Marketing and Product Management Special - The Great Customer Resignation 😕- Product strategy tips w/ Ravi Metha (x-TripAdvisor & x-Tinder)💍- Do you like cookies? 🍪- Shipping product vs. features ✅
A product strategy will succeed or fail based on the support across the broader company
Episode #53. Ready to read & learn?
Here we go: this is the start of year 2 of The Timestamp.
This week, I am sharing a few takeaways from my weekly life which is at the intersection of marketing and technology. I hope you will enjoy it.
#1. The Great Customer Resignation?
From The 2022 CRM impact report, a survey conducted with 1600 sales & marketing leaders by Sugar CRM was published on March 2022.
Reasons for customer churn are still a topic that is widely misunderstood.
Companies are struggling with churn and the average churn rate is 32% globally. More than 1 out 2 companies (55%) fail at identifying customers at risk of churning… and 51% do not understand the reasons leading to churn.
Worse. 57% of respondents admitted that their churn rate increased over the past 12 months.
Ok, but why?
“81% of sales and marketing leaders believe their customers leave because of a lack of communication and personalized, relevant messaging”.
Then it is becoming vital to use a leading central system (CRM) to interact with your customers. But guess what, most CRM solutions are failing.
“76% say their biggest frustration with CRM is it’s either too complex, not intuitive or user friendly, or cannot be customized”.
“56% feel they are missing data to improve their marketing campaigns and sales conversions”.
It seems that we are facing a new wave of innovation that will have to make sure companies can have “a consolidated view of customer information across the whole organization”.
75% of S&M leaders think this is critical to delivering optimal customer experiences.
#2. Learning from a Product Strategy guru
Set “Non-Goals” and build a product strategy stack - Lessons for product strategy stack from an article published in First Round Review in March 2022. Extract and takeaways from this interview of Ravi Metha (x-TripAdvisor and x-Tinder).
« Fast-moving startups are hesitant to invