Associate Peter Hanschke is an Ottawa-based product management specialist. His post is part of our continuing series about the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market. We welcome your comments.
By Peter Hanschke
I’ve seen this situation far too often.
The engineering team and product management decide on what the next revision of the product needs to be or, in a new product introduction case, what the new product will be. The development team goes through its process to define how to build the features or product and starts a large development cycle.
There is always a great deal of interaction between engineering and product management, but, sadly, marketing is left out. I’m not sure why; maybe they feel that marketing won’t “get it.” Instead, the development process winds through the last test phase without any input from the marketing team. When all the critical bugs are fixed the product is released. It is at this point that marketing gets the product information thrown over the wall with the unrealistic expectation that it will create an immediate miracle. And then everyone wonders why the press release, the collateral, the web site, and so forth are so late in coming.
Marketing needs to be involved as early as possible. There is a process that marketing goes through to develop materials for the new product that will resonate with the target market, a process which takes time. But marketing is too often left behind. By the time the next round of updates is released from engineering, marketing has just dealt with the previous set.
As more engineering teams embrace agile development methodologies, marketing has a greater chance of getting involved early. The regular, predictable cadence of iterative agile development makes it ideal for marketing to be part of the overall team that is designing and developing a new release or product. As each iteration is completed, there is a review and demonstration of what was built during the iteration. Marketing can use this opportunity to its advantage in the following ways.
- Groom customers to be references. As soon as features and capabilities are in a demonstrable state, engage the customers that were keen to have the feature in the product. Or, if this is a groundbreaking feature, show it to your top customers. Ask for their feedback – customers respond very well to new features that they can see and interact with. As the feature grows and matures during the development process, keep them engaged. Your chances of ending up with a customer reference at product launch time will greatly increase.
- Create buzz early. As features make their way into the product, start prepping the market for launch. Capture little snippets of someone using the new feature and post the video where your market lives. Create a buzz as the development of the product continues so that customers and non-customers alike will upgrade or buy the new release or product when it becomes available. Engage analysts and experts within your target markets to start blogging about the new capabilities. The idea is to have an overlap between developing the product and creating market awareness. Naturally, be cautious if you are in a highly competitive market and make sure the feature or capability is going to be part of the product when launched.
- Develop the messaging early. As the new release or product takes shape, work on the value it delivers to the market, the messaging that is needed to drive the marcomm engine and the unique selling proposition. Use those customers you engaged early on to help frame the message. Ask them what value they get, what problem it solves for them, or simply why they would use it. Test this message with other customers. Tweak your message. Since marketing has been engaged early, there’s enough time for all these activities to be done properly.
It is very important to view marketing as a member of the development team like quality assurance, product management and others. But it’s also incumbent on the marketing team to force its way into the engineering process. After all, without marketing all you have is a piece of software.
/// COMMENTS
6 Comments »Heather MacIntosh
July 20, 2011 11:43 amYou’ve nailed it, Peter. This is the classic case of engineering (and sometimes product management) not understanding the marketing role, thinking it’s only marcom, that all that needs to be done is write a little blurb and post it on the website. In many cases, product marketing can provide input into the product concept to make a better product. In actual fact, the go-to-market process may TAKE LONGER than the product development and testing – especially if you have channels to inform and train. If marketing isn’t brought in at the very beginning, the product launch may either be delayed or not be as effective as it could be. It is all avoidable and results in finger-pointing. Why not plan for success from the very beginning?
Francis Moran
July 20, 2011 3:04 pmPeter was one of the very first product-development guys I ever heard talk about how critical it is to involve marketing in the process from the very outset. It’s the reason I recruited him to our band of associates. I knew several of the companies that would want us to help them would be in the product-formation stage, and I wanted a product management resource who understood that you need to bring marketing along with you. The wisdom of recruiting Peter has been proven by the fact that he is integral to one of our very first clients, an assignment we’ll be telling blog readers more about as it progresses.
