I got a chuckle from this recent tweet that called out a malapropism in another tweet clearly intended to comment on employee sentiment analysis. It’s an important type of text analytics (and a focus of my employer, Attivio) to analyze and discover “business signals” buried within online reviews, surveys, and other text-based opinion.

But, just as ‘many a truth is said in jest,’ many a truth can also be said by mistake as well: companies should monitor – and avoid – employee “sediment.” Doing so will help ensure an environment of innovation and free-flow of new ideas.

Somehow that ‘sediment’ gaffe triggered a memory (from ‘sediment’ to ‘dirt’ … ‘soil’ … plants) of an article I read some time ago about “potted plant syndrome” in the workplace. I couldn’t find the article I had in mind, but this article hits on the same idea:

There was a boss who complained that everyone around him was a “potted plant.” He couldn’t understand why his managers wouldn’t take charge of an idea or come up with solutions. In his management meetings, if a manager suggested how to handle a problem or come up with solution, he would tell them how they could do it better or differently. Or, he would argue that they were wrong. He didn’t realize he was killing commitment and innovation.

The boss was a one-person idea prevention department. People were tired of standing out with an idea only to get it shot down, so they stopped offering them, becoming “potted plants” – hence my employee ‘sediment’ line of thought.

And now a quick story…

A business professional (we’ll call him “Rick”) met with a company leader to understand how he wanted a certain technology solution to work. Rick listened and asked questions, teasing out from the leader the specific desired outcomes and results he was looking for. In the course of the conversation, the leader drew his thoughts and answers to the questions on a whiteboard.

The next day, Rick presented a plan describing how the ‘actual’ solution would work, delivering the end results the leader had articulated. The plan included a time-saving idea involving a simple update to existing data that would provide many of the desired end results quickly.

Far from being pleased, the “leader” was incredulous.  “I told you exactly what I wanted,” he said testily to Rick. “What is this?!”

And then Rick understood the unfortunate reality that the “leader” never wanted Rick to propose an innovative solution; no, the “leader” wanted a replication of his desires and wishes exactly as described (instructed) on his whiteboard. Rick’s job was to be a gofer; an order taker. Did the “leader” want fries with that?

Withholding his own incredulity (and the snarky fries rejoinder), Rick obliged and completed the project to the “leader’s” specifications – which were needlessly complicated and rarely followed by the system’s end users. Not long after, Rick, not terribly interested in becoming a “potted plant,” chose to move on…to much greener pastures.

If a company doesn’t want “potted plants” for employees, they shouldn’t grow them by burying their ideas.

Monitor “employee sediment,” indeed.

Here is an excerpt:

The Gift of Endless Memory, a 60 Minutes story originally broadcast on December, 19, 2010, introduced viewers to emerging research on superior autobiographical memory – the extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from one’s personal past. The story featured five of the six people recognized by researchers as having this superlative level of memory, including actress and author Marilu Henner…

I would have liked to have learned much more about how each group member actively uses their memory to their benefit. How does each person effectively manage what amounts to a vast personal “database” of highly detailed memories, each one as vivid as any other, regardless of the passage of time?

Please read the entire article here:

The Gift of Memory – and the Gift of Perspective by Mike Urbonas

Source: The Fighter official movie website

Or: When Leadership Squanders its Innovative Workers

My wife and I finally watched The Fighter (2010) for the first time on DVD. It’s an exceptional movie based on the true story of Micky Ward, a professional boxer from Lowell, Mass.

Set in the early 1990′s, the film introduces Micky Ward (portrayed by Mark Wahlberg) as an aging boxer whose champion potential is slipping away as trusted family members fail to look out for his best interests.  Between his drug-addicted brother Dicky (Christian Bale) missing training sessions and his mother Alice (Melissa Leo) mismanaging his matches, Micky Ward suffers a series of stinging defeats and considers ending his boxing career.

The Fighter led me to wonder how many people are out there today with similarly high potential being similarly squandered. Does this suggestion ring true to you?

I am certain the vast majority of people (certainly not just product marketers and product managers) have felt the same gnawing cognitive dissonance during their careers that Micky Ward felt: an awareness that one’s work and skills were somehow being stifled, but knowing neither why nor what to do about it.

I believe the root cause behind the vast majority of struggling products (and, therefore, struggling businesses) is people not living up to their potential due to a non-supportive organizational environment. Like Micky Ward’s frustrations early on in The Fighter, the core issue is a pervasive inability of people, starting with the management team, to work with one another effectively and treat each other properly.

There are many types of managerial dysfunctions that contribute to a non-supportive environment that adversely impacts people, which cannot help but adversely impact products. Here are a few that might ring true to you (though I hope not!) …

Leadership that is disengaged from the company’s original innovation and brand equity. Beware of management who was not around and/or not emotionally invested in the company’s original innovations that earned its success and brand equity in the first place. There are many particularly bad examples out there, such as “professional” management teams as described in this past blog post.

