Anchoring Your Product and Marketing Core Propositions with Mad Libs

I have found that when a new product or service is being conceived, people on the team often explore different aspects of the offering, creating variants or describing the solution and its results in ways that vary from short-term tactical to long-term market-changing sets of fundamental principles.  This behavior is natural and shows you that your team is really investing themselves in the product.  It shows they are internalizing it and they are engaged.

There is a risk of taking this too far, and you’ve probably seen it in action: The exploration can quickly turn into an echo chamber, where ideas are reflected back and forth among the team and executives until the group polarizes around a common idea using language that only makes sense to the group.  Your risk is taking the echo-chamber product / message combo outside and receiving…a TOTALLY BLANK STARE from your customers and the industry, because your team has iterated itself into a corner that nobody can understand.

The key to avoiding the blank stare is to transition the team from “talk” to “try” before you get embroiled in group-think.  Whether your team uses a Product Discovery* process to learn about your customers and the right solution (which I advocate - see note below) or develops and markets products using some other method, you need to sense when the echo chamber is starting up and stop the discussion there.

One way to crystallize things is to force the team to discuss and complete a single “Mad Libs” style Anchor Statement that clarifies what the product is solving, for whom and to what result.  People often don’t have a clear thought process on this, and may struggle to articulate it.  Here’s an example of what I’ve put on whiteboards during team discussions:

You’d be suprised how much this simple exercise can make people think, challenge each other and clarify their understanding of the core proposition they are thinking of taking to market.  From there the Product Discovery process (or whatever method you use) has enough to get started in a practical way.

If you are running a team that is struggling to get to the core of things - or worse - is spinning around trying to get to a core strategy by summarizing all the conversations to include every point of view, you should give this a try.  Constraining the story often forces clarity.

Go create!

* I’ve grown to be a real fan of a clearly delinated Product Discovery process and believe that many problems in both product development and marketing stem from a lack of clarity on what the customer actually needs and what is being offered.  Many people have written about this and Marty Cagan does a particularly good job of encapsulating the key ingredients of good product strategy, product discovery and other aspects of a product-led culture. Because this has already been written about extensively, I will not reprise it here but will refer to it in this post.

Thanks, Steve.

Yesterday Steve Jobs passed away and there have been a flurry of reactions from people all over the world.  Many of those reactions came from people who purchased the products that Steve and his team designed but have never created a product themselves. Some reactions also came from colleagues, some from real leaders who know what they’re talking about and some who are just leadership pundits not wanting to miss out on this week’s press cycle. Some of those reactions have come from people who create products - products that touch millions of people at a time.

This post is written from the standpoint someone in the latter group, and I have been a member of that group for the last twelve years.  Steve’s approach and his story has been tremendously influential to product people the world over and to me as an individual.  Through the world’s reaction to his death I was struck by how effective Steve has been at creating a daring vision and then projecting that vision in a way that people saw how to conform reality to their dreams.  This applies equally to internal employees, stockholders, the press and pundit crowd or consumers who are buying the products and integrating them into their lives.  People have gotten used to joining in with Steve’s vision, and now that Steve is gone they miss him and are wondering who will lead them next.

While showing us how to make our dreams a reality, Steve has also had a strong hand in shifting global tastes to emphasize design. Instead of going for lower cost, bigger marketing spend, fancy distribution strategies or other methods, Steve showed how loyalty and owner evangelicism can shift the framework through which we ascribe value to things at a fundamental and economically disruptive level. 

Steve has touched many of us personally and I believe that Steve’s full impact will not be known for some time. In a world where development costs and barriers to entry have lowered to the point where anyone can make and distribute a piece of crap to efficiently address a “market” - and many do - Steve taught us to care about elevating our existence in an almost Renaissance-like fashion.

Thank you Steve, for showing us that there is a way to grasp greatness and that “grokking” the consumer and the solution can change entire economic systems for the better.  But now it is our responsibility to stop waiting to be led…instead we must take the torch that you lit and carried for two decades and to learn to carry it on our own.

