Francis Adanza recaps the Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the Product to Market event at SVPMA on July -11-2007.
SVPMA: Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the Product to Market
This evening, I attended the SVPMA event featuring Chris Shipley Co-Founder and Chairman, Guidewire Group, Inc. The title of the presentation was Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the Product to Market. Surprisingly, Chris brought two additional speakers with her; Steve Larsen, Co-founder and CEO of Krugle and Arya Barirani, Marketing Manager, HP Software Global Campaigns. This was a great panel presentation where I took away two key insights from the question and answer discussion.
- The Importance of Product Management Experience
- The Difference Between Product Management and Product Marketing
You often see teams of developers build in house tools inside of big companies. The tool is widely adopted throughout the company so there must be a market for it. This is not always true, but naive teams of developers leave the big company and try to form a business. Without effective market research they are basically just throwing something out there and hoping it sticks. Sometimes this works, but overall it is not an effective strategy.
Steve Larsen recommends that if you want to be a CEO start your career through product management. As a product manager you work with all parts of the business. Every departments success relies on product management. Product managers work with engineering to develop the product, help with sales and marketing, talk to customers, help finance with budgets and forecast. The secret to being a good product manager and a future CEO is make everyone feel like they own the idea.
Arya Barirani talked about his experience as a Director of Product Management for Mercury Interactive before the company was acquired by HP. He was responsible for working with the product managers, product marketers, and developers. He had to convey a vision and look beyond the release, the launch, the roadmap, and figure out customer acquisition. He had to work hands on with the sales people to figure out why the product was not selling. It was not because sales did not know how to sell it.
Product management always wants to wait until the product is perfect, meanwhile product marketing is always ship now. The biggest challenge for both departments is when is it ready? Launch is when we have a meaningful value proposition that allows us to sell in the market place. Revisions are when we have enough feedback from customers and high demand.
Unlike HP, Krugle and for the most part all startups do not enjoy the luxury of having product managers and product marketers on staff. Founders have to play the roles of both. Most importantly, they need to sell. No one understands the technology better than they do. Therefore hiring a sales guy before the product is robust and the messaging is accurate, will be a waste of time and capital. Founders need to talk to prospects and understand in their customers language the benefits of the offering. In addition, it is important to keep the product lean and mean by only developing features that customers will pay for. We often see startups spend too much time over developing compared to selling.
Description of Event from SVPMA Website
Session Overview: Too often, product management stops at the moment the product is “finished.” The product launch is as much a part of the product management lifecycle as are the market requirements, development schedules, and QA cycles.
This discussion is introduced and moderated by Chris Shipley, Cofounder and Chairman of market intelligence firm, Guidewire Group, and leading product and technology analyst for the past 20 years. As Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences for Network World, Shipley has helped over 1500 new products to market since 1996, including such well-known brands as Palm, Salesforce.com, and TiVo.
About the Speaker:
Chris Shipley is cofounder and chairman of the IT market intelligence firm Guidewire Group, Inc. (www.guidewiregroup.com). A leading technology and product analyst for the past 20 years, Shipley is dedicated to the success of technology entrepreneurs, focusing exclusively on identifying market opportunities and accelerating the most promising companies and products to market. At Guidewire Group, she drives the firm’s strategic initiatives, and is the lead analyst and writer for The Guidewire Report, the firm’s twice-monthly digest of market analysis and early stage company briefs.
Shipley is perhaps best known as the executive producer of the DEMO Conferences for Network World where she has helped technology companies to bring over 1,500 new products to market since 1996, including such well-known brand names as Palm, Salesforce.com, and TiVo.
Fortune Small Business Magazine placed Shipley on its “Top 10 Minds in Small Business,” and the San Jose Business Journal named her a “Woman of Distinction.” She has often been cited as a leading influencer by Marketing Computers magazine. She has covered personal technology since 1984 and has worked as a writer and editor for a variety of technology and consumer media.
Shipley holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Literature and Communication Arts from Allegheny College, and pursues knowledge and understanding relentlessly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070703154421/http://www.svpma.org/meetings.html
Related Blog Posts
- A Holistic Approach to Launching a Bootstrapped Startup
- “Now What? Your Post Launch Growth Plan” Podcast and Transcript
- Hard Drive: Seven Practices I Used to Launch a Successful Startup
- Q: Can We Launch First and Ask Customer Discovery Questions Later?
- George Gilder: Entrepreneurship is the Launching of Surprises