When it comes to innovation, I have been guilty of thinking only in one dimension. I have mostly focused only on new features and functionality changes in my products that differentiate it from the competition. I know I am not the only product manager with this limitation.

However, not envisioning a new initiative as a whole new business process may result in failure. A good product may target the wrong buyer in the right segment, a marketing message could hit the wrong audience, a sales force may react negatively to your new solution.

So it is worth mentioning when a tool is available to help product managers think more systematically at an early stage of their innovation process.

Such is the case with the “Innovation Radar” presented in a complete fashion in “Grow from Within”, a book from Robert C. Wolcott and Michael J. Lippiz published in 2009. The Innovation Radar forces you to look at innovation in 12 different ways and encourages product managers to adopt a comprehensive view of their innovation initiative. The book is tackling a more general topic: investigate what makes an intrapreneur successful and the innovation radar is only a chapter of the book. Great read nonetheless.

The goal of this post is not to extensively discuss the model, as I could not do it as well as the authors.  However, in this post, I will provide a brief description of the Innovation Radar and help you imagine how you can apply the model to:

• Innovate with your existing products
• Build a comprehensive approach for developing new products
• Anticipate avenues that your competitors could take

So in order to discuss the Innovation Radar, please look at the illustration above, which is directly taken from the book. There are 4 major dimensions, Offering (What), Customers (Who), Processes (How) and Presence (Where). The other 8 dimensions are distributed between these 4 dimensions based on their type of impact. For example, the customer experience is obviously between “Customers” and “Process.” Let’s go through each dimension, with a short explanation and a few questions you can ask yourself about it:

1 Offerings: Creating unique products or services that are valued by customers. What unique architecture or feature set can we bring to our customers? That’s the dimension most of us focus on.

2 Platforms: Common components which can be developed and reused for multiple markets or customers. What are the common technologies, architectures and modules which can be shared by my customer base to reduce my costs?

3 Solutions: Customized, integrated set of products and services to solve a customer’s specific business problem. Can I package my offering differently in order to simplify, bring more flexibility, or reduce cost  in order to attract different buyers?

4 Customers: Discover new customer categories, different buyer personas, or unmet/unarticulated needs. Could there be unidentified business problems your customers may be facing?Is there an unserved up- or down-market?

5 Customer experience: Everything each actor in the sales cycle and end users see or feel about your product and your company. What collateral would resonate with my audience? Can I simplify the user interface to address a new segment? What type of support do I need for this new audience?

6 Value Capture: The mechanisms a company creates to earn its share of the market. How can we redesign the sales cycle in increase our margins? What pricing model leads to optimal profit margin?

7 Processes: The configuration of business activities to conduct operations. How can I reorganize support to reduce costs? Can I develop a single methodology which can be reused for a specific class of services?

8 Organization: How the company structures itself to respond to the needs of the customer. Will this new concept benefit from an internal, separate organization that can execute faster? Are the proper incentives in place to ensure that each team member delivers on the strategy?

9 Supply Chain: The method to deliver product and services. What could be automated, or configured by the customer to provide faster delivery, cheaper cost or improved flexibility?

10 Presence: Channels employed by the company to bring the offering to the market. Should I replace my “farmers” account managers by “hunters”? How can I integrate my offering into a partner’s larger solution and use that partner as a new channel?

11 Network: How a company or product can connect to the customer to improve the value of the product. Can different types of users in my installed base benefit from my existing products? What interfaces should I build to leverage a partner’s solution and unleash new value for my customer?

12 Brand: Symbols, words or marks used by a company to communicate a promise or an image to the customer. How can the company’s brand be leveraged to reinforce the new concept? Would my audience feel that the innovation falls naturally within the brand, or would it be considered a stretch?

The true value of the tool is that, when used correctly, it forces you to envision many of your innovative product’s implications upfront.

Gather a multidisciplinary team in one room for a brainstorming session and go through a series of questions which you will have carefully prepared in advance for each dimension listed above. Be careful not to lead your audience or you will kill creativity. Together, in a few hours and under your lead, the team can minimize the surprises your innovation will produce and define what’s needed, rather than forcing you to operate later with a set of options limited by your budget and time-to-market imperatives. That could mean the difference between success and failure. And maybe you may even find new ways to innovate in the process.

