Product Managers Are Falling Victim to An Expert Game of Telephone

Remember the old party game, Telephone?  The group sits in a circle and someone starts with a phrase and the fun is to see how much the phrase changes from it’s original version as it make its way around the circle.  Great icebreaker but a terrible affliction for Product Managers.  Think about, Product Managers are charged with the very soul of a company, the relationship between their product/service and the end customer.  They are the fighter pilots of the enterprise, targeting markets, fending off competition, and last line of defense between corporate strategy and market reality.  So why are there so many layers of obfuscation between the Product Managers and their target market?  The diagram below introduces the Product Manager Web, a representation of the different sources of market intelligence that PM’s have to wade through on a regular basis to fight their way to actually having an impact on customers.

First off, the organic resources that have direct contact with your customers all bring their own agendas to the insights they share.  It’s not a bad thing but PM’s need to understand the inherent bias these other stakeholders bring to their efforts to impact the market.  Sales teams are famous for asking for additional features to be added based on their last client conversation, buoyed by the belief that, if they just had twice the speed at half the price, the sales team would meet their quota in the next 15 minutes.  Outbound marketing and the agencies that support them are notorious for being unable to measure the half of their marketing that works, reporting on metrics like buzz and visits, always requesting more resources to boost these easy to capture but hard to use metrics.  Internal market research teams with their surveys and focus groups are essential to get answers to specific questions but can often be used to reinforce outdated perceptions of the market.  Ask anyone at Nokia after the iPhone was launched for war stories that will make you weep…  Customer service organizations, inorganic (outsourced) as often as they are organic, excel at uncovering problems to fix.  With a focus on reducing cost of engagement, there is little time or attention put to moving consumers from satisfied to delighted.  All of these methods focus on current customers and prospects and find little to peek behind the curtain of the competitors and their customers.  This gap is partially filled by consulting firms like Gartner and IHS iSupply which provide generic research that ensures everyone has the same data about everyone else, not necessarily a source of competitive advantage…

Product Managers hungry for direct contact with their market have few options, costly customer visits, endless hours trolling through reviews and twitter posts.  Each of these methods drain resources of time and money from the PM’s efforts to defend their firms from the constant onslaught of competitors.  We have been focused on this issue for a quite some time at Argus Insights and will be sharing much of what we have learned in future posts.