Starbucks is a recent high-profile example of “post-founder” management that missed the mark badly.  After original visionary CEO and chairman Howard Schultz’ retirement from Starbucks, the company pursued an unfortunate strategy of over-expansion while becoming less like the original Starbucks and more like Dunkin’ Donuts.  Thankfully, Starbucks is also a success story in recapturing that innovation and rescuing its brand following the return of Howard Schultz to the company. His book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, is definitely on my “to read” list.

In an organization with a management team that just doesn’t “get” it, innovators are much more likely to be “reined in” than celebrated.

Leadership that punishes unsuccessful innovation.

If you say, ‘I want people to take risks,’ and then fire the guy if the outcome fails, it becomes clear how your organization really feels about risk.

- Anthony F. Smith, Consultant and author of the book ESPN the Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports.

There’s a great old movie sight gag featuring an overworked bus boy at an understaffed diner. Hurrying with two full armloads of stacked dishes, he slips and drops one armload of dishes that fall shattering to the floor. The slave-driver boss roars, “You idiot! You’re fired!”

The bus boy looks his boss in the eye, shrugs his shoulders, lets the other armload of dishes fall crashing to the floor as well, and walks out.

The lesson is clear: a company culture that punishes workers for honest mistakes, and even worse, for taking a risk and trying out a new idea that doesn’t work out, deserves the plentiful fallout it creates. Nothing stifles innovation (or, for that matter, careers, information sharing, customer service, etc.) like a ham-handed “slap on the wrist” from an authoritarian boss.

Leadership that fails to reward or even recognize successful innovation. Failing to appreciate or acknowledge innovation success might even be worse than scolding unsuccessful efforts. I recall some years ago reading some of the 1985 book Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur by Gifford Pinchot. The book described an ingenious manager who single-handedly created a new multimillion dollar stream of revenue for his employer. The manager discovered an innovative breakthrough that transformed tons of scrap material previously hauled away as waste into a vital component of a new product.

Great job, right? Tell that to the manager’s employer, whose collective response was little more than an indifferent shrug. Incredibly, the manager was not rewarded in any way for his multimillion dollar innovation (!!) – an injustice that Gifford Pinchot seemed to gloss over and almost excuse:

[The manager] doesn’t seem bitter that he barely received a thank you for creating a new business…He is from that loyal generation who is thankful for a job, and my questions about recognition and rewards made him uncomfortable.

This feeble conclusion to a dismal story debunks the book’s premise; after all, an entrepreneur in charge of his or her own company actually reaps the rewards of his or her innovation, rather than having them gobbled up without even a “thank you” by an indifferent executive team!

In addition to conveying the cynical notion that the manager “should just be thankful he has a job,” the company made a very loud and clear statement about how little it valued innovation and those who engage in it.  I’m sure  that message was received loud and clear, and remembered, by others across that organization.

Leadership that is preoccupied with “problem solving,” not innovating. Referring to the previous sad example, problem solving would have amounted to simply finding a new vendor willing to dispose of ‘all this worthless material waste’ for a few bucks less than the current cost. Innovating is what that manager actually did, turning that scrap material into revenue-generating gold.

An organization unduly focused on linear “problem solving” will readily recognize the former and often underappreciate the latter (even if the innovative efforts prove successful!), perhaps even going so far as to label those innovative efforts as indicative of “not taking direction.”

I discussed this malady in a recent article exploring the Hierarchy of Imagination, in which I suggested that many boss-subordinate conflicts stem from incompatible levels of imagination, such as a highly “creative” person reporting to a “left brain”-focused, “problem solver” boss.

Some years ago I recall reading about the CEO of a consumer product manufacturer [UPDATE 1/21/2012: I since recalled the article appeared in the Boston Globe, by writer Dale Dauten who spoke with former Gillette CEO James Kilts]. who proudly described how he successfully… [drum roll?] mandated a dramatic reduction in the company’s product SKU count. Hmm.

Apparently Mr. Kilts regarded the number of SKUs as being excessive and too complicated. I remember being underwhelmed by what struck me as administrative work of nominal relevance. Apparently summary roll-ups of SKU data would not placate Kilts either. I also wondered whether some poor soul had to regularly burn the midnight oil to break all the product SKU data back to its previous level of detail necessary for operations.

My frame of reference is the article by Dauten, but I now see that Kilts later touted this same achievement in a book entitled Doing the Right Thing. Anyway, Kilts soon sold Gillette out to P&G.

Instead of tinkering over such “problem solving,” I hope your company’s leaders are doing the right thing and attacking the work they were mandated to do: increase the top line by setting the vision, agenda and right environment for creating innovative new products.