One of the challenges facing product managers is the difficulty balancing daily crisis and strategic work, which often results in the strategic taking a back seat. However, product managers have a unique opportunity to add value when a crisis is presented to them by ensuring that the problem is properly defined. All you need is proper timing, the appropriate methodology and some persuasion. Let’s focus on the methodology part.

Here comes the crisis of the day. Question to self: are we barking up the wrong tree? When handed a crisis to help resolve, there is a good chance that you’re given a problem formulation as well as a solution in the same breath. In the race to find a solution, you may be lead in the wrong direction without noticing it. Somewhere an executive or a key customer is upset, so time is of the essence and all you have to do is execute! Wrong. In fact, this is a perfect time for a problem restatement.

Please consider the difference between two descriptions of the same problem:

• “The system is too slow and we need to buy more hardware” and
• “The use case for this particular customer requires too many operations, negatively impacting network traffic and reducing system performance”

Which problem would you rather help solve?

Let me share an anecdote which I heard as a kid growing up in the 70’s in France. At that time the Paris architecture was changing and not for the better. Many companies relocated to the La Défense District, west of Paris. Towers were a new thing then for that part of the world and for the first time most companies were distributed across many floors. With no email, chat or cell phones, face-to-face meetings were more common, so employees were moving around a lot. As a result, employees started to complain about having to wait too long for the elevators. One company hired a statistician to work with the elevator installer to reduce the average wait by a whopping 20%. Despite this great achievement, the complaints kept on coming. Everyone was at a loss until the HR manager with a psychology background observed the employees waiting for elevators. The observation triggered the idea to place mirrors on the walls between the elevators. Complaints stopped immediately.

The problem was not that the wait was long; it was simply that during the wait employees were bored!

Since people (or Parisians at least) generally enjoy looking at themselves in a mirror, the issue solved itself. The problem was indeed stated incorrectly from the beginning and this error lead to the wrong course of action.

Nobody can be upset with you for trying to better understand the issue in order to solve it diligently and efficiently and perhaps recast it as an opportunity!

Based on personal experience, what is presented as a product problem may actually be a symptom and additional digging is required to uncover the true problem, as in the case of the elevators above. There are multiple ways of finding out if you are dealing with the problem itself or one of its symptoms and my favorite methods are the 5-whys, the fishbone diagram, as well as the “broaden-the-focus” method. I will not discuss each method in detail, since it has been done before quite well already. Instead, I will present why and in which context these methods can be used successfully.

-          The 5-whys method makes you ask “why” until you find a root cause which you can act upon. I like it because it is very simple, it can be done on the fly while discussing the crisis with the panic-stricken stakeholder. As part of the conversation, you can find the root causes of the problem together and mutually agree on a more accurate definition of the problem.

-          The Fishbone Diagram works better with a team of experts and in a company culture that is used to this type of exercise. It provides a more complete analysis of the root causes, and will typically convey more authority because, after all, it is the result of an expert team, not just the imagination of the product manager. A fishbone diagram can also be performed after the crisis is resolved.

-          The broadening-the focus technique tries to redefine the problems in terms that are more in tune with improving your product, by rephrasing this problem in a larger context. For example, if the crisis is caused by the customer dropping your product because there are “too many clicks”, your problem redefinition will be “how do we improve the user’s experience?”  This method works best if you want to demonstrate a pattern of similar issues. Capitalizing on repetition of the same crisis will give your problem definition more credence.

No matter what method you chose, one thing is almost certain: you will need to solve the problem as you redefined it AND the immediate crisis. However, documenting the issues and presenting an improved view of the problem will be beneficial to your team and your product in the long-term.

In the first post I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].  The second post addressed the importance of effecting leadership within the context of the two aspects of people and organizational culture [Leadership in Product Management (2) – People & Organizational Culture].  This final post in the series will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of functional organization.

Let’s consider two notional functional organizations.  While all departments play important roles within a company, arguably those most relevant to product management are Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  Aligning the objectives, much less the activities, across these disparate departments is a challenging proposition.  More often than not they have discrete objectives, agendas and measures of success that compete rather than complement each other.

In Figure 1, I have depicted an organization that is largely sequential in its information flow – the departments are discrete with hand-off points clearly delineated.  Sales controls distribution, Marketing owns positioning and marketing, and R&D retains development.  Overall coordination is provided by Products.

