Pragmatic Marketer Spring 2016

T H E P R O D U C T M A N A G E M E N T A N D M A R K E T I N G A U T H O R I T Y
SPRING 2016

THE PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
AND MARKETING AUTHORITY
FOUNDER/CEO
Craig Stull
PRESIDENT
Jim Foxworthy
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Rebecca Kalogeris
EDITOR
Lisa Sorg-Friedman
DESIGNER
Norman Wong
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Sarah Mitchell
Pragmatic Marketer™
8910 E. Raintree Drive, Scottsdale, AZ 85260
Interested in contributing an article?
PragmaticMarketing.com/submit
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher. Other product and/or company names
mentioned in this magazine may be trademarks or registered trademarks
of their respective companies and are the sole property of their respective
owners. Pragmatic Marketer is a publication of Pragmatic Marketing, Inc.,
and Pragmatic Marketing, Inc., shall not be liable, regardless of the cause,
for any errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or other defects in, or untimeliness
or inauthenticity of, the information contained within this magazine.
Pragmatic Marketing makes no representations, warranties, or guarantees
as to the results obtained from the use of this information and shall not be
liable for any third-party claims or losses of any kind, including lost profits
and punitive damages. Pragmatic Marketer is a trademark of Pragmatic
Marketing, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved. ISSN 1938-9752
(Print) ISSN 1938-9760 (Online)
Since 1993, Pragmatic Marketing has conducted product management
and marketing training for 8,000 companies on six continents. Our team
of thought leaders produces blogs, webinars, podcasts and publications
that product professionals around the world turn to for industry insights.
W
HEN IT COMES TO FOOD, ORGANIC is all the rage.
There are whole sections of the grocery store focused
on organic fruits and vegetables. It’s featured front and
center on packaging. And it comes with a premium price.
In business, though, it’s the inorganic growth we talk about
most: mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, takeovers. Those are
the stories that fill the news and grab the headlines. And they
can be powerful tools, as Frank Tait writes about in this issue.
But what if we put just a little more focus on organic
growth, on thinking about how we can leverage the products,
organizations, processes, customers, markets, etc. already in
place to drive growth? With the right focus, could we move
beyond slow and steady growth and really start to drive the
numbers and scale our business naturally?
Those were the driving questions as we put together this
issue of Pragmatic Marketer and why we’ve gathered a
team of thought leaders to talk about everything from how
to cultivate the right employees to how to grow through
segmentation. And as always, we’ve tried to include
actionable tools and tips you can implement immediately. So
grab a coffee and dig in!
fresh
content
Happy reading,
Rebecca Kalogeris
Editorial Director
editor@pragmaticmarketing.com
Share this issue >

F E AT U R E S
Sign up for your free
subscription, delivered quarterly via email,
at pragmaticmarketing.com/subscribe.
2 Bits & Pieces
2 Building Market-Driven Startups: Andrea Moe
Road Warriors: St. Louis
Flowchart: How to Say “No”
2 Build Better Products
18 Where’s My Data? Crafting a Robust
Product Data Strategy by Michael Peach
21 A Product Manager’s Worst Nightmare
by Daniel Elizalde
2 Sell More Stuff
24 How One Executive’s New Product Ignited
Revenue Growth by Greg Alexander
28 Selling: It Takes an Ecosystem by Scott Salkin
2 Lead Strategically
30 A New Product VP’s 90-Day Checklist
by Rich Mironov
33 8 Blocks: The Critical Realities For Growing
Any Business by Paul Schwada
2 A Pragmatic Approach
37 Put this issue’s ideas into action
D E PA RT M E N T S
THE GERMINATION
OF GREAT
PRODUCT TEAMS
by Anuraag Verma
CULTIVATING THE RIGHT
CUSTOMERS
by Jesus Ramirez
EMBRACING
INORGANIC GROWTH
by Frank Tait
ORGANICALLY GROWING
SOCIAL MEDIA
COMMUNITIES
by Sheila Kloefkorn
8 11 13 15
SPRING 2016 pragmaticmarketing.com 1
CONTENTS | VOLUME 13 | ISSUE 2 | 2016

2 pragmaticmarketing.com SPRING 2016
BITS PIECES
V
IDEA IS A STARTUP WITH A GOAL TO SIMPLIFY the way that television
inventories are bought and sold. Today this is a very manual
process. The media buyer determines the target market
and then contacts that specific market’s rep (and there are more
than 600 of them across the U.S.). Now imagine that you want
to buy local advertising in the California and New York markets.
First, you must contact multiple reps (each has responsibilities
for specific TV stations), then those reps must find out what
their station’s inventory is and get back to you. This is all
handled by telephone and fax (yes, fax). It can take weeks or
months to buy one TV spot on a show.
When I joined Videa to help bring this
new product to market and address
these problems, we didn’t have a
mature product marketing department
in place. This provided me with an
opportunity to leverage the key
lessons from my Pragmatic Marketing
training as well as from 18 years of
experience working in small business
and enterprise software.
Lesson 1: Get buy-in. Explain to
everyone—from the ground floor to
executive staff in every department—
why you’re there and what you intend
to accomplish. If necessary, draw it
out on a whiteboard or piece of paper; explain the Pragmatic
Marketing Framework to your stakeholders. This ensures there
is a shared understanding of the “why” in marketing and the
strategic role we fill.
Lesson 2: Create a strategy. It’s crucial to talk to prospects and
implement a process so that you can build products people
want. Remember, hope is not a strategy. The process of product
development is often quite foreign to entrepreneurs. They
may not understand the importance of doing market research.
Instead they’ll say, “Oh, I went to a conference and talked
to people.” That’s fine, but it’s important to do quantitative
research around the product you’re trying to build.
At Videa, I discovered six different positioning slides from
business development, sales and operations, really anyone who
had touchpoints with the company. We had plenty of work to
do to ensure that our messaging was consistent and on point.
Lesson 3: Prioritize. If you don’t have buyer personas, start
there. If you haven’t done a competitive analysis, start there.
While there is no rule about where to start, doing a gap analysis
makes a lot of sense. Not only will it shed light on where
responsibilities lie (or don’t lie) within the organization, but it
allows you to say “What are we doing well? What are we not
doing well?” Now you can start to prioritize.
Lesson 4: Bring co-workers along. I’ve learned the importance
of bringing people along to show them how things should
work. I’ve seen the value of having different teams, not just the
THE CHALLENGES OF
Building
Market-Driven
Startups
Hope is not
a strategy.
The process
of product
development
is often quite
foreign to
entrepreneurs.
Andrea Moe, senior director of marketing
for Videa, shared her firsthand account of
building market-driven organizations inside
startups at a recent Pragmatic Leadership
Breakfast in Atlanta. Below are some of the
highlights from her talk.

product or marketing teams, take Pragmatic Marketing courses.
The training gets everyone on the same page; it helps provide a
level playing field where everyone speaks the same language.
Lesson 5: Share. You often get the best
feedback from departments that may not
understand what you’re trying to do, so
always carry your one-page competitive
analysis documents with you. I post them
on the shared directory so everyone has
access. They help everyone understand
who it is that’s in the market, what they
are doing, how they are doing it, all in a
succinct one-page document. It’s a great
way to validate that what you’re thinking
is correct.
Lesson 6: Be creative. Trade shows, meetups and professional
happy hours are great opportunities to get feedback on your
positioning documents and marketing materials. They’re also
great opportunities to talk to people about their concerns and
find out what keeps them up at night.
Twitter has been a great resource for connecting with
people who are experiencing the same things I am. Even
better, they’re willing to share information. I recommend asking
questions addressed to #prdmgmt and
#prdmktg.
Lesson 7: Be patient. Remember that
the concept of product marketing may
be foreign to many co-workers, so be
patient when you explain the process to
people within your organization. If you
have case studies, share them. Show how
you plan to build the product and the
types of activities that are required to be
successful. Be sure to demonstrate the
buying process, your buyer personas and how you plan to map
everything. Initially, they may be unfamiliar with the process,
but be patient and talk it through.
If you keep these seven lessons in mind, you’re well on your
way to creating a market-driven organization, regardless of
company size.
TRAVEL TIPS FOR ROAD WARRIORS
Long known as the “Gateway to the West,” St. Louis was the launching point for
Lewis and Clark’s famed expedition. Today the city is a study in 21st-century urban
renewal and a burgeoning tech ecosystem that continues to brim with historic sites
and landmarks.
Meet Me in St. Louis
Gateway Arch | gatewayarch.com
The stainless steel arch is a symbol of the city’s role as the “Gateway to the West.” At a
height of 625 feet, it’s the tallest national monument in the world. The arch is located in
the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park, where you’ll also find the Museum of
Westward Expansion, the Old Courthouse (site of the Dred Scott slavery case)
and the first cathedral to be erected west of the Mississippi.
The National Blues Museum | nationalbluesmuseum.org
Opened earlier this year, the museum offers visitors a venue through
which to explore the various regional styles of the blues and learn about
the musicians who created this music. The 23,000-square-foot museum
includes more than 16,000 square feet of highly interactive technology
and artifact-driven exhibits, and a 150-seat performance area.
The Delmar Loop | visittheloop.com
The Delmar Loop got its name more than a century ago from streetcars
that came west and “looped around” before connecting to other areas.
Now the six-block district of restaurants, boutiques, bars, galleries and
open-air cafés is where the young and trendy go to see and be seen.
St. Louis Art Museum | slam.org
One of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums, SLAM has an
encyclopedic collection of more than 33,000 works. Admission is free.
You often get the
best feedback from
departments that may not
understand what you’re
trying to do.

BITS PIECES
St. Louis Zoo | stlzoo.org
How many cities can boast of having one of the top
zoos in the country that’s also free to the public?
Well, St. Louis can. The zoo is home to more than
5,000 animals, so there’s plenty to see. Popular
habitats include the Penguin and Puffin Coast and
Polar Bear Point.
ITEN | itenstl.org
“Tech hub” and “St. Louis” may
not be synonymous yet, but the
city is determined to change that
perception. ITEN was founded in
2008 as a catalyst for the region’s
IT startup ecosystem, enabling
experienced entrepreneurs to help
other entrepreneurs build successful
tech ventures. The organization serves
more than 280 startup ventures and involves
more than 80 volunteer mentors and six
entrepreneurs-in-residence.
Anheuser-Busch Brewery | budweisertours.com
Take a free 45-minute tour of one of the world’s
largest and most recognized brewing facilities. Not
only will you gain a wealth of beer knowledge from
your tour guide, you’ll also visit the historic Budweiser
Clydesdale Stable, watch beer being made in the
Brew House and stroll through the cellars where it’s
aged, all while sipping on samples (if you’re 21 or
older, of course).
Gateway Arch Riverboat Cruises
gatewayarch.com/experience/riverboat-cruises
After viewing the city from the Gateway Arch, take
a relaxing riverboat cruise on the Mississippi River
for a view of the St. Louis skyline from a replica
19th-century paddle-wheel riverboat. Choose from
one-hour sightseeing cruises, skyline dinner cruises
or specialty cruises.
Gus’ Pretzels | guspretzels.com
Nestled in the shadow of the Anheuser-Busch
Brewery, Gus’ Pretzels is a third-generation family-
owned and -operated St. Louis tradition. It’s a great
place to start or end a brewery tour.
Pappy’s Smokehouse | pappyssmokehouse.com
This Memphis-style BBQ joint is nationally renowned
for its top-notch smoked meats and tasty sides. It’s
such a hit with locals that lines often form around
the block.
Scott Joplin House State Historic Site
mostateparks.com/park/scott-joplin-house-state-
historic-site
If you’re a fan of ragtime jazz, you won’t want to miss
a visit to the house of Scott Joplin, who lived here
with his wife Belle from 1901 to 1903. The house is
furnished in period style and includes memorabilia
and a player piano featuring the artist’s music.
pragmaticmarketing.com/live
Pragmatic Live is on air.
Our popular webinar and podcast series will help you conquer your greatest
product management and marketing challenges. It offers best practices and
tips, as well as an inside look at how they’re being implemented in some of
today’s most successful companies.
So, if you’re looking to stay tuned in to the latest in technology, look no further than