I would also very much like to hear your insights into this topic.

Here is a link to the Pragmatic Marketing article, and a link to the original blog post.  Enjoy!

Photo by Clare & Dave (Flickr CC)

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about the simple and clever Cake Model for Product Planning, a smart product management methodology by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path, a user experience (UX) design firm.  The cake model helps launch desirable products as quickly as possible, and in so doing, help customers achieve positive, successful product experiences as quickly as possible as well.

The Adaptive Path Cake Model urges product managers not to try making a big huge honking cake of a product.  That requires baking a very a big cake (on its own, rather plain and dry), then adding some filling, and then some frosting.  Hopefully your target markets are willing and able to wait for all that, and the finally-completed cake is the flavor, texture, etc. they were expecting.

Instead, product managers should first spec out a cupcake of a product that be made relatively quickly, with a small amount of cake complimented with enough filling and frosting to make people want it  – and get value from using it – right away, as is.  Users achieve success and a sense of competency with the product now, and eagerly look forward to enhancements.  For more on the importance of getting your users past the newbie threshhold with your product to passionate user, check out this classic post – one of my favorites from Karhy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog (archive).

One cupcake product model example that comes to mind is the online to-do app TeuxDeux.  Instead of trying to bake the entire cake of “everything” that belongs in a to-do app, TeuxDeux offered up a quick cupcake: a dead-simple online to-do application for people who might find the very wide and deep features of more comprehensive to-do apps like Remember the Milk a bit intimidating.  Users raved about TeuxDeux’s highly intuitive “cupcake,” and have since provided over 10,000 enhancement suggestions, culminating in new online features as well as an iPhone version.

Meanwhile, product marketing managers contribute to the success of the cake model through two primary roles:

• Convince your target market segments that your cupcake not only tastes good, but also tastes far better than competitors’ big, plain, dry cake (or their attempts at cupcakes).
• Have, or quickly gain, vertical (industry/field) and/or functional subject matter expertise (SME) to help render your cupcakes particularly flavorful to those market segments.

I think the Cake Model for product management, combined with the above-noted product marketing role, also aligns well with the market segment-driven product strategy of Proficientz, formerly ZigZag Marketing, as recently presented by John Mansour, Managing Partner at Proficientz, to members of the Boston Product Management Association. 

Under such a market-driven strategy, product managers are across-the-board experts on the product, setting product priorities based on key market segment growth potential, and product marketers are influential in identifying those key market segments, leveraging SME, and developing effective messaging and marketing strategy for each segment.  (A market-driven strategy becomes even more vital when you have a number of products, now managed as a portfolio, in which each product plays a defined role as part of a complete solution for the key market segments).

In turn, such a market-driven (not product-driven) strategy lends itself to the quicker creation of cupcake products, as well as subsequent iterations, building off the initial cupcake to create a small layer cake, then a bigger sheet cake, and perhaps someday a wedding cake. 

Of course, your “cake” need not be gigantic to be amazing and extraordinarily successful!

Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination was designed by John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, based on his conversation with Patti Brennan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similar in design to Maslow’s classic Hierarchy of Needs, the Hierarchy of Imagination is represented as a pyramid progressing from the base of reactionary behavior with little or no imagination (Reflex), proceeding upward to Problem Solving, then Creativity, and finally the pinnacle of “completely unrestrained” Imagination.  It is a very thought-provoking model.

I had a few thoughts related to this Hierarchy of Imagination and the workplace, and product management and marketing in particular. I’d like to know your thoughts as well.

