Answers to questions raised during the recent webinar, Creating A Compelling Product Business Case with Demand Metric. Questions and answers cover best practices for the timing, intention, multiple products and creating buy-in across the organization.

Think of the customer's view at every moment from design of products and services to the sales and follow-up care. What will their reaction be? Let this approach guide all your design efforts. Let it shape your redesigns to keep pace with a changing customer demographic. Remember, the customer experience is from the outside in to your company -- not from the inside out!

Why do products fail? Trying to organize all of the reasons that your product might fail is a Herculean effort. Understanding how your product did, will, or might fail will help you focus on what you need to do next.

A common reason for losing a deal is that the client was looking for something else but you tried to sell him anyway. Your internal process refused to disqualify the buyer. You ultimately lost a deal that you should never have pursued. And the most common process problem is a failure to disqualify.

In agile, each function has learning up front, a build in the middle, and a validation at the end. Since the customer typically has working software to experience the functionality, and is saying "yes" or "no" to each one as it's completed, it's less likely to need revisions later on. The customer validation after each new build increases leaning earlier in the process and makes the product more accurate. An accurate product gets traction faster, uses less resources and is lean.

Price is more than just what the customer needs to buy your product or service. It is also telling the customer more about your offering. Take care that your prices are telling them what you want.

Whether it is Microsoft applications like Office, Visio or Project or other Enterprise applications used by their company, most of the time Product Managers are left to their own devices to learn how to use the tools that are critical for their day to day success. But as new applications become available that are more powerful and useful, it's important to give your team of Product Management professionals the support they need. This is even more critical if the software is integrated into your existing or new product processes that span across different functional groups in your company.

When working as a Product Manager with an engineering team one of the biggest challenges you face is prioritizing what features are critical to include in your next product release. One of the most popular techniques for prioritizing features in an MRD (Market Requirements Document) or functional specification is to use the HML (High, Medium, Low) method.

Just build a great product and you'll take the market by storm, right? That's the myth perpetuated in Silicon Valley, and it's a difficult lesson that many entrepreneurs, and seasoned companies, end up learning the hard way. Sure, some products seem to have everything magically fall into place and succeed. The majority of successful products, however, have good planning and execution combined with a great product.

Source: The Study of Product Team Performance, 2012™ In January of this year Enterprise Agility and Actuation Consulting joined together to conduct a global survey of product team performance. One of the survey findings that did not make the white paper was based on the question "What characteristics do you believe differentiate your organization's successful product development initiatives from those that have struggled or failed?"

By pairing business analysts with product managers at key points throughout the life cycle of a product's development, organizations can optimize bandwidth, expertise, and interest-related challenges that allow both roles to do what they do best - create value.

Part 1: Identifying anomalies and converting them into business opportunities
©2011 by Karl Hellman and Robert S. Siegel

Part 1 of a 4 part series

We all delight in the legend of the entrepreneurial-hero--the genius who invents the new product that transforms the world as he or she is sitting in their dorm. And the world has indeed produced wonderful entrepreneur heroes, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

By Patrick Zuluaga

You have heard so many marketing experts telling everyone to use social media as part of their promotional marketing mix. The Internet is flooded with information on using Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Numerous articles have been written on how using social media can help promote your brand image and how it can generate web traffic for your main business website.

By Sam Miller

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