YES
BUILD
IT!
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
YES
YES
YES
YES
n=manyn=1
YES
YES
YES
YES
YES
YES
YES
YES
Can we buy or
partner for it?
Does it fit
with your
company’s
competencies?
Development Customer
Is it on the
roadmap?
Is it profitable?
Can anyone
else do this?
Will it
eliminate
technical
debt?
Is this a reference
account?
n=1 or n=many?
Is there
another
solution to
the request?
Does it have
market data?
Is it
reuseable?
Does it relate to
your corporate
goals?
Is it solving
a market
problem?
Does their logo
bring the perfect
balance to your
About Us slide?
Is the demo location
on your bucket list?
Will the feature
make you look cool
to your friends?
YES
YES
WHO
MADE THE
REQUEST?
sales
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
ON
HOW TO SAY
Don’t build.
NIHITO
Don’t build.
NIHITO
Don’t build.
NIHITO
Don’t build.
NIHITO
Don’t build.
NIHITO
MANY
Want to learn more about how you can make a bigger strategic impact in your
company? Register for a course near you: pragmaticmarketing.com/buy
You’re never going to have time to get out of the office
and into the market if you’re always busy responding to
requests. But which of those requests can you really say
no to? Use this handy flowchart to find out.

A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE:
Cut out framework, avoiding pesky paper cuts.
Post conspicuously throughout office.
Follow framework faithfully with peers.
Reap the benefits of being market driven.
Rinse and repeat.
© 1993-2016 Pragmatic Marketing, Inc.
STRATEGY
EXECUTION
Visit pragmaticmarketing.com/framework or call 480.515.1411 to learn
more about how to put the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ to work for you.
5
4
3
2
1
MARKET FOCUS BUSINESS PLANNING PROGRAMS READINESS SUPPORT
Market
Definition
Distribution
Strategy
Product
Portfolio
Product
Roadmap
Business
Plan
Pricing
Buy, Build
or Partner
Product
Profitability
Innovation
Market
Problems
Win/Loss
Analysis
Distinctive
Competencies
Competitive
Landscape
Asset
Assessment
Positioning
Buying
Process
Buyer
Personas
User
Personas
Requirements
Use
Scenarios
Stakeholder
Communications
Marketing
Plan
Customer
Acquisition
Customer
Retention
Program
Effectiveness
Launch
Plan
Thought
Leadership
Lead
Generation
Referrals
References
Sales
Process
Collateral
Sales
Tools
Channel
Training
Presentations
“Special”
Calls
Event
Support
Channel
Support

E
VERY TIME I FIND MYSELF IN A NEW ROLE or with a new product, I always
start with engaging the market. Working with customers and
prospects will provide insights into what your users value and
the problems that they want to solve. This will help you determine
what content to focus on.
You should also engage with your sales team to see who the
typical buyers are and then perform win/loss calls. Once you have
identified the buyer and user personas through these methods,
spend time with the team to do a positioning exercise for those
personas. Now you will have a core message established and an
understanding of your buyers’ criteria for solving their problems.
This is in essence the DNA you need to start creating content
for the web. And content that focuses on the buyers’ needs is
significantly more engaging than product-focused content.
You may have heard that nearly 70 percent of the buyer’s journey
is complete before they even reach out to sales. That means
when buyers find your content, it’s because they have a particular
challenge to solve and are evaluating the options. So make sure
your content explains how you can help your customers.
Your online presence should also extend to other places your
personas congregate online. This is another place a buyer
persona is helpful, because when you interview buyers you
can find out what they read (blogs, journals), whether they
use social media, and if so, which networks. This will help
you prioritize your content channels, mirror the language
they use and understand how your content resonates with
readers and drives engagement.
Ask the Experts:
In building
an online
presence for
a product,
where do
I focus my
content?
Do you have a question for our experts? Send us an email at experts@pragmaticmarketing.com.
PM
ASK THE EXPERTS
Jon Gatrell, Instructor
Pragmatic Marketing

B
UILDING A GREAT PRODUCT TEAM BEGINS WITH hiring great
product people. But who are product professionals
and what exactly do they do? Sometimes even
product pros find this a difficult question to answer
because their scope is wide and they wear many
different hats.
Ken Yeung, a reporter for The Next Web, defines
them as, “the unsung heroes of the industry, these
skilled professionals are the people who manage every
movement of the product’s lifecycle, taking the idea and
guiding it through development.”
So how do you find one of these multi-talented,
unsung heroes that’s the perfect match for your
products and company?
CREATE AN IDEAL CANDIDATE PERSONA
This role is often a jack-of-all-trades, able to dabble
in anything from software engineering to market
predictions, customer surveys and sales. Unfortunately,
it’s not always possible to find someone who checks all
BY
ANURAAG
VERMA
GreatGreat

the boxes, but by starting with a clear picture of who you want,
you’ll have a much better idea of what traits to look for and where
and how to go about sourcing them.
Defining exactly what you want in the role is not a clear-cut
task and will vary across companies. The skills, experience and
personal qualities required will be dependent on the specific needs
of your company and the role you are trying to fill. However,
there are some common traits to look for.
Customer Empathy
They must display a deep understanding of both
customers and competitors to build products that
customers want to use. This valuable market insight
comes from having a genuine sense of empathy.
Rather than viewing themselves as separate from
the customer, they must be willing to immerse
themselves in the customer’s world to understand
that perspective: what their needs are and how to
meet them.
To screen for this, ask candidates about your
target market and note their reaction: Do they relate
to and respect your customers? Do they have past
experience with them, or express passion for learning
more about them?
Work Ethic
Product management requires doing whatever it takes to get
a variety of jobs done. It requires a heightened level of focus
and commitment.
The success of the product is in their court, and you need
to trust that they’ll be there to catch the ball at all times. Their
strong work ethic and commitment to the product’s success needs
to be contagious enough to carry the whole team through.
Communication
Strong communication skills are critical to success. This includes
listening to—and implementing—customer feedback, providing
succinct but detailed updates in meetings, and maintaining
communication channels between engineers, designers and
the marketing and sales team. To gain trust and communicate
efficiently, it’s important they speak the language and technical
jargon of each department.
It’s easy to pick up on oral communication skills during an
interview, but also consider using a short writing assignment to
test a candidate’s written communication skills.
Past Experience
Do you want someone who will successfully meld into a large
company culture? What about someone who has skills that
pertain to a specific industry? Or, perhaps you want someone
who is more entrepreneurial. Maybe you want someone who can
build out a team and create a structure for building new products.
Knowing how high within the organization or team this person
will sit helps determine what past experiences and skill sets to
look for.
“Unless the position is very junior, I'll usually hire product
managers who've actually shipped a product,” said Ken Norton, a
product partner at Google Ventures. No amount of studied skill
can beat hands-on experience.
Skill Set
As they interact with people across all levels and departments on
a daily basis, they must fit seamlessly into company culture. They
should be easy to work with and willing to joke and have a bit
of fun, even when under pressure. Although the skills you focus
on hiring for will vary based on whether someone spends most
of their time in marketing and sales or works with engineers to
develop the product, here are some common skills to look for:
• Technical: Not all product positions require technical
skills, but it’s beneficial to
understand what is required from
the engineering team and be
able to discuss this in technical
terms. This helps ensure an
understanding of the technical
implications of a product decision.
• Business and marketing: There’s
no use building a great product if
no one wants to buy it. They must
understand the market they are
catering to and must know how to
tailor current and future products
to meet those needs.
• Management and
communication: Product people
don’t work alone, or even in one
department. They collaborate with a diverse team and need
the communication, leadership and interpersonal qualities
suited to this role.
• Strategic thinking: Product professionals, especially at a
senior level, must be able to think strategically. This helps
them be successful in planning, budgeting, resource allocation
and operations.
Skills can be learned on the job, so don’t be too critical if an
otherwise acceptable candidate doesn’t have the entire skillset you
are looking for.
THE JOB DESCRIPTION
Now that you have a very clear idea of what skills, personality
traits and experience you’re looking for in a candidate, you need to
create a job description before you can start sourcing candidates.
As product positions can be so open-ended and vary from
company to company, try to be as clear as possible on exactly
what their duties and responsibilities will include. Do you require
someone to market current products? Will they conceptualize and
build new products? Will they only focus on a specific industry?
Paint a picture of the work environment and the teams they
PRODUCT
PEOPLE
DON’T WORK
ALONE OR
EVEN IN ONE
DEPARTMENT.

will need to coordinate with. Be clear about who you are as a
company. Spell out the exact skills that are necessary and any
other educational requirements. Indicate the experience level
required and provide an idea of what a successful candidate would
be like. Also remember to reflect on the appeal of working at your
company, rather than simply listing your demands of applicants.
SOURCING
Sometimes the best candidates are already working within your
organization, masquerading under another guise. Designers or
engineers who have years of experience working with your
particular products and systems or have occupied prominent
project leadership positions before could be ideal candidates.
They are already ingrained within your company culture and
have a deep knowledge of how your business works.
On the other hand, sometimes the best solution is to bring in
fresh, outside talent with the exact industry skills and experience
you are looking for. A few managers I asked said they found
their best hires through referrals from their professional network
and other team members. They also recommended the following
job sites:
• Angellist (for startups)
• LinkedIn (check out the Pragmatic Marketing
Alumni Group)
• SimplyHired
• Mind the Product
• ProductHire
THE JOB INTERVIEW
Once you have hand-selected promising applicants, it's time
to screen them. This is your chance to filter through the noise
and hone your selection. Screen for skills defined in the job
description and ask questions that give each applicant a chance to
teach you something new.
You need to validate their ability to conceptualize, create and
carry through products that solve market problems. Use these
interviews as an opportunity to test how they problem-solve and
meet the criteria you set.
Microsoft is known for drilling interviewees about how to
solve a single problem until they can no longer come up with a
solution. The focus is not on a candidate’s answer to the problem,
but rather on the steps they take to try to solve it and how well
they handle themselves when they don’t.
Discuss a problem and see how the applicant divides it into
smaller actionable steps. You want to see how candidates define
problems, how they break them down and what experience they
have with testing and measuring possible solutions.
Asking questions helps encourage candidates to think
strategically. It also reveals their level of problem solving,
technical ability, communication skills and passion for product.
Ken Norton sums it up: “When I learn something from
a candidate, I know two things: (1) they're not afraid to speak
critically, and (2) they're probably smarter than me. I want both
in a product manager.”
CLOSE THE DEAL
Innovative people want to work with other innovative, creative
people. To attract the best, you must be the best and be able to
demonstrate that you are a company people want to work for.
Use the people on your team as shining examples of the culture
someone would want to be immersed in.
Be sure to publicize concrete examples of impressive products
you have created and provide a breakdown of how they evolved.
Be transparent about your company culture and the types of
challenges product people will face.
Hiring the perfect product team member can be a complex
process. It is a critically important role that needs to be defined
specifically for your company. From the start, be clear about
who your ideal candidate is and refer back to these attributes
throughout the hiring process.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anuraag Verma is the head of business development at Alpha,
an on-demand user insights platform for product and innovation
teams. Anuraag has successfully launched new businesses and
products across four continents, and his diverse career spans
engineering, consulting, technology, education and not-for-profit.
He has facilitated hundreds of workshops for senior executives at
companies including General Electric, American Express, Staples,
Danone and Pearson. You can connect with him at alphahq.com.
Cindy Alvarez, author of Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your
Customers Will Buy, suggests asking the following interview questions to test
how well candidates think on their feet.
Your product is just about to
hit code freeze, but the sales
team has gotten feedback that
one of the company’s most important
customers won’t buy it unless you add
feature X. Talk through the process for
understanding your options.
You discovered a bug in a product that
has been deployed to an enterprise
customer. QA tells you the bug is an edge
case—at most, it will affect 1 percent of users,
probably less—but for those it does impact, it will
be an extremely negative user experience. Take 10
minutes to compose an email response.
You’re reviewing
product functional
requirements with the
engineering team, and they tell
you that developing feature Y
is not possible. How do you
respond?
1 2 3
INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS TO ASK
PM

CULTIVATING
RIGHT CUSTOMERS
P
RODUCT MANAGEMENT, MARKETING AND DEVELOPMENT teams are
getting more in tune with the needs of customers and
potential buyers than ever before. When executed correctly,
this results in better products, more successful launches and faster
adoption. But while more companies are taking the time to get to
know their customers, many are not using collected feedback as
effectively as possible.
The breakdown is not because of a lack of skill in gathering
and applying data, but because that data is too broad. Data and
information gathering is either being generalized or recycled.
It lacks insight and the rich context needed to properly assess a
market and make product decisions.
A misfire in customer segmentation could mean the
difference between a product failure and success. Broad markets
need to be divided into subsets of consumers or businesses with
common needs, interests or priorities, and then specific strategies
to target them developed around that data.
Focusing on the wrong customer is a complete waste of time.
It will lead to a product that has little or no utility or appeal for
those it was intended for, and ultimately it results in an expensive
and lackluster launch.
Truly understanding whom you should be building for will
help reduce the complexity and scope of the first version of your
product. This will enable your team to get to market quicker
and help reduce cost and risk. Focusing on the right customer
segments—the customers who have the greatest need and demand
for your product—will streamline acquisition and drastically
increase traction. Just as the right soil will help seeds sprout more
quickly and produce healthier crops, proper segmentation will do
the same for product launches.
CULTIVATING ORGANICALLY
Many product teams already take time to understand their
customers at a surface level, by pushing surveys, reviewing product
analytics and feature requests, but how do you dig deeper to create
more insightful segments? It starts by spending time with potential
customers and users. Pragmatic marketers have an acronym for
this: NIHITO (nothing important happens in the office).
Surveys have their place, but to gain rich, meaningful
“ah-ha!” insights, you have to open the dialogue with everyone
from potential buyers to early adopters. Getting to know your
market helps you understand the nuances and subtleties of their
needs, which will help you develop important distinctions about
what they care about and how they’ll use your product. As you
move through testing the pains and gains, then products and
features, and finally willingness to pay, take note of the attributes
of these users. Age, gender, education level and income level
are straightforward things to consider. Less obvious, but even
more important: What critical problems do these users have or
what challenges do they face on a daily basis? Are they technical
or nontechnical? Early adopters or followers? Luxury shoppers
or frugal consumers? Do they use your product in different
BY JESUS RAMIREZ
Why Segmentation Is Key to a Successful Product Launch
THE

PM
environments or settings?
For enterprise products, important attributes to consider
include company and team size, key business goals, vertical,
spending budget and revenue. Also, is the customer product- or
service-based? Multi or single location? Finally, what is the price of
the product or service they are selling?
This is not an extensive list of attributes, and your team will
need to determine the important ones for your particular product.
But creating this list is a critical step in starting to segment, and,
ultimately, to prioritize your customers.
Once you’ve segmented your customers, you can begin
prioritizing these segments using relevant business criteria, such as:
• Product need/demand—Which users have the highest demand
for your product? Why? Are there users that can’t do their job
without your product vs. users that simply benefit from it?
• Market size/opportunity—How many potential customers exist
in the market? How many customers
are there in the smaller segments? For
example, you may have an app that helps
all SMBs (small-medium businesses), but
discover that restaurants in the U.S. far
outweigh dry-cleaning businesses.
• Ease of acquisition—Can you clearly
identify the channels you’ll use to acquire
them? Again, while restaurants represent
a huge market, maybe they are harder to
reach than plumbers and photographers
who naturally promote themselves online.
• Sales cycle—How many touch points
does it take to win them over? How many
stakeholders are involved in a buying
decision?
• Potential value to product/platform—
Are they early adopters, sharers or
potential brand advocates? Do they have
a large budget or spending appetite? For
example, some companies have targeted
influential adopters and given their product away for free because
they know they will share it with others. It’s important that you
find your own early adopters.
Before wasting time building products or features customers
don’t care about—or even marketing to the wrong subset—take
time to segment based on these values. The data will help uncover
potential untapped or underutilized segments and may even help
you sidestep a potential product dud.
NURTURING ALIGNMENT
For anyone involved in product development and launch, you know
how challenging it can be to align teams around one direction—no
matter how large or small the team is. Having validated data about
your assumptions helps ensure the team makes decisions based on
facts rather than on ego, opinion or generalized data.
This approach ensures that during development the features
prioritized are those that satisfy the core needs of ideal customer
segments. Second-tier features can be parked until a later version
or may be scrapped entirely. This not only reduces time to market
and overall investment, but enables you to start testing the actual
product sooner, and ultimately to generate revenue sooner.
FERTILIZING FOR IMMEDIATE IMPACT
Data from customer segments will also impact the product’s
branding and messaging. Whether it’s a consumer or enterprise
app, users are growing accustomed to, and demanding, relevant
and personalized messaging in the products they use.
Let’s take a fitness app. Without segmenting and prioritizing
your users, you may struggle to find the right voice and tone
that resonates with three distinct segments: hardcore triathletes,
casual weekend runners and new mothers trying to get back into
shape. Hardcore athletes may want harsher, more cut-and-dried
instructions, while casual athletes may want friendlier, more laid-
back and even funnier encouragement.
Whatever it may be, understanding the
various segments will help your team develop
a story (and give the app a personality) that
will resonate with ideal customers. Baking
this into the product through branding,
features and messaging will support not
only acquisition, but also retention and
engagement.
Sales and marketing can use customer
segmentation data to create more effective
marketing campaigns and sales collateral.
The marketing team gains invaluable insights
into customer characteristics and behaviors
that allows them to identify which channels
to penetrate, strategies to execute on and
the marketing messages that will more
effectively attract users. Together, the sales
and marketing teams can work cohesively
to build the right messaging to get past
gatekeepers, talk to decision-makers and
answer questions.
Yes, proper customer segmentation takes time, but product
teams are in it for the long haul. We all want to create winning
products that have longevity in the market, and that begins
with creating the right foundation. Segmentation is the key
to building for—and targeting—the right customer and to
cultivating a lasting relationship.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesus Ramirez is a partner and vice president of product at Tallwave
and an advisor at Tallwave Capital. He helps founders and product
managers hone their products' launch and growth strategies. Prior
to Tallwave, Jesus spent more than eight years in product leadership
roles, leading teams at Zazzle and DrFirst, as well as working with
numerous startups as a consultant and advisor. He earned a B.S. in
product design from Stanford University. Connect with Jesus on
LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/zeusrz.
WITHOUT SEGMENTING,
YOU MAY STRUGGLE TO
FIND THE RIGHT VOICE AND
TONE THAT RESONATES
WITH DISTINCT SEGMENTS

I
T’S NO SECRET THAT SOCIAL MEDIA HAS BECOME
a crowded space. With advertisements
always popping up in our news feeds,
major brands competing for our attention
and what seems like endless posts from
over-sharing social media “friends,” it
seems as if there’s practically no space left
for anything meaningful.
Yet in order to remain competitive,
today’s marketers must continue to
find ways to stand out from the crowd,
especially because social media use among
businesses and consumers continues to
skyrocket, and it doesn’t appear to be
slowing down anytime soon.
The proof can be seen in the
statistics: Social media use has seen a
nearly tenfold jump over the past decade.
According to the Pew Research Center,
approximately two-thirds of American
adults used social networking sites
in 2015, up from 7 percent when the
research center began tracking social
media usage back in 2005.
So what’s the key to rising above the
noise when it comes to your company’s
social media channels? For starters,
concentrate on organic growth tactics,
a strategy that can help you build
momentum and value for the long term.
ORGANIC VS. PAID SOCIAL MEDIA
Unclear about the definition of organic
versus paid social media? Ultimately,
organic social media is about quality,
not quantity. Yes, you might be able to
quickly recruit 300 new followers via
paid social media methods like buying ads
on Facebook or Twitter, but if they aren't
engaged, they really don't matter.
Organic reach stands for the number
of unique users who have seen your
content through unpaid distribution. The
number includes both people who have
interacted with your content, (i.e., they
liked, tweeted, re-shared or commented)
and the people who have discovered your
content via other users’ actions. Think of
organic as the ripple effect. When you
skip a stone (your social media post) on
a pond, you can see the ripples grow into
bigger circles as the stone skips across the
water.
When used correctly, social media
is the most direct, personal and easily
accessible way a company can truly
connect and foster relationships with
followers. With an organic social media
approach, companies benefit by having
real, honest conversations with customers
who have a better chance of becoming
lifelong, loyal fans.
BEST PRACTICES: ORGANICALLY GROWING YOUR
SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNITIES
It may sound obvious, but the point
BY SHEILA KLOEFKORN

PM
of social media is to be social. Brands should be actively
engaging and interacting with the individuals and companies
following them via social media sites like LinkedIn, Google
Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. How can this
be accomplished? Ask questions, answer questions and leave
comments. These are all positive ways to engage. And people
will likely follow you because you’re engaging with them on
a deeper level. The key is to post relevant, educational content
associated with your industry, products or services. Remember,
you want to be seen as an industry expert.
Finally, no one wants to experience significant churn. By
growing your company’s following organically, you will engage
and connect with users who are less likely to stop following you.
Think of it this way—before sending a request, ask yourself:
Does this company or person have an issue my company can
resolve? Would they be interested in my solutions? Do they
relate to anything about my company or industry? If your
answer is “yes” to most of these questions, they are likely to
accept your request.
WHERE DO I START?
Growing your social media accounts one relationship at a time
can be more time-consuming than paid methods. However, for
marketers who truly understand the value in this type of organic
growth, the ultimate rewards are plentiful and long-lasting.
Here are a few of the many ways you can start to build
organically via social media marketing.
Truly engage. Don’t just talk to talk. Engaging with your
social media audience means a number of things, all of which
digital marketers have been trying to better understand for
years. To make it easier, break the concept down into simpler
terms: To truly engage means to align with the interests of
your followers. In some cases, this may mean sharing amusing
images or compelling video. In other scenarios, it may require
sharing comprehensive research and studies boasting measurable
results. Once you establish a following—even if it’s small at the
start—it means to support and share your followers’ content, to
respond to their comments and to help them with their needs. To
truly engage in social media is similar to having a real, face-to-
face discussion with a lead and taking time to listen to what is
important to them.
Be consistent. One of the best ways to organically grow a
LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook account is to remain consistent.
Stick to a posting schedule and decide what should (and
shouldn’t) be shared on the account. Take the time to think about
it thoroughly. You should have a vision for these accounts before
you get started. For example, random and unrelated images will
not get much attention and will make a company’s social media
page look unprofessional. Keep everything consistent and always
have your brand’s target audience in mind.
Make social media customer service a top priority. In
social media, your customers are literally at your fingertips.
You have the opportunity to impress them every day via social
media. Any messages on LinkedIn can and should be responded
to immediately. Want to really make an impression? Reach
out to those who follow you on Twitter, those who like you
on Facebook, and send them a “Happy Birthday” message or
recognize something they have achieved. It can be helpful to
relate based on interests that go beyond a purely professional
focus, so be sure to brainstorm ideas that align with their
personal interests.
Create real-life relationships. Why not take some of your
social connections to a more meaningful place? Whether this
means on the phone, on Google Hangouts, in a physical coffee
shop or even in your office conference room, make it happen.
Remember, you can tweet to someone all day, but until you
actually speak to them, you don’t truly have an understanding
of their exact agenda or personality. Even a 10-minute
phone introduction can create a start to a fantastic, working
relationship.
At the end of the day, organic social media is about
connecting with people, not just playing the number of followers
game. It’s about segmenting your influencers and advocates and
building genuine relationships with them by engaging with
their posts and content. And in social media, as in any other area
of digital marketing, the best measure of success is not how big
your network is, but how qualified.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheila Kloefkorn is CEO/president of KEO Marketing, a full-service
B2B marketing agency specializing in marketing strategy, messaging,
digital infrastructure, execution and analytics. KEO Marketing grows
Fortune 1000 companies and mid-market businesses. Sheila was
recently named one of the “Top 10 Business Leaders of the Year”
and “Top 25 Dynamic Women in Business” by the Phoenix Business
Journal and one of 15 Arizonans to Watch by the Arizona Republic.
She is president of the Phoenix chapter of the Business Marketing
Association and a frequent speaker on a wide range of marketing and
business topics. Learn more at www.keomarketing.com.
YOU CAN TWEET TO SOMEONE ALL
DAY, BUT UNTIL YOU ACTUALLY
SPEAK TO THEM, YOU DON’T
TRULY HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING
OF THEIR PERSONALITY.

M
ANY BUSINESSES WITH HIGH VALUATIONS GROW through a blend of
organic growth and inorganic growth. The key is to find
the right balance for your business and the markets that
you serve and the right synergies with your acquisition targets.
The approach you use for organic growth can also apply to
inorganic growth. Start with the market problem and market
definition, which are the same regardless of growth type. Make
sure to gain a clear definition of market segmentation and an
understanding of buyer personas, including the business value
these buyer personas will achieve by solving their problems.
It’s also important to understand the distinctive
competencies of your company and those of your acquisition
target. This information will be crucial in determining how to
address post-close business integration.
The acquisition will bring customers, products, intellectual
property and talent. You’ll need to evaluate each of these
competencies separately.
CUSTOMERS
You need a good sense of your cost to acquire a customer (CAC)
and then compare the acquisition cost to the cost of winning and
retaining these customers in the market. The target company’s
relationship with its customers is also critical (and tends to reflect
the level of talent too).
PRODUCTS
It’s important to assess how well the
products solve market problems. Many
target companies are not aware of
the Pragmatic Marketing model and
don’t have anything like marketecture,
which maps up problems to features.
But if you plan to continue selling a
product, you’ll need to quickly build out
the marketecture as a prerequisite for
marketing and sales planning.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Intellectual property acquisition—such as patents, copyrights
and access to relationships that facilitate sales—tends to be
pretty straightforward, but you’ll want to be clear about what
you’re getting and the implications.
TALENT
Talent is the acquisition wild card. People do business with
people, and key industry and customer relationships are often
dependent on individuals. Assessing the right people to retain
is a combination of science and art that needs its own book.
But it is essential to retain industry, domain, customer and
product knowledge.
While all acquisitions at their core involve one business
taking over another, there are often distinctly different strategic
reasons behind the transition.
Complementary extensions are a fertile field for companies
just starting out with inorganic growth. These acquisitions
allow you to leverage the knowledge of your current market
and buyer personas by looking for companies that sell products
to buyer personas in your market. From a product management
perspective, this is similar to the plan and business case you
would make to build a new product.
You will get a good sense of which other companies address
your buyers’ problems simply
by asking them. Another way
to identify targets is to look
at your integration partners
or your backlog of requests to
integrate with other solution
providers.
Also, to leverage your
current investments, look
BY FRANK TAIT
INORGANIC GROWTH
EMBRACING
A C M E

for products that fit your existing go-to-market strategy. A
comparable technology stack is another important consideration.
And you cannot overestimate the importance of company
culture, because compatible cultures provide the foundation for
successful acquisitions.
You will want to prioritize potential acquisition targets
using the same criteria you use to prioritize your product
roadmap to determine the best fit to solve the market problems.
Once you have identified your target, calculate the total
addressable market (TAM) using a method that’s consistent with
your primary product. Because the diligence and negotiation
process can take as much effort in smaller acquisitions as in
larger ones, look for businesses with TAMs that materially
increase your company’s overall TAM.
With roll-ups, you remove capacity from a market by
acquiring a competitor that sells similar solutions to yours in
that market. In addition to the items in the complementary
extension category, roll-ups have several interesting implications
to consider. A roll-up implies that you plan to migrate your
acquired company’s customers onto your product. In effect, this
is like a big sale. (Doing an acquisition where you intend to
continue selling the acquired company’s products is treated like a
complementary extension.)
From a product management perspective, this is similar
to the plan and business case you make to implement a rapid-
growth strategy for a current product. However, there are some
additional factors. You need to balance the acquisition cost
against the cost of competing for—and winning—the business
from the competitor, along with the time-value of money.
It is important to understand how many of the target’s
customers are already in your sales pipeline, particularly if the
deals are in your financial forecast. This may result in reworking
not only your forecasts, but your sales quotas. Be sure to look
at individual sales territories, because companies tend to have
regional strengths, and the impact may be disproportionate.
The migration strategy is critical for these acquisitions. You
need to have a plan that discourages these customers from being
poached by competitors while you transition them onto your
products. Speed of migration and any seasonality of the business
are factors here. A reasonable plan gets a customer migrated in
less time and effort than if you implemented that customer from
a regular sales win; otherwise, it may not be a good deal.
New area acquisitions are some of the most challenging
because you are entering markets where you have little or no
presence. These might include new markets or geographies
with similar buyer personas or new product areas with new
buyer personas within your current market and geography. For
example, a new market could be a software company that is
expanding from a historical focus on higher education into water
and gas billing for public utilities. A new geography might entail
expanding from the United States into the European Union.
And a new product area could involve expanding from human
resources into payroll.
In each of these, talent retention is critical. You don’t know
what you don’t know, and you need the acquired company’s
team to be successful to ensure that you reach your growth
targets.
Of these scenarios, the easiest to implement is the new
buyer persona within your current market and geography. Look
for businesses that are adjacent to yours and where your existing
buyer persona could be a key influencer on the buyer persona
of the acquired company. (Keep in mind that new markets and
new geographies are advanced acquisition approaches that should
be attempted only after you refine your process with a couple of
more straightforward acquisitions.)
Implementing successful acquisitions requires a
comprehensive, well-thought-out plan. As part of our
onboarding and acculturation process, whenever my companies
lead acquisitions, we ensure that key management personnel
and all product management employees attend Pragmatic
Marketing’s Foundations and Focus classes. We do this within
the first 90 days; it’s one of the initial steps we take to introduce
new employees to our common language and processes. And it
ensures that we are better aligned for strategy and growth. It’s
a tangible statement about the value we place on investing in
people and the importance of the Pragmatic Marketing model in
our business.
Remember, acquisitions are measured in years. They begin
with the targeting process and continue for several years after
the close, until the acquired company is thoroughly blended into
your operations. When you execute on the fundamentals laid
out in the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, you will lay the
foundation for the success of your organic and inorganic growth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Tait has more than 30 years of leadership and management
experience in strategic planning, sales, marketing, service delivery,
software development, and mergers and acquisitions. As senior vice
president of product for Frontline Technologies, he leads product
management, strategic alliances, and mergers and acquisitions. Frank
has used Pragmatic Marketing for 20 years. Contact Frank at
ftait@frontlinetechnologies.com.
COMPANIES TEND TO HAVE REGIONAL
STRENGTHS; TERRITORIAL IMPACT MAY
BE DISPROPORTIONATE.
PM
ACME

Leave the firefighting
to the professionals.
Pragmatic Marketing provides practical, actionable training and a comprehensive
toolset for product managers and marketers.You’ll learn how to use market facts to drive
strategic decisions and how to balance the tactical activities that can consume your day.
All of which means you can make a bigger impact on your business and your products.
IGNITE YOUR CAREER. Visit pragmaticmarketing.com or call 480.515.1411 today.
While it may not be a hose and a dalmatian, you do need the
right tools to get the job done.That’s where we come in.
Your job is to be strategic.
UTIVE BRIEFING FOUNDATIONS FOCUS BUILD MARKET LAUNCH PRICE ACTION PLAN

DEPARTMENTS
Sell More Stuff
How One Executive’s New Product
Ignited Revenue Growth 24
Selling: It Takes an Ecosystem 28
Build Better Products
Where’s My Data? Crafting a
Robust Product Data Strategy 18
A Product Manager’s Worst
Nightmare 21
Lead Strategically
A New Product VP’s 90-Day
Checklist 30
8 Blocks: The Critical Realities
For Growing Any Business 33

