Product Management Blog

Dear Marketers: This is One of the Hidden Costs of Groupon

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Mindy L.:  Hello Tom! Welcome to the Great Wolf Lodge! How may I help you today?

Mindy L.:  Good afternoon!

Tom Leung:  Hi there Mindy

Mindy L.:  Hello!

Tom Leung:  I'm hoping you can help me, I'm kind of miffed at the moment.

Mindy L.:  Sure, what can I help you with?

Tom Leung:  I have reservations at your Grand Mound location for today.

Mindy L.:  Great!

Tom Leung:  And my colleague at work is going today as well but apparently he paid 1/2 what I paid. I'm not asking for a refund but would like request a complimentary room upgrade.

Tom Leung:  :-(

Mindy L.:  At this time we only have our standard suites available for today, so we would not be able to offer a free upgrade.

Tom Leung:  Can u put us in a Grizzly

Mindy L.:  They are sold out for today.

Tom Leung:  oh man. that's a bummer. I hate groupon.

Mindy L.:  Is there anything else I may assist you with, Tom?

Tom Leung:  yes, i'd like to request a coupon for an upgrade next time i visit

Mindy L.:  You would have to request that at guest services when checking in.

Tom Leung:  i feel like i'm paying $400 and my friend is paying $200

Tom Leung:  that's just wrong.

Mindy L.:  Our rates change very quickly this time of year based on room availability. As you can see we are almost sold out for today, so that makes the rates much higher.

Tom Leung:  so what can you do for me next time we visit?

Tom Leung:  and you're partly sold out because you gave the rooms away for 1/2 price to a bunch of people and folks paying full freight like me get hosed.

Mindy L.:  Unfortunately, I am not able to honor any add on amenities or upgrades. You have to refer to guest services when you arrive at the lodge.

Tom Leung:  ok thx, please tell your supervisor i intend to blog about this and post to yelp as well. i'm not pleased.

Mindy L.:  All of our chats are monitored by supervisors at all times.

Mindy L.:  Thank you for visiting greatwolf.com Tom, have a Great Wolf day!

Thank you for visiting greatwolf.com! We hope to see you at the lodge!

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Update: An ABS reader from the ABS Facebook page rightly called out I was a bit condescending and unreasonably upset in talking to the customer service lady.  He's probably right in that this business didn't do anything wrong by charging people different prices and I could have scoured all the deals sites before booking directly from the business itself.  That said, here are some takeaways I'd suggest are worth considering:

 

1.  If you do mega-discounts on the same inventory on 3rd party sites like Groupon while charging direct customers double at the same time, just be aware that it could make the direct customers upset.  Arguably,  those direct customers (the ones who went to your website) might be the highest value ones.

 

2. While it may still make sense to do things like Groupon while charging direct customers higher prices, you may want to consider offering those direct customers something more (e.g. more flexible booking, complimentary services, etc.) which don't need to make the difference but numb the pain a bit more for missing on the great deal.

 

-Tom

Help Test a Minimally Viable Product

Hi Folks:

Practicing what I preach, we've been iterating on a new concept which allows you to one-click call any telephone number from Firefox for free.  Call any telephone number on any web page from browser, bridge to your mobile, or text the number for future reference.  It only works in Firefox now and requires latest version of Firefox.  Would love to get your feedback in the comments here or send it to me directly (tleung <AT> marchex dot com).

Check it out at www.LetsFirefly.com

Thanks,

Tom 

It's 2012, But I Still Like PRD's

I know in the age of agile, things like product requirements docs are a bit out of favor but I still like them -- at least to help solidify the PM's thinking and facillitate some tough discussions. It's often easier to flesh out non-obvious misalignment when you walk folks through a good PRD and some nice mocks than agreeing on the strategy in abstract.

So here are some things I like to see in a PRD. You don't have to write it as a long doc, heck you can even use it as a check list but if you can't answer these questions quickly, you probably haven't thought through what you're building as much as you need to.

• Who's the customer? What do they say, do, think, and feel?
• What problem are we trying to solve? Why is it a problem?
• What does success look like (this is often best written as a "press release")?
• How does it work (best written as a few paragraph user narrative like "jane decides she wants to grow her business...")
• What are the key use cases? What use cases are out of scope for now?
• What are the key capabilities and features we'd need to build to support that (stack ranked P0-P3)?
• What are the biggest open issues (and include stake in the ground for answers)?
• What does the experience look like (low-resolution sharpie sketches).
• What are the milestones? How are we gonna avoid this becoming a never ending project?
• What are the key metrics to measure and goal against? What do we think success will look like from a metrics point of view?

