Archives for category: Planning
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What is a Product Roadmap?

June 27, 2016 //
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What do you understand by the term ‘product roadmap’? There are lots of definitions, some narrow and some broad, some internally focused and some market- or customer-focused. And how detailed should a product roadmap be? Should it pin your detailed colours to the mast, or should it be high level, allowing you room for manoeuvre?

I think that over time B2B customers have become somewhat desensitised towards product roadmaps. This is especially true in the software industry where the sheer complexity and number of moving parts, combined with the influences of individual customers, conspire to make roadmap projections aspirational at best and at worst downright misleading and fictional.

The pressures on the business in a dynamic landscape are changing all the time, and I’ve seen businesses where products or product enhancements have arrived 2 or 3 years after they were advertised to come on stream.

But back to product roadmap definitions. The one I use when asked this question defines a product roadmap as a plan of product or platform developments, delivered through a release mechanism – which could be a few or several times a year – through properly managed projects and programmes. After all, you’ve got to be sure that all the parts of the business can fulfil their element of the whole product solution. In other words, the roadmap should really be about when new releases are delivery ready, not sales ready. By all means seed the market, and build the demand to allow for the natural lag of a sales cycle, but publish your roadmap based around genuine availability.

Customers love to see detailed roadmaps, but only if you actually can commit to the associated timings, otherwise the trust quickly evaporates. Just like in sales, you’re only as good as your last quarter. Software development never seems to build in any buffer for the inevitable bumps in the road – probably because the front of the business is pushing for the earliest possible delivery date – and when those bumps occur, it’s very hard to get back on track. That’s why I fall back on the principle of under-promise and over-deliver to customers, and pushing back to the business. The customer comes first, so I’m in favour of high level roadmap pronouncements that strike the right balance between demonstrating progress and allowing wiggle room, so you can be on time, on brief, and maybe even on budget.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

A Sense of Urgency

June 15, 2016 //
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A sense of urgency is the secret weapon of the self-starter. A self-starter adopts a sense of urgency because he or she understands that time is the most precious commodity, and wasted time can never be won back.

I try to instil this in my kids, with almost unwaveringly poor results. Whenever they’re asked to do anything around the house, or to get ready for school, they seem to head into a neutral gear, returning the aside I made to them once: ‘yes Dad, I’m on a sponsored go slow…’ They don’t buy into the concept of the sooner you start something and the quicker you do it, the quicker you can get onto something else. Either that, or they fly through jobs in a slap-dash fashion that necessitates a rework and the accompanying retort: ‘if only you’d done it right the first time, you’d be done by now…’

It’s all about balance. A sense of urgency – in work or play – combined with the right level of quality gets things done in the most effective way. Emptying a dishwasher, putting everything in the right place with no breakages and a sense of urgency gets the job done correctly in the least amount of time. This sense of urgency, using the dishwasher example, pushes us to group items for the same cupboard or shelf into one trip, so that we minimise aggregate journey time.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we fly around our daily work and house tasks like people possessed all day. Everyone needs downtime. Don’t get me wrong, I love to relax, and taking time out from work and play is key. But you can still relax well, relax effectively :-).

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Outside In

June 10, 2016 //
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Are you an ‘outside in’ person, or an ‘inside out’?

I’m not talking about advanced forehand strokes in tennis here; I’m talking about how you approach things in the world of work and life.

I’m an outside in kinda guy. I like to start from the outside, getting the big picture, understanding the whole, before I work my way in to the specific problem or task at hand. I do this because I need the context first. I need to know how what I’m trying to do connects with and affects the other pieces of the big picture. I find it difficult to do something in isolation.

Lots of people are inside outers of course. They move in the opposite direction to outside in folk and I suspect they also have different personalities, different jobs and different ways of working. They don’t need the context, they don’t want outside factors to impair their judgement, and away they go.

Both approaches have their pros and cons though, and I also suspect each type of approach is better suited to a particular job.

Which are you, an inside out person or an outside in?

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning

From 0 to 10

June 3, 2016 //
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They say that getting to $10m in revenues is the hardest stage for a B2B company. Why is that?

Well, it’s a combination of factors. In the early days you’re still tinkering with your business model. You’re still figuring out product-market fit. You’re not sure what to concentrate on, to whom, and where. You can’t reap the benefits of scale.

Perhaps most importantly, though, you’re in a real life situation, and subject to the normal pressures of working with other people, both in your company and outside your company. You’re trying to develop something that’s going to have the right appeal to a sufficiently large enough market, yet you probably have a small number of customers who exercise a disproportionately large influence on you, in terms of how they want you to develop your products and services.

You’re torn between giving the paying customers what they want, which is essentially something that’s customised to their requirements, and developing something that does the job for the maximum part of your addressable market, but which doesn’t immediately translate into positive cash-flow. This is especially true in software.

Any company can sell an idea and get funding, possibly running into the millions. Any company that can get from 0 to 10 million – in revenues – and beyond is a different proposition, an animal that has risen above 90% of the other animals and proven itself. It will still have challenges, but it’s done what many have tried and failed to do. It’s a player.

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Categories Customers, Planning, Strategy

Are You Working In or Working On?

May 11, 2016 //
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Always a good one this, to remind ourselves periodically. Not just for entrepreneurs or people that have their own business. For people who are employed, people who are volunteers too.

Are you working in the business or on the business?

Are you fire-fighting or planning?

Are you thinking long term or pre-occupied with the short term?

Are you stuck in the weeds or looking over the parapet?

Are you servicing the business you won without also looking to snare the next piece of business?

Working in the business means we’re simply getting by, doing what’s in front of us, addressing the tactical. Working on the business means we’ve an eye on the future, we’re looking at opportunities, we’re being strategic.