BUILD BETTER PRODUCTS
Where’s My Data?
Crafting a Robust Product Data Strategy
BY MICHAEL PEACH
I
N THEIR SEMINAL ARTICLE ON PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, Good Product
Manager, Bad Product Manager, Ben Horowitz and David
Weiden argue that product managers should be top-level
leaders who set the vision and are ultimately accountable for
their product’s success or failure. In essence, they should be
CEOs of their products. Almost 20 years after it was written, it’s
remarkable that their argument remains relevant in an industry
defined by constant change.
In reviewing the role of product manager as mini CEO, the
role of data in decision and strategy support naturally surfaces.
New digital technologies throw off huge volumes of data
that increasingly underpin key planning and decision-making
functions. In fact, 89 percent of U.S. respondents to PwC’s 2015
CEO survey said that new digital technologies created “very
high” value through data and data analytics.
But what about product managers? While companies
have created standardized dashboards and tools for financial,
operational and marketing functions, they have lagged in
instrumentation for the products themselves. This leaves
product managers at a relative disadvantage to the C-suite
and fails to adequately capture a tremendously valuable
source of data.
Many product teams rely on web analytics for information
about their users. However, these tools aren’t optimized for
registered, logged-in users interacting with a full-fledged
software product, especially one built around increasingly
popular single-page UX designs. They need to understand how
users interact with specific features and to map complex user
paths through the application. Attempting to contort a tool
that’s designed for mapping anonymous visits and optimizing
sales funnels to meet a product manager’s needs is a difficult
task and often results in suboptimal measurements.
To function as the CEO of their product and team,
product managers must have a data strategy that
meets their needs. They need to take
charge of this strategy and ensure
that their applications
capture the data
they need.
Events: The Building Blocks of Product Data
Before diving into specific measures, it’s worth spending a
few moments talking through the basic foundation of product
data: events. An event is an action that a user does in an
application. An individual event has several aspects: the action
itself, the user who initiates the action, and the date and time
that it occurs. For example, a URL page load (something that
a web analytics package would track) is an event, but so are
more granular actions like following a link or clicking on a page
element. These basic events and their associated attributes are
rolled up and analyzed to arrive at the key measures discussed
in this article. As a part of any data strategy implementation,
product teams must ensure that they can accurately capture
these events in totality.
Key Product Metrics
So, what should product managers measure and how is it
different from other key performance indicators deployed in the
enterprise? These five key factors can provide unique insight
into a product’s health.
Factor 1: Breadth of Usage
The simple way to think of breadth of usage is to answer the
question, “How many users do I have?” But in reality, it’s more
involved than that. Product teams should first benchmark
their total users based on the size of their target market
and then filter based on active users, not registered users.
What constitutes an active user can vary depending on the
application; and a product team must define what an active user
means to them. At a minimum, there should be some sort of
activity at least every 30 days.
It’s also important to consider the distinction between users
and customers. For many SaaS companies, a single customer
account will have multiple associated users. Product teams will
want to measure breadth at the user and customer levels, and
within customers as well.
Factor 2: Frequency of Use
Frequency of use goes hand-in-hand with breadth and focuses
on how often and how long users engage with a product.
Product teams should look at the average number of sessions
within a given time frame and the average duration

PM
of each session. Combined, breadth and frequency provide a
clear view of a product’s total use. A wide range of active users
indicates an engaging experience that delivers differentiated
value to a target audience.
These measures should be reviewed for the total user
base, but it can be helpful to apply the same analysis to
user segments. For example, the usage levels for premium
versus basic subscribers—or across different user roles—are
important cases that should be considered along with an
overall measurement.
Factor 3: Depth of Use
Conceptually, this is a relatively simple measurement:
What percentage of application
features get used within a specified
time frame? However, in practice
it can be a bit more complex and
difficult to capture. Obviously, every
user is not going to use every feature
in an application. For effective
measurement, product teams should
look to first define their key features,
the ones that make up the product’s
core functions or are heavily used by
happy customers.
Next, the feature measurements
should be defined. Product teams
need to identify which sequence or
group of events constitute their key
features and then aggregate the
measurements accordingly. This factor
is a strong measure of the value users
receive from a product. If the majority
of users only use a small subset of key
features, that’s an obvious concern. However, even if the key
features are widely used, groups of features that get little or
no use could represent poorly used development resources
and an opportunity to reprioritize projects.
Possibly an even bigger concern is when different users
exclusively use different feature subsets. This can indicate a
product without a strong core identity or value proposition. It’s
often helpful to apply the same types of segment analysis to
this factor, along with breadth and frequency measurements.
Factor 4: Efficiency of User Actions
How difficult is it for users to complete common tasks in an
application? For example, think of adding a new vendor in
a procurement application or posting a job requisition in
a recruiting application. A common task represents a core
function within the application and typically comprises several
application features used in a specific sequence. To measure
efficiency, product teams should look at the total number of
users who begin a task and see what percentage successfully
complete it.
This measure can augment user testing and help show
the usability of key product functions. Understanding that
some applications are necessarily more complex than others,
product teams should still focus on driving high completion
rates for the application’s core tasks. Looking at each step can
help identify which specific feature causes users to bounce out
of a process and identify areas for improvement.
Factor 5: Satisfaction and Qualitative Feedback
Satisfaction and qualitative feedback may seem odd to include,
because by definition, qualitative feedback isn’t analytical.
However, this is a significant source of
insight for product teams that should
be included in any evaluation of a
product’s health.
Aggregating user events can give a
clear picture of what users are doing in
an application, but not necessarily why.
Soliciting direct, open-ended feedback
from users through polling or user
testing can provide critical context to
observed behaviors.
Qualitative feedback, whether
through a standardized measure
like net promoter scores or another
mechanism, can provide an overall
user-satisfaction rating that is a key
indicator of growth potential. Product
teams should always include this
information as a part of any product
data strategy.
When making strategic decisions, these five factors help
provide a clear, detailed view of application health. They help
prioritize roadmap decisions, identify break points in the user
experience, and understand the behaviors of the highest-
value and most satisfied users (who are not always one and the
same). Most importantly, at this level, product data provides
a consistent baseline of valuable information that product
managers and their extended teams can use to support product
decisions. By creating and incorporating a data strategy,
product managers can set their vision to successfully function as
the CEO not only of their products, but also of their teams.
About the Author
Michael Peach is the head of product marketing of Pendo.io, the
provider of a product success platform that is used by software vendors
to capture usage analytics and deliver in-application messaging and
guides. Contact him at mike@pendo.io or follow him on Twitter at
@pendoio.
Polling or user testing can
provide critical context to
observed behaviors.

A
FAILED LAUNCH IS THAT TERRIBLE SITUATION in which your product starts
breaking or misbehaving as soon as it is launched into
production. You and your team have spent the past few
months planning and executing on the requirements, but the
day you launch to production, something goes wrong.
Users can’t access the software. Errors appear all over the
place. The site is non-responsive. And this is all happening
while your marketing team is working at full steam letting the
world know about your grand new product release. It is product
management’s worst nightmare.
The good news: With strategy, planning, hard work and a
bit of good luck, you can avoid these failed situations.
Define an MVP that Fits Realistically into Your Timeframe
In any product release, no matter how low or high the stakes, it
is important to have a clear understanding of the requirements
and to propose a MVP (minimum viable product) that is doable
within that time frame. It’s better to release something that has
limited functionality but is very stable than to release extra bells
and whistles at the expense of reliability.
Remember that software is always a work in progress. The
only certainty after a successful version 1.0 release party is that
the following Monday, you’re back to work on version 1.1.
Be Realistic About Your Team’s Capabilities
As you create the product roadmap and pitch it to executives,
it is important to be honest about the capabilities of your team.
We often fall prey to the halo effect and believe that since we
have a great team of back-end developers, they can tackle
any other area, such as mobile, UI, etc. However, software
disciplines are very specialized these days. For example, in SaaS
software teams, it’s common to find specialists for services,
database, networking, front end, security and mobile.
Make sure you work with engineering leaders to understand
what it will take to build the product. If your product is complex,
needs high availability or has tight deadlines, be realistic about
whether your existing team is sufficient to meet those needs.
You might need to change scope or convince the executive
team to hire the resources you need. Otherwise, it’ll be almost
impossible to deliver on the product promise you are making.
A Product Manager’s Worst
Imagine that the product you’ve
been working on for months or
years implodes on its first day
of life—product management’s
worst nightmare. Unfortunately,
this story happens too often in
the software world. Here’s what
you can do to prevent it.
BY DANIEL ELIZALDE

Product management
must understand the
impact to customers
when their product is
down ...
Don’t Forget to Include a Project Manager
Agile zealots might not agree with the idea of having a project
manager. After all, the product owner should be able to handle
it all, right? I don’t think so. This approach might work for small
products with a handful of developers, but when the scope
grows, this model doesn’t hold.
Complex products will have multiple teams working on
related items, and there need to be people dedicated to
making sure everything fits together. Scrum of scrums can help,
but in my experience it is better to have people dedicated to
tracking progress and timelines and making sure everything
is advancing in the right way. This need is accentuated if your
product includes both hardware and software.
A strong project manager can own the day-to-day
operations, keep track of the goals vs. the schedule, and
keep everybody on the same page: vendors, engineering and
other departments. This person can be the central point of
communication for reporting status and risks.
A note of caution: The fact that product managers often
have a project background doesn’t mean we should take on
both roles at the same time. The more we can offload those
responsibilities to a dedicated project manager, the more
risk we mitigate and the more time we’ll have to focus on key
product needs. If you find yourself doing more project than
product management, you are probably not adding all the value
you could be.
Agile Development Can Reduce Risk
Agile provides a framework for minimizing risk by implementing
iterations that produce working software. It is not a silver
bullet, but it can help a lot. It provides us with a framework for
continuous improvement, one sprint at a time.
Each iteration is self-contained, meaning that it includes
design, development and testing. Therefore, the code on
every single iteration is tested to ensure it meets the desired
levels of quality.
As part of the testing strategy, the QA team should
develop unit tests, perform regression testing and build a
comprehensive automated framework to validate all the use
cases defined by product management. There will always be
some manual testing on every iteration, but the better the
automated coverage, the better the chances of success.
Now, making sure the development team implements the
right delivery processes is not the responsibility of the product
team. It is the responsibility of the delivery team, and their
engineering leaders, to make sure that their execution process
yields good results. But in many companies, especially at small
startups, these processes are often not in place.
Since the product launch is your responsibility, do some
investigation to ensure all the right processes are in place.
If they are not, then it is okay to start conversations with
development leaders and begin shepherding the creation of
those processes. Otherwise, your chances of success will be
greatly diminished.
Plan for Performance and Stress Testing
Product management must understand the impact to
customers when their product is down. For example, if my
system fails, will businesses cease to operate? Will electricity go
down? Will people’s lives be in danger? The bigger the impact,
the more you have to plan for performance and stress testing.
You also need to understand your audience and the overall
usage of your product. This understanding should be part
of the product requirements. You should be able to answer
questions like:
• Will we have 100 or 100,000 concurrent users?
• Which times of day are more likely to have peak usage?
• What redundancy and elasticity specifications does the
product need in order to meet demand at peak times?
Understanding the constraints is the first step. The next
one is to come up with a plan to test them and ensure you’ll
be ready to handle them when they occur. Make sure to have
some projections on how your adoption will grow and how your
infrastructure needs to scale in order to meet that demand.
Chances are you’ll be way off, but you need to start somewhere.

