Mr. John Mansour, the founder and CEO of ZigZag Marketing, spoke about When the Tail Wags the Dog at the November 3, 2004 meeting of the SVPMA. Mr. Mansour's presentation explained how a product manager's world gets turned upside down and what can be done to set it right again.

Product managers get pulled in many directions, from sales demo, urgent customer issues, development problems, partner opportunities, and more. The pull of all these forces leads the product manager into a purely tactical role, trying to keep up with the day to days challenges and neglecting the long term direction of the product. To resolve this, Mr. Mansour recommends a good offense is the best defense and has six steps to take control.

Balance your team
A balanced product team is one of the keys to success. There are seven macro steps in developing and marketing a product:

• Strategy and planning*
• Functional design*
• Develop, QA, and package
• Rollout & readiness*
• Demonstrate solution*
• Customer implementation
• Technical support

Product management is usually responsible or deeply involved in Strategy and Planning, Functional Design, Rollout and Readiness, and Demonstrating the solution, which are indicated above with the asterisks. What is most often missing is a person to handle functional design. The speaker emphasized that this is a fulltime job, and the person must have domain expertise. Often this team member carries the title of Business Process Analyst. So what do you do if you are understaffed?

A single product manager cannot handle all four roles. If you are in this situation, good luck. If you only have two product managers, however, John recommends splitting roles so one person takes Strategy & Planning and Functional Design and the other handles Rollout & readiness and Demonstrate solution. Another option is one person owning Strategy & Planning and Rollout and Readiness while the second person has responsibility for Functional Design and Demonstrate Solution.

With three people, the work can be split with one person each owning Strategy and Planning, Functional Design, and Rollout & readiness. Demonstrating solution would be handled by one of the three. With four, each roll is covered. If the product is new, the emphasis will be on the the functional design; you might even put two people against this need. If the product is mature, the focus will be spread evenly.

Spread the knowledge
As product manager, you will always need to get involved in all areas of the product, sales, and support life cycle. But your goal should be to move from first string person to second or third. Thus it is essential to spread the knowledge throughout the company. This may be achieved by demonstrating the product to your internal teams, giving the customer training to members who need a more in depth understanding, and by having certification for those individuals who require the most knowledge, such as support.

Have a complete strategy
Like a travel vacation, you need to know where you are going, how your going to get there, how long the trip will take, and how much you are going to spend. A typical strategy looks like a stack of bricks, where each stack represents a release and each brick a feature. A more comprehensive strategy looks out over 18 - 24 months and ties in with the corporate objectives and the entire product analysis and approval process.

Fence the sales force
Keep the sales force focused by pointing them towards the money. Be specific about the markets and target customer. This way they are chasing the deals that match with the product direction. Further, you need to align marketing and specifically lead generation as well. This way, the sales force is speaking to qualified leads pitching the correct value proposition, and staying focused on the correct market.

Validate early and often
At all stages of the product development, validate. The cost of an early, medium, and late design change is 1x, 50x, and 200x respectively. First, validate that you're solving the correct problem and understand its priority relative to other problems you could be solving. Once the functional design is fleshed out, validate how you intend to solve the problem. Then validate with a working prototype for software or a pre-production proto-type for hardware. Finally, validate the final product with a few early adopters. Mr. Mansour mentioned the BMW iDrive as an example of not validating. Consumers found this joystick controller to be difficult to learn and use, especially while driving.

Communicate in plain simple English
Communicate your message in simple English. Don't try to be clever. Lastly, keep the message focused on the problem being solved. Click here to view John Mansour's presentation.

About the Speaker
John Mansour is the founder and CEO of ZIGZAG Marketing, Inc. In 2001 John packaged 15 years of high-tech industry experience into a 10-step "How To" methodology focused on the execution phases of planning, developing, and marketing high-tech products. Over the course of his career, John functioned in roles ranging from pre-sales, product marketing, product management, director, and vice president with blue-chip companies including MSA and Dun & Bradstreet, mid-market companies including Geac and Symix Systems, and start-ups with really bad names never to be mentioned. John's product experience includes everything from managing a portfolio of legacy products to planning and launching a multitude of new products. To learn more about ZIGZAG Marketing's methodology, go to www.zigzagmarketing.com.