Given this functional organization, the leadership style most congruent would most likely be one of command and control.  Products would assume positional authority over Sales, Marketing and R&D, directing their activities towards common objectives.  While some product managers may aspire to this model, I have no personal experience with it.  I do however have experience with discrete departments, but with less-than-clear hand-off points and no productive level of overall coordination.

In Figure 2 on the other hand, I have depicted an organization towards the opposite end of the spectrum from that above and is more representational of the matrixed departments with which most of us are likely to be acquainted.

Within this functional organization, Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products are discrete departments but have areas in which there are distinct responsibilities as well as those that overlap.  While each department retains primary responsibility for their function, ideally they are complementary and supportive.  An example in this figure is positioning and marketing developed by Marketing, some of which goes directly towards targeted markets, while other is developed specifically for use by Sales in support of their efforts in distribution (direct and indirect).

R&D is more engaged with the market facing activities of the company, and while still receiving direct market input, also benefits from additional feedback from people who are market facing informed by the perspective of Sales and Marketing.

Products would provide overall coordination but in an overlay manner.  In this model Products would also have a direct market-facing role and provide input to R&D.  The most congruent leadership style for this functional organization is one of collaboration.  Collaborative leadership is a much more complex affair and is defined by Wikipedia as, “an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership).  As most PMs find themselves in organizations similar to this model, the need to effect leadership to bring about alignment extends beyond people to include separate departments as well.  Organizational collaboration has become a necessary fact of professional life.

The above are overly simplified representations but in so doing, I have attempted to depict two points on a continuum of functional organizations – each company will be unique in both its layout as well as resulting inter-organizational dynamics.

Returning to the subject topic of leadership, a successful product manager will need to assess the lay of the land – particularly with respect to people, culture and functional organization – and develop an appropriate leadership approach that will serve to attain the overall objective of organizational alignment towards common goals.  There is simply no formulaic answer or definitive methodology such as pitch, business case, executive fiat, etc. that will meet continuously evolving needs.

Nor is this a fixed proposition once a line has been determined.  Each change in the market, stakeholders and/or organizational alignment or composition will often require an adjustment.  Think of it as a finely balanced Rube Goldberg device in which the various components are always in motion and therefore the center of balance always shifting.

Leadership is not without pitfalls and failures.  The issues and challenges are far too complex.  Rather it is marked through being able to align the organization more often than not so that objectives such as successful entry into a new market and sustainable attainment of market share are achieved.

Successfully developing and launching a solution or product requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational alignment.  Only in delivering upon the internal challenge of organizational leadership can there be any expectation of product or market leadership.

Examples of people within business who embodied successful leadership have become icons of American business – names such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Thomas J. Watson, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove and Steve Jobs.  And the latter is also quite arguably the best product manager in living memory.

REFERENCES

Leadership – has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership

Collaborative leadership – describes an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership

8 years later, HP does it Fiorina’s way

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5777808.html

HP developed its strategy under the guidance of former CEO Carly Fiorina. But it wasn’t until Mark Hurd took the helm that the company’s plans were made a reality.

http://www.cbfeature.com/special_coverage/news/still_hp_after_all_these_years/hps_critical_battlefield_in_china/

HP Way

http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm

Shackleton – The true story of Shackleton’s 1914 Endurance expedition to the the South Pole and his epic struggle to lead his 28 man crew to safety after his ship was crushed in the pack ice.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/

The best depiction by Hollywood of the dynamism involved with leadership was Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Sir Earnest Henry Shackleton, the British Antarctic explorer.  Shackleton (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/) is a film testament to this unorthodox leader who was adept at continuously adjusting his leadership approach as required in the face of unimaginable challenges – environmental, organizational and crew.  His success was ultimately measured by leading his 28-man crew out of Antarctica following the crushing of the expedition’s ship without a single loss of life.

In the first post on leadership in Product Management I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].   This post will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of two of those aspects: people and organizational culture.

In most organizations, alignment of people around a common initiative in the context of product management immediately involves multiple stakeholders in terms of decision makers and influencers.  With respect to people and personalities, the immediate task is to identify the stakeholders relevant to product management.

As with prospective customers, these will include both decision makers and influencers.  Also material with respect to people is the need to approach people differently.  Some stakeholders will require no more than being asked for support, while others will need more formal persuasion in terms of market assessments, pitches and business cases.  It should be recognized on occasion there will be those stakeholders you will not be able to inspire or persuade and for them you should identify a means to mitigate their impact.

Similar to development of a good go-to-market plan, development of a stakeholder engagement plan (whether formal or informal) will increase the chances of obtaining your objective of advancing the product / solution plan Products proposes.  In short, the engagement plan should identify the decision makers and influencers within the organization whose agreement (or at least neutrality) is critical to advance your objectives.

Engage your stakeholders one-on-one.  Doing so provides you with the opportunity to engage each stakeholder using an approach most appropriate to them.  It allows you to demonstrate your knowledge of the market and why they should buy into what Products proposes, and therefore align themselves in terms of objectives and metrics organic to their departments.

Engaging stakeholders individually also allows them to privately air disagreements or concerns which you must address as part of your product, solution and/or go-to-market plan.  Note the “must” in the previous sentence.  Failure to address the concerns shared with you one-on-one will most likely prevent their support of Products in the current initiative.  It could also result in limited to no access to these stakeholders for future projects.

This also provides a firebreak in the event a particular engagement does not go well.  Company-wide presentations are best utilized as forums for publicly demonstrating broad consensus across the organization – not for persuasion of undecided stakeholders.  If you have done your job properly, the true benefit of public presentations are to demonstrate that all (or the majority) are agreed with the go-to-market plan and aligned accordingly.

Organizational culture is important as your approach in leadership should be informed by the predominate culture.  The primary dimensions in which this comes into play are “what” and “how”.  Let’s explore some examples to illustrate the point.

Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1999 largely on the basis of her strong performance in rising through the ranks at AT&T and Lucent.  Prior to her departure from Lucent Fiorina led Marketing and Sales for the largest customer segment.  She brought with her to HP this focus upon sales and marketing which was initially lauded as a much needed shake up of the staid engineering oriented company.  However, Fiorina’s personality and approach ran counter to the well established “HP Way” (http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm) and proved to be a catalyst to her eventual dismissal.

Fiorina’s successor, Mark Hurd, was appointed CEO in 2005.  Though Hurd continued the head count and cost reductions, his approach was much lower profile than that of his high-flying predecessor.  His focus upon productivity and efficiency seems to be more in line with the inherent engineering culture of HP.  Assuming leadership of HP, Hurd took on expectations that he would return HP to “boring profitability” – a challenge that he has delivered upon in spades. 

Interestingly however, a closer examination of the strategies upon which Hurd has successfully executed trace many of their lineages to Fiorina.  No where is this more apparent than in the acquisition of EDS which delivers upon a strategic proposal made early in Fiorina’s tenure – and which precipitated the now infamous proxy fight with Walter Hewlett (son of co-founder William Hewlett).

There is a growing level of recognition that strategy developed by and under Fiorina has proven to be both sound and profitable for HP.  What is equally apparent was that the “how” of her approach was out of synch with the much vaunted HP culture and as a result it is Hurd that has received recognition and reward for the successes of HP.

From 1986 to 1997 Apple, Inc was then known as Apple Computer and struggling to define its path in the highly dynamic personal computer business.  This period in the company’s history is best known for the notable failure of Newton and plummeting share prices.  Yet Newton was only one of many endeavors undertaken by the executive team, all of which contributed to the declining market capitalization.

Under the respective leadership of John Sculley, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio Apple moved away from its predominate culture in two ways.  Under the auspices of Sculley, and continued by both Spindler and Amelio, the organization of Apple was changed from that of being product focused to various forms of nominal corporate functional alignment.  Secondly, the company embarked on a spectrum of technology initiatives that were far removed from the core competence recognized today. These initiatives ranged from central processors (Aquarius) to high-end workstations (Tesseract) to high volume / low margin go-to-market strategy (wading into the prevailing PC price wars of the time) to licensed manufacturing (Mac clones built by Radius, Motorola and Power Computing).

It was not until the return of Steve Jobs and his assumption of the CEO role that Apple again found its footing.  Jobs appears to be the very embodiment of the Apple culture and he reasserted the focus upon products and the user experience.  The results have been stunning.  The CEOs before Jobs had each in turn attempted to lead Apple into various forms of “what” that was not congruent with the predominate culture – none of which were successful.

The point is to be aware of the company culture and align your leadership efforts accordingly.  The degree to which your approach with respect to either “how” or “what” is divergent from the culture will increase the level of difficulty in attaining your objective of aligning critical stakeholders and therefore the company behind your initiative.