To ensure this planning for performance and stress testing
gets done, it should be part of your standard process, and not
a one-off exercise. Performance testing must be done in every
sprint, and it should be done in an environment similar to the
real world. Anything less and you risk maxing out your website
very fast. The performance team should have their own stories
in the backlog and should have deliverables for each sprint.
Additionally, I recommend doing end-to-end performance
testing several times before the release. Which brings me to my
next point …
Allocate Time for Integration Testing
Even though agile promotes creating production-ready code on
every sprint, the reality is that it is hard to get there. If you have
a big development team, each agile pod might be able to test
their part of the code, but there is no guarantee that everything
will work flawlessly when you merge the
code of hundreds of developers.
To mitigate this risk, put aside at least
one sprint for integration testing and
stabilization before every major release.
The goal of this sprint is to stabilize the
system and get it ready for production.
No new features will be developed during
this sprint.
On top of the technical challenges
associated with integration testing, be
prepared to convince your executive
team that no new features are going into
the product during that final sprint. They
might not be happy, but it’s our job to
educate them on the process and help
them understand that in the end, this effort will benefit the
product, the users and the company.
Communicate Delays
Let’s face it. Delays happen. Building complex products is hard,
and it is not an exact science. Many things might come up, and
delays are likely to occur.
When faced with a delay or any other roadblock, it’s
imperative to have open communication with the executive
team. Sponsors need to have timely access to information so
they can make decisions that might affect the whole company
(not only your product).
Take advantage of agile and use the end of each sprint to
inform your executive team about the progress—and more
importantly, about whether the product is on track to meet the
deadlines you agreed upon.
It’s Better to Delay than to Implode
If, after all these precautions, you realize that your product
still won’t be “ready” by the deadline, then you need to make
a decision: to push the release out further or to cut scope to
ensure that at least something is released. Notice that I say
“ready” in quotes, meaning that it’s up to you, along with your
team, to determine what ready means. You can play with the
scope and with the timelines, but I do not recommend playing
with quality as a variable to meet a deadline. That’s how your
worst nightmares become a reality.
I’m not saying that delaying is easy, but it might be less
expensive than pushing forward with a faulty product. To make
these decisions, it’s important to understand both the technical
and business side of your company, so you can understand the
impact even before you make the recommendation to your
executive team.
A good example of managing a delay comes from Gran
Turismo, the best-selling car-racing game in history. The
release of version 5 was delayed for a couple of years due to
“executive decisions” because they believed
the game was not ready to meet expectations.
In the meantime, the company released a
reduced version called Prologue to keep the fans
engaged while they worked on the final product.
The approach worked. Although Microsoft
and others launched competing products during
the wait period, the launch of Gran Turismo 5 was
a huge success, in part due to the credibility they
maintained with their audience and the fact that
when the product came out, it truly delivered on
its promise. Not all companies have this luxury,
but it’s worth considering whether there might
be some middle ground.
At the end of the day, it’s product
management’s responsibility to bring the
product to light. Failure to launch can be a disaster not only for
your company, but also for your career as head of the product.
Luckily, many of the risks can be mitigated with good planning,
foresight and great communication.
About the Author
Daniel Elizalde is a seasoned technology product leader, with 17
years of experience developing high-tech products for startups and
global companies alike. He is also the author of the popular blog
TechProductManagement.com, a real-world guide to IoT product
management. Daniel is head of product management for Stem, Inc.,
which leverages the power of the Internet of Things to develop energy-
storage solutions for the Smart Grid. Follow Daniel on Twitter at
@delizalde.
... if my
system
fails, will
businesses
cease to
operate?
PM
This article originally appeared as a guest post on MindTheProduct.com.
Learn how to build better
products in our
Focus and Build courses.
pragmaticmarketing.com/courses

A
S THE CEO OF SALES BENCHMARK INDEX (SBI), I work with a lot of great clients to help them achieve sales success
at their companies. One such client, Marc Osofsky, the senior vice president and general manager at
Lionbridge Technologies, faced a unique challenge. He was tasked with growing revenue by bringing
a new product to market at the $600-million public company and global leader in translation services.
He did this by developing Lionbridge On Demand, the industry’s first e-commerce solution for
translation services of all content types. He built an entirely new go-to-market model for the innovative
product that blended inside sales and e-commerce. And he was able to build a predictive sales model
and grow revenues a staggering 500 percent.
This was no easy task. But it’s one many product leaders face. Marc shared his experience with
SBI, providing insight into how he reinvented himself, ignited revenue growth through a new
product and became the fastest-growing division in the organization.
Finding the Opportunity
To begin, Marc looked at the size of the overall market and growth rates.
“My bias is always to look for change,” he explained. “It is hard to get
someone to buy a new product when everything’s going fine; they’re not under
any pressure to change, and there’s not really an underlying driver. That’s a
tough situation: to try to have a knife fight and get people to throw things
out.” He paid attention to behavioral changes in the marketplace. What
were the buyers doing differently? And how could he use this to his
advantage? Once he located the opportunity and recognized behavioral
changes, he had to determine if he could win. It was important to test
before fully investing.
Turning the Vision into Reality
After locating a hidden growth opportunity, Marc’s next step
was to collaborate with his CEO and build an entirely new
business within the organization. Because Lionbridge is an established,
mature company, this innovation caused concern in some quarters. But
Marc overcame these concerns by addressing them in stages. “Not only
was it a new business model, it challenged our existing model,” Marc
said. “It was a stage gate process. I didn’t try to go in with some huge five-
year plan asking for a massive amount of money. I went in with a pilot.”
Once he created buy-in, he secured enough funding to create a
minimal viable product. It was the smallest amount of investment
needed to get the product to market and start selling.
He started with smaller clients and projects. And
he kept moving upward as more success
occurred.
SELL MORE STUFF
How One Executive’s New Product
Ignited Revenue Growth
BY GREG ALEXANDER

Building a Roadmap
As the initiative progressed, every piece of the roadmap
was designed to do one thing: make it easier for
customers to accomplish their objectives. Lionbridge avoided
the waterfall approach used by many large companies, instead
opting for an agile approach that allowed them to create the
product quickly with minimal development effort. “That was a
key to our success, especially early on,” Marc explained. “We
got to market quickly and avoided letting a big company, with
all its interested parties, put too much weight on something
and crush it.”
The next step was pricing. Marc knew he wanted to
simplify the pricing model, so he used a single flat price that
allowed for instant quotes. He also made sure that every
customer would buy the same product. He combined the
revenue and cost into a single bucket and built the pricing
from there. It was an efficient way to manage the economics
and allowed him to think about pricing from a product
perspective rather than from a client perspective.
Ready to Launch
Once Marc realized he had a working product, he
prepared for launch. “If you look at our mix between
sales and marketing, we took much more of a sales-heavy
model and built the sales team first,” he explained. But it
was challenging to create and get funding for a predictable
revenue model with all new sales hires. A new model requires
proof. As a result, the first year was focused on capturing
performance metrics and building a ramp curve for revenue.
Marc’s hiring profile was another key to his success.
He understood the type of sales rep that would be most
successful in his new model and hired to that profile. New
hires went through an intensive two-week process to learn
how to be successful. The goal was to ensure that they could
communicate the core message and handle any objections
that came their way. Immediately following training, reps were
on the phone selling. No time was wasted.
New hires had three months to generate a positive cash
flow. Then their monthly quota grew 10 percent each month.
This was positioned as a wave that the reps had to stay in
front of. If that wave caught up to them, they were required
to participate in a plan to help turn things around. Using that
approach, Marc built a model and demonstrated that it could
be predictable based on his early results. This gave him the
confidence to go in with a 40- to 50-person hiring plan and
build out the rest of his team.
Takeaways
The first step to accelerating revenue growth in a new market
with a new product is to find the change. “If you’re trying
to bring a new product to market, there’s got to be some
underlying change that’s forcing buyers to look for something
different, that’s forcing buyers to feel pain, and that’s
causing them to want to look into the marketplace for better
solutions,” Marc said.
He also recommends finding repeatability. This is more
about sales and marketing than the product itself. If the
product concept is right, the roadmap becomes pretty
clear. But now you’ve got to execute and get the product
to market. There are several key questions to ask yourself at
this stage. What are the sales channels? How will you sell the
product? What is the average sales size? You need to build
a scalable model. Because once you’ve got the product, and
repeatability, it’s all about having the confidence to scale.
Entering new markets with new products in pursuit of
revenue growth is hard to do. Marc was able to be successful
at Lionbridge by using a well-thought-out strategy. This
sounds simple, but don’t confuse simple with easy. Without a
documented strategy, Marc would not have been able to build
his new division, which is now at $100 million in revenue and
still growing.
About the Author
Greg Alexander leads Sales Benchmark Index’s (SBI) focus on
the CEO’s role in accelerating revenue growth by getting the
product team, marketing department and sales organization
into strategic alignment. He is the host of The SBI Podcast and
SBI TV. Greg is also the editor-in-chief of The SBI Magazine,
the leading B2B publication focused on sales and marketing
effectiveness. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books:
Topgrading for Sales and Making the Number. Greg graduated
from University of Massachusetts Amherst with a B.A. in English
and received his MBA from Georgia Tech.
PM

MARKET LAUNCH PRICE
Pragmatic Marketing offers SIX different CERTIFICATION LEVELS
that allow you to demonstrate your understanding of the Pragmatic Marketing
Framework™ and the activities and skillsets required to bring it to life.
Each certification coincides with one of our courses, and you have
the opportunity to sit for the exam at the end of each training day.
So if you’re ready to demonstrate your expertise to the world,
visit pragmaticmarketing.com/certification
or call 480.515.1411.

SELL MORE STUFF
SELLING:
It Takes an EcosystemBY SCOTT SALKIN
T
HE BUSINESS OF SELLING TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS—whether hardware,
software or a service—is at a strange intersection;
there’s constant curiosity about new trends, yet staunch
reluctance to try any new sales strategies. Product teams,
marketers, sellers and senior executives are keenly aware that
the consumer landscape has undergone a complete overhaul.
Yet many of the approaches to reach prospects and customers
remain the same.
Consumers are the new experts. They know your products,
or at least your industry, better than they get credit for. And if
they don’t, they can turn to more options than ever for advice.
They also know when they’re being mass-marketed to, when
a rep is trying the latest tactic on them, and when genuine,
experience-driven value is being provided. Yes, these savvy
buyers are on to the old-school push marketing and selling
strategies, and they’re not buying it.
The onus is now on brands and their partners to reach
people in their actual habitats and truly engage with
them, not to use generic cold-calling scripts, automated
marketing programs or semi-automated sales emails and
hope for the best.
Choose Conversation Over Convenience
As the number of lead-generation tools increases, sales
teams have—by their own admission—fallen into the trap of
convenience, awaiting “A” leads. It’s easy to acquire lists or
email addresses and blast a one-size-fits-all message. When you
know that a program will guarantee a certain reach and “results”
at practically no cost, with relatively little time or strategic
investment, real thought-leadership and relationship-building
become increasingly rare.
In a world where it’s easier to ignore or delete even the most
creative and targeted marketing than to interact with it, sales and
marketing teams must engage and collaborate before selling.
Because while social selling, email, collaboration tools and
content-marketing automation make it easier than ever to be in
the game, when you use these tools without providing genuine
value, you’re talking at prospective buyers, not with them.
Cultivate the Community
Your sales ecosystem is probably bigger than you think. It
certainly may include a direct sales and marketing team, as well
as indirect resellers and partners. But what about outsiders who
influence your buyers’ decisions? And their social influencers?

