Sales people are not often seen in product development meeting, they enter when the product is ready to be sold. But many would agree that the sales acumen of the people involved in various levels of product development tremendously contribute to the final success of the product.

Then why is a sales guy not involved in a product journey from the very start?

The answer is quite simple sales people should sell and not develop. I have a different approach and my point is that if you can get some knowledge assimilation from the streets on to the white board you will have a better product at the end of the day.

The logic behind this statement comes from the following reasonings

• You always think market intelligence and miss on the sales intelligence which is the real-time innovative flavor that the sales team adds to you product face to make it enticing to the customers in absolute real time
• Your sales person is the closest you can get to your customers if you want a street opinion much ahead in a product life cycle. Unless you have some customer evangelists available to you during product development
• All great innovation happens when two approaches to the same problem confront. Put a developer and sales guy mid way during a product development. you will see the chaos but if you stay as a third party reviewer to the commotion, you can take home some very interesting perspectives of where you are heading

Now the biggest challenge is an IP issue where you don’t want many people outside the product group to be aware about what is going on. But this is a challenge you can overcome if you really want to

Fix that and next time try getting one of your sales guys to your product meeting and see what happens

The Social Media and Social Networks are changing the way people work. In a Software product development scenario Social media can deliver some very interesting value propositions.

We call it the Social Feature BOX. This addresses a key element in product development mainly Prioritizing Feature lists. This is a process to convert the noise in the social media to actionable information through the use of some innovative ideas as shown below

Arriving upon the right set of features to be included in a release is always a challenge as there are many factors that come to play

1. What are the most important features or functionalities
2. What are the functionalities our customers wish to see
3. What percentage of customers are requesting a feature
4. What is the cost to build the function in this release
5. What are the functions that will give a competitive edge

The question is how you can use Social networks to get insights into prioritizing the features for your upcoming release

Why Social Media?

Social media is a ever growing pool of market intelligence. Social media includes not just your customers, but also your prospects and competition. If you are able to harness the power of Social media to listen and separate  valuable information from the noise it can throw tremendous insights into your product development exercise.

Social Listening Boxes

Social Listening boxes are listening aids to the Social networks. They can be in many forms and placed at convenient locations

1. Your Twitter account
2. A dedicated resource positioned within the company as a Social Listener
3. You Facebook, myspace and similar Fanpages
4. Your Linkedin Groups and other such groups that discuss market relevant information in your space

This list will go on to all networks where you see your potential customers and competition hangout.

Social Conversation Boxes

This are typically a collection of conversations culled out from your listening boxes. They have informations such as

1. Likes and Dislikes on articles that talk about your competitive products or your products
2. The fan following for your competitions fan page
3. The increase/decrease in Fan following for a competitor during a launch
4. The discussion in your competitions fan pages
5. The most popular tweets on a subject in your domain
6. Re-tweets for your official tweets
7. The results of selective conversations you start and follow in various networks

The limit is your imagination to see how all you can cull out the information

Social Feature Boxes

The Social feature box is an intelligent derivative of the social conversation boxes. An elaborate list of what people like within your domain area.

Social Feature boxes are typically filtered and prepared by people who understand your product road map and try to infer from the conversations as to what all could be the possible opportunities

Feeding the Feature List

The Social Feature Boxes continuously feed market defined functionalities, and requests into your feature prioritization process which will then be put into your own analysis and included based on your limiting factors such as budget, time, resources etc…

The whole idea is to place a few ears at various  places where you already have your mouth wide open. This way you will know what people have in their mind rather than trying to force your way into theirs.

To discuss more on how social feature boxes can benefit in your market readiness journey please feel free to contact me below

Software Product development is a great field to be in and to successfully contribute to a product team it is good to know your product owner better. Product owners share certain common traits when it comes to driving the product development initiative.

1. They are all focused on the success of the product
2. They are all responsible for the failure attributed to a product

The interesting fact is that irrespective of these similarities individual product owners approach the ownership equation differently. They bring with them a different set of challenges and expectations from their team members

So the first thing is to realize that product ownership is only one responsibility that an individual takes up among the other roles and responsibilities he or she has within the company

Further each product owner brings a different set of skills on to the table. They also bring varied experience levels into this new role as they try their best to drive it. Their backgrounds also bring them face to face with totally different challenges to address.

Their business goals often define their expectations from their team members and they push a different set of priorities as they drive the process. All in the good faith that the product should succeed in the market place.

As product team members the better you know the expectations of the product owners the better you can positively contribute.
As a Market readiness evangelist I work with several product companies and product owners and I have often found it easy to understand them when I broadly categorize them into three

Entrepreneurs as Product Owners

Here comes the visionaries, mavericks and dreamers who move from one dream to another converting them into reality. They are often in that role because they drive the whole business initiative behind the development. They primarily focus on market opportunity, profitability, revenue and cost advantage as their driving factors

Technologists as Product Owners

Often taking up ownership the technologists are asked to deliver under a set of rules and guidelines and often pre planned budget. They have the responsibility to build a team from scratch. Technology is the driving factor for this group

Business Managers as Product Owners

They undertake ownership because business demands it and their knowledge of market is of prime importance in building the said product. They are very customer centric and often marketability will be their driving force. Their realization that new markets can be sustained only by happy customers they will focus their energy in creating the best customer experience to a business need

While product owners and team members spend several hours trying to understand each other, I always recommend a business impact session that every product owner should have their team. A session to understand the business impacts associated with each release. A session to acknowledge the challenges and expectations so that everyone will be able to work as a team for a common goal.