• The hierarchy should not be interpreted as disparaging jobs in which little creativity or problem solving is expected. What sets a worker in such a job apart from others is the level of wisdom they bring to their job (Read more here). That said, a person in the Reflex category had better not find himself in a Peter Principle job situation and be expected to proactively solve problems or provide creative leadership.
• Many boss-subordinate conflicts stem from incompatible levels of imagination. A Product Manager who spends his time gathering customer enhancement requests and prioritizing bug fixes (Problem Solving) will likely find himself in trouble with his VP who expects him to creatively identify new, ground-breaking features for the next version of the product. Conversely, a “left brain” business owner who prides herself as a Problem Solver may underappreciate the creative work of her marketing manager. She might be reluctant to attribute new business leads to creative marketing, but be unusually perceptive of flaws in “how” marketing tasks were completed (was paperwork completed properly, did a project merely beat a deadline or was it finished with days to spare, etc.).
• With the above thought in mind, I read an article linked on John Maeda’s blog on the challenges creative people might face when pursuing leadership roles. I’m willing to wager that many of those surveyed demonstrating ambivalence towards creative people tend to fit into the imagination hierarchy as Problem Solvers themselves, perhaps focused on successful project administration but with less awareness of the creative value and impact of the final project. To paraphrase a passage I recall from a Tom Peters book, “the project was done under budget and ahead of schedule, but no one cared about it.”
• In fairness to Problem Solvers, creativity needs to be directed carefully. Product manager turned CEO Barbara Tallent warns Product Managers to avoid working on “cool stuff” instead of what customers have already said they need and will pay for. (Read more here).
• The further you go up the imagination hierarchy, the more vital your skills of persuasion are. In order for a creative person or someone with “completely unconstrained” Imagination to achieve his vision, he will need to effectively brief others in the organization on the merits of that vision and gain their buy-in, enthusiasm and support (Read more here).
• I liked Patti Brennan’s comment: “teaching creativity doesn’t work but expanding their imaginations might work better.” In her work in patient healthcare, Patti Brennan believes “that in order to get patients to take control of their health, they need to imagine what it looks like to be more healthy.” Indeed, the ability to visualize something better than what you are already doing is vital for creativity. Similarly, creativity requires a capacity to empathize with others, whether we are talking about the health problems of patients or the challenges and frustrations of our customers. Good product managers and product marketing managers can translate their empathy towards what customers are going through into well-defined products and clear, relevant, engaging messaging and content.

I found Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination very insightful and I look forward to reading more from John Maeda’s Creative Leadership blog.

If you liked this post, you may also like:

Is your Product Like “The Fighter”? Are YOU? [Or: When Leadership Squanders its Innovative Workers]

Today’s “New Rules” Marketing Organizations Run Like Winning Football Teams

Innovative Companies Don’t Have Employee “Sediment”

Getty Images

I recently read a great Ad Age article by Chris Kuenne, Four [Marketing] Talent Categories You Need to Win in a Connected World.  Recognizing that many marketing organizations still cling to discredited, “old school” marketing and PR, Chris Kuenne provided a timely description of the new talents, skills and attitudes found in today’s “new rules” marketing organizations that are actively contributing to company growth and success.

Chris Kuenne listed four skill categories vital for today’s successful marketing organization – Strategic, Analytic, Program Design and Technological – which, combined with talent-building marketing leadership, will yield well-orchestrated “personally relevant experiences” that “translate the brand promise into relevant and entertaining interactions that always seem fresh and new.”

To support his spot-on core point that “the old set of skills and conventional deployment will not work,” Chris Kuenne offered a sports analogy:

In [American] football, everyone is a specialist with a distinct position and responsibility. Each player goes one-on-one against his opponent, helping the team advance the ball in a linear fashion down the field. Marketing over the past 50 years reflected this linear approach, in which a brand’s marketing plan specified a highly planned, seldom altered, set of initiatives…Today marketing is closer to rugby. All players handle multiple roles, using many different skills…

Transformation through Innovation. Both football and today’s marketing function have benefited dramatically from innovation.  The one-on-one, seldom-altered, linear genre of football described by Chris Kuenne is an accurate description of the “smashmouth” version of the sport as it was played over a century ago, as exemplified by the feared Army football team and its predictable but brutal, physically punishing running game.

And so it went, until Notre Dame, in 1913, under new coach Jess Harper, unveiled an innovation that would thankfully transform the game: Notre Dame took unprecedented full advantage of the forward pass (!), recently legalized but widely ignored. Practiced that summer by quarterback Gus Dorais and offensive end and legend-to-be Knute Rockne, Notre Dame’s passing plays bewildered the Army defense for a lopsided 35-13 upset victory. (Of course, clever, daring plays unimaginable even a decade ago continue an ever-accelerating trend of innovation on the football field.)

It is amazing in hindsight that marketing has not experienced such dramatic transformation until recently. At roughly the same time as Notre Dame’s game-transforming forward pass innovation, John Wanamaker, the pioneer of the department store, made his famous remark, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  Similar frustrations by marketers have continued on right up to present day!  Thankfully, marketing innovations today are replacing decades of plodding, seldom-altered, and maddeningly difficult to measure interruption marketing with a still-evolving paradigm of content marketing, permission marketing and marketing automation technologies. The marketing function is finally undergoing its own game-changing, “forward pass” of innovation and transformation. More >>

Improvisation. In the football game of an earlier era, the coach’s called play was the play, no matter how obviously ready the defense was ready for it. Today’s football calls for champion quarterbacks to decipher disguised defenses in real-time and “call an audible” – a quickly-improvised new play (Peyton Manning has turned this into part science, part theater). Teammates must also recognize the need to improvise a play as well: wide receivers must know when to “cut their route” and expect a very quick pass in response to an anticipated  rush on the quarterback. The defense must be ready to change its coverages at a moment’s notice as well. The old school coach’s “command and control” of a football game has given way to much more flexible play-by-play in response to real-time game situations. In similar fashion, members of winning marketing organizations are afforded the autonomy, and have the skills, to make real-time corrections during a marketing campaign or other activities, and do so collaboratively with others on the team.