Learn how to sell more in our Market and Launch courses.
pragmaticmarketing.com/courses
PM
The entire ecosystem shapes your buyers’ path to purchase.
And understanding the complexities of that path, and how your
product or service slots into it, is crucial to new customer growth
and success.
It starts with understanding the most complex part of the
entire ecosystem: your customers. Educated, skeptical and well-
connected, today’s buyers will go to bat for a brand if it speaks
to them on an emotional level. But to reach that level, you must
champion customer success.
Of course, to help them achieve success, you must know
how your customers define it. What do they care about? What
are their needs? Are they even looking for a solution to the
problem you purport to solve?
The irony is that there is a huge list of names already in your
CRM, but you have no idea who is at the other end or what
their real business issues are. So start with your customers. Go
straight to the source to discover their needs. It may sound
obvious, but a majority of executives and
their sales and marketing teams are still
not talking to enough customers on a
daily basis or focusing on their success.
And if you don’t have that knowledge,
how can you possibly communicate
the right messaging to your channel or
partners? After all, they’re the ones who
will stand face-to-face with the prospect
or customer when a deal is on the line or
a renewal is just around the corner.
But don’t just talk to your channel
partners and resellers, listen to them.
These are people on the front lines.
They’re talking one-on-one with
prospects, discovering what questions
they have and what potential roadblocks
keep them from purchasing. They
also know the types of conversations
prospects have with others and which issues have the potential
to result in churn.
Using these insights, you will be able to create more
effective training, personas, messaging, sales tools and content
marketing assets—all of which will better support your direct
and indirect sales partners.
Survey the Land
The goal from getting to know your customers firsthand is
creating one or multiple buyer personas, or short narratives,
that paint a biographical picture of the many types of people in
your target base. A solid buyer persona—or partner persona, if
you’re recruiting partners—is like a pot of gold to a salesperson
or marketer. It becomes an intelligent cheat sheet to refer to
when they direct their efforts.
As you begin to deconstruct your buyers, you’ll discover
what types of conversations they’re having and where, who or
what is shaping their decision, and how to begin to establish
and build trust with them. Zero-in on how to involve their
spheres of influence and you can create a brand trusted by
people you may not even be directly selling to.
Once you’ve learned everything there is to know about your
market, you can begin to effectively support them, providing
real value along each phase of their path to purchase. As such,
you will need to understand what each phase looks like and how
to identify where and when they start and end. That way you
know when to step in with resources and answers.
If this sounds like an overwhelmingly personal way to
conduct business, that’s because it is. But sellers and marketers
can’t afford to operate any other way. No amount of inauthentic
automation or heavy-handed push marketing will afford this
level of engagement or support.
Time is valuable, but a fear of the time it takes to get to
know an audience on a deeper level can be a major factor
keeping sales teams from evolving alongside their customers.
The good news is that the more
you practice mapping your customer’s
journey, the more automated the process
becomes. It’s a matter of repetition.
You’ll get better at anticipating moves,
asking questions and pinpointing
common trends. And all these tools can
be used to support your partners selling
on the front lines.
There’s no doubt about it, selling is
hard. And in many regards, the attempts
to make it easier have actually made it
harder by driving us farther away from the
people who matter most: the customers.
By taking the human element out of the
sales equation, we’ve lost sight of the
fact that audiences are people. There is
power in connections and collaboration,
just like there’s power in technology, and
the best sales forces are the ones that figure out how to get the
most from the humanity inherent in each.
About the Author
Scott Salkin is the founder and CEO of Allbound, a SaaS platform that
helps businesses accelerate channel partner sales through content
marketing, collaboration and customer success. Scott guides the firm’s
overall direction and strategy. He also speaks at marketing and channel
events around the country. Follow Scott on Twitter at @scottsalkin or
email him at ssalkin@allbound.com.
A solid buyer persona
is like a pot of gold
to a salesperson or
marketer. It becomes
an intelligent
cheat sheet.

A New Product VP’s 9
I
NDIVIDUAL PRODUCT PROFESSIONALS DRIVE INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTS or services. But vice presidents of product establish the broader context
for getting great products built and making them successful. They use a combination of processes, trust-building, hiring,
mentoring and cross-functional leadership to help their individual product managers succeed. Since I spend most of my time
wrangling product issues at the C-level, here are some thoughts on creating conditions that can unleash great product work.
For context, let’s imagine a newly arrived vice president (or director) of products. She is taking over a product team of five,
matched with a development
organization of 50. Product roles
are poorly defined, priorities are
muddy, overall development
productivity is uninspiring, and
there’s lots of griping about how
product management isn’t doing
its job. What should our heroine
put on her 90-day strategic
to-do list?
Create and merchandise a
minimalist current-quarter
priority list. As quickly as possible,
she needs a simple, force-ranked
answer to “What are our top three
priorities this quarter?” This should
be obvious but rarely is. Even
if it’s only partly correct, the list
gives her a way to push consensus
among the executive team—which
will be critical to everything that
follows. An astute negotiator,
she gets the executive staff’s
agreement that her list is “right
enough” and they will back her
product priorities. She relentlessly
shares this high-level list with her
functional partners (development,
sales and marketing) to uncover
any festering disagreements. (The
list is less than a roadmap, and
it doesn’t address feature-level
choices, but helps her sort “you
don’t agree with my priorities”
from “you think my team is
failing.”)
Become the heat shield for
escalations. Our VP won’t
LEAD STRATEGICALLY
1
2

90-Day Checklist BY RICH MIRONOV
be surprised that her team gets five-plus escalations every day from sales, support, customers and prospects. Each of these makes
sense in a vacuum, but her individual team members are spending a lot of time defending the current plan from trainloads of
seemingly good suggestions. She knows that sales and marketing live in an “and” universe, but development lives in an “exclusive
or” universe. Her product professionals straddle the two.
Since she has buy-in to her few explicit priorities, her team can respond more clearly to other requests: “That’s a great idea; tell
me more about the customer’s root issue … but we’ll need to put that into the backlog since it’s not one of our top things for
this quarter.”
Lots of escalations will ricochet back to her, but she can stand firm on most of the account-specific
requests that consume so much development time. She becomes the congenial promoter of “exclusive or”
thinking at the executive level, freeing up her team to make
more nuanced decisions.
Create some job boundaries. She’s certain to discover
that every department feels short-changed for product
management attention, and the combined set of demands is
impossible to meet.
• “The scrum product owner book says that product
management must be at every standup and available
to development teams 24/7. Every story needs to
be exhaustive, and we need four sprints-worth of
groomed backlog.”—development
• “Product management must be on every new
customer call and in every technical partnering
meeting. Everyone at the company works in
sales.”—sales
• “We need dual-track discovery teams of product + UX
+ technical architecture in the field at all times.”
—innovation/lean strategy
• “Your team has to staff six industry events next
quarter, create four segment-specific product
pitches and do weekly webinars.”—marketing
• “Incoming bugs need to be ranked and sized within a week.”—support
Her individual product managers don’t have enough organizational leverage to fight back against this
job-scope creep, and they’ve inadvertently raised expectations by temporarily filling gaps, only to inherit those
gaps permanently. Our new VP needs to set general guidelines for her team, which makes this less personal. “I
expect that you’ll each spend 60 percent with development; 30 percent with customers, prospects and market
discovery; and 10 percent with organizational communications/planning. Trade shows only if you’re speaking.
No unqualified sales calls: only train-the-trainer and technical closer meetings. Let’s talk through where that’s
challenging, and what I can take off your collective plates.”
Build trust, promote cross-functional goodwill and sell the value of product management. Our
VP will be frustrated (but not surprised) that almost no one at her company understands what product
management does, or how they really add value. Combined with the unbounded job expectations above, her
team is often viewed as failing. So she starts a slow-but-steady roadshow for her peers and their departments.
Vice presidents
of product
establish
the broader
context for
getting great
products built
and making
them successful.
3
4

This combines basic education (“Here’s how my team helps
us build the right products and make money”), active listening
(“I’m sure things aren’t perfect. Let’s talk through your issues
and pick one to address first”) and endless reiteration of
priorities (“Here are our No. 1 and No. 2 deliverables for the
quarter. Let me know if there’s anything you would put above
No. 1.”) She’s building trust along the way, clarifying that her
team is neither rejecting enhancement requests out of spite,
nor willfully avoiding meetings just to sit around. Her product
managers have tons of responsibility but no authority, so they
need cross-organizational trust to get anything done.
Get development re-energized. She may hear some
developer complain about wasted work or erratic
priorities. A student of Daniel Pink, she knows that we get
the most out of teams through motivation, not force. She’ll
work to get development excited about problems and
emotionally connected to users. She’ll show that they are
working on what really matters to paying customers. And
she’ll do it by organizing product/vision sessions specifically
for development. (“Real users have these problems. Product
and development collectively refine problem statements and
collectively find solutions. We want the smartest people in the
room to figure it out.”) Engineers start working late because
they love to solve meaningful problems.
Update the hiring and training/mentoring plan. Our VP
has repeatedly inherited untrained, unmentored product
teams with the wrong skill sets and in the wrong geographies.
She rips up the current hiring plan and job descriptions, which
emphasize subject-matter expertise over product management
experience. She moves actual product experience to the top
of her candidate filter and requires that all new product hires
be co-located with their development teams. Then she starts
a weekly mentoring/coaching cycle with her current staff,
emphasizing organizational collaboration and strategic market
understanding. Not all of them are well-suited for product
management, but she’ll groom as many as she can. (And help
find better-fitting roles in the company for the rest.)
Organize market discovery teams. After a month or
two, morale is up and escalations are down. Her product
teams are starting to find their grooves. Now it’s time to
start identifying what the broader market really wants from
her product line. Our VP might partner with development to
form a part-time market validation team (her best product
professional, a UX veteran and a software architect) to
validate new product concepts with real B2B users. Or she
might push for instrumentation and A/B testing of consumer
SaaS improvements. Or maybe oversee a few other lean
experiments. Executive-level air cover for these teams is critical,
since it’s easy to value current-quarter deliverables above all
else and keep postponing real market learning for just another
quarter or two.
It’s a lot to do. It’s a good thing our heroine plays the
long game, finding motivation in small wins and attitudinal
improvements along the road to great products. And revenue.
And cross-functional trust.
It’s worth noting that great product professionals can work
out some of these issues for themselves (and their teams). But
we want them to focus on their specific products and services.
It’s very hard to drive organizational change while also building
winning products.
Also, some directors and VPs are really player-coaches,
managing a small part of the product portfolio themselves
while overseeing a team. If you have more than three direct
reports, though, you should be focused on this kind of
organizational enablement and process improvement — which
your staff can’t do for you. Delegate the product-specific work.
Product management leaders have to create an
environment where their teams can be successful. That
includes a lot of organizational design, behavior modification
and relentless focus on the few most important projects.
About the Author
Rich Mironov coaches product executives, product management
teams and agile development organizations. He also parachutes
into software companies as interim VP product management/chief
product officer. A seasoned tech executive and serial entrepreneur,
Rich has been the “product guy” at six startups. He founded the first
ProductCamp, is the author of The Art of Product Management and
blogs at www.Mironov.com about software, startups, product strategies
and Silicon Valley product management. Rich has a bachelor’s degree
in physics from Yale (with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories),
an MBA from Stanford, and he often lectures about the business of
software. Contact him at rich@mironov.com.
PM
LEAD STRATEGICALLY
We get the
most out
of teams
through
motivation,
not force.
5
6
7

