Effective Product Thinking
Effectivus is focussed on helping you to bring the best possible products to market in the most effective way. We combine strong commercial, technical thinking with innovation to deliver concrete results which will help you deliver better products. We focus on technical products, especially software, delivered into business markets. We have over 20 years experience with products for the creative industries.
Serendipity in New Product Development
Three types of serendipity: how do these apply to product discoveries as opposed to scientific ones?
Malcolm Gladwell entertained a diverse audience at the Oxford Playhouse recently with a 90 minute talk about serendipity in cancer drug discoveries. As usual his stories were engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always entertaining. My 17-year-old son was just as engaged by him as I was, which is a pretty big compliment. Some parts of it are in this New Yorker article.
He described a division of serendipity achievements into three levels.
Going ‘Off-Strategy’
Why your optimal strategy may be sub-optimal
Mark Jenkins, Cranfield University professor of business strategy, has posted a piece on “Off-Strategy” on HBR’s blog. Mark studies strategy in Formula 1, a highly competitive business where very small margins make the difference between winning and losing. In his post, he points out that Mark Webber won the Hungarian Grand Prix by adopting a very different strategy from those drivers he was competing with.
The difficult truth we have to face is that if we have the same facts and similar skills and resources as our competitors, we are likely to come up with the same strategies. Those strategies will pitch us directly against our competition and leave our customers unable to differentiate. How often have you seen two or three small companies killing each other competing for domination of a niche? Too often, I bet.
What I’ve seen happen next is even more unpleasant. Those two competitors start to watch each other more than the market, or their customers. Then single biggest reason for making any sort of move is either ‘because our competitors did it’ or ‘because our competitors might do it’. Their marketing focuses on knocking the competitors rather than explaining their product’s benefits. Their recruitment either ignores people who have worked for the competition (because they must be evil) or concentrates on them (because they must know secret stuff). All of this leads to just one thing: disappearing profits.
Marketing Metaphoria
Book review and thoughts on connecting to customers
On vacation, I finally got around to reading Marketing metaphoria: what seven deep metaphors reveal about the minds of customers by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman. This book is about uncovering the unconscious thoughts and feelings that influence customer behaviour around a topic or product.
The authors’ approach to this is threefold: thinking more deeply about customer behaviour, soliciting the underlying metaphors behind customer behaviour, and using a simple metaphor schema to help generate ways of connecting with those customer emotions.
“Thinking hard” is often difficult to achieve in our frenetic working lives when we are constantly interrupted. Our thinking tends to be focussed around the present and near future, it tends to be about the familiar, based on existing assumptions and focuses on surface differences rather than deeper similarities. More than anything else, employees fear punishment for thinking differently, or not appearing active. All of these factors get in the way of us thinking in a creative and structured way about our customers and offerings.
Seeing the future comes [un]naturally
Dispelling two myths of scenario planning
On the last day of our holiday in Umbria, my wife, youngest son and I had decided to climb Monte Patino, NE of Norcia, in the morning before driving down to Rome for our afternoon flight back to London. In order to be able to complete the walk before lunch we elected to drive up a “bianca” (dirt track) to start higher up. We abandoned the car when the track got too steep to negotiate, reversing it into a narrow space between a cliff face and the track. On the other side of the track was a vertiginous drop.
On the way down I could not help but imagine what woes may have befallen the car and how that would affect our travel plans. What if it was clamped, had been towed away or rolled down the hillside? All completely illogical ideas considering the circumstances.
Later that day I discovered that my wife had been equally obsessed by the idea that one of the sharp stones might have caused a puncture; a much more logical possibility.
The Product Manager’s Toolkit
Book review gets robust criticism from author
“The Product Manager’s Toolkit: Methodologies, Processes and Tasks in High-Tech Product Management”, Gabriel Steinhardt, Springer Science+Business Media, 2010
I was immediately drawn to this book by its title; there are so few helpful books on product management for the high-tech industry. I read a huge amount around the subject not only in order to keep myself up to date, but also to offer my clients pointers to books that they might find helpful, so I was happy to read it for review.
In it, Steinhardt sets out to provide ‘a consistent and holistic managerial approach to product management’. He points out, quite rightly, that every technology company seems to have a different definition of what Product Management means. He defines the role as covering both the product planning activities of figuring out what a product should be, but also the product marketing ones of presenting its benefits to the customer. He puts those two roles alongside the roles of Sales Engineer (often called product specialist, evangelist, pre-sales support, etc) and MarCom Manager.
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