An obsession for analytics. Today’s most effective professional teams – not just pro football, but baseball, basketball and hockey as well – are utilizing data analytics in ways and depths unimaginable even a decade ago, to predict future success on game day and optimize success off the field (demand-driven ticket prices, non game day function space usage, etc.).  Boston Globe Magazine provided an insightful report on the new, fast-growing career path of sports analytics, with grads with degrees in statistics, computer science, mathematics, etc.increasingly landing jobs in the front office of professional sport teams. Fascinating stuff, of direct relevance to all marketers:

It used to be that player evaluation and play calling relied heavily on subjective analysis…Instinct, experience, and very basic statistics like the box scores tracking a baseball player’s hits, strikeouts, and runs batted in per game drove decision making.

Now scores of new data points are available, letting team officials know the odds that one strategy will be more successful than another. Is it better to walk a particular player or pitch to him? To sign an aging all-star point guard to a single- or a multi-year contract? To punt, attempt a field goal, or try a running or passing play on a fourth down from the 50-yard line in a certain game situation? …Perhaps not coincidentally, Robert Kraft, whose family owns the Patriots, Red Sox owner John Henry, and the Celtics group all come from wildly successful business backgrounds, where number crunching is a way of life.

Celtics co-owner and venture capitalist Steve Pagliuca calls Boston “a new Florence” for sports analytics. A similar analytic renaissance now exists within marketing as well, led by sites such as Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker, whose excitement and enthusiasm for marketing analytics jumps off the page. I encourage you to visit Chief Marketing Technologist and start with one of Scott Brinker’s personal favorite posts, Rise of the Marketing Technologist and actively utilize marketing analytics in tandem with marketing automation and other key technologies. The active use of analytics is a force multiplier for effective marketing as it is for successful sport teams.

Leaders with proven acumen and leadership skills. Chris Kuenne provided advice to CMOs equally applicable to football coaches when he wrote that leaders “must encourage collaboration across radically different temperaments, skills and backgrounds.”  That’s an accurate description of football and marketing teams alike.  Equally important are the coach’s/CMO’s own qualifications: how many, how much of “hard skills” – the vital talents, skills and attitudes identified by Chris Kuenne – does the leader in question really possess? Has the coach/CMO demonstrated his or her “soft skills” – a proven ability to “attract, inspire and retain the best talent”? Coaches and marketing leaders alike can neither succeed nor even “get by” without these essential talents.

Put simply, authentic leaders, like champion coaches, attract and inspire highly talented professionals.  Poor coaches and poor business leaders repel talented people.

NFL fans will readily recall the Peter Principle-style failure of Minnesota Vikings coach Brad Childress, resulting in his high-profile firing during the 2010 season. Brad Childress’ implosion, summarized by Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com, should serve as a cautionary tale for those in any executive position who lack “new rules” acumen and leadership skills:

Childress had never been a head coach at any level. He had been the offensive coordinator of the highly successful Philadelphia Eagles, but coach Andy Reid called almost all of the plays over that period… [As Minnesota Vikings head coach] Brad Childress had a distant relationship at best with players, feuding with most key veterans at one point or another. And his schemes were uninspiring and rigid, routinely minimizing the skills of talented players…

Some successful coaches channel [New England Patriots coach] Bill Belichick, attempting to out-think and out-scheme opponents. Others emulate Bill Cowher [coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 15 seasons], whose motivational skills kept his teams playing hard… Childress didn’t fall in either category, and ultimately that’s why his players turned on him… They felt neither inspired nor challenged.

It’s as easy to recognize a winning, innovative marketing organization as it is to recognize a winning football team. Marketing organizations led by savvy, authentic leaders proactively gain business insight from customers, understand their challenges and needs, and translate that understanding into engaging, relevant solution content across new online communication avenues. They are the ones setting new rules for success.

On the other hand, marketing organizations with leadership that is inattentive to existing customers, blithely clinging to “old rules” marketing tactics, are the equivalent of NFL teams with one-dimensional play calling (otherwise known as “run, run, pass, punt”!) that lose games with embarrassing regularity.

A technology evangelist “promotes the use of a particular product or technology through talks, articles, blogging, demonstrations, [etc.]…The word ‘evangelism’ is taken from the context of religious evangelism because of the similar recruitment of converts and the spreading of the product information…”  (Source: Wikipedia)

I recently came across a blog post by technical writing and communications professional Dr. Ugur Akinci, who wondered aloud whether there was a better term to describe the title of Technology Evangelist. Ugur Akinci noted the dictionary definitions of evangelism in its original religious context; those definitions suggest communication that is, among other things, decidedly one-way. Point well taken, but none of the other alternative titles suggested – technology communicator, ambassador, champion, advocate, enthusiator (the latter one intended to provide a chuckle!) – comes close to conveying the role as vividly as Guy Kawasaki’s original term of technology evangelist: the active persuasion of people to buy into the superiority of his/her particular technology product and help spread the word about it.

Actually, the term technology evangelist becomes even more appropriate if we use more secularized religious terminology to describe the product offering itself. I have in mind an article product management professional Jacques Murphy wrote a few years ago, asking a still-timely question: Is Your Product a Missionary or a Savior?

(W)hile every (software) company wants their product to be brand spanking new, there are two very distinct strains of newness: the Missionary and the Savior. And one of those two types is a much harder sell…The Missionary product…represents a new idea or a whole new take on an old idea. Nobody has heard of it and your company is in the position of telling others about it and convincing them of how important it is…

With a Savior product, the market comes running out into the streets to greet it, cheering it along all the way. The Missionary product has to go exploring into lands unknown to make converts through its boundless zeal.

Of course, Jacques Murphy’s “market running and cheering to greet a Savior product” hyperbole has since become literally true many times over by Apple’s amazing run of true Savior products. As for software, particularly in the B2B space, every product will have some missionary, or educational, aspect to it. You will always need to effectively convey your understanding of your customers’ problems and how and why your product solves these problems in ways far superior to your competitors. Every software solution requires effective product marketing, and benefits greatly from technology evangelism.

But a ”true” Missionary product will also offer a very different solution to fulfilling a need; a solution that might even be openly contrarian to current conventional wisdom; a solution that is proven to yield unique and compelling benefits for your customers, but in very new ways. Having a technology evangelist, a name and face for the product, actively advocating your unique, even contrarian solution to the market, becomes absolutely crucial, absolutely vital.

A very good recent description I’ve read describing what a technology evangelist is, does, and should do is a blog post by Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. In the form of an entertaining “Master to Grasshopper”-style conversation, Simone Brunozzi imparts advice to the aspiring technology evangelist, with links to further resources:

• Know the technology you’re promoting inside and out, know what customers need, know your competition, be ready and eager to learn new things
• Practice your presentation skills, learn to effectively communicate in public, using powerful visuals, voice, body language
• Give your audience a memorable experience, and show them respect (Simone Brunozzi includes a great story on how he immediately won over a restless audience that had just sat through a turgid, I’m-reading-my-index-cards speech by a pompous CEO).

But as good as Simone Brunozzi’s advice to the aspiring technology evangelist is, a very important piece must be added: the technology evangelist must be a content-creating machine (!), as emphasized in the new book Content Rules by Ann Handley and CC Chapman. The ability to devise and create online content – success stories, webinars, videos, articles, ebooks, blog posts and more – that your prospective customers will find informative and helpful is the single most important tool in the technology evangelist’s arsenal (more here!).

As Ann Handley and CC Chapman write in Content Rules, the active, prolific creation of online content helps the technology evangelist and his/her company become a trusted resource that prospective customers will look to, foster a desire to work with your product, and finally ignite customer passion for your product based on their success with it, to the point where they help you create content in the form of testimonials and other online content – all stated goals of the technology evangelist, and absolutely critical goals for any company with a “true” Missionary product.

One last thought: On the other end of the content creation spectrum, if a company has no constant influx of new online content – no new case studies, no new customer testimonials, no new webinars featuring customers, no podcasts, blog posts, nothing! - then you can rest assured that no technology evangelism is taking place, no new understanding of evolving market needs is in progress, and the company is implicitly relying on the market to become “seekers of truth” (another borrowed term of religious origin!) and somehow find the product on their own – the online equivalent of a frustrating archaeological dig.

Source: HikingArtist.com (Flickr CC)

In a recent thought-provoking TDWI article, David Champagne informed readers of The Rise of Data Science: a discipline of emulating the scientific method when analyzing data, in a conscious and laudable effort to ensure objectivity and avoid poor analytical practices.  Having just recently blogged on the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, a type of flawed analytical logic business intelligence users might fall into, David Champagne’s article caught my attention.

From David Champagne’s article:

Back in the “good old days,” data was the stuff generated by scientific experiments. Remember the scientific method? First you ask a question, then you construct a hypothesis, and you design an experiment. You run your experiment, collect and analyze the data, and draw conclusions. Finally, you communicate your results and let other people throw rocks at them.

