Product Trio Challenges - Part 2
We talked about choosing the right people for in this article. These are another set of challenges we have faced during discovery. Have you heard the following from your colleagues?
Another PM - “I have a conflicting initiative on which I want to conduct discovery.”
Marketing manager or sales - “This is great for the customer but how will we generate revenue?”
Engineering manager - “It is better if use a technology like AWS”. They are focused more on the shiny stuff instead of real customer problem!
Few ways to solve this -
Partnering with other PMs
If you have multiple PMs in your organization then you all have to be coordinated. (Any program managers listening?). It is possible that you have related products i.e. you have to partner with other product managers. It also means that during discoery you might have to interview the same customer. Approaching them separately will only annoy them. You have to approach them as one. Work with other product managers to be able to ask your questions and make the best use of their time.
Marketing can be done only when marketing managers understand the product!
That is why we want marketing managers engaged in discovery. They need to understand what makes our product unique. How will they educate customers about our product? What will customers pay for? Will you want different pricing models based on different customer types?
Another thing we have done in the past is this - We were spending most of our time on writing scripts for a repetitive task. We were doing this for almost 2 years. We realized that our employees can be used for higher value work instead of doing the same repetitive task. We could achieve cost savings instead of charging customers for this. We freed up 2 employees and now have better employee satisfaction.
Engagement from engineering in discovery
Marketing of new engineering technologies can be very enticing to engineers. They ’d want to try those out instead of using old technologies with the customer problems. Don’t get me wrong. We need to give them the right problem and they can then conduct spikes with new technologies to solve the customer problem. U;timately, old technolgies will be obsolete and so there will be a need to switch. So this has to be a strategic move.
Final Thoughts
While discovery is a complex process, I think that biggest thing to understand here is the need for collaboration between various functions and the part each function plays in customer’s success!