Alan Armstrong, Director, Wily Technology - New product releases often miss the mark. Product and Marketing Managers try to "spin" engineering- or field-driven features, but poor product design is obvious to everyone. To make matters worse, each department - or each rep - develops their own idea of what the product is and how to explain it while marketing and product management scramble to prepare demos, analyst presentations, whitepapers, and other materials. How could you expect a successful launch with this approach?

Market Maps can turn this problem around by giving designers, developers, testers, marketers, SEs, sales people, and senior managers a clear picture of the target users and buyers. With this picture in hand, downstream activity becomes simpler and more effective.

In this session, Alan will describe Market Maps and provide the steps for developing them using real-life examples to illustrate. He will talk about the difficulties that can arise and suggest ways of overcoming them, with a particular emphasis on the personal/political challenges.

Thanks folks, for joining us today. This is an abbreviated presentation of the one that I gave at the first Software Marketing Perspectives meeting. Today I am talking about market maps. These are a way of discovering and encoding the kind of information that software companies need. And I'm particularly focused on software and high-tech firms, generally. I'm looking at the kinds of information that we need in order to build, bring to market, actually market, and sell and support products. I believe very firmly that there is a core set of information that, if we develop it very well, can help us to become much, much more efficient at both product development and the outbound activities involved in selling the product.
Slide - Your life?:

I'm sure that most of you on the line today, who take time out to listen to the presentation, will say that this is what your life probably looks like, right? The executives are all very happy with the results of the product. The marketing VP is smiling, talking to you on the phone, saying how great the positioning is. And the salespeople just can't believe how well the product is selling. And the developers are saying how "cool" the stuff is that they are working on, because it's so market-driven.
Slide - Or?:

In fact, if your life is anything like what my life has been over the past ten years of product management, the reality is lot different. And we get a lot of comments from the CEO always demanding more growth. Marketing is wanting us to "jazz up" the presentations. My favorite question is, "Can you jazz that up a little?" And as for the developers - I think the path to bad products is paved with the phrase, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could ... ?"
Slide - Alan Armstrong:

I'll tell you just a quick bit about myself. My name is Alan Armstrong. I am currently a Director of Solution Management at Wiley Technology in Silicon Valley. It's actually closer to San Francisco. My contact information shows there. And you can find a copy of this PowerPoint at the URL located on this slide. If you wish to re-use some of this content, just contact me and talk to me about how you would like to use it. I'm not terribly protective of it, but I would like to see how it is being used.
Slide - Organizing Principles:

I am going to run through five or so of what I call "organizing principles." These are principles that underlie the whole approach to developing market maps for use in product development, marketing, and sales. I'm going to use a series of examples from the consumer industry to try to illustrate the points here.
Slide - 1, Market Maps are embedded, Electronic Binocular:

When you first saw the image on the screen, I wonder what you thought this product was targeted at? My wife gave me permission to tell this story. I showed this image to her a few months back. She pretty much right away guessed what this was for. I wonder if you thought it was designed to watch and listen to sporting events, concerts, and to find out what your kids and grandkids are up to? In fact, you can record things with this such as birds chirping and waterfalls flowing. I don't know. That was not the image that came to mind here. I thought that was quite interesting. I think the intended use is actually to "Tap into nature's secrets like never before."

In any case, the point that I'm trying to make with this image is that the intended use of a product is embedded. It is something that is deep within the way that we portray a product, the way that we develop a product, and the way that we talk about a product. It's part of the language and grammar that we use. The trouble is that we so often are using the language that we don't talk much about the language itself. We don't talk much about the underlying, embedded understanding of the world and the product that we are building.
Slide - 1, Market Maps are embedded, Perfect Golf Club:

Likewise, here is another example. I wonder if you looked at that and thought, "That's probably tomato juice." Personally, I looked at it and thought, "If you need to drink, you will always find a way to do so, including on the golf course." Again, this is another example showing that they know pretty well who their target audience is, even if they don't advertise it exactly as such.
Slide - 2, ladder of inference:

The principle that I have been describing here has actually been developed by someone named Chris Argyris and it is called "the ladder of inference." What "the ladder of inference" talks about is that there is a pool of available data inside the world. Our minds, as we are observing this data, organize the data, based on our mental model and probably something from our childhood psychology, into a view of the world. Then we take actions in the world.

