Quick Tips - Tips from the practice masters...
In an ideal world, you start out with a clear definition of a problem and then systematically work your way toward a great solution. But in the real world, you sometimes find yourself with a great technological solution in search of a compelling problem. Even if your business is currently successful, there are good reasons to leverage the investment you've already made by discovering new applications for your core technology. But how do you increase your odds of success? At a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, Arun Ranchod, Business Development Manager with MEDRAD, and Jim Thompson-Colön, Head of Future Business at Bayer Material Science, shared their shared their experiences and techniques with selling the new possibilities to your organization.
Remember: this pays off, eventually. A counter-argument to the complaint that successful business lines shouldn't subsidize people in labs who seem to be playing around is to show them a pie chart of revenues and graying out those business areas which wouldn't have existed without that play. It can be dramatic and stop discussion.
Give advance warning. Survey your colleagues internally to test the waters. Approach them one-on-one. Tell them you're going to be working on this, that you might be pitching this idea to them in three months, that you have a gut feeling there might be a market need for this, but that you've still got due diligence to do. If you can prove to them in three months that it's a good idea, you need them to signal their support. But if that person replies ‘we tried that ten years ago and it didn't work,' or ‘that's not the market we're in,' it doesn't necessarily mean you should abandon the idea.
Sell up. Internal support is critical to any idea. If you can sell an idea to somebody at a high level and they become passionate about it, they can run with it for years. When the VP is sitting there saying that he/she likes this idea, even if everybody else is puzzled, it can go forward.
Watch out for make-believe numbers. Just because a number appears in a spreadsheet cell doesn't mean it's legitimate. Nobody really knows the cost of a future product. You could say it would be somewhere between $5 and $15, but that spread can get much larger. So put down a range of numbers, and be generous with how wide it is. It can be a full order of magnitude. People won't mind when you tell them that based on the information you have today, it's somewhere between 10 and 100.
Buy sheep, sell deer. Storytelling is very important. Ten years is a long time, but it's not an unusual development cycle for many types of products. Sell stories, sell hope, sell buzz. Management might shut the project off in three years, but that's just part of the game; some things fail and you have to accept that.
Play politics. How you play your company's own internal politics is important. Understand when to maintain objectivity and when to be passionate. You need to know how to sell, how to tell a story, how to pre-sell if you need to, and to know which players really drive a decision. The selling you do is not so much to external customers as it is to your internal customers.
Calm down. Matching up your company's strategic fit criteria and financial criteria with a customer problem helps to take the emotion out of decisions you might otherwise be too invested in, possibly leading to bad choices.
Repackage it. Even if you're able to take an existing product's underlying technology into a new market, you will almost always have to repackage it and check if it still fits your value proposition.
Create an archive. If a technology doesn't fit your criteria, archive it; it may become a fit for you later. Maintain a database of archived technologies. Set criteria to decide whether it's worth spending the money to protect the IP for sale, licensing, future use, or whatever.
Take a fresh look. In the past, product ideas that were archived would stay in mothballs. Build a review of inventoried technologies into your company's strategic planning cycle so you can take another look at them later on. If there are different people in different places looking at it with fresh eyes at different times, it can help make their possibilities clearer.
Take stock. If your company is publicly traded, early stage technologies can help the value of your company rise in the stock market because analysts love it. When your company's stock goes up, the payback can be in millions of dollars. Analysts invest in future revenue, so if you have cool stories that indicate future revenue, the value of your stock can go up long before the revenue materializes.
Spend someone else's dime. The best time to find a market application for a new, unique technology is before the founder even starts a company. Ideally, it is while the inventor is still on someone else's payroll because you can burn up a lot of runway trying to find the right application and market.
Find skills that work, avoid attributes that don't. What do you look for in staffing up for the task? Interviewing skill is important. Business acumen and a good instinct for what will make money is important. Search skills are important too. But know-it-alls will quickly fail at the job. You have to be open to other people's ideas. It's often best to hire experienced people.
Get smart. Another personal attribute is acquiring the scientific knowledge, analytic skill, and understanding of different applications to be seen as credible with customers. But avoid the propensity to become the expert yourself.
Champions of Product Management 
