"Engineer vs. Customer" seminar overview and presentations
Jukka Kotovirta, Partner at Gearshift Group, summarized the essence of the day, "the zen of product management":
(1) Segment the market - Know who your customers are
(2) Aim for leadership in key segments - Know what matters to your customers
(3) Balance simplicity & richness - Know how to make the most with the minimum effort
You can find Jukka's presentation here.
Pirkka Palomäki, Senior VP of R&D, presented F-Secure's "scrum of scrums" product development and launch process, which utilizies agile methods in all project phases. By fixing resources and delivery time(!), F-Secure is able to leave room for changes in the end-user and customer requirements. This approach enables F-Secure both react fast to last-minute partner and market requirements while still maintaining the big picture with the overall product roadmap. They also have increased productivity and quality, although exact financial data is very hard to measure.
You can find Pirkka's presentation here.
Gabriel Steinhardt, managing director of Blackblot Inc, a recognized product management expert and a business partner of Gearshift Group, shared his view on the integrated product management process and presented a ready-to-use methodology, which is used by many leading companies round the world. Gabriel pointed out that product management is a mixed discipline of product planning and product marketing. Product manager has many roles (4 to be precise), which should be taken into account when developing product management expertise. Every role has its own view on product management. All views are equally important when aiming for and maintaining success.
Gabriel used Motorola Iridium and and CueCat Barcode Readers as examples of failures in product management. 75% of new product development programs fail commercially. In some countries the rate is even higher. Interestingly, Pirkka showed statistics that 25 % of the total features developed were actually true requirements of customers. Coincidence? Common to all failures was that they focused too much on technology, thus missing the entire analysis or making an inadequate analysis of the true market requirements. "If you CAN build a product, it doesn't necessarily mean, that you SHOULD".
You can find Gabriel's presentation here.
Jan-Erik Nyrövaara, CEO of Idean, talked about "the next big thing" - how users and communities are shaping up new kinds of service concepts and products, especially in the mobile and Internet domains. True winners focus on identifying and refining weak signals. Users cannot identify the exact nature of weak signals; users can only give hints, which need to be processed and carefully crafted into market requirements.
To really have a hand on the pulse on user's future needs, you have to become a global player. Using partner networks and well commercialized professional services you can deliver world-class professional services from Finland.
You can find Jan-Erik's presentation here.
Many thanks to our speakers and all of you who attended the seminar. Product management
is not rocket science, it's all about discipline, a well-defined process and good
tools to support it - doing the right things and doing them right.