professional network consists of current and former coworkers, clients, your next potential boss and more. What could possibly go wrong?

I can only imagine the alerts from LinkedIn: you've just been endorsed for the following skills...

According to founder Max Fischer, "I think it helps people feel a little more comfortable about people. I was looking through some profiles earlier today and the tag line says "You must love sports and dogs" or "I really love this hockey team." 

Wait - I thought that's what Facebook already does. It captures your social graph, your interests, your experiences and more. But it does that in your social circle, not your professional circle. In other words, people who are less likely to adversely impact your career if things don't go quite right.

There could be worse ideas for dating. Perhaps a "classmates.com" for prison parolees, or an app that sits on top of the national sex-offender registry. And, I'm sure there will be those who find LinkedUp to be a useful app. But, there's a reason we don't have a single social graph, covering our business and personal lives. And most of us prefer that those world's do not collide.

 

 

 

The Simple Change that Could Dramatically Improve Hotel Customer Satisfaction

If you knew that a specific feature of your product annoyed 40-50% of your customers, what might you do?

And if you knew that you could remove that annoyance by spending pennies, how quickly might you try to solve that?

That’s what I thought.

And that’s why it’s so frustrating to see how business hotels have either a total lack of understanding or lack of interest in the needs of business travelers. 

Like most of you, my phone is now my alarm clock. And my bedtime reading is done on an iPad. Yet, when I check into a room in a typical business hotel, I find a nightstand like this:

So, my next step is to start moving the furniture, pulling the nightstand out to access the electrical outlets. And what I usually find is a rat’s nest of electrical cords and no empty sockets, like this:

Think about it, the last thing that a guest thinks about before they go to sleep in their hotel room, is how annoying it is that they have to move furniture and untangle electrical cords.

These pics were taken at the Hyatt Regency Denver, but it could be any number of high end business hotels I’ve stayed at in recent years. 

Ironically, the less expensive hotels tend to have figured this issue out. I stayed in a Hyatt Place hotel (Hyatt’s budget line) in Kansas City earlier this week and, not only were there ample outlets right by the nightstand, there were ports to plug HDMI, VGA and RGB cables into the flat screen TV. Perhaps it’s no surprise that these mid-level hotels have gotten it right. After all, they also provide free WiFi and other amenities.

What the business hotels have to learn is that, for most business travelers today, this is our ideal nightstand: 

Most of us don’t need a fixed clock radio. I automatically unplug the alarm clock when I check-in, so I don’t accidentally learn that the previous tenant set the alarm to go off at 4am. And while we do need a phone in the room to call room service or the front desk, we don’t need it to be at our bedside. I’m sure that in the pre-mobile phone days, travelers might have sat in bed chatting with family on the hotel phone, but those days are long gone. The phone over on the desk suits our needs just fine.

For now, I’d be happy to see hotels simply bolt a small power strip to the nightstand or headboard, so I can plug in. For now, I carry a Belkin mini power strip when I travel, but I still have to move furniture and unplug things to use it.

Installing a power strip is a simple and inexpensive fix that hotels should implement immediately. If you could make a dramatic impact on customer satisfaction for a few bucks, wouldn’t you do it?

note: this post is not intended to critique the Denver Hyatt Regency. It's a great hotel, with a terrific gym and the staff are fantastic. I would glady stay here again next time in Denver. But this is a fix that Hyatt and their peers should implement immediately.

I Moved

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve just joined Connotate as Vice President, Product Strategy. 

Connotate is the leader in the web content extraction space. Publishers, ecommerce retailers, financial institutions, government agencies and others rely upon Connotate to aggregate, organize, analyze and distribute web data at scale.

Connotate agents can mine content from websites, extracting critical pieces of data, then structure, aggregate and organize that information for use in analytical applications. Clients use Connotate to monitor prices on tens of thousands of items, run background checks on potential new hires, and aggregate data to update information services.

In many ways, Connotate is the perfect home for me. I’ve spent much of the past fifteen years helping publishers and media companies create content-driven products. Extracting insights from the web has been a big part of that - from my early days at semantic pioneer ClearForest to harvesting and tagging news and social media content at Alacra. 

While many technology companies have latched onto the big data theme, Connotate has been focused on extracting data at scale since the start. Whether you’re automating background checks, analyzing the sentiment of customer comments or pulling pricing data from competitor websites, Connotate can deliver highly accurate results across a wide range of disparate sources.

Connotate goes way beyond simple web scraping. Today’s complex websites, built with AJAX, Javascript and HTML5 don’t allow for easy content harvesting. The Connotate technology leverages feature-based machine learning with heuristics to do intelligent extraction. And the system is highly resilient. The feature-based approach allows Connotate extraction algorithms to continue to perform accurately, even when website designs change. 

