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BMA Product Mktng/Mgmt Roundtable - Chuck Henderson on Launch

This morning we had our monthly BMA Product Marketing/Mgmt roundtable, with Chuck Henderson of Breakthrough Product Marketing discussing “The Product Doesn’t Matter in New Product Introductions”.

I invited Chuck to speak based on insightful comments he made in response to a launch query on another weblist. The advice he shared some months ago (which he revealed as originating with Cathy Kitcho’s High Tech Product Launch) was that launch must do two things:

1. Create demand for your product or service (create pull)
2. Set up the company to be able to fulfill the demand (make money)

True, beautiful, succinct, and something - as I reflected - I realized that startups and new product teams often deprioritize in a world of limited funds and time. Too often the operational side of the house is neglected, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where companies fail to plan for success. As an example I ran across yesterday gives a nice snapshot of the problem. It comes from Joel Spolsky at FogDog software, now selling a project management book to support FogBugz, one of his software products, who wrote two weeks ago an account of how difficult it is to fulfill physical product vs. downloadable code. In a world where we just can’t do everything we want when we can see it in our strategic path, how do we account for the unexpected opportunities that emerge as we build our businesses out. Joel optimized for code, but now needs to kludge in shipping. How many examples can you think of where back-end processes are made deliberately unnecessary in the early stages of the business - workarounds adopted so this overhead can be eliminated - only to become critical later when you’re selling a more fully-developed product?

Another discussion surrounded the sales side of the house, where we thought through just why the internal aspect of launch (the sales rep training, the lining up of manufacturing, fulfillment, billing, customer service, etc.) are so often deprioritized. It’s incredibly ironic because, as the wiser sales guys in attendance reminded us, it’s far easier, cheaper and margin-pumping to sell to your current sales base. For that, you need to keep them happy. Customer happiness, once they’ve been sold by the flashy sales stuff, is determined primarily by the “boring” post-sales activities of fulfillment, service and support. I can think of a dozen startups that totally deemphasize their support functions. It’s just not seen as mission critical, as product development obviously is - because it is, well, both obvious and interesting. Support is the stealthy make-or-break function in customer retention, but it’s hard-to-quantify and unobvious ROI make it difficult for otherwise responsible folks to spend their limited dollars and time here. Another factor which occurs to me now is that building strong support infrastructure results in a lot of confusing, conflicting, and contradictory customer data. What startup, bravely going about executing their business plan, can afford to be distracted by this feedback? You know there’s value there, but it’s gotta be like comments on A-list bloggers: how can you tell what’s good and real?? Personally, I’m not sure what the answer is - I have a bias against it as well, one I need sessions like this to talk me out of.

Again, we drew in the thinking of Steve Blank from Haas/e.Piphany, who covers some great stuff in his Four Steps to the Epiphany. You should own and read this book. It’s samizdat-style, but getting a fancier cover (our copy has a map of the Tokyo subway which is amusing for its own reasons). $24.95 will unlock the secrets of the startup universe.

Chuck’s notes from the session are here (FYI - he’s going through a rebranding and Innovation Acceleration will be the new name as of 1-Apr-2005) .

This roundtable (which I ususally post about as FYI) occurs on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30-9am. It’s always a great group of people, where experienced folks share their knowledge and we noodle through ideas to help improve the practice of the ambiguous world of product mtkng/mgmt.