Nowadays, thanks largely to all of the newer tools and techniques available for handling ever-larger sets of data, we often start with the data, build models around the data, run the models, and see what happens.  This is less like science and more like panning for gold…Perhaps the term “data scientist” reflects a desire to see data analysis return to its scientific roots…

Barry Devlin, in his business-focused commentary on David Champagne’s article, noted the worlds of science and business have rather different goals and visions, which I interpreted as data science might offer limited benefit to business managers.  But perhaps the best practices of data scientists have a lot more in common with those of business managers after all, in light of some commentary I came across on effective business decision-making.  That commentary gave high praise to the manager who utilizes the scientific method in the decision-making process. The author was not a technologist, but rather: Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management.

Revisiting Peter Drucker’s writings on effective decision-making process will show surprising similarities to the best practices of data science, and yield beneficial insights for business managers seeking to make more effective, data-informed decisions.

Barry Devlin wrote that the worlds of science and business work differently with data. For example,  business is concerned with improving the bottom line while science seeks “real and eternal truths.”  This is true, but scientists also never stop evaluating and improving on “truths.” The scientific process of seeking “real truth” and not accepting conventional wisdom is very similar indeed to the business decision-making process. From Peter Drucker:

(E)xecutives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions. These are, of course, nothing but untested hypotheses and, as such, worthless unless tested against reality…

People inevitably start out with an opinion; to ask them to search for the facts first is even undesirable. They will simply do what everyone is far too prone to do anyhow: look for the facts that fit the conclusion they have already reached. And no one has ever failed to find the facts he is looking for…

The only rigorous method…is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first…Then no one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses – in decision-making as in science the only starting point.  We know what to do with hypotheses – one does not argue them; one tests them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore worthy of serious consideration… (Source: The Essential Drucker , Peter Drucker, p. 252).

The process of testing opinions, aka hypotheses, will of course involve analyzing data – a process for which Peter Drucker again calls for a scientist-like inquisitiveness: “The effective decision-maker assumes the traditional measurement is not the right measurement…The best way to find the appropriate measurement is to…look for “feedback,” (Drucker, p. 253), which Drucker describes as “organized information” that is ”built around direct exposure to reality” – better known today as a performance metric. Finding the right performance metric(s) is “a risk-taking judgement,” Drucker says.  And the best way to mitigate that risk is by using metrics with some actively proven experiential value.

Finally, the evaluation stage of scientific method - “letting people throw rocks” at your conclusions, as David Champagne wrote – is again very similar to Drucker’s advice to business leaders, urging them to “create dissension and disagreement rather than consensus” (p. 254):

The effective decision-maker…organizes disagreement…It gives him alternatives so that he can choose and make a decision, but also so that he is not lost in the fog when his decision proves deficient…And it forces the imagination – his own and that of his associates…[The effective decision-maker] starts out with the commitment to find out why people disagree. (p. 256)

The best practices of data scientists and business decision-makers seem to overlap heavily.  Thankfully, though, the business manager does not need to actually become a data scientist.  Doing so would require adding to the business manager’s functional expertise two additional copious skill sets of the data scientist: extensive mathematics/statistical capabilities, and “hacking skills” – the ability to find and retrieve data from disparate sources on one’s own. David Champagne writes, “Finding and retrieving data sometimes requires the skills of a burglar” (emphasis added).   This is cringe-worthy terminology to CIOs already working hard to avoid shadow systems and the multiple versions of the truth they might bring.

That said, Barry Devlin makes a succinct and strong case for the data warehouse as a leading source, if not the only source, of trusted data, not to mention trusted performance metrics, that business decision-makers can use with no need for “hacking skills”:

This is where a data warehouse comes in.  Of course, only a small proportion of the data can (or should) go through the warehouse.  But the value of the warehouse is in the fact that the data it contains has already been reconciled and integrated to an accepted level of consistency and historical accuracy for the organization.

An effective data warehouse will serve business managers as a laboratory of sorts, enabling decision-makers to test opinions/hypotheses by asking good questions and getting good answers: data that is “true” (accurate) along with proven performance metrics.

Business executives and managers will do well to adopt Peter Drucker’s best practices of decision-making, which closely follow the best practices of data scientists analyzing and interpreting data.  Doing so will help lead towards better, data-informed decisions, and away from managing based on irrelevant measurements or “looking for the facts that fit the conclusion.” – in short, acting like a data scientist and not a ‘mad scientist.’

I was already impressed with the work of Stu – I mean Dr. Stuart Payne – and his staff, and yet was even more so after reading his Principal’s Message in the latest issue of Northwood Elementary’s impressive parents newsletter, which summarized the goals he and his teaching staff set for 2011:

At the beginning of this year, our dedicated staff set…three goals for ourselves: (1) Rigor, (2) Differentiation, and (3) Progress Monitoring.

