I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes products successful (or not), and was following a discussion on an email list that I participate in (The Inbox Insiders, a collective of email marketing experts from vendors, agencies, and brand marketers) that prompted me to write here about some of the parallels.
The original discussion started off as a bit of a complaint amongst email marketing practitioners about how email marketing only seems to get the attention of the C-suite when something goes wrong. The fact that it is a marketing (and revenue-generating) workhorse goes largely unnoticed and unrewarded. This complaint is not new and stems from the wide perception that efficient and effective email marketing deployment is easy, so why should it be applauded?
The reality is that email marketing is not easy. Content matters. Cadence matters. Creative matters. Targeting and segmentation matter. List growth matters. Coordination with other marketing channels matters. There are a multitude of little things that factor into the success of an email marketing program and they all have to line up every time a campaign goes out the door.
The disconnect is that most folks outside of email marketing have the impression that sending an email campaign works the same way as sending a personal email. It doesn’t. You could just as easily equate what goes into building a car out of Lego bricks as you could about building a Toyota Prius. Huge orders of magnitude different.
What does all of this talk about email marketing have to do with Product Management? Nothing. And everything.
Like email marketers, Product Managers are constantly negotiating to sell their ideas on product strategy and execution to the C-suite and others throughout the company. Like email marketers, addressing the pain points and near-term targets is always easier than making a decision to focus (and invest) in the long-term. And frequently, we are directed to fix things instead of making the leap to avoid the problem in the first place. You’ve probably heard this before:
“You’ve got to get this issue fixed NOW or our biggest customer is going to leave!”
In our fast-moving technology world, we get used to accepting “good enough,” which is equivalent to “it doesn’t cause more pain than something else.” That changes when something goes wrong and the pain meter shoots up. Then we rush around trying to resolve the pain until we can return to the status quo. In some sense, it’s a race to stay where we are. Not an ideal environment for innovation or moving your product from good to great.
I don’t want to keep racing to keep the status quo. I want my products to solve problems, not just fix them.
