Driving with Customers
How different are the management tactics and strategies between managing a lower-price product for a mass market, and managing one for a higher-price “Enterprise” market?
I’ve been thinking about this, because I have experience with a high-price Enterprise-product company. I get curious how it would be without customers having a ton of weight to throw behind enhancement requests. I don’t know which I would prefer more, to be honest.
With Enterprise, there is that certain pressure to make sure the customers who are paying are getting their stuff in the product, relatively quickly. This isn’t a bad thing, because queue jumping can serve as a quality stream of revenue for the business. However, unless managed with care, the product could get out of control and become jagged with custom enhancements just for those clients willing to pay more than others, or have a more widespread brand reach.
Now, with consumer-based products, I’ve tried to think out how this could work. There are many different avenues from which requests and ideas could come in. For example, I could see a message board system working well, which creates a communicative relationship between the product team and the customers. A feature “form” on a website may also work well, as could having a yearly gathering of customers to come together and talk about the tech your shop is producing.
I suppose at the end of the day, you are dealing with a larger base of customers, which demands an incresed level of aggregation for the requests to make sure the good one’s don’t fall through the cracks, and with Enterprise, the requests are more focused, so the risk is making sure the product works well for everyone.
There are a few common joins between both scenarios, however (not necessarily in order of anything).
1. Making sure the product stays in line with corporate vision and strategy. If this doesn’t happen and the two become disjointed, you may be looking at either EOL’ing the product, or attempting to right the ship as fast as possible.
2. Focusing the product, knowing your market, and listening to it. Regardless of how well you think you may know what your customers want, unless you are listening to them, you can’t know for sure. The vision of the product needs to come from the business overall, and yes, some of the cool things the product does will be based on ideas internally. But, don’t leave out the customers — they pay for and use the product regularly (hopefully), so they do know it well also.
3. Gathering and managing the data. In either scenario, market data (enhancement requests, usage statistics, etc…) need to be gathered accordingly. This could come from multiple sources (customers, internally, comeptitors, etc…) but it can’t be left out there to float. It’s too easy for a PM to get buried in the “cool” stuff or putting out fires on a day-to-day. They need to spend time making sure this data is factored out and handled appropriately.
There is a ton to write on this subject, but I wanted to get some thoughts down, and today was a good day for it. I’m always curious about the steps taken / avenues travelled down for this taking place at other compaines, regardless of their focus (hardcore tech to more brand management style).
So cool — so, so cool.