This Ain't Your Daddy's Window Sticker

Or, how passion and skunkworks can unlock innovation

I don’t write about work much but I felt this was worth sharing.  At Kelley Blue Book we have a great product team and big plans.  This story however is about innovation led by designers and engineers.

Like most decent-sized websites we have an ambitious roadmap and lots to do just to keep our business operating and growing each day.  The upshot is we don’t always get as much time to work on disruptive ideas as we’d like.

This year we’ve opened up the gates for Skunkworks projects, and three have already come to fruition.  I will show you one here, and talk about how we manage it.

Backstory

About 6 months ago we decided to get into the vehicle classifieds business for ourselves.  While we’ve been working on that, we’ve prioritized our focus around building a great shopping experience but we haven’t yet tackled the challenge of how to build a differentiated and incredibly useful seller’s experience.

Enter Passion

Some of our engineers and designers wanted to move more quickly, and even more interestingly, noticed that private sellers would cite what appeared to be outdated or incorrect values when they listed their vehicles for sale.  They found this not only on internet listings sites but even on vehicles parked with a “for sale” sign in the window.

So they got together and The Seller’s Toolkit was born.

What’s Seller’s Toolkit?  It is a beta service that allows you to create physical window stickers or any variety of widgets, links or images that you can post on an internet listing, your blog or even your Facebook page.  The common theme for all these is that you can verify the current Kelley Blue Book value for the vehicle as it is described by the seller.

This means that sellers who create listings with our toolkit can always present a current value and a shopper has a way to confirm the current value of the vehicle as described by the seller. 

Here’s what a window sticker would look like:

Image of Window Sticker

That image above is a static capture of the printable window sticker.  Try the QR code, the SMS code or the IVR number to the right.  An example of the dynamic image that you could post into a classifieds site would look like this:

Actual Dynamic Image

Depending on when you read this you’ll note that the vehicle value may be different between the static window sticker I’ve posted and the dynamic image, and that’s precisely our point.  Our values change over time - we update them weekly in many cases - and we wanted to find a way to help people have the most current value when they sell their cars.

Try Seller’s Tookit out for yourself, and we’re interested in your feedback.  Check it out at http://www.kbb.com/sellers-toolkit

Skunkworks - The Process

We manage this kind of innovation through a Skunkworks program here at Kelley Blue Book.  Like many scrum based product organizations, we plan both near-term and medium-term, and we maintain some degree of flexibility in our plans.  The challenge is how to manage new ideas coming in so that you don’t lose focus on your priorities. 

We’ve created a product council that meets twice a month and although these meetings have a very business focus to them, at any time engineers can present a working prototype that they’d like to add to our site and our business.  We then decide whether to productize it.  If we choose to move forward, we build it out and release based on an approach we set in that meeting.

That’s it - pretty simple really.  It is engineer and designer-led, meaning that an executive can’t go ask a few engineers to hack something up for a pet project.  I can’t ask for “some new and interesting stuff in the next quarter.”  In my role I am not even told what the ideas are until they are presented to me, and I am discouraged from asking about them in any detail should I hear about them before they are formally shared.  The team determines when they are ready to surface their idea.

Skunkworks - The Results

A common question might be whether the stuff that is presented in the product council is “buttoned up” enough to put on the site, and how much “massaging” has occured to make something like a Seller’s Toolkit a reality. 

The answer: Each of the three skunkworks projects we have launched (including Seller’s Toolkit) have been modified very little from their original form in terms of design/concept.

The skunkworks teams - typically consisting of only 3-4 individuals a piece - do a very good job of thinking everything through.  They then enlist the help of user testing, legal, QA and other teams right before they go live.  And by the way, the initial management presentations are not debacles with engineers drooling on their shoes.  They are compelling and succinct.  After seeing the initial presentation for Seller’s Toolkit we showed it to a strategic partner without rehearsing anything with the team and said partner was duly impressed.

