Product Management

How to Develop and Market Better Products Faster

by Brian Lawley

“The Product Process.” For entrepreneurs to corporate managers, this phrase is akin to running in sand, pouring molasses or enduring the Chinese water torture. But the product process needn’t be a thankless chore.

Performed correctly, the product process is the key to dramatically successful products achieved through better teamwork and characterized by less friction and stress in your company. The product process can actually become a tool that helps your company deliver better products faster because it answers critical questions up-front and gives everyone on the team what they need, when they need it.

In essence, the product process becomes a forcing function – ensuring that the most difficult discussions and decisions are addressed early on in the product development cycle rather than delaying your company’s efforts with constant interruptions along the way.

The key to success is having enough process so that everyone in your company can create and execute plans from it, yet at the same time building in just enough so that it remains “lightweight” and your company can move fast and be nimble.

Over the past few years I’ve worked with many clients and companies who were either a.) racing to launch products with no process whatsoever (i.e. we’ll come back and think about putting some process in place once we have launched and become wildly successful) or b.) using mammoth processes that were so extensive no one could possibly understand the details let alone follow them.

This article describes a basic four-phase lightweight product process based on my 18+ years of Product Marketing and Product Management experience, working with literally dozens of teams and having watched many products fail and a lucky few triumph.

Building Contagious Products

Every company wants to build products that are contagious – that are so compelling and meet customer needs in such a strong way that sales are bound to take off. Products that customers can’t stop talking about – that provide tremendous customer satisfaction so that the industry and the channels and everyone involved can’t help but recommend them.

How do you build and market products like these? And just as critically, how do you do it quickly so that you don’t miss the market opportunity? Of course, there are lots of factors that play into this. But one of the most important is to inject as much customer and market awareness as you can into your products as early as possible, while getting engineering and marketing to commit to a process so that plans can then be rapidly executed.

The challenge in implementing such a process is that your company will need to have the courage to spend some extra time up-front to define the product and commit to the details early on. The reward, however, will be great: a clearer sense of exactly how the company will meet customer needs and increased accountability from everyone involved.

Phase I: Product Idea/Vision and Validation

The product process begins with an idea or product vision. This might be for a completely new product, a line extension or an upgrade of an existing product. The idea may come from engineering, product management, the company’s founders or some combination. Regardless of its origin, the idea becomes interesting and viable enough to create a proof of concept, whether simply on paper, as a Shockwave or html demo, or as an actual working hardware or software prototype. In parallel with this, product management conducts some up-front due diligence to validate customer needs and determine if adequate profitability levels can be achieved. If the product is viable the company commits to applying the rest of the process to its definition, development, and marketing.

Phase II: The MRD (Market Requirements Document)

Assuming that the idea makes it past the proof of concept, Product management (also called “Inbound” marketing) then delivers an MRD. Product management’s role is multi-fold: 1.) to identify the target customer segments and conduct appropriate research to understand their needs, 2.) to scan the competitive landscape and ensure that the company’s competitive position can be a winning one and 3.) to ensure that given the technological and business landscape that the company can enter the market and dominate it through product, channel, or other means that provide a sustainable competitive advantage.

The MRD need not be a long document (I’ve delivered MRDs as short as 2 pages) but it has to provide enough of an overview of the market opportunity and the customer needs that engineering will be able to respond to it. It also must include a window of opportunity – the period of time that the product meeting these needs must be delivered in order to win in the marketplace. In cases where there is more time you may want the MRD to be very detailed, even including examples of how the features must specifically be presented to the user and information about future releases and what the product’s architecture must be designed to support.

One other note about MRDs: the product manager shouldn’t be created in a vacuum. Instead the product manager should brainstorm potential features and directions with the whole team and really make sure that they feel some ownership and can contribute their expertise; otherwise the whole process may break down if the MRD contains big “surprises” that don’t take into account their insights.

Phase III: Product Specification & Schedule

After engineering receives the MRD, they deliver a first draft product specification and rough schedule. The specification should respond to the needs outlined in the MRD and also include features that engineering believes are necessary for success (such as architecture changes or features that are so cutting-edge that a clear customer need may not have emerged yet.)

Using the product specification and schedule, engineering and product management then go section by section to finalize what is absolutely critical for the release and to “scrub” the schedule to determine the earliest date that the product can be delivered. Coming out of these talks, engineering then delivers a final specification and a committed final schedule. The final product specification should clearly call out which areas, if any, of the MRD will not be delivered, whether due to schedule or resource constraints or due to engineering complexity. Product management, engineering, and other company management then sign off this specification and schedule where relevant. After the specification is signed off any changes, whether requested by product management or whether indicated by engineering that they are no longer feasible, will trigger an immediate “out of bounds” condition where all parties re-negotiate the feature set/schedule mix.

Phase IV: The Product Launch Plan

As the product moves from the Alpha stage into the Beta stage, product marketing then becomes more involved. Note: in some companies the Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager are the same individual. Product marketing is responsible for all outbound communications about the product, and works in conjunction with the other team members (PR, marketing communications, channel marketing, sales, and others) to successfully launch the product and to keep the initial sales and market momentum going.

The Product launch plan should cover all of the critical details such as positioning, pricing, marketing programs, launch activities, sales activities, PR, and more. Many of these sections will be created by others in the company and integrated into the plan. By having the previous work to rely on (a solid product specification based on customer needs as outlined in the MRD combined with a committed schedule) the Product Launch Plan can be delivered and executed by the entire launch team resulting in an effective launch.

Back To The Beginning

From here we return full circle to the beginning once again. A new vision or theme begins to form for the next version of the product. The product marketing manager continues to implement marketing programs and work with sales, PR, advertising, and other groups to market the current product. At the same time the product manager captures feedback from customers, press and analysts, technical and customer support, and other sources. This combined with new competitive information and market trends are then all used to create the next version of the MRD and we repeat phases II-IV.

Making The Process Work

When you implement a process such as the one outlined above there are a few things that will help to make it more successful:

1. Keep the documents as short as possible. Make a commitment to delivering documents in less than thirty days.

2. Get up-front buy in and complete commitment from the top down and from the entire team. Make sure that management is willing to stick to the process and the rules. Make sure all of your team members understand the process and why it is important.

3. Tie employee performance reviews and quarterly goals to the process, including quality of documents and level of teamwork.

Of course, these are just a few suggestions. The key to success will be to make a simple process become an integral part of the way your company does business, so that in the long run you get the benefit of learning as well as delivering better products faster.

Brian Lawley is an 18-year marketing veteran with extensive experience in-house, as an external consultant and in interim VP of Marketing and Director of Marketing roles.

This paper and the material it links to are published with permission of the authors.  All rights to these materials remain with the authors.