These succinct goals no doubt rang true for Northwood Elementary parents.   In fact, they rang quite true for me in my world of product marketing.  Let’s look at each one more closely:

Photo by courosa (Flickr CC)

Rigor.  Stuart Payne writes: “Through rigor, we endeavor to make sure that every child is challenged in a developmentally appropriate manner.”  This vital educational goal can be easily adapted to product marketing/product management terms: We must challenge ourselves to really understand our products and our markets, and convey our value in a compelling manner that our target markets will understand and be motivated to learn more.  I am reminded of a blog post by Dave Kellogg (MarkLogic CEO for six years) on applying (rigorous) critical thinking for effective product positioning (I elaborate on Dave Kellogg’s fine post here, BTW).

One sidenote: Stuart Payne also wrote: “(R)esearch indicates…that when the work is too difficult, (students) become frustrated.”  This reminded me of a classic blog post by Kathy Sierra: Do your customers feel a similar sense of frustration trying to understand and/or use our products?  Why?  How can this be corrected (and fast)?

Differentiation.  Of course, as a product marketer, product differentiation is critical.  However, Northwood Elementary is referring to differentiation as in the non-standardization of classroom instruction:

By designing differentiated lessons that meet the needs of our students varying ability levels, we ensure success for all  (emphasis added).

So let’s look at “differentiation” in a similar way for marketing: The “standardization” of marketing and PR is long gone, as David Meerman Scott and others have already made quite clear.  That said, what different means, what different avenues should we share our product messaging?

The new book I am reading now, Content Rules by Ann Handley and CC Chapman addresses this very topic (watch for a book review here soon).  In a nutshell, it’s a how-to guide to differentiate your product messaging mediums – video, podcasts, webinars, blogs, ebooks.  Doing so enables us to connect with prospects in the mediums of their choice, in which we convey in informative, compelling ways what our products are and why they are essential.

Progress Monitoring.  Stuart Payne explains:

Progress monitoring is the way in which we gauge the effectiveness of our instruction and the way in which we measure students’ progress toward their learning goals (Emphasis added). During our Response to Instruction (RTI) block, for example, we are able to target instruction in a way that aligns with each child’s reading ability.

Similarly, how do you know if your marketing programs are any good?  I’ve always defined success of my product positioning, messaging and marketing content is its capacity to yield qualified leads and ultimately translate into revenue.  True enough, but just counting up “leads” is insufficient.  Ardath Albee, in her excellent book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, connects the dots between marketing and revenue with content marketing:

Building online engagement…depends on your ability to develop compelling content…’Engagement bling’ is what I call the positive results your company gains from sustaining trusted engagement with prospects and customers throughout their buying journeys…

The goal of marketing in a complex sale is to generate qualified demand that efficiently transitions to revenues.  And if you want to increase the level of demand for your solutions, it is critical that you enrich the relationships your company establishes with prospects and customers.  Marketing with contagious content operates like a pay-it forward system for your company.  This is because the value your content provides transfers to the value your prospects and customers ascribe to your company (p. 14 & 16 – emphasis added).

Ann Handley and CC Chapman elaborate further in Content Rules:

(A)ccording to Forrester Research, “Long sales cycles and complex purchase decision-making challenge B2B marketers to find the most qualified prospects and to build relationships long before the first sales call.” As a result, you need to embrace a new mind-set – one focused not just on generating leads but on developing a [content] strategy to keep prospects engaged until they’re good and ready to talk to your sales reps. (p. 25)

 In other words, the old metaphor of the marketing department “throwing leads over the wall” should be replaced by a metaphor of marketers throwing an entertaining, informative party that prospective customers want to stay at and meet all your friends…who happen to work in the sales department!

There’s plenty more to write about on this topic, but it’s important to note that Northwood Elementary is taking an innovative approach in how student progress is being measured (its Response to Instruction block noted above, as opposed to, say, grades – a flawed, lagging indicator).  Similarly, marketing programs should be judged not just on a flawed measure such as the number of “leads” who, for example, opened an email link, but based on the quality and duration of the engagement of prospects to “keep them at the party.”

The staff goals of Northwood Elementary to engage and help their students succeed bear some interesting similarities with the goals of effective marketers, working to engage and help their prospects succeed with your products.  And, no, I’m not suggesting prospective customers be treated like elementary school children.

Actually, hang on, I take that back: If your prospective customers are given the same respect, dedicated focus as afforded to the kids in Northwood Elementary, with the same authentic desire to help them succeed, that will put you way ahead of competitors whose product marketing practices and corporate culture are the equivalent of vapid school lessons that may as well have originated in the mimeograph era.

If you liked this post, you may also like:

Be a Dogged (Not Dog!) Product Marketer/Product Manager

Play the Product Marketing Game Like a Chess Grandmaster

“Missionary” Technology Really Requires a Technology Evangelist