Happy shipping :-)

-Tom

Rebecca Henderson from HBS on Innovation

I attended a conference call this morning hosted by HBS featuring Professor Rebecca Henderson talking about her research around innovation.  Thought I'd share some takeaways.  Here's a link to some of her other publications around innovation strategy.

Why is it so hard for large companies to innovate?

1. Most new ideas have a low probability of success so it's easy to poke holes in any idea and shoot it down.  Furthermore, it takes investing in some level in 10-20 ideas to get one that really takes off.

2. Most new ideas seem most interesting to peripheral customers.  Core customers like you for what you do today.  Parodoxically, customer-centric organizations often miss the most disruptive innovations precisely because their current customer set finds the innovation to be a bit on the margins.  This is one of the core arguments to Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemna concept.

3. Most new ideas have lower margins than the core.  This is because they may meet a different need, an embryonic market that's not yet fully developed, and/or the current company's cost structure and internal infrastructure is set up for the current core business.  If you take a innovative idea and manage it to "the numbers" and then underinvest in it, it will almost certainly fail.

Lean Startup: How Intuit Innovates

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Why Leading a Product Org is Hard...

After doing in product management over the last 20,000+ office hours, I still find there are some things that are extremely difficult to do consistently well as a software product management leader.  

So this post is for all of you hot shot PM's a few years out of b-school who wonder what things might slow down your career progression once you've nailed the fundementals.  (Many of these might be applicable for leaders outside of product management as well.)  

Below are five tough challenges and some color on why I think they're hard.  In the future, I'll probably do some posts on lessons I've learned and potential approaches worth considering for each of these areas.  Feel free to share thoughts and advice in the comments.  I need all the help I can get ;-)

1. Hiring

Everyone knows the most important thing in any business is hiring great people.  Pulling that off is at least 1/2 of my job.  Here are some reasons building out a world-class team is a pain in the butt.

A lot of good people you want to hire to work for you would love to have your job (which is a good thing).  They're usually kicking butt wherever they are, have a long track record, and solid credentials -- which is why you're recruiting them in the first place.  Unfortunately, many of those same A candidates find anything less (working for you versus being you) beneath them even if their current job is less challenging than the one you're offering.  That's not a dig on them, it just makes it hard since you ideally want someone who's ambitious but also fired up to do the job for which you're hiring today.

Unless you're recruiting for the company du jour, the candidates you want may not know about your firm or at least the opportunity you're trying to fill so you may not be interviewing the right people.  Let's face it, there's only a few hot companies in tech each year.  A few years ago it might have been Myspace, Plaxo, and Yahoo.  Then it might have been Google, Facebook, and Zynga. Next year, it will be a whole new crop.  If you're like 99.9% of hiring managers, you're not from one of the two or three "it" companies of the year (of course we all believe we're the next one) so you have to hunt versus gather.

Most people are not a good fit and to make matters worse, the interviewing process is like weather prediction.  It's better than guessing but wrong enough that it can feel like that.  Case interviews, behavioral interviews, reference checks, etc. are most good at evaluating a candidates interviewing and personal marketing skills.  Trying to figure out how someone will actually grow long term in your Company versus talk about performing may be akin to picking stocks -- shades of improvement over random.  To be fair, it's a bit more achievable to pick people who can do the job you're hiring for today, it's the growth ceiling that's harder to forecast. 

Design Thinking...the video

Just stumbled across this...  Apparently Tim Brown gave this presentation at the MIT Sloan School (not sure why he didn't do this at HBS).

 

Recruiting Product People

Hiring top talent is hard.  Check out this video to see the lengths people will go to attract the interest of great product managers.

 

How to Screw Up Your Exec Product Review

Having been on both sides of dozens of exec reviews, I thought I'd share some observations on common pitfalls I've seen as well as have learned the hard way.

1. You don't answer the right question.

Many times, certain folks in your review (often your skip level) have specific bees in their bonnet about your product/project.  Don't wait till the review to find out what they are.  Just as you'd talk to customers before shipping a product (and God help you if you don't), you should find out what the key audience members are looking to accomplish well in advance of the review so you can focus on building the slides that matter versus the ones everyone ignores. 

Harvard Professor Linda Hill on "Being the Boss"

I just listened to a presentation by HBS professor Linda Hill about being an effective manager.  While I didn't hear anything earth shattering, there were a few items that were thought provoking.  Here is my summary and commentary on some of Professor Hill's assertions (she recently wrote a book entitled "Being the Boss" if you're interested).