My engineers won’t do that.  What do you do to create this environment?

Nothing overt.  We have a product development model which emphasizes full discovery of customer needs.  For KBB.com this translates into really understanding our end user’s needs.  We widely share information that we gather during foundational research or user testing with our engineers - the designers are often involved with the research - and we encourage all team members to personally interact with customers.

So trust your designers and your engineers, feed them data and give them a little space.  Good things will happen.



You WILL be Latino!!! You WILL!!!

My wife’s last name is Lago, and she’s of Italian descent.  This week Facebook started mysteriously displaying all non-user-generated website copy in Spanish.  She never asked for it, and has also clicked a “not interested” link they’ve displayed when prompting her if she wants to continue her FB experience in espanol.

On her computer I just typed in “Facebook.com” to check something and saw the login screen above.  FB is evidently not deterred by her user preferences.

How Not To Go Out Of Business

Today I got the strangest email from Clear / Verified Identity Pass - the company that provides a registered traveller service in some of the major U.S. airports. The email told me that they were unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations. I loved the $120-$130 a year service - you used a special identity card and sailed through security, but this all-at-once disappearing act strikes me as ill planned.

To make sure the note was real, I went to flyclear.com. I got this note:

Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.

Clear’s Privacy Policy

Clear’s Online Privacy Policy

There is no explanation as to why this happened, no indication of whether I get a refund of my annual fee (I’m not holding my breath but they should still tell me) and no sense of whether there is a future for them or if they are in fact DONE. I have questions:

Should I cut up my biometric security card and throw it away?  Is there any competing company that would be taking over the Clear traveller population?  What will happen to my annual fee?

If the Clear guys are reading this (and it sounds like they may have plenty of time to go online soon), I’m disappointed that you didn’t think of a better transition, especially for your paying customers.  I don’t necessarily expect you to broadcast that you are in financial trouble - people might stop signing up or renewing - but as recently as 6/3 I received a marketing email about how Clear would make a great father’s day gift.  If I was a recent subscriber I’d be pissed as hell right now.  For the rest of us who signed up at some point or other, the fact remains: Now you’re gone.  With my money.  And without a sense of whether I have anywhere to go with this card.

The money isn’t really what’s getting at me - its the lack of closure.  If you wrote me to say, “hey, this economy is a bitch and people aren’t renewing anymore…we’ve run out of cash and are shutting down.  For those of you wanting your money back, we’re using what cash we have left to provide some kind of meaningful severance for our employees…” I’d be O.K. with that actually.  I have no idea what you’ve done with the money or how responsibly / irresponsibly you ran the business up until the last minute grates on me as a former entrepreneur.

It’s hard not to judge but you’ve given me no other information so I’ll stop the commentary here.  Please update your site with some kind of explanation…as of right now it looks like you didn’t really think your operations and financial structure through very well.

Update on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 10:12PM by Christian

UPDATE: I was talking to a bunch of people from one of our partners who travel as much as I used to during my startup days. We were all sharing our stories of how we learned of Clear’s shutdown - some of them finding out at the airport where some temporary queueing lanes had been set up. That’s a good move. I also learned that Clear had updated their website, the most current text reading:

Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.

What will happen to my personal information?

Applicant and Member data iscurrently secured in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration’s Security, Privacy and Compliance Standards. Verified Identity Pass, Inc. will continue tosecure such information and will take appropriate steps to delete the information.

Will I receive a refund for membership in Clear?

At the present time,because of its financial condition, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. cannot issue refunds.

Clear’s Privacy Policy

Clear’s Online Privacy Policy

So while not a complete explanation at least there’s clarity around refunds.  And one traveller who was in the midst of signing up had told me that he was notified that his card wouldn’t be charged.  These are good steps…still a little on the opaque side however.