Like many people these days I am stretched too thin. While agile marketing is a great topic I’ve decided to consolidate my blogs and focus on an area that I think spans some of the areas I have been trying to cover. The new blog is called “Soul of a New Business” and it will track on a daily basis what is happening in my life and my company’s life as I get a new business off the ground. This will be my second start up. My first is a custom fly rod eCommerce site at www.flycatcherinc.com which is doing very well. Join me at my new home at http://soulofanewbusiness.wordpress.com
17
Oct
08
Packing up and moving
28
Jun
08
More on Customer Stories
Customer stories are a great way to organize thinking for agile marketing. Customer stories force you to think from the customer’s perspective. Moreover, they automatically add a market and customer segmentation mentality to your thinking that aids in being agile.
It is impossible to think of customer stories without visualizing the customer. This forces you to consider what does this customer look like, what role do they play, what industry are they in, etc. The best way to capture this mental exercise is to keep a journal of the customer attributes that are associated with the story. Soon enough the customer will become flesh and blood and will bifurcate a number of times into different customers that are either individuals that play a different role in a buying decision or are uniquely different than others in the use of your product or service.
Having a set of customer descriptions, you can then use these to build customer panels and advisors for performing Continuous Market Monitoring. Recruiting customer prospects into panels, advisors or just spot interviews fleshes out the view of the customer. Natural segmentations start to occur. Homogeneities evolve and natural variables are revealed. These allow you to further refine your model and your stories creating more customer groupings, each with their own set of stories.
For example at Intermec we did an analysis of the retailer market segment for use of hand held computers on the store floor. We built a number of user stories through a series of customer interviews at different retail chains. Building up our set of stories we found large differences between store types. Large box discount stores used hand helds to do mobile checkout and process store returns. Grocery stores used them only to do inventory taking and receiving. Building up user stories allowed us to quickly segment the markets and prioritize design issues. We were able to decide what segments to retain and which to reject. On those we retained, we were able to identify the variables that drove alternative stories so that we could integrate stories into a larger whole.
Dynamic customer interaction brought down to earth with customer stories provide rich detail and transparency to the development of product and messaging.
Customer stories are a great way to organize thinking for agile marketing. Customer stories force you to think from the customer’s perspective. Moreover, they automatically add a market and customer segmentation mentality to your thinking that aids in being agile.
It is impossible to think of customer stories without visualizing the customer. This forces you to consider what does this customer look like, what role do they play, what industry are they in, etc. The best way to capture this mental exercise is to keep a journal of the customer attributes that are associated with the story. Soon enough the customer will become flesh and blood and will bifurcate a number of times into different customers that are either individuals that play a different role in a buying decision or are uniquely different than others in the use of your product or service.
Having a set of customer descriptions, you can then use these to build customer panels and advisors for performing Continuous Market Monitoring.
At Intermec we did an analysis of the retailer market for use of hand held computers on the store floor. We built a number of user stories through a series of customer interviews at different retail chains. Building up our set of stories we found large differences between store types. Large box discount stores used hand helds to do mobile checkout and process store returns. Grocery stores used them only to do inventory taking and receiving. Building up user stories allowed us to quickly segment the markets and prioritize design issues.
In my last blog I talked about the power of decisioning superstructures. In this blog I wanted to provide a concrete example of putting decision superstructures in action. In the mid 90’s, I ran marketing at a company that built world class field computing products. We turned the market upside down by building the world’s first completely rugged portable computer. To do it, we had to make a myriad of trade off decisions in the design. How long should the batteries last? How big should the hard drive be? Should we back light the display or make it reflective? And many, many more design decisions.
We were able to discuss, test and decide on each design trade off in real time using logical reasoning and interactive customer feedback. We documented each decision as to what was decided, what the alternatives were, and why the decision was made the way it was.
The end result was a sales training manual that covered all the important decisions. It actually answered all the typical buyer questions in detail including explanations that provided solid rational answers for the design elements. It provided the sales people with good talking points for the entire product. As important it created answers for questions being asked by the sales force.
Without the document the sales force would have been asking very logical questions about what would have appeared to have been, “you guys must have been smoking something” kinds of design elements. In most situations, we would have been telling the sales force that we couldn’t remember exactly why the decisions were made but we do remember they were made for a good reason. Instead we were able to give them hard answers that convinced them the design was well thought out. Moreover, it gave them the confidence in the product to truly believe it was the best. The product was extremely successful, the sales folks loved selling it, and it was in use by some of the biggest field service organizations in the world. You can’t get better than that!
One key off shoot of continuous market monitoring is the building of a Decisioning Superstructure.
In agile product development, functionality is built into the target product or service using customer stories. Customer stories are scenarios of operations that the customer will seek to perform using the product or service. Stories are collected and ranked before being assigned to a sprint. A sprint is the development and delivery of a set of stories that can be accomplished in short time period (usually two to four weeks).
At the end of a sprint, the product or service can be delivered to the customer for review and comment. During these review sessions, the reaction of the customer along with the dialog and change options can be recorded and decisions justified and explained.