Leadership as a topic has a great deal of breadth and depth.  With respect to product management the term “leadership” usually evokes the context of product or market leadership.  While these are worthy goals to which many of us product managers aspire, there is much work to be done in laying the groundwork for the desired level of success.  This is particularly true if the objective is to achieve product or market leadership on a sustained basis – think Exchange over Lotus Notes.

Attainment of product or market leadership requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational leadership.

Over the course of three posts we will explore the topic of organizational leadership in the context of product management.  Many of you will reflexively think that this is ground more suited to CEOs and the like, and that Product Managers should stay primarily focused upon identification of market opportunities, development of products / solutions and their successful launch into the market.  However, product management best practices make implicit, or in many cases explicit, the need to run a product or solution as a business unto itself.  Therefore, unless you have direct control of all the means of production, marketing and distribution, you will need to effect leadership to ensure the organization and its disparate departments do what is necessary to win in the market.  I liken product management to being the CEO for the given product or solution.

Leadership is one of those concepts ready to grasp but difficult to define, so let’s take a moment to reflect upon definitions to ensure we are all working within the same context.  Referencing Wikipedia, one definition of leadership is the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership).  Note the focus upon persons.  The formative years of my professional career were spent as a naval officer, therefore to me there is a clear distinction between leadership and management.  Leadership involves alignment of people around a common initiative or objective.  Management is the control of assets and/or processes.

Having assumed a role as Product Manager you have learned or will learn quickly that there are many beyond you with opinions as to what the Products department should be doing.  As Joshua wrote in his recent post, A GPS for Product Roadmaps, a successful product strategy requires more than simply the PM’s imprint.  To be successful, a company needs to align itself around one or more clearly defined product or solution strategies so that all departmental teams can pull in the same direction.  Critical to the achievement of organizational alignment is ensuring the core objectives and effort across Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  This is best accomplished through the exercise of organizational leadership.

In approaching the challenge of alignment through leadership, the purview of product management expands beyond identifying a market opportunity, defining a product or offering and its successful launch.  In addition to the above, the foremost task of product management becomes the alignment of stakeholders and organizations such that there is consensus with respect to the go-to-market plan, and all know their role in its execution.  To accomplish the requisite level of alignment requires a multi-disciplinary approach spanning all the elements readily recognized as “good product management practices” to also encompass inspiration and persuasion.  In a positive sense, these are at the core of leadership.

The objective of this post was to posit and outline the need for product managers to effect organizational leadership.  It is axiomatic to state that every company is unique.  Yet relative to product management, there are three aspects of organizational composition that are consistently material:

• people (and personalities) that comprise the relevant stakeholders
• organizational culture
• functional organization

In the next two posts we will explore these three material aspects as they relate to organizational leadership by product management – what they mean and how they can be leveraged to achieve the outcome you desire.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a product manager is attempting to arrive at a consensus when identifying what enhancements, bug fixes and other development items should be included in the product roadmap. Perhaps you, too, will identify with a few of the themes in this *mostly* fictional dramatization…

Bob, a product manager at Ultramegadyn, spent the last week combing emails, Excel spreadsheets, defect tracking systems and post-it notes accumulating all the product ideas that have been sent his way over the last year.

The result can be summed up in one word. Whoa.

Bob’s got way more ideas for things to be done than could possibly be addressed in the next several hundred, if not thousand years.  So as a good product manager, he starts whittling down the list. He’d like to grow revenues by expanding into a new market, so he includes these capabilities. He also includes some tweaks to existing functionality to respond to competitive pressures. Sprinkle in some 24×7 availability and he’s done in time for lunch.

Bob’s still feeling pretty good about himself when he starts circulating his roadmap presentation with other parts of the organization. Only then does he realize the extent of his troubles as the sales team starts asking what he’s going to do about the laundry list of enhancements they need to placate a certain large customer. Next, the Director of Product Development starts mumbling about man-years and hardware costs just before she falls out of her chair. Bob get’s back to his desk and finds a voice mail from the VP of Technical Support. He’s complaining that product management never includes his team in any product strategy decisions and that they need a number of enhancements to make the product easier to support. Bob sits back and thinks to himself, “Wow that was fast – if only our case resolution times were that quick.”

So what is Bob going to do to salvage his once promising career in product management?

Well, selecting the right development investments to be included in a product roadmap is an exercise in multiple-objective decision making. Difficulty occurs because seldom is one investment best in every dimension. For instance, a given enhancement may translate into increased revenues, but may be very expensive for the organization to develop, may not align with strategic objectives or your own product strategy.