This principle of "the ladder of inference" is used broadly in the field of psychology. I have seen it used in things like collaboration training and conflict resolution. But I think it is particularly important to the area of product development, product management, product marketing and sales. Why? Because we, who sit in the building and develop all of the products and marketing materials, are operating on our mental models of the world, not necessarily on the world itself. So the job of product management, in particular, is to go out into the world and understand and to gather primary data and then to create the mental model, bring it back into the building and evangelize it.

I am incredibly convinced - and I have seen in my own practice - that, if we can do a good job of this modeling, if we can do a good job of distilling it and helping people to understand it, and particularly if we can help to influence the mental models of the people who are developing and marketing and selling the product, then we can have much more lucrative products. We can have much more effective products, products that satisfy our users and our buyers.
Slide - 3, problems vs solutions, Magnetic Wristband:

So the challenge for product managers becomes to identify and notice (and I emphasize the word "notice") problems that other people have not noticed. I don't know about you, but I do a little bit of handyman work around the house. I have built decks and done various home improvement projects. As much as I have done this stuff, I still stand up on top of a ladder and drop screws on the ground. As much as I try to pay attention to the problems around me, in thinking about products, which is something that sort of runs as a "background thread" in my brain, I have never realized that in fact there might be a solution to the problem of dropping screws from the top of the ladder, then getting down off the ladder and getting back up.

Yet here are some people who I think have come up with a very innovative solution to that problem. It's interesting that, even though I have taken the time to scan this and present it to you, I still don't own one of these things. So there might be something about their marketing and selling technique. But, nonetheless, I think that if I saw this at the hardware store in the impulse aisle, I would definitely buy one.

The point I'm making here is that it's very important to be out in the world, outside the walls of the building and, particularly, not asking people what their problems are. If you were asking me at the top of the ladder what my problems were, I would say something about the fence that I was trying to build or the deck that I was building. But, in fact, a problem that I wasn't even aware of as a user was the dropping of the screws. You would have had to be there and listen to the words I was saying about those screws as I dropped them.
Slide - 3, problems vs solutions, Watering Can:

Here's another one. How many people out there (just silently "raise your hand") have a pot for watering watering flowers? Yet, I have honestly never seen something like this in use. If you have ever tried to fill a flower watering can, you know that this is actually a challenge. Most sinks and faucets don't accommodate that. Yet here are some people who realized that there is a "larger use" case involved. Again, it's a part of noticing the problem that your users are facing.
Slide - 4, You have time for this:

And then, here is Grand Principle Number Four: You have time for this stuff. I personally got into product management because I was tired of working as a software developer on products that literally sat on the shelf and did not sell. I spent some time with users and realized that we weren't building things that they actually needed. So, as a product manager, I suppose it's just an aphorism to say, "You need to get out there and do this stuff. You need to get very, very good at not asking people what they want, but noticing the problems that they have and looking for the unnoticed problems, the ones they can't even articulate to you.
Slide - 5, Make it visual or meme-able, the pyramids:

And then, once you have done the data collection in the world, you need to synthesize that data into something that is what I call "meme-able". You can create a "meme" about it (I'll explain that in a minute). Preferably you will also make it visual. I have a couple of examples of this and then I'll describe what a "meme" is.

The first example is something that I think can be applied to a lot of software products. That is that our customers spend a lot of their time installing and doing basic setup and configuration of our product and very little time really sort of benefiting from the automation that we have provided. The example in the market close to the one that I'm working on right now is leveraging intelligence of data that gets collected. So, they spend a lot of their time setting up the software and not much of their time being able to really get the benefit of the intelligence that we can build into the software.

