Category Archives: Marketing

No Margin = No Mission

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“Put on your Oxygen mask first before helping others”, how many times have you heard this in a preflight safety talk as the attendant wraps the rubber band around their head.

Just a little perspective here, what have folks forgotten about basic math, Money in needs to be greater than money out, period end of story. Sure you can build community and monetize later but bottom line is the longer you live on OTM (Other People’s Money) the less you take away after the work.

There are no free lunches, even if you are an 18month old start-up with 8 employees that hits the Google lottery you are not the first one in the dinner line at the end of the day. Accepting funding is giving away future earnings from an equity event. The only way to offset that is to use that money to add greater value than the money taken in, oh yes value here is market return in Dollars, Euro or Yen.

Every expenditure you ask an executive or investor for you best have an ROI that is above twenty points in less than 2 years. We only read about the long term in so many news stories because it is easy to be right when there is no accountability curve.  99.9% of business is run on a short turn ROI or it fails. Even a young company needs to think 2 year turn on concepts or the bootstrap becomes dilution of equity not increase in value.

Large companies get this, Mid-size companies become successful when they learn to live it and small companies that don’t get it become someone else’s and the founders’ slaves to investors.

Build your business model up front when you are building your product, in Lean approaches we often focus on the service and building the product but honestly the expectation is that the PM is in the background building the model.

Capitalism is bad only to those who cannot compete, the simple goal is add value to someone’s life and they will pay you. That is true for the marketplace up and down the chain. You provide value to the marketplace they pay, your employees’ provide value you pay them, your firm provides value to the financial markets you IPO, your valuation goes up as a company people invest in you, your brand gains promise and proves performance customers pick you first>

Simple Right! Produce value to the system and it returns value to you!

Honesty About Your Work and Product.

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Honesty about launch data is rare, as we all set targets we all map the results based on the target. Lying about data is classic behavior, asking about data sorting, sampling weighting and to see the entire sample is heresy.

Lying starts with simple things that have banal impacts on results and the system and migrates to a level where the results are so skewed that they ring the BS bell of a casual viewer. Once the data issues are uncovered the trail will show what you have been doing, data forensics are fairly easy.

Once you head down that road you have two choices, stop and try to reset a baseline (not Recommended) or come clean, claim an awaking and have a solution. Trying to resent will in almost any case be a path to getting caught. Data is a support for our gut understanding, the main reason you manipulate is to align results with expectations.

A great example is government data now, we hear of growth and lowering unemployment but when we look around the truth is not in alignment with the words so we look deeper for the first time. Foot note after footnote leads to the truth that there is more spin than truth.

The spin may always have been built in but the current owner is the one caught. There is a short period when a CEO or PM who inherits data can call foul and become the savior. BTW saviors in these situations get little accolades, many times they were hired to expose this and it is a test of sorts. You were hired to uncover the issues and take action, do not dwell in the past.

My suggestion, claim insight, tell the story of where things seemed to go wrong and have a plan forward. No one wins when the past is the focus, the Board or hiring manager has already taken action that was painful, move forward or be under suspicion of competence.

Winners who can fix things have no reason to dwell on the past, they have the ability to move in the right direction so do it. Those with no ideas dwell, allowing others to seize the glory. Glory goes to the detective who captures the criminal and makes the streets safe, not the scientist who determined that the victim was killed in the parlor by the maid with a candlestick.

Years ago my wife and I were guests at a preopening seminar of the Holocaust museum in DC given by the curator. The last of the series was on how did this happen not what happened. The class was all baffled on how apparently smart normal people could build a complicated system of transportation, camps, ovens, and burial pits, then process their clothes, and personal items including silver dental fillings. His answer was they only participated in one little part of a greater system of wrong doing and could ignore the reality of the whole system.

This is true for data lies, one sales guy cuts corners, an analyst only pulls the data he is told to, outliers are removed to smooth the data by the review team. Each person somewhere understands they may be participating and are.

Embracing Competition

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If you look around and have no competition you are running the wrong race. One of the great Macros for developing products and messaging comes from Geoffrey Moore and goes something like this

FOR – define the user segmentation…

WHO HAVE THIS PROBLEM? – Define present state

DOES WHAT? – Promise of your solution.. future state

UNLIKE – competition or current way of doing

Competition proves your value and can be a partner in moving along the innovation ramp. Competition can also be a process that is internally handled. Competitive research both primary and secondary does not replace customer contact or reflect on your innovation velocity.

Actually competitive research is best done by outside contractors who can objectively listen to the market without the internal noise. Yes I have been contracting for a few years and this is not a self-promotion but an honest suggestion. If you can build a firm based on outside contractors in certain areas or as an overlay you are doing yourself a favor. Services providers are not inhibited by the prejudices that roam the halls of every company.

Every firm thinks they have built the greatest widget or service that will change the world of their target market.  This is a classic trap much like calling customers lame because they don’t see the value. It is your responsibility to communicate and deliver.

Use bubble charts and quadrant charts to communicate internally where your company is and why your strategy is what it is. Show how you may be a commodity now who is the power player that will eat your lunch when the status quo changes, it always does. Every member of the team and in your company should know intrinsically where you sit and why you are moving forward.

Innovation comes from the most amazing places, enable all your team through knowledge do not keep strategy behind the executives doors!

 

Defining the Problem – The first step

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There are many wise old sayings that equate to starting or going through the gate is the hardest part of a journey.  While some interpret this as overcoming inertia when truthfully many refer to the larger issue of determining where you are and where you are going. Let’s tear this down into both stages as they relate to product development.

Defining the Problem -  Where are you?

Defining the Solution  – Where are we going?

Recently there was a conversation at a product developers meeting about how the strongest companies approach innovation and problem solving. The two methods are positional to compromise or consensus or Problem identification with solution creation.

More common in society is the compromise or consensus model. This is based in so many social activities today from politics to reality TV. (those may be more similar than we think) Positions and solutions in this model are embedded in ideas and ideologies. Ideologies in business are often embedded in a functional role description. The solution is believed to be in a compromise of ideas and rarely checked back against the problem.

This method solves very little and often leaves bigger issues in its wake. Parties are exhausted after positional consensus eager to move on. You can spot this practice when you hear phrases like “we beat that horse to death” You get the picture, not problem solving but debate.

Next look at problem definition first as an approach. Clearly digging into a problem is not fun, it is pulling a scab off and can uncover other mistakes. A simple trick is to look at it as a forensic exercise and prohibit the blame game when issues are uncovered. The tough part is when the issues are embedded in choices long ago made or made by key people in the organization. I strive to remind the team that these choices were made in a different environment and  market that seem to be a problem now but could have been a great solution.

Be wary of the person who vilifies past actions, these are the idea killers. We learn from our past mistakes, How many times have you seen a true retrospective take a close look at what went well?