The best way to sort through all the alternatives is by creating a scoring system to help you (and the rest of the organization) understand how each investment decision ranks when evaluated against key organizational objectives.

Not only does a scoring system make it easier to determine which enhancements should be included in the roadmap (by picking those with the highest scores), it provides a platform for collaborating with other groups and achieving organizational consensus. This is because the decision criteria are set out for everyone to see. Instead of having a subjective debate over pet projects, which will only lead to the parties entrenching positions, feedback will come in the form of new or modified objectives, weights and scores. The following four steps will guide you through the process:

Step 1: Identify Objectives

A good way to start is by reviewing your own product strategy, along with departmental and corporate objectives. If you’re doing it right, your roadmap items should have an impact on these things. For example, product investments will better differentiate your company, grow revenue or market share, reduce support costs, or help win XYZ account. You’ll also want to include objectives from other parts of the organization so that their interests are represented. Lastly, try not to double count by including redundant objectives. You would not want to include an objective that counts revenue and another one that counts incremental sales.

Step 2: Measure Investment Candidates Against Each Objective

For each candidate feature, you’ll want to assign a score for each objective. In the example above, I’ve used a range of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. In this way, you can see that Feature 1 is expected to contribute to High Revenue Growth, but since it has a score of 2 for Low Development Cost, we can assume that it must be a fairly expensive project to complete. Obviously, score ranges must be calibrated using values that make sense for your organization – for instance, a company with $500 million in revenue may find a range of $0 to $100 million appropriate for the High Revenue Growth objective, but this range is likely too small for a company with $15 billion in sales. Also, be sure to include this information in a scoring key to guide those that will be working with the model.

Right about now you may be asking the question, “What about business cases?” and I’m glad you did. Roadmaps help you plan and articulate your product strategy for the next three to five years. The farther we look down the road, the greater the inherent uncertainty; thus, roadmaps must be somewhat fluid in order to appropriately respond to changing market dynamics. Thus, we need a system to quickly evaluate interesting opportunities for inclusion in the roadmap. Some may argue that the business case should be used for this task. However, I find that while business cases are a great tool for assessing the appropriateness of near-term investments, they are too time-consuming and assumption-laden to be useful for road-mapping. Using the 10 point scale is a good way to ballpark our expectations and is an acceptable proxy for the business case.

Step 3: Determine Objective Weights

Next you need to determine the objective weights so that they reflect the priorities of the organization. All the weights, when summed, should total 1.0 and reflect the importance of the objective relative to all the others. Our example weights High Revenue Growth at 0.40, which means that the organization values revenue 4 times more than it does Supports Product Line Integration which is weighted at only 0.10.

It is often helpful to tie objective weights to those of the larger organization, since taking a corporate position will help reduce the squabbling that may occur among stakeholders. If your company practices management-by-objective (MBO), you may have already been handed a framework to start with.  Review the five or so corporate-level objectives – they’re probably on that little card next to your computer monitor. Chances are successfully achieving these objectives is rewarded by funding a certain percentage share of an annual bonus pool. These percentages are actually implicit weights, which you can then leverage for use in your scoring system.

Step 4: Apply Scoring System

Once you have all the scores and weights, you can tabulate the total score for each feature. This is done by calculating the weighted average.

Feature 1:           10 x 0.40 + 2 x 0.30 + 3 x 0.15 + 8 x 0.10 + 5 x 0.05 = 6.1

Do this for all your features and then sort descending by Total Score. Presto! The candidates at the top of your list are the best ones for inclusion in your roadmap.

Do your results square with your intuition? With stakeholder expectations?

If they don’t you might have a poor analytical model on your hands, but don’t worry; you’ll probably need to take your model through a few iterations to get it just right.

Here are some things to look out for. For one, you need to mercilessly eliminate redundant objectives. As I mentioned before, this will cause double counting and throw off your results. Secondly, you want to make sure that your weights accurately reflect an objective’s relative importance. Over or under valuing an objective will also throw off the score. Lastly, it’s easy to focus on objectives that lend themselves to being quantified, but don’t overlook “soft” objectives that may be important to the organization. Your model will also benefit from the input of others who may help you identify missing objectives and weighting problems. At the conclusion, all parties should understand and agree with the model – even if they don’t like the all the results.