H
AVEYOUEVERMETASALESPERSONWHOENJOYEDDOINGEXPENSEREPORTS?Me neither, and I certainly understand why.
Not only are they tedious, expense reports don’t directly contribute any value to the salesperson’s
work. They’re simply a constraint he has to deal with because someone once bought ﬁshing gear
on a company credit card.
We all have constraints. They limit our time. They limit the available options when we make
decisions. They limit our effectiveness. And they may not provide much upside to compensate us for
the limitation. But they’re real, so we need to identify and work around the most signiﬁcant constraints.
LEAD STRATEGICALLY
BY PAUL SCHWADA
The Critical Realities for
Growing Any Business

You may have worked with someone
who resembles a certain animal when it
comes to constraints:
The ostrich puts his head in the sand
and refuses to acknowledge the reality of
the constraints. He’s the guy who keeps
suggesting the same idea, even though
everyone else knows the idea won’t gain
any traction with the people who have to
approve such things.
The seal barks loudly and obnoxiously
about the reality of the constraints. Seals
don’t really suggest any ideas; they
just tell anyone who will listen why the
organization is too foolish, lazy, fearful or
short-sighted to avail itself of certain oh-
so-obvious solutions.
The donkey knows the constraints are real, but
stubbornly resists them. The donkey acts on his
preferences—doing some things, refusing to do others—
even though it will cause aggravation for himself and
the organization.
All three are committing a grave offense: They’re wasting
opportunity. Sure, some of the constraints you face may
be unfortunate. But most businesses have way too much
potential to waste time pretending the constraints don’t exist,
complaining about them or fighting them. Your objective is
to grow the business, so recognize what you have to deal
with and move forward.
You don’t need to identify every last constraint (“I
can wear open-toe sandals on Fridays in June, but not on
Mondays in March”). You need to highlight those that have
important implications for your growth efforts. It’s not always
easy to identify constraints until you bump up against them,
and I’ll admit it’s not very exciting work. So here are some
ways to identify constraints.
Your Risk Profile
If you’ve ever found yourself thundering
behind closed doors at the shortsighted
nincompoop who refused to approve your
plan (a no-brainer!), the problem probably
wasn’t his IQ or his eyesight. More likely,
you were feeling the constraint of his
appetite for risk. Each organization has
a unique risk profile that exerts powerful
influence. It develops from a blend of
many sources, but more important than
understanding the source of the madness
is defining it so you can save yourself the
grief of thundering at all.
The basic question is simple: What
could you afford to mess up in order to try
to grow the business?
Could you go into the tank this year, this quarter, or
this month in order to try something that might prove
valuable over multiple years? Could you afford to ruin some
relationships in this customer segment, or with these channel
partners, in order to try something that might allow you
growth in other areas?
Maybe you can only make investments that will pay off in
a year or two; a slower return is unacceptable. Or maybe your
organization is comfortable with decade-long payoffs.
Your risk profile almost certainly constrains various
investments based on their size.
Maybe the official approvers don’t care about time frame
so much, but no one’s putting
anything more than $20,000
on the line—no matter how
wonderful the opportunity. That
kind of limit may have nothing
to do with the depth of your
company’s pockets.
The ostrich
puts his
head in the
sand and
refuses to
acknowledge
the reality
of the
constraints.

Or perhaps you can’t invest more than $10,000 without
a federal inquiry, but you can waste up to $9,999 and no
one will say a word.
Maybe it’s brand. In some companies you just can’t
take any risks with the brand or the public image. They
place conservative limits on what the brand means and
the things to which it is attached. There are endless
possible constraints defined by your risk profile, but
advancing an organization in significant ways always
entails risk. If you’re going to try to grow the business,
you need to know your limitations.
Cultural Expectations
There are plenty of other possible constraints you need
to know about. Some are cultural: We’re going to work
a certain way, communicate a certain way, pay people
a certain way, care about certain things and hire certain
kinds of people. If every employee in your organization
attended a prestigious university, your growth plans may
be limited to ideas that involve such pedigreed personnel.
If you can’t market the business to a certain kind
of customer because that customer just doesn’t fit the
managing partner’s self-image, so be it. I know a guy
who blows blood vessels quarterly because the
company’s leaders just can’t wrap their heads around the
modern idea of developing a venture capital function
within an established corporation. He sees obvious
benefit in adopting the new style; they see themselves
wearing a fashion that just doesn’t feel right—the
discomfort probably compounded by the constraints
of their risk profile.
Mandatory Processes
There are usually some “mandatories” you have to work
around. These are things you simply have to do and
there’s no point in arguing about them. The salesperson’s
expense report is just one example of this. If you have
to jump through certain process hoops or meet rigid
timelines to get official approval for
funding, plan for it. If you have to provide
quarterly updates to the top executive for
any special initiative, you just have to deal
with that mandatory requirement.
Assumptions
Similar to mandatories, sometimes the
organization won’t accept anything other
than a certain answer to a certain question,
and this kind of constraint can be troubling.
The sacred cow might be that your prices
can never fall below a certain threshold,
A
PROVIDER OF PARKING AND TRAFFIC SYSTEMS
discovered an opportunity to sell a huge system to a
major airport. But the sale—the equivalent of an entire
year of normal revenue—required the organization’s full focus
to develop a completely new system from the ground up.
The team won the project, to which they dedicated several
years and several dozen software contractors. Meanwhile, the
base business declined. The core product line was showing its
age, the channel partners felt
neglected and competitors
were advancing while the
team looked the other way.
When the dust settled,
the organization was left
holding two leaky pails—a
new product line with few
prospects beyond an unhappy
first customer, and a core business approaching the point of
no return. Drained of energy for heroic efforts and a fresh
perspective, both of which would have been required to turn
around the core business, the organization bumped along for
a few more years, then died.
What reality did they miss? More than any, they failed to
define whether the new opportunity fit their risk profile
and resource pool, two important parts of their internal
constraints. The base product line was already well-aged when
the big airport RFP came out, and the channel partners were
already concerned. The leaders didn’t intentionally decide to
abandon the core business in favor of the new, but they didn’t
evaluate clearly whether the risk involved in pursuing the new
segment—considering the massive product development
investment required—was prudent relative to the
opportunities in their core business and its current condition.
Nor did they accurately define the resources necessary to
adequately support both new and old product lines.
LEAD STRATEGICALLY
TWO ROADS DIVERGED

Learn to lead strategically in our
Foundations course.
pragmaticmarketing.com/foundations
PM
or that customers choose you because the founder’s picture
is on a billboard. If you have to be at that one conference,
regardless of whether you think it’s a good investment, fine.
And doggone it, if your product has to be made in (pick a
country) or your CEO’s grandfather will roll over in his grave,
then it just does. In a case like this, identify the sacred cows
and move on. You need to know about faulty assumptions,
but you can usually work around them. Few constraints are so
substantial that they obstruct all paths to growth.
The Four Ps
Sometimes a constraint is inherent in the traditional four
Ps—product, price, promotion and place (also called channel
or distribution). Ideally the people trying to grow a business
have access to all four of these levers, but the reality may
not be so kind. The upside is that thinking through your
constraints in the four Ps can actually be a creative and
insightful exercise.
Particularly in a company that is defined by the one thing
it does, you might be stuck with the product. It is what it is,
of course, but the situation is often more nuanced than that.
Portions of the total product offering may be fixed, but there
may be some aspect you can change—such as the name, the
configuration or the warranty.
Maybe price is a constraint. For whatever reason,
you can’t fiddle with the price of a certain high-visibility
product (or a highly regulated product). But consider these
constraints carefully; like product, there are many angles to
price, and you may discover that you have more flexibility
than you initially thought.
What about promotion? How constrained are you when
it comes to making decisions about how you’ll promote the
business, such as that trade show you “have to” attend?
You need to know this to avoid wasting time (and political
capital) on growth efforts that simply aren’t real options for
your organization.
And place/channel/distribution can be a constraint in
many kinds of businesses. How do you actually deliver to
the market, and is there wiggle room in that model? Could
you eliminate or change channels? If not, could you add
a new channel? Could you modify the channel you use, or
modify how you use it?
There’s some overlap between the categories I’ve listed
here, certainly, but these are the kinds of constraints you
need to know about. And the process of thinking through
them will get you close enough to reality.
To highlight the importance of constraints, let’s use an
example from the Four Ps. Having to use a certain channel to
market is a difficult constraint to work around. You may be able
to create a secondary channel to subsidize it, or you can try to
optimize the approach for that inferior channel (to make the
best of it). Either of these options will usually be better than
trying to change a deeply and widely believed assumption.
And if the assumption really is wrong, then this may be a
brilliant opportunity to help everyone to realize that—as you
try to put a square peg into a round hole.
Take a moment and make some mental notes: How does
your organization’s risk profile constrain you? What cultural
characteristics do you need to accommodate? What are some
deeply held assumptions that you question? What are some
mandatory processes or actions? Which of the Four Ps can you
fool around with? Are they constraints—do you just plain have
to live with them—or not?
Book excerpt from 8 Blocks: The Critical Realities
for Growing Any Business by Paul Schwada.
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Schwada. All rights
reserved. Published by GamePlan Press, Inc.
About the Author
Paul Schwada is the managing partner
of the Chicago-based consulting firm
Locomotive Solutions. He applies practical insights gained from a long
history of work inside corporations with the objectivity of an external
collaborator. He helps clients around the world find, and take, the
best path forward. Connect with him at linkedin.com/in/pschwada, via
Twitter @BizWellDone or locomotivesolutions.com.
LEAD STRATEGICALLY
You need to
know about faulty
assumptions–
identify the sacred
cows and move on.

A PRAGMATIC APPROACH
Put this issue’s ideas into action.
Seek
Customer
Empathy
To screen job
candidates for
customer empathy,
ask what they know
about your target
market and then note
their response.
Anuraag Verma
page9
Get to Know
Your Market
Prioritize customer
segments to uncover
untapped potential
and sidestep product
traps.
Jesus Ramirez
page11
Be
Consistent
Stick to a posting
schedule for social
media and always
keep your brand’s
target audience in
mind.
Sheila Kloefkorn
page14
Identify
Market-Driven
Acquisitions
Select potential
acquisition targets
using the same
criteria you use
to prioritize your
product roadmap.
Frank Tait
page 16
Select Data
Wisely
Develop a data
strategy that ensures
your applications
capture the data you
actually need.
Michael Peach
page 19
Understand
the Impact of
Outages
First understand the
impact on customers
when your product
is down, then plan
for the right level
of performance and
stress testing.
Daniel Elizalde
page22
Find the
Change
Identify why buyers
want a better
solution before
you launch a new
product.
Greg Alexander
page25
Champion
Customer
Success
Find out how your
customers define
success so that
you can help them
achieve it.
Scott Salkin
page29
Keep it
Impersonal
VPs fight job-scope
creep by setting
general guidelines for
the team.
Rich Miranov
page 31
Anticipate
Constraints
Identify your
company’s limitations
to speed the path
of growth for your
business.
Paul Schwada
page 33
Sign up for your free
subscription, delivered quarterly via email,
at pragmaticmarketing.com/subscribe.
Share this issue

Pragmatic Marketer Spring 2016

Pragmatic Marketer Spring 2016

More Related Content

What's hot (18)

Similar to Pragmatic Marketer Spring 2016 (20)

More from Pragmatic Marketing (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Pragmatic Marketer Spring 2016