In fact, what they would value is the exact opposite, the inverse of this. So, I used this particular visual device to help the product development team and even the executive team to understand the kind of shift that we needed to make, and frankly, what I think that a lot of software companies need make, in our investments. We call it "putting the genius in the box." The idea is that we want to absolutely minimize the time that users need to spend on the overhead of using our software and to absolutely maximize the benefit that they can get out of "the genius in the box" that we can build in.

The point here is that it took a lot of observation in order to recognize this to be true. Then it took a lot of work on whiteboards and discussing things with people to come up with a model that is easy to crystallize and visualize. And I think that is a very important thing.
Slide - 5, Make it visual or meme-able - 3:2:50:

That gets to the concept of a "meme." Here is another "meme" that we use internally. This is modified from one that we use. But it is the simple ratio (I'm not sure if it's technically correct to call this a "ratio," since there are three parts to it). This came from the work of some people internally, at my company. I didn't personally come up with this one. It became incredibly effective internally.

These three numbers represent something like the time that it takes to set up a product, the number of people who are required to set the product, and the number of applications that it can support. We were going from a ratio of something like 15:5:3 and we wanted to move to a ratio of 3:2:50. The idea is that, when you can boil it down to something so simple, your developers, your marketers, your salespeople can all internalize it and express it a lot more effectively.
Slide - Introducing Market Maps:

Those are the principles that underlie what I call "the market map." If you apply those principles and then get into developing the specific distillations of the information that you find out in the market, I found this to radically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the work.

If you think of this picture as kind of a "view of the world," everyone outside of your company, your customers, your buyers, your users and so on, then touching the market in the outbound activity are the marketing people, the executives, the sales, the consultants, and development. Each of those people has, as we mentioned before, a working understanding of the people that they are selling or marketing to or building for. Yet, each of those concepts might be different. So it is our job in product management (and if you call it "product marketing," that's fine as well) to distill, express, and evangelize the stuff in the middle: who are our buyers, what problems do they have, which ones do they not know about that we have discovered, and so on.
Slide - Market Map, exploded:

So I'm going to explode this circle in the middle and talk about the various information pieces that form a market map that you can use to express the "world outside" and then evangelize internally to get everybody singing from the same songbook. Let's walk through these one by one.
Slide - The pyramids:

The first thing that I think is very important is the visual corporate strategy. I went through this in more detail earlier. Our strategy was to invest so as to invert this triangle for our customers. Once you have explained that to people, they can look at the triangles and say, "Oh, I have to basically orient all of my decisions around that." It takes a sales job and a lot influence to be able to do that. But the critical piece here is to have something that is simple and easy to express.
Slide - Circles with the pyramids:

You'll notice that at the green rim (I hope it's green on your screen), the one outside of "trends, buyers, and users," that I have drawn those pyramids, as a way to say, "In any place where you need to insert the corporate strategy, you can put something like that in there." Literally, in our discussions, we would hold up this inverted triangle pyramid and use it as a check for our decisions. That's the power of making it visual.
Slide - Company Strategy example:

Second, it's important to have a company strategy. I hope that you have one. And I hope that, if you don't know what it is, you can find out what it is. But I think it is very important to be able to distill it into something very simple. The way that I like to express it, as part of a market map, is "directional" in nature. For example, Apple was moving "from publishing to being a media center." Their target market was moving from "artist to music listeners." If you can express it in this simple way, you can help people to understand it. Again, it's about distilling.
Slide - Product Strategy example:

This is an example that is genericized from my own company strategy internally. But it gives you an idea. This was similar in shape and form to the kind of strategy that has been driving Wiley for the past few years. Just parenthetically I'll note, if you want to check out Wiley's website at WileyTech.com, we were just acquired for a very nice revenue multiple, 7.2 times our trailing twelve months. I can't claim that it was entirely due to a well-articulated strategy, but I do believe that this played a significant role in making us much more effective at this activity.
Slide - Value Proposition: the Roller Coaster:

The next part of the market map is something that I call the Value Proposition. This is something that helps you to encapsulate what capabilities and what value you are providing to users and to buyers. This is a format that I have found to be very effective. It walks through what we call "the Roller Coaster." We write it as a letter to our user or to our buyer. We need to create one of these for each of our different users and each of our different buyers. The "Roller Coaster" goes something like this. The letter to the customer is, "Dear Miss Customer, Your life is hard. Here is why your life is hard." It's amazing how, when you start a presentation that way or start a conversation that way, you engage people in something that is very visceral and guttural for them. You get their attention early, rather than PowerPoint presentations that start out with "Who we are as a company."

The next step is, "Wouldn't it be nice?" This is where we present the ideal solution. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could X?" I'm not talking about features here. I'm simply talking about capabilities. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could stand on top of the ladder while you're building a fence and not drop all of the screws all over the floor and spend the next hour cleaning them up, or for that matter, losing a screw that you can never replace." Maybe that's getting a little too personal, but I lost a screw that I could never replace and then I couldn't hang the picture that I wanted to hang, or whatever.

Then the next part of this is, "The trouble is ... ." We talk about the challenges of using alternatives. Here we have to talk about alternatives that range from, potentially, competitors of ours to alternatives like doing nothing, things that come outside of our particular market.

The last stage is, "Aren't you lucky that ... " Maybe it's "Aren't you lucky that you're talking to me today, because it just so happens that I have the thing that fits your needs, solves your problems, and makes your life easier.

When you look at it this way, it seems almost formulaic. It is formulaic. It seems almost simplistic. But I can guarantee you with this method that, if you can spend some time distilling your value proposition into this format, and not get drawn into features, you will absolutely knock them dead. This value proposition is the central piece that we use internally to develop every single of marketing and sales collateral. Rather than having product managers spend all of their time developing collateral, we simply hand over the value proposition and then we critique the work or work with the people developing the content. But this encapsulates what we're talking about. So, again, it's about centralizing and distilling the information so that marketers, if you will, can just "add water" and flesh out the ideas.
Slide - Conversations:

The next part of what I would like to talk to you about is what we call "conversations." Now, if you are in the world of enterprise software, in particular, though I guess this would be true outside of enterprise software (my experience is mostly in that market), it seems that we are never selling to an individual. Even if our customer is a system administrator, if our product is worth more than fifteen thousand dollars, we have to talk to at least two people in the company. But if your market is anything like mine and that of other companies I have worked with, there is, in fact, a community of people who need to help our user to succeed, whom we have to influence in order to make the sale, or even beyond that, whom we have to influence in order to make the product effective inside the customer's shop.

We have distilled this "community of users and buyers" into something that we call "conversations." What we do is that we look at each of our target roles. We express in a very brief way what they need to accomplish and whom they depend on to accomplish those goals. This turns out to be a highly distilled format. You need a lot more detailed expression of these conversations in order to develop products. But it serves as a checkpoint to go back to. It's something that is very simple and distilled. And, though it can look simple on paper, it can take a long time to develop and it can provide a lot of productivity in an ongoing way. These are called "conversations."
Slide - Personae, Garden Hose:

Next is "Personae." I don't have a lot to add to the body of work that has been done about personae. So I'll just run over that in a thumbnail here. But I find it to be a very effective way to model the market that we are going after. Now, why did I use this picture? If you look at that hose, that looks like a very "enlightened" person, there are lots of windows. She is just watering some plants. But, when I looked at that picture, the "persona" that came to mind was my own wife. I pictured myself where the plant is, actually, getting sprayed there! So, that's just an example of getting to know your market.
Slide - Personae, Yong Chow:

But it's important with "personae" that we are able to distill and express a number of things about the people that we're trying to sell to. These include a physical instantiation with a picture and some information about their background and their experience so that we can talk about them. When we are looking at a particular marketing piece or marketing venue or a particular product feature, we can say, "That's not a venue that Yong Chow (in this case, our "persona") is going to. I have spoken to a dozen of these guys and, in fact, they don't attend those conferences. They read these magazines." Or, "They buy this magazine and they leave it sitting on their desk. There we need the back cover." Personas give us a way to talk about our users in a sort of "shorthand" way.
Slide - Goals and Situations:

The next piece that we'll talk about (and we're just about done here) is goals and situations. Once we have developed the personae, the conversations, which are in highly distilled format, we have found it very effective to develop Goals and Situations. Here we are talking nothing about features of our product and we are talking everything about what our users are trying to accomplish. For each persona we go through and enumerate the goals that they have. "I need to accomplish X." (I see there is a spelling mistake on the slide here. I apologize for that.) Then we talk about the situation where that goal arises.

The example that I use here is, and I wish I had a photo of this for you, those things that they have in Radio Shack where you can plug all of your devices in using a single road charger. Isn't that cool? What is the goal there? The goal is, "I want to go on the road and I want to be able to charge all of my devices. I don't want to carry a lot of things with me. The situation is that I'm on the road. I find myself running between meetings and not having the particular charger that I need. I need to be able to access it quickly and charge my device."

So, we have developed these for our own products, and I have helped some others outside of our company to do this as well. We developed a very detailed description of the goals and situations that our users find themselves in. Then it is the job of engineering and product design, particularly interaction design, to develop a product that we can check against these goals.

The nice thing about these goals is that they are usable not only by product development. They are usable in marketing. We can just walk through our goals and situations and write white paper after white paper, because we can say, "Here is goal number one. Here is the situation you find yourself in. Now let me explain how you would do that with the product. Let me explain to you the challenges that are here and how to overcome them." So, this is a format that is well-distilled and can be leveraged in a number of different areas.
Slide - Goals and Situations, examples:

My experience is that when I explain this to people it helps a lot to give much more concrete and detailed examples. And if you would like to discuss this approach or, frankly, any of the parts of this approach, I encourage you to give me a call. My information is posted at the end of the presentation and will be available online, as well.
Slide - Glossary and Encyclopedia:

Lastly, we talk about having a glossary and an encyclopedia. This has got to be the most boring part of the whole thing, and the most difficult part of the whole thing to produce. But I must say that this is probably one of the things that you can leverage most highly. If your company is anything like the ones that I've worked in, we frequently have multiple words to express the same concept. We also frequently use the same word to express multiple concepts. And different people use the same word at different times to mean different things. So it's a "many-to-many" problem, and the problem worse than this is that we are not even aware that we are doing these things until we waste a lot of time discovering that we have made mistakes or have had misunderstandings.

So, our solution to that approach is to develop a glossary and an encyclopedia. The notion is that you write down the words that you use or where you find collisions in the definitions. Then you just write down the definitions of these. It takes dedication and it takes effort. But, if you can get everyone using the same words to mean the same things, your productivity will really just skyrocket.
Slide - Non-functional requirements:

And finally, there is something that we call "non-functional requirements." Everything that we have talked about until now has been mostly in the domain of problem specification and user specification. Now we are talking about actual solution-side specification, where we have to say, "And by the way, the product cannot do this. It cannot take up more than ten gigabytes of memory on my user's computer."

When you look at this picture (I don't know about you, but for me), you say, "I think this is creating more problems than it solves." In fact, I'm not sure whether the picture on the right or the left is the solution to the problem! Also, parenthetically, I have a power bar at home that has rotated the outlets, which I find to be a much more effective solution to this. But I can just imagine trying to rotate the outlets and trying to use this arrangement. It's not quite exactly "the" approach.
Slide - Non-functional requirements, sample list:

I have given a couple of dozen examples of non-functional requirements. These are pretty boring to create. It can "draw your blood," pretty slowly. But it's worth doing this. It is necessary to write these requirements simple because, if you don't do so, you are not going to have a successful product.