Using this technique for roadmap planning can make the process a whole lot more efficient and collaborative while getting the best product possible out. It is also a way for stakeholder to be part of the process and champion your product in their respective departments.  Not to mention it’s a lot more effective than looking angrily in the rear-view mirror and yelling, “You all are cruising for a bruising; don’t make me come back there!”

The promise of software that optimizes specialized customer workflows has been fulfilled. Whether it is in claims management, sales enablement, order taking, or customer on-boarding, workflow solutions can offer a slew of advantages that can ultimately result in improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs and increased productivity for your end customers. Among these advantages are:

1. The reduction of manual tasks by using automation
2. The improvement of the overall IQ of the group of people performing the task by learning from the best and applying it to the rest
3. The collection of metrics to manage the process and further optimize it
4. The availability of all the necessary information in one place to improve the interaction with the end customer

However, getting the end users to embrace the new workflow is not always easy. Concerns typically arise around job losses, having more work to do, having to compete against other co-workers because individual metrics are now available, or simply because of the perception that the new workflow will limit freedom or creativity.

Many organizations that had success implementing workflow solutions have used change management best practices to facilitate the acceptance of the new solution. Corporate alignment, proper incentives and training, and enhanced Human Resources support have done wonders to make the end-user embrace the switch to the new workflow solution and help users see it as an opportunity instead of a threat.

However the vast majority of organizations today may not have the structure, the inclination or the resources to invest in a lengthy, cross-departmental change management effort.

So what can product managers do to maximize their chances to have the workflow product deliver on its promise by gaining the user’s acceptance?

Product Managers have many levers at their disposal to create a dynamic of success:

• Set expectations during the sales process: Ensure that the buyer understands the impact of the change the deployment will have on their organization and make sure this buyer prepares for that change internally
• Do a pilot but set the rules upfront: If there are reservations about the product and the buyer determines that a pilot is necessary, accept but set up the rules: determine the length, exit strategy and success criteria of the pilot. Request what you need from the buyer to make the pilot successful. If the buyer balks, then the pilot will not be successful and the opportunity may not be a good fit afterall
• Propose a multi-phase approach. Big resistance against change? Proceed step-by-step. Work with the buyer to define a roadmap that will make the change more palatable over time
• Make your product more configurable. Flexibility, along with well-documented best practices makes prospects more comfortable, especially around User Interface issues. Making a screen look different to please users and taking their input into consideration can help drive acceptance
• Make your product more customizable. Every customer thinks they are different, but we know that they are not all completely different; otherwise everyone would use completely custom solutions instead of products. That being said, the ability to accommodate a certain level of customization required by an advanced customer will set you apart from the competition and facilitate acceptance
• Improve your product’s integration capabilities. By integrating with applications already established at your prospect’s environment, you can help the buyer leverage their existing investment, while minimizing the impact of change
• Offer change management services. By building best practices and offering a service to execute these best practices, or simply by having a “change management workshop” with the buyer and relevant prospect’s stakeholders, you can jumpstart the change thought process and clearly put the ball in the customer’s court, while providing all the assistance they need
• Communicate: Training, Ebooks, white papers, and webinars documenting why your customers are successful will go a long way in facilitating your prospects’ understanding of what it takes to implement your product

But….

• Your sales force may see the change management discussion as a negative for their opportunity and become reluctant to communicate your message
• Your sales force may also be hesitant to pull out of a deal even though you know that the chances of a successful implementation are slim
• Phased approaches also mean phased revenue, which is something your CFO may be reluctant to accept
• Your product architecture may not be suitable to accommodate customizations or configuration
• Your service organization also may not be able to implement or support multiple configurations or customizations of your product, making this alternative a non-scalable situation

Can you see a pattern?

If your prospects cannot arm themselves to make the necessary changes, YOUR organization must step up to the plate for success: the sales force must be able to weed out prospects with a large chance of failure early in the process. Your CFO needs to understand that in some accounts revenue may be delayed. Your R&D organization must improve customization, configuration and integrations capabilities. Your service organization must organize to satisfy customers with a more diverse set of implementations. Your Documentation and Marketing department must ensure that the non-technical aspects of your solution are covered properly.

And you, the Product Manager, an active observer of the market and of your internal organization, must be objective and recommend the right mix of the options described above, based on what the market can accept and the limitations and strengths of your organization. It’s a tough job, but it is why you are doing it.