Last year, Connotate acquired Fetch, its largest direct competitor, and is currently positioned for strong growth. There are a number of interesting market opportunities which we’ll be exploring in the coming weeks and months. If you have web data challenges, I’d love to get your thoughts on areas where we might focus. You can reach me at bgraubart-at-connotate-dot-com.

You can read the formal announcement of my joining Connotate here.

Sales Tax Will Have Little Impact on eCommerce

The web is all a-flutter about the likelihood that Congress will start requiring ecommerce sites (and catalog retailers) to begin to collect sales tax in all states. The bill has passed the Senate and now moves to the House, where its passage is less certain.

If it passes, it will clearly be a boon for the states, who now miss out on an estimated $20 billion per year in sales taxes. But it's unlikely to do much for brick & mortar retailers, in their efforts to curb showrooming.

In the early days of online commerce, the avoidance of sales tax was definitely a key factor in helping ecommerce sites generate revenues. In those days, most sites charged for shipping, so avoiding sales tax was a way to offset shipping costs. And, of course, on large purchases, saving 7-8% could be significant.

But today, saving sales tax is one of the smallest value propositions that the good ecommerce sites offer. I'm an active Amazon shopper. My first Amazon purchase was in 1996 - it was for the book Creating Killer Websites and two others. In the years that followed, I rarely went a week without an Amazon box being delivered to my house. I was among the first group of users of Amazon Prime, and remain a member today. 

While the shift of books and CDs to digital form has reduced the number of packages shipped, it hasn't reduced my purchases. We stream Amazon movies via a Roku box, buy our MP3 music from Amazon, use the Kindle app on the iPad for reading and more. And for all but the very largest purchases, I don't bother price-checking. Amazon provides a great user experience, fantastic customer service (on the few times I've needed it) and delivers exactly what I need. So,for me, it's not worth looking around in order to save a few dollars on a typical purchase. I'd rather buy from Amazon.

I've never been a "mall person" and prefer to shop on my own time, typically around midnight when I've finished everything else I need to do for the day. Amazon customer reviews are typically much more informative than the sales reps at a brick and mortar store, while their product selection and inventory are much more complete.

Living in New York, I've been paying sales tax on my Amazon purchases for the past four years. It's had zero impact on my purchase behavior.

While Best Buy is now price-matching ecommerce sites in an effort to stop showrooming, the user experience on Amazon is typically superior. And for those users who don't ask for the price match, Best Buy prices are still 25-40% higher than Amazon on most items.

At the margins, requiring online retailers to charge sales tax may give a slight boost to brick and mortar stores. But for most of us, the benefits of online shopping far outweigh the experience that brick-and-mortar stores provide. 

What Commitments Should Free Platforms Make to Users?

With all the buzz around Google's (GOOG) plan to shut down Google Reader, and the similar outcry when Yahoo announced its intention to kill off Delicious, it's fair to ask the question:

What should users expect from the free services they depend on?

The fact that users are not paying a fee to use a service, doesn't mean that companies are not profiting from their use. The old saying goes that if you're not the one paying, then you are the product. Meanwhile, more and more we are becoming dependent upon the tools we choose. So, before we adopt new services, should we have some level of commitment to what will happen if the company no longer wants to support it?

At minimum, there should always be a way to get your data out of the system. Anything you put in should exportable for use in other services. Delicious offered a bookmark export utility. Google Reader lets you grab your OPML file to load into other readers. But what about other services? Blog platforms generally let you export all your blog posts, but that doesn't necessarily include images and other key metadata.  If gmail or Yahoo Mail were shuttered, there's no easy way today to retrieve your email archive and load it into another email system. 

Should companies commit to a plan to open source a service if they choose to no longer support it? That's a bigger decision and one that companies would not likely offer willingly. But if they want us to put our data into a service that may disappear down the road, perhaps it's reasonable to expect them to do so. In enterprise software, it's not uncommon for large clients to get companies (particularly early stage companies) to agree to an escrow provision, should the company go bankrupt.  Under the b2c model, if a company is monetizing its audience, is it not reasonable to expect there to be a safety net in place should the company be unable or unwilling to provide the service?

Of course, any such clause would likely be unenforceable. But in an environment where a handful of large platform companies (Google, Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Facebook (FB), Twitter) are becoming more deeply entwined into our workflow, a company might gain a strategic advantage in making this type of promise to its users. Just as Google claimed a "Do No Evil" mantra, perhaps there's an opportunity for one of these platforms to adopt a new "leave no user behind" mission statement. Perhaps before the next platform company kills one of its offerings (Hey Twitter - I'm looking at Tweetdeck), they should look to adopt this user-centric approach.