One comment that I'll make about this is that it's important to try to simplify each of these. We're not out to write "tomes" about non-functional requirements. What we have found over years of trying to do this is that we need to create a "headline." For example, in the area of localization and localized ability, I make a statement like, "It needs to be localizable, but not localized." That is, I want to be able to commission a project six months from now in which we localize to the Japanese market, but I'm not asking you to localize to the Japanese right now. So, our developers create string tables instead of hard coding the strings into the UI, for example.

So you create a headline here and then more detail is necessary. But you want people to be able to snap these things off.
Slide - Opportunity Grid:

Then we have something we call the "opportunity grid." I'm not going to go into this in much detail, because we are running out of time. But the idea here is that you need to divide your thinking up into the market that you are targeting, the user you are targeting, the user goal you are targeting, and the technology that you are targeting. Then you mark it up according to whether each of these things represents a new major or minor change. When you are developing a new product, or a revision to an existing product, if you use this grid and figure out where you sit in each of these rows, you'll find that you can update only selective parts of your market map and save a lot of time.

We have found a particularly poignant example on our last time through this. With the project that we were working on, it turns out that the engineering team decided after they were a year or so into development that they were not actually going to be able to deliver it. So, the company cancelled the project. And it was the right decision, given where they were. But it turns out that all of the users and user goals that we had created carried over to the next time through the project, where they were using a more agile approach. That's one benefit of doing this, that you can reuse the stuff.
Slide - The punchline:

And that's the punch line: this approach has, over and over again, delivered results. And more than anything, it has eliminated a lot of wasted time. I think that's about it.
Slide - Marketing:
I will say, though, that this distillation of the information can be used by all the different parts of the company. So, in the case of marketing, we are going to be using those value propositions over and over again.
Slide - Demos:
In the case of demos, we are going to be using the conversations. With something that is highly distilled in this way, I can go to my demo person and say, "I need a demo that allows (in this case) Role Number 3 to figure out X, Y, and Z there, and to get the information that they need from the people around them." The demo scenario can walk through this conversation.
Slide - QA: Use cases:

QA can use the "use cases," the goals and situations that we have provided, to test the product. And we want to make sure that we use QA in a different way here, not just to identify defects, but also to help us to ensure that the product satisfies the goals and situations that it was intended for.
Slide - Sales:

Likewise, sales can use the market map. They need to know whom they are going after. That is where our personas come in. They need to know what problems those people have. They need to be able to be articulate about the goals and the drawbacks of the alternative solutions and about how our product solves those problems. So, again, you are reusing all of this material, now in the case of sales.
Slide - Services:
This also applies to services. This is a place where I have more faith than I have actual "witnessed outcomes." I think that most software companies are not very good at "productizing" their services. But I think this is going to be a growing edge for us as an industry. If we can correctly articulate these goals and situations, we can build services that help fill in the "human gap" that no software in the world can do. I think that "productizing" services in this way is going to be a growing edge for us as a software industry.
Slide - None of this works - on its own:
I've talked about the grand principles, the parts of the market map itself, a little bit about how to develop them and a little bit about how to leverage them in different areas of the company. But I want to say, as the slide says here, "None of this works on its own." This takes a lot of dedication, focus, by you as a product manager. It takes a lot of support if you are a VP of product management or a CEO. You need to be supporting the people who are doing this. Otherwise we are going to spend all of our time "fighting fires." But, if you can spend your time developing, articulating, distilling, and evangelizing this kind of information, life is going to get a lot easier. But it does take an investment up front. And it does not work on its own. It needs you.
Slide - Contact information:
We're going to wrap up here and, as promised, here is my contact information.