Jag Duggal reveals four lessons that even the best teams often overlook. Discover these critical mistakes and how to avoid them to boost your product’s chances of success.
I voted for customer anecdotes because of my experience in product management. I’m now retired but as a product manager my greatest successes came when I remembered who the customer was and when we focused on solving problems that cost them time and money. An anecdote: I worked on a product that helped migrate user customizations over when the company upgraded the PC hardware. When I came into the company, the main message was to preserve all the hundreds of settings in apps such the Microsoft Office suite. Not a bad idea but the buyer in corporations was the IT department and with few exceptions such as high level executives, IT can limit how much time they have to spend getting people up and running again. In fact, a common trend then was to treat IT as a profit center who could charge calls back to the originating department if it was anything but critical functioning, and restoring all the custom settings in Microsoft Word didn’t fit that bill.
But after talking to some prospective customers, their big issue was getting Microsoft Outlook email hooked up and working again, something that wasn’t trivial then when done manually. It was taking IT workers about 1.5 hours per PC. Our software did that automatically and that became the main selling point and the reason for some very large corporate and government contracts. It was a minor feature in the grand scheme of what the product did, but it was the one we could pitch in cost savings. I worked with the team to change the messaging and we had a good run in that version blamed on that message alone. All this came from listening to a few tech support calls and asking specific questions of where their pain points were.
I voted for customer anecdotes because of my experience in product management. I’m now retired but as a product manager my greatest successes came when I remembered who the customer was and when we focused on solving problems that cost them time and money. An anecdote: I worked on a product that helped migrate user customizations over when the company upgraded the PC hardware. When I came into the company, the main message was to preserve all the hundreds of settings in apps such the Microsoft Office suite. Not a bad idea but the buyer in corporations was the IT department and with few exceptions such as high level executives, IT can limit how much time they have to spend getting people up and running again. In fact, a common trend then was to treat IT as a profit center who could charge calls back to the originating department if it was anything but critical functioning, and restoring all the custom settings in Microsoft Word didn’t fit that bill.
But after talking to some prospective customers, their big issue was getting Microsoft Outlook email hooked up and working again, something that wasn’t trivial then when done manually. It was taking IT workers about 1.5 hours per PC. Our software did that automatically and that became the main selling point and the reason for some very large corporate and government contracts. It was a minor feature in the grand scheme of what the product did, but it was the one we could pitch in cost savings. I worked with the team to change the messaging and we had a good run in that version blamed on that message alone. All this came from listening to a few tech support calls and asking specific questions of where their pain points were.