It’s the opposite of the golf shot. As Gary Player once said, ‘If you look up too early you might not like what you see.’ In our working and private lives, if we look up too late, well, you get the picture.

Working in or working on? Eventually, there’s no ‘in’ if you don’t do the ‘on’.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Productive B2B Buyer

April 18, 2016 //
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A few years ago, I used to work with a company called The TAS Group. They invented something called the Sales Velocity Equation, a metric for sales effectiveness.

It was a really simple and powerful way of thinking about how effective a sales person or organisation you are. In a nutshell, your sales velocity for a given time period (let’s say a quarter) is proportional to the total number of qualified deals you work during the period, multiplied by the average deal size, multiplied by the percentage of deals that you win, the total then divided by the average sales cycle length for those won deals during that period. It’s all about speed, the implication being that if in the next period you can improve the factors above the line and reduce the sales cycle length, your speed – or sales effectiveness – increases. Good, huh?

On a number of occasions I suggested that the natural corollary to this is the buyer velocity equation, but my thoughts were not bought into, which is fair enough. I think it still has merit though.

If you’re a B2B buyer – and I suppose you could think too about yourself as a B2C customer or consumer, offline or online, though it’s nowhere near as elegant – you want to be as productive a buyer as you can.

It follows, then, that your productivity within a certain period is a function of the number of projects you have tabled, the average size of those projects, the amount of projects you get off the ground, and the length of time from project conception to project kick-off, or even to project completion. The greater the projects volume and project size, the greater the percentage of projects you get off the ground, and the quicker you get them off the ground, the more productive a buyer you are.

Make sense to me anyway. In the same way as the sales velocity equation, it helps you strip away the waste and the unnecessary and focus on the small number of important levers of success.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

It Is What It Is

March 14, 2016 //
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One of my previous bosses – and I’ve been fortunate enough to have several excellent ones – had a phrase he often relied upon.

“It is what it is.”

This for me is all about accepting what you have, dealing with what’s in front of you, and making the best of the ingredients. You made a plan, you executed it, results followed and you’ve measured where you stand. It’s no use lamenting the what ifs, because, as the older generation still say, “if ifs and ands were pots and pans.” The second half of that phrase contains what you might term a ‘politically incorrect epithet,’ but it conveys the point well enough.

There’s something so succinct about It is what it is, that for me it’s like a snap of the fingers where you break out of the negative or wistful feelings and get in the right mindset, get your game face on. Let’s deal with what we have and let’s make the best of what we have.

Because, after all, we have what we have. We’re active and in the present tense. We can improve our future situation with this hand we’ve been dealt. In life and business we can’t really ask for a re-deal.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning

There Are No Competitors

March 11, 2016 //
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“There are no competitors”. I used to be fond of saying this, especially in previous industries I’d worked in which were fairly commoditised and definitely got the thin end of the Porter 5 forces wedge. These industries were also fiercely competitive.

My point was really this: There are no competitors, only potential partners or customers.” There is always a possibility of working with someone rather than against them. It’s more productive, and better for the collective, greater good. Of course, one of my reasons for saying this was to re-position my company, and de-position the opposition, by making such a statement, implying that we were different, unique even.

To an extent this is similar to the process of challenging the status quo. When you can look at things from a fresh perspective, and frame the place where you compete in a different way, then you reframe your market, you create fresh categories for yourself and you forge a unique set of dynamics where you are the lynchpin or fulcrum around which everything revolves.

When you can do this, your competitors melt away. There are no competitors; only you exist in this space, and your value enhances accordingly.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Challenging the Status Quo

March 9, 2016 //
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We’re constantly hearing about entrepreneurs or leading companies that challenge the status quo and look for new ways to do things. This can often give them an important edge in the market, which inevitably takes the competition time to identify and address.

Challenging the status quo is easier said than done, however. It takes a certain mindset which needs to operate in two dimensions. The first dimension is that you have to be able to think outside the box, to use a battered cliche, to be able to eschew the standard assumptions and accepted situations. The second is that you need to be able to do it a lot, and ideally all the time.

I was reminded of this some months ago when helping to prepare some messaging around a certain market, which included defining that market and how that market was structured. A couple of the senior individuals were in the team and I was struck by how differently and more expansively they were able to view the market they operated in, and hence how they could position their company in a more different and more beneficial way.

They simply brushed away the assumptions about how the industry was structured, assumptions I had wrongly taken as the pillars for how things worked in the industry.

It’s obvious that the role of senior executives is to be looking over the parapet far more often than other staff who are more siloed, specialist, operational, or tactical. But, that said, it was refreshing to see people who took a professional approach to questioning everything and thinking deeply about what they could and couldn’t move.

As you can imagine, visionaries are far more able to see everything as movable. For them there is no status quo.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy, Technology

The Fourth B2B Product Launch Process Step

February 17, 2016 //
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In our third B2B product launch process step, we were busy gathering our requirements, making sure that we had as much information at our disposal for the next stage.

The fourth step in the B2B product launch process step is to do your planning.

Here’s a process that I find works for me:

  • Work backwards from the launch date
  • Figure out the individual tasks that need to be done by each department or function, noting any dependencies, or sequential tasks that cannot be done until another task has been completed
  • Decide when the tasks need to be done by, in other words how many days before launch
  • Assign an individual responsible for delivering each task
  • Calculate how long each task is going to take
  • Make sure that some individuals or functions don’t have a total of days that looks too challenging to fit in before the launch date. If the total number of days is greater than half the available days for a person or team, they might be too stretched to deliver on time, and you may need to look at scaling back their tasks or finding someone else to help out
  • Plot when all the tasks need to start. As each task naturally becomes a line item on a spreadsheet, you can then monitor progress as you go

With your planning done, you can set about getting your people ready to execute, and get into the fifth stage.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy
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