Pragmatic Marketing Rule #16

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #16: Positioning should be complete before you start developing.

Anyone who’s spent more than a few days in product management, product marketing, or development in a technology company is familiar with that scary creature: The Continuously Morphing Set of Requirements.

Everyone can be guilty of feeding this particular beast by coming up with a last minute feature request, and there’s nothing that’s a bigger guarantee of slipping your launch date than pressuring the techies to get those features in. And sometimes, those seemingly itty-bitty, no harm-no foul featurettes are a lot bigger than you think they are.

Even if you have stellar positioning, you still might have light bulbs go off in your head after the date for changes has closed, but if you have solid positioning completed before the developers take hammer and chisel and start churning out the product, there should be no major surprises, because you will already have thought through:

• Who exactly will be using this product?
• How many different constituencies (worker-bees, managers, partners, customers of your customer….) will be using the product?
• What precisely will each of these groups be using it for?
• What do each of these groups need in order to truly adopt the product?
• What do each of these groups need in order to derive maximum benefit from the product?
• How will the product be deployed?
• How will the product be sold?
• What does each of the channels selling the product need to sell effectively ?
• Who will be implementing this product?
• What do they need to easily deploy it?
• Who will be supporting this product?
• What do they need to effectively support the product?
• Where will this product be available?
• Are there any regional/country differences we need to worry about?
• Etc.

This all might seem Duh-simple, but you’d be surprised at enormous changes at the last minute that can become crucial if you haven’t gotten your positioning act together.

For example, if you haven’t thought about your sales guys, you may forget to mention to the developers that you need a demo version that’s web accessible and that sets back to its original state after each demo.

Tour decision to market the product in Honduras may have some implications. What if your software application gets implemented as Software as a Service, when no one in Honduras has enough bandwidth to access it - they need a licensed version of their own. (I have no idea what the bandwidth situation is in Honduras, by the way, but I do have a client with a SaaS product that did experience access problems from some countries.)

You could neglect to realize that management may not want to use the product day to day, but may want to see high level information on a dashboard.

The more precisely you’ve defined your positioning, the less likely you are to have any last minute surprises - or post last minute surprises, when you’ve already launched the product, only to find it comes up short for any number of reasons. Reasons that could easily have been avoided if you’d thought things through!

When you get your positioning straight, you not only save yourselves a lot of headaches - you also raise the probability that those who have to develop the product for you will actually thank you! (No guarantees here, just a possibility….)

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