John Stamos: Kevan. Welcome back.
Kevan Savage: Thanks, John. Always good to be back. Talking more about all things go to market with you.
John Stamos: Absolutely. So just via introduction, John Stamos co-lead our industrials practice. Kevan leads our marketing practice. Last time we talked about the changes that we’re seeing in the marketing organization, given all of the changes that we’re seeing in the industrials sector and what organizations are doing to be successful. For this discussion, let’s tackle product management, product marketing. So I’ll just leave it wide open. Kevan, we talked about the four key themes. One of them is product management evolution. We didn’t get into that topic, but let’s talk about it now.
Kevan Savage: Absolutely. Oh, this is going to be a long discussion, I’m kidding John. But this is a near and dear topic for both of us as we’re, you know, working with clients, um, quite frequently in terms of product management, evolution and what that evolution looks like for many organizations is around the pivot from engineering-led to market-driven. And what I mean by that is, it’s not to say that engineering-led background is not important. It’s to really advance that into more of a market, commercially driven mindset. And so what do we see all the time? We see in product management teams, lack of customer centricity. We see undefined business cases. We see lack of process. An example of that is at least once a week we hear from an industrial manufacturer, we really struggle with launching new products, or we launched a product and we’re not getting good vitality around it. And so what that means is you have to shift towards different commercialization strategies. And so a couple of things to think about. You need to have a formalized product lifecycle product process. Right. And everybody says they have a new product introduction process. But we mean cradle to grave. How do you actually assess a market? How do you concept a product? How do you actually early beta launch a product? How do you actually launch the product? How do you substitute the product? How do you retire the product? We hear a lot about launches, but not about management. And so what does that also mean? That means that your product teams may be too focused on launching new products and not focused enough on what the sustaining strategy is for the broader portfolio.
Kevan Savage: So you need to think through that process. To do that, though, you also need to build what we call cross-functional councils, right? We see instances all the time where we’ll ask a leader, a general manager or a president, even the head of product like, hey, talk to us about competitive analysis, talk to us about voice of customer. And in many instances we’ll get the feedback, which is like, well, we’re just not good at that. But we’ll talk to other parts of the team, right. Maybe part of the marketing organization. And they’re actually very competent at, you know, running voice of customers. So you need these councils to actually lift the competency of your organization if maybe you can’t get that from your product marketing teams themselves and you have to upskill them. The important point there is we know that between 25 and 30% of a headcount budget in an industrial manufacturing environment is in the product management team. So if you can’t upskill them with business case development or pricing strategy, competitive analysis, you won’t evolve the function, right? And so you’ll get stuck between how you are setting up an engineering-led motion to a market-driven motion. So a lot in there, John. I know we have some passion and based on our own professional backgrounds in this space. Anything else you’d add there?
John Stamos: I think you summed it up well, where I think there’s the engineering capabilities that are important, but they’re a table stake. And as individuals are growing in their career, becoming the leaders in managing the products, managing the line, you’ve got to have all of the other elements that come with the marketing aspects that, you know, oftentimes don’t translate. You’re a product manager, you’re a product marketer, but you’re still focused on the speeds and feeds and the technical details of the product. Again, not discounting the importance of that, but you need to have the strategic and element and understand the commercialization, the key value drivers to inform investments and think about the lifecycle of the product. Question as we round it out, what connectivity do they need to have to marketing and sales to be successful in that? You talked about the council. I’m just curious how it weaves internally within the organization.
Kevan Savage: Yeah, maybe a two-part response. So the council is a cross-functional council, right? If you’re going to evolve kind of product commercialization, the portfolio of products and services and the product management function, you need to do that together. You’ll find that there’s an aspiration to do that in most of your companies. But product management teams can’t do that alone. They have to do it in conjunction with the marketing teams and sales teams. In some instances, we see those councils led by executive leadership where they say, look, we need to advance competitive analysis. We know we’re very weak there. So marketing teams, product teams, sales teams, engineering teams, go figure it out. Right? Sometimes we see marketing lead those councils. But those councils are really kind of the operating model and the mechanism that we see work in some organizations. So that’s point number one. Number two is you need to manage accountability for how you evolve product management competency, even if it’s not within your reporting structure. What do we know? We know that when you ask a marketing leader how they feel about their responsibility layer for product management they’ll say about half the time, yes, we’re responsible for that or we’re not. If you ask product how they feel responsible about marketing, it’s about half the time, right. And so the point there, if I could leave the audience with an analogy is, if you have a business development team in your organization, SDRs, BDRs, and a marketing team, that marketing team needs to manage the SDRs and BDRs to accountability and results the same way that product teams need to manage marketing and marketing teams need to manage product teams even if they don’t report into the same leader, right? And so that lack of accountability we see very, very often. That’s where we see that council help shape the accountability layer and bring those teams together, so they’re optimizing the broader organization even if it’s product-focused to start with.
John Stamos: You summed it up well. A lot of these organizations to be successful need to think about the competencies, the skill sets, the roles themselves, where they focus the operating model, and the conduit across the organization. Kevan. Thank you.
Kevan Savage: Thank you. John.