Drew Hannush
July 20, 2011 11:30 pmGreat points. I agree completely with getting marketing involved early on. We are currently working on a product that originally was intended for a tech audience. Once we started planning, the marketing ideas helped change the direction of the product and it went from being something a few techies would get, to being something very useful for a wide range of individuals. Marketing is just as important to successful products as the engineering that goes into them, as far as I’m concerned. Nice tips on getting the buzz going as well. Help the market get ready so you don’t have to explain it all upon release of the product. You’ll have interested buyers right up front.
Rocket Fuel Marketing
July 21, 2011 5:32 amI’m in complete agreement with you that marketing should be involved from the outset of product development. Where I might differ here is that we believe that, one, product management is a marketing function and second, that marketing’s involvement in the product management process precedes product definition and development. While we recognise that you are trying to extend the involvement of marketing in the development process, the inferred definition of marketing’s responsibilities in this post relate to no more than promotional activities or marcomms (marketing communications) that are a small single aspect of overall marketing responsibility.
We believe that the conception of products is, necessarily, a cross-functional activity that is led by marketing and directed externally towards the markets where the product is aimed. It should be occupied with the practical questions of “What to sell? Where to sell and how to sell?” As McKinsey rightly points out, choosing the right markets creates more value than having superior products. Real marketing is not just about promotions. Marketing is, amongst other things, the conception of unique product value based on a deep understanding of customer values and the nature of transient fast-moving markets and the competitive factors in play.
We do understand where you’re coming from and you rightly identify part of the problem of traditional product development. Here product management sits uncomfortably between marketing and engineering that have very different outlooks and approaches. It’s the role of marketing to identify market and customer opportunities; the role of engineering is essentially problem solving – to build a product that addresses specified market opportunities and that satisfies customers’ desires, wants and needs. There is a place for product management to project manage the conversion of the market opportunity to a deliverable product. But this must be marketing led, which is why we advocate the positioning of product management as a marketing function. We prefer to call it “product market management”.
We’ve also shared the massive difficulties where product management is an operational abstraction of a technology or engineering function. It’s very commonplace even in market-leading technology companies. It does require marketing to be highly literate specialists in technology itself since their job is frequently concerned with the unravelling of complex technical specifications and their reconstruction to properly reflect market and customer demands (wants, desires and unmet needs). One thing for is for sure: It’s not simple and a whole lot more complex than messaging, content, websites, customer references and promotions. There’s probably a good reason that 9 out of 10 product developments fail to meet their originators expectations or fail. Simply put, they fail because they make no sales and the reason for that is that they are not developed to address market and customer considerations at the outset.
Thank you for a very interesting post. You certainly stirred up some interesting issues for us.
Geoffrey Wilkins
Principal
Rocket Fuel Marketing
Francis Moran
July 21, 2011 8:26 amGeoffrey: I can see how this post could leave you with impression that we believe marketing needs only to be brought along with product development, that marketing is the sidecar to the product-development motorcycle that is really driving the show. If you go back to some of Peter’s past posts — and even to the original post with which we launched this re-focused version of our blog — I think you will find that we are very much the same minds, that marketing needs to play the leadership role in the product-development process.
Indeed, in the assignment in which Peter and I are now engaged, the first step in our four-part approach is one of market definition. Our first questions are about whether there is even a market opportunity here, is there a pain or need in urgent need of solving or addressing? And if there is a pain, are there customers willing to pay to have it solved, what will they pay for, how much will they pay and how many of them are there? Do the needs of various customers add up to a sufficiently common set of requirements that there is even a product solution available? Only then will we get into the question of what our client needs to build and sell.
It sounds as though you have walked many of the same roads as we have in this too-often prickly relationship between marketing and engineering. Thank you for adding your thoughtful perspective to the conversation.
Never expect mission-perfect prose in the first cut | Francis Moran & AssociatesFrancis Moran & Associates
September 24, 2013 11:03 am[…] the marketing folks are often brought into the product development cycle far too late, when a release date is looming. They have to scramble, and scramble fast, with their efforts […]