The features don't always sell the product

Product managers and product marketing professionals are integral members of their company's business team. Nothing fowl there. But their responsibilities, their deliverables, and their perspectives are often different. Respecting those differences is critical to the launch of any successful solution in the marketplace, according to technology marketing veteran Adam Boone

At the most successful companies with formal product management functions, the relationships between product managers and their marketing counterparts are close and supportive, where both teams pull in the same direction. At least that's been the case in the career of Adam Boone, who is currently vice president of strategic marketing for Syndesis – the privately-held Canadian telecom software company that acquired suburban Pittsburgh-based CoManage last August.

But there are also built-in tensions between the two disciplines, he acknowledged, and these tensions are not only necessary, they are there by design. They grow out of marketers and product managers having different responsibilities, different deliverables, different needs, different stakeholders, and different pressures. Product managers and marketers tend to view the world in slightly different ways. And unless those differences are recognized, they can lead to error, waste, delay, and missed opportunity.

Horror stories

“I've heard horror stories, where they just don't see eye to eye, especially in a business-to-business (B2B) context,” Boone said. “The product managers think that marketing is about taking the hard work that they do and turning it into fluff. And marketers, on the flip side, view product managers as just not getting it – not understanding what is necessary to build something the market at large actually wants.

“Building the wrong product could be a consequence. Or building a product that's too specific to one powerful customer who doesn't really reflect the needs of a broader market,” he noted. “Of course, some very successful companies make a great deal of money building custom solutions. But it's much more time-consuming, expensive, and less profitable than creating a single product that can serve a whole range of potential customers.”

“Sometimes there's a gulf between what marketers think they need to say in order to field a competitive product, and what Product Management has actually put into that product. So Product Management feels it's not getting enough data about the market from Marketing, and Marketing feels it's not getting enough data about what's possible with the product from Product Management.”

Nuts, bolts, and customers

“A product manager is focused on which requirements realistically have to be in a product to meet a customer's needs. Then they negotiate with Development and with Engineering to make sure those requirements can actually be met, how they can be met, and what timeline they can be met in. So they're very much about getting into the nuts and bolts of things and understanding how that can be achieved. It's obviously a critical, basic group of tasks they need to perform, or nothing ever gets to market.

“Marketers, on the other hand, are less concerned about the product itself than they are with what it does for the customer. There's an old marketing saw that says if you're running a hardware store that sells hammers, what you're actually selling is the ability to hang a picture. Because ultimately what the customer wants is not your product; what they want is something your product enables them to achieve. That's what marketers are paid to worry about.

“Sometimes the customer's business goal has less to do with requirements or features than it does with being convinced you can help them achieve something important. If you're just asking the customer to compare your speeds and feeds against the next guy's, all you're doing is comparing spec sheets. You're not really selling and you're not going to get the value you should.”

Paint by numbers

“If I were to create an ideal product manager, he or she would be able to map features to a customer's business issues. The moment a product feature was being discussed and started to make its way into the requirements documents, they'd be able to start to make the business case for that feature and why it would have value to a customer. How does this feature help the customer to make money, or save money, or achieve some other strategic business goal? They'd also be able to speak to that in front of customers and work with them to understand how those business needs relate to the product.

“The ideal product manager wouldn't just launch products – they'd launch solutions. That sounds like a cliché, but I mean it in the classic sense. They'd understand everything that would have to be done in the customer's environment to make the product work there. And they'd be able to state the business case for the whole transformation caused by the solution, not just the part your product would provide. Being able to articulate that is essential because it's what ultimately allows you to beat your competition.”

Dead chickens

There's an old joke among marketers that Boone uses to illustrate the difference between the marketing and the hard-core engineering approaches to bringing a product to market. “If some companies, particularly those from a B2B context, were launching a KFC franchise, their slogan would be: ‘Eat our deep-fried dead chicken parts.' They wouldn't come up with ‘Finger-licking good,' because what's important to them is the product. And what is the product? It's deep-fried dead chicken parts. But that's not what the customer wants to hear and it's not what the customer is looking for; the customer is looking for something finger-lickin' good.”

“And there's something else that's overlooked a lot – not just by product managers but by everybody in B2B – it's the self-interest of buyers in B2B markets,” Boone pointed out. “Say you're selling computers to a large corporation. You may think that all you need to do is go in there and show why your price is better, your value is better, your product features are better, your integration and support services are better, and then win the deal. But what does the buyer on the corporation's side really care about? They care about not making a mistake. They're thinking, ‘I'm going to be dropping several million dollars on a computer system for the company. If I buy the wrong system, my career is down the tubes.' That's what they care about. It goes back to product management. You need to focus everything you do on showing how you can help to make that customer a success.

There's an old business saying: ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.' And that's what this is all leading toward. Your goal as a marketer is to make your company the IBM in your industry so people feel that it's a lower-risk proposition to go with you than the next guy's.”

Peter Longini is a Managing Editor for the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it