Collecting the decisions that come out of the sprint reviews with the customer an Operational Decision Superstructure (ODS) for the product or service can be built. The ODS becomes a collection of explanations for why the product or service was built the way it was. All trade off decisions become recorded history in the ODS.
The ODS becomes the source for creating product FAQ’s (frequently asked questions and answers), for creating sales training material, for creating competitive knockdowns, and for building marketing materials. The ODS becomes an invaluable marketing tool.
05
May
08
eXtreme Marketing Rapid Response
Imagine being in a meeting with developers when the question comes up, “we could extend this one function really easily at only a small cost to the product. Should we do it?”. You think to yourself that it sounds reasonable but really aren’t sure. Well, with eXtreme Marketing you can provide qualified answer rapidly without guessing and without disrupting the pace of development.
One of the big advantages to XM’s CMM process is the ability to get answers to spurious function and feature questions extremely rapidly. As questions come up during the development process, they can be incorporated into the continuous market testing as a normal course of business. If the issues are logical in nature they can usually be answered within one or two rounds of survey deployment. A small sample size is sufficient to test whether or not a concept has any hidden gotchas. If the issue is more statistical in nature, then deploying the question provides an immediate early indicator that provides and immediate litmus test and over time improves in accuracy increasing the confidence level of whatever decisions that are taken.
27
Apr
08
eXtreme Outbound Marketing (XOM)
eXtreme Outbound Marketing (XOM)
XOM is a component of eXtreme Marketing which in turn is a technique used within Agile Marketing. XOM is relevant to any marketing promotion situation, although it is most appropriate for high growth businesses that encounter rapidly developing market opportunities. XOM provides a platform for rapidly developing and testing market promotion opportunities.
Built on metrics
Core to XOM is the ability to rapidly and accurately measure impact. To do this XOM relies on continuous market monitoring (CMM). Best practice CMM techniques involve setting up weekly execution of market surveys applied continuously and incorporated into the organization as standard practice. A core set of questions form the basis for the market survey and create a backbone of longitudinal information capable of showing trends and impacts.
Adjusted within this framework are a set of rotating questions that are incorporated as either a core candidate or are brought in situationally. Core candidates are questions that appear to be critical to longitudinal data gathering but have not proven themselves out. Situational questions are brought in to support specific short term knowledge goals or to support test programs, such as a new ad campaign.
One of the bigger problems in XPM when the product manager must act as the surrogate for a diverse customer base is dedication to the development effort. The product manager is often performing the dual role of representing the customer to the developers while actively staying in touch with the market in order to provide adequate representation for product requirements.
What is important is that the product manager not forget that the reason he or she is actively and aggressively interfacing with the customers is in order to be the voice of the customer. The product manager must take the time to provide real time feedback to the development team. Anything less is a dereliction of duty and a major impact on either quality or timeliness of implementation, or both.
Management must recognize this dilemma and provide adequate berth to the product manager to allow proper interaction to occur. Product managers must develop the proper tools for there specific situations to keep the dialogs going (Webex, VPN, teleconferencing, video conferencing, etc.) with sufficient bandwidth. A communications plan should be set up at the start of the program to insure adequate dialog and it should be reviewed and adjusted often.
If a product is being designed for a single customer, then it is both best and easiest to get the end customer involved in incremental reviews of functionality. When the product is being designed for a market the problem becomes larger and more difficult. Selecting a single customer for a product review will result in individual customer biases that can skew the results significantly. The marketing manager often becomes a surrogate for the customer and can act as the full time guide for product feature development and ranking. This is an appropriate method to use for most programs.
It is important to get the voice of the actual customer into the development cycle, however. XPM promotes this idea through the use of consumer advisory panels. Advisory panels are groups of consumers that meet as a group or provide individual feedback to functional blocks of the product. Advisory panels exist for the duration of the development cycle.
It is not practical for advisory panels to review all functional block releases. Best practice dictates that the marketing manager act in the role of real time feedback with advisory panels operating on a one in three or one in four review cycle frequency. While this may result in having to correct for mis-steps taken by the marketing manager, this approach will keep from burning out the advisory panel which would result in high turnover and delayed responses.
Furthermore, advisory panels are likely to provide divergent suggestions from members of the panel due to difference of opinion or operational procedures. It is up to the marketing manager to reconcile these differences and make final judgments for direction to the development group.
08
Apr
08
XPM – eXtreme Product Marketing
XPM is a component of eXtreme Marketing which in turn is a technique used within Agile Marketing. XPM is relevant to any product development situation, although it has it’s roots in software development. The idea behind XPM is the development of small sub-modules of the final product that are developed in such a way that they can be shown to both the internal customers (marketing and management) and the external customers (end users).
Focusing on small incremental and functional deliverables creates an environment that shows continual progress which is important in maintaining forward momentum and excitement in the program, but more importantly it provides a method for getting rapid and continual feedback from the customer as to the fit and finish of the product AND how well it meets their needs. Doing this creates an environment where feedback occurs early in the development cycle which in turn improves the end product and allows for incremental corrections at a low cost (where such corrections may be prohibitively expensive downstream).
The effectiveness with which XPM gets implemented is totally dependent upon the infrastructure that is set up to provide appropriate and rapid customer feedback. I’ll talk about this topic in my next blog.