 

Related articles

As Google Abandons RSS, Will LinkedIn Fill the Void?

Google Is Killing Google Reader

Yahoo: Much Ado About Remote Workers

Some companies are just lightning rods for controversy.

In the past week, since the release of an internal email indicating that Yahoo would no longer support remote workers, there have been hundreds of articles and blog posts (I guess this adds one more) and tens of thousands of tweets and comments.

Of course, controversy is nothing new for Yahoo. Once the darling of online media in its infancy, Yahoo (YHOO) has attracted an outsized amount of criticism in recent years. Of course, the company has made some dumb moves, so much of the critique is warranted. But this time, I think it's a bit silly.

Is Marissa Mayer's new policy right for Yahoo? 

As an outsider, it's really hard to tell. Every company has its own unique culture. I've worked for a company which was completely virtual. We had employees in dozens of cities around the globe. And, from the start, we put in place tools and processes to support a global, virtual business. As a result, we had great communications, both internally and with clients, and smooth handoffs on the engineering side.

I've also worked for a company that was centered around an in-office experience. Communications there were often informal. Some of the most important decisions were made in hallway discussions between the cofounders and members of their management team. If you were out of the office that week, you might have little chance to weigh in on that discussion. Is that good? Well, it worked well for them.

The key is that every company's culture is unique. There's a reason why many successful startups use a single, shared space. It encourages collaboration and information sharing in ways that don't always happen with digital communication.

One important thing to note from the Yahoo discussions is that it seems that only a small percentage of their 11,000 person workforce works remotely. The policy has been described as affecting "hundreds" of employees. If 95% of your employees work in the office, it's likely that the bulk of your processes and systems are aimed at supporting that environment. Those who work from home may miss critical information or be unable to contribute in the same ways that they might if they were in the office.  If it were 25%, not 5%, it might actually be easier to support. The communications processes and tools would have to be in place to make it work.

And let's keep in mind that many tech companies discourage remote working. According to Google CFO Patrick Pichette, as noted in All Things D:

‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ 

From some of the fallout, it's clear that the impetus for this decision was, in part, due to frustrations with the overall culture at Yahoo. Kara Swisher notes that "Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm". 

I hope that's not the primary driver of the new policy. I don't believe you'll create a more productive workforce by simply forcing people to spend more time in the office. Yahoo needs to attract the types of employees who will be passionate about what they do, and not those focused on doing as little as possible.

If I were launching a new company today, I would learn towards the virtual model or a hybrid virtual/office mix. The advantages are great and the disadvantages are modest, provided you design for it. But let's cut Mayer some slack here. She's still in the early days of trying to change a culture in efforts to turnaround a company facing deep challenges. She needs to make the decisions on how to revamp their culture and their business. The scorecard for her effectiveness should be looked at over several years and not quarter-to-quarter or based on specific policies.

 

 

image of Marissa Mayer courtesy World Economic Forum.

image of Patrick Pichette courtesy C2-MTL

Three Possible Strategies to Support Best Buy’s New Price Match Policy

Best Buy (BBY) announced this week its intention to begin price-matching prices from key competitor websites, such as Amazon (AMZN), Buy.com, Target.com (TGT), B&H, Walmart.com (WMT) and others, for purchases made in its stores.

On its surface, it seems like a smart and aggressive strategy for Best Buy to remain relevant and to discourage its customers from showrooming, using Best Buy to view items, then buying them cheaper online.

Yet in practice, I don’t know how the numbers could work. There’s no way to profitably run a brick and mortar big box retail business that matches the best of online pricing.

For comparison, I just spot-checked a few of Best Buy’s prices.

Best Buy offers a Canon Vixia HF M50 Camcorder for $499. Amazon has the same camcorder for $429. The Epson WF-2540 printer is $129 at Best Buy. It sells for $99 at Amazon.  And it’s not just Amazon. A pair of Sennheiser PX 100-II headphones are marked “sale – see price in cart” at Best Buy. That sale price is $55.98.  But B&H Photo has the same headphones for $43.46.

And those three items are hardly unique. On almost every item I checked, the Best Buy price was 20-40% higher than prices at Amazon and other sites. The exceptions tend to be large screen TVs, where Best Buy is competitive to the best online prices, and certain brands which are rarely discounted, like Dr. Dre Beat headphones or an Apple iPad.

And that experience is consistent with what I’ve seen in the real world. There was a Best Buy across the street from my old office. Any time I tried to buy anything there, I found their prices to be 25-50% higher than the online price. I might pay that premium for an emergency pair of earbuds, but for anything over $25, I found myself ordering via the Amazon app instead, often before leaving the store.

So, how might Best Buy adapt to a world of price-matching? I see three possibilities:

First, Best Buy can hope that while price-matching becomes a useful marketing campaign, customers don’t bother to actually do it in practice. This seems unlikely to me, unless they either make the process too difficult to perform (“let me find the manager for you” or “you just need to fill out this 12-page form and we’ll match the price”) or perhaps deploy cellular signal jammers in all their stores.

The second option is for Best Buy to work with manufacturers to create custom versions of its products for their stores. This is the trick that the mattress industry has used for decades, to make price comparisons difficult. When mattress discounters like 800-Mattress sprang up, department stores scrambled for ways to keep their artificially high prices up. The solution was for mattress manufacturers to create “exclusive” models available to each department store or retailer. So, you can’t compare the price of the Stearns & Foster Delana mattress from Macy’s, as that model is not available at Sleepys or elsewhere.

Might Best Buy try something similar? Could they ask Canon to make a Vixia HF M50BB (or similar) which is only available at Best Buy? That might be a bit more difficult to do across some product categories (I can’t imagine Apple participating) but for some products I could see it. Truly unique offerings would be most compelling, but that's really hard to do with electronics. Home retailers like Target (TGT) can get designers to create custom collections; FAO Schwartz has unique toys that Toys R Us can't offer. But there's not as much flexibility with electronics. Maybe a custom color for a phone or camera, but that's about it. Another option might be to create custom bundles. Perhaps a flat screen TV, a wall mount and HDMI cable could be bundled together into a package that is exclusive to Best Buy. Smart consumers might compare the bundle to the price of the unbundled components, but you won’t have a one-click price check from a barcode.

A third option might be for Best Buy to treat big ticket items as loss leaders then offer private labeled accessories, unique to Best Buy. This is not far off from their current process for large screen TVs. Their prices on these tend to be fairly competitive, as they know people price compare before dropping a thousand bucks on a flat screen. But they hit you up for a $59.99 HDMI cable and a $119.99 wall mount, items that can be purchased for a third that price at Amazon.

If they truly wanted to be price-competitive, Best Buy would make it easy to check competitive prices in their stores. But they’ve actively avoided this to-date. Best Buy actually incubated a startup, Tecca, which offered mobile apps providing detailed information and comparisons on electronic products. The apps included barcode scanners which returned pricing from Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com and Google Products. Yet although they funded it, Best Buy was never comfortable enough with Tecca to encourage its use in their stores. Tecca was shuttered late last year, but could have been the centerpiece of this new “price matching” strategy.

I think Best Buy will likely employ the use of bundles and white-labeled accessories to improve margins, while using price-matching on major items as loss leaders. That approach may slow the showrooming somewhat, but it doesn’t seem like an effective long-term strategy for a profitable business. They can’t possibly sell enough overpriced accessories to support 1,000 big box stores across the U.S.

How do you think Best Buy will handle price matching? Add your thoughts in the comments.

Photo: Best Buy - Champlain Center Flickr/daysofthundr46

Related articles

Best Buy to make online price-matching policy permanent

Best Buy Has Declared 'Showrooming' Dead In Its Stores

Launching Content Matters llc

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Content Matters llc, a consultancy aimed at helping publishers and brands develop and implement effective strategies for delivering content over mobile, tablet and web platforms.

Content Matters will be focused on helping companies develop and implement their strategy in three areas:

• Tablet and mobile. Many publishers and media companies are struggling with the move to mobile platforms. Tablet adoption has outpaced even the most optimistic projections, leaving publishers scrambling. Yet developing an appropriate strategy for tablet and mobile is not simple. Publishers need to develop a clear strategy for their audience, which will drive decisions on platforms, app vs. mobile web and other key factors.
• Content Marketing. The line between publishers and brands is fuzzier than ever. For brands, content is the new form of advertising. At the same time, publishers, particularly information publishers are sitting on top of vast unused assets. Meanwhile, most social media efforts fall flat. A holistic content marketing strategy taps into existing content assets, creates new assets as needed, then uses a mix of traditional online and social media to engage an audience.
• New Product Development. An effective product funnel is the lifeblood of long-term business growth. Yet, for most media and publishing organizations, new products get short shrift, with product teams sucked into a never-ending cycle of product revisions. Even in cases where there is a focus on new products, those efforts are often disconnected from real-world use cases and go-to-market strategies.

Content Matters acts as an extension of your existing team to help you embrace technology and drive new product and marketing ideas.

For more information, visit Content Matters llc or contact us.