How to make your software product portfolio great again
I’ve been working in the IT industry for the past seven years and was privileged to play different roles in business analysis, quality assurance, pre-sales, tech writing and product management in a handful of companies. Therefore, I thought I should pen some of the observations I made that I feel would be helpful to create quality products with a lasting impression.
Overview
The IT arena is fast-paced, complex and extremely lucrative like never before. Buzzwords like IoT and digital transformation had caught traction from the clients globally. Irrespective of the domain, many organizations, statutory institutes, and the general public are exploring the possibilities of adopting IT to create improved productivity, enhanced experience and more profit, e.g., the PSD2 compliance. There is also a multitude of vendors with various product offerings to choose from. This creates an immense competition amongst the vendors. No matter how hard you innovate, features and functionality can always be copied. However, a good customer experience might create a lasting impression on the customer’s mind. Even when the things don’t go as you expected. In this post, I’d like to highlight a few key things any software organization can consider to deliver a product with a lasting impression.
Market: Where will you sell?
First, you have to identify whether you want to sell apples or oranges or both.
It’s important to Identify the market segment you want to do business in based on the software category, i.e., whether to sell a game, a software application, an ERP or even middleware and the business domain, i.e., whether to cater to the healthcare domain or the banking domain. Grasping the domain knowledge as much as possible and identifying the needs of the stakeholders is imperative to create a quality product or a solution that won’t be rejected or looked down at the delivery.
Features: What will you sell?
After identifying the market segment, you have to strategize to create the minimum viable product (MVP) by identifying the most suitable features that your product offering would have and figure out when you want to deliver them to attract early adopters. This is where subject matter experts (SMEs) come in handy. R&D and time management are two beasts you want to balance out well when you want to innovate. Otherwise, you will end up in analysis-paralysis. Given the people, time, budget and resources, you may not be able to deliver everything in the first cut. The old phrase divide and conquer comes to the rescue. You have to carefully plan your release plan where each milestone including alpha, beta, GA and UAT versions are carefully thought of. In parallel to this, you need to maintain quality product presentations and marketing collaterals to indicate how useful your current product versions are and product roadmaps to hint what’s in store for the clients. This enables clients to get a good experience every time you do a new release while keeping them notified, excited as well as assured about how their future with your product’s going to be.
When crafting software products, just packaging brilliant code will not help for the simple reason that you are not alone.
Yes. You are not the only people who are going to bag those clients. You have to be ahead of the game from the start. Treat it as a blind date that you want to make successful somehow. From analysis to delivery, user experience (UX) should be taken extremely seriously. You have to empathize your clients. Get into their shoes and feel their pain. Therefore, writing use cases/user stories should be part and parcel of the product development process, that would provide vital input for the quality assurance and UX folks. Whether they are written by business analysts or software developers, user stories are things you cannot overlook.
Creating easy to use documentation in the form of manuals and guides will assist your clients to get things started as well as when things are not that straightforward. Well-written documentation can actually conceal bad product user experience to a certain level by providing clear concise instructions.
Sales and Marketing: Who will sell?
Just because you created an awesome product it’s not going to sell itself. You need to market it and attract leads. You have to figure out the best mix of marketing and selling strategies that would fit your organization and the product offering.
Identifying the value proposition is the key to a successful selling strategy. After identifying the value proposition, it needs to be the mantra of all your sales, marketing, engineers, managers, etc should be chanting out to customers, partners, evaluators, etc.
Yes the fluff won’t help. You have to create and share ample amount of quality marketing material before the release, at the release, and after the release to create traction and search engine optimization (SEO).
Sales folks can accommodate outbound, inbound or a mix of both to attract leads. In order to sell well, you should know what you are selling. No matter how hard you try to make you sound serious while bluffing about product features you don’t know, the client will identify. If you are not confident in explaining product features, it’s best to bring in somebody who is confident. It could be an engineer, a business analyst, a product evangelist or a product manager. Somebody who can win the customer’s trust would help. It’s about maintaining a trust-based relationship to create a win-win situation for both the vendor and the client. Basically, you have to treat your customers the way you would expect to be treated at a restaurant.
The knowledge you gained through customer interactions must be shared with the product development and delivery folks. That knowledge is extremely important to shape the products to be useful for existing customers and prospects.
It’s important that you plan out how you will deliver your good news and bad news to your clients and take them through a subtle roller coaster ride to prevent boredom. You must talk to them and nurture them periodically. So that you can identify the opportune moment to cross sell and upsell. Don’t forget to spontaneously delight your clients either. It could be a cool feature they never thought of, a discount, or merely a t-shirt or a mug with your company logo printed on it. Those things create lasting impressions. Don’t we all love giveaways?
Synergy: How to sell?
Synergy is an extremely important notion. In order to have a lasting business, first we have to be honest with ourselves. If trust and respect are not cultivated within an organizational culture, there is no guarantee that the workforce will be true to their job role and deliver a quality product. Trust and respect are two things every employee including the CXOs and the senior managers should practice. One should respect others as much as you would want others to respect you.
I’ve seen how certain sales/pre-sales folks brag about the fact that they are at the frontline and that product teams should work according to what they say. It’s true that they play a major role to get the ship sailing. Good tires will not make a vehicle move if the rest of the parts aren’t active and synchronized. Thus, it’s important to share the knowledge retrieved through customer interactions with the folks who actually create the product. Discussing them at organizational forums and conducting brainstorming sessions are extremely helpful to come up with a solid and an extensible product roadmap. Teamwork is more of we and less of me.
Sometime back, I was at a supermarket queue waiting for my turn. Just as I got my turn the security officer came and scolded the cashier in front of all the shoppers. The cashier broke into tears and ran off. That obviously did not create a good impression in my head. However, another cashier promptly came and started attending to my groceries. But I wasn’t happy. When running an organization, it’s important to look after each other’s back especially in front of your clients. Finger pointing or ball passing do not solve problems. The leadership should be extremely careful to identify unhappiness amongst their teammates and resolve them promptly. They say happy employee = happy client.
I hope you found what’s written above useful and that you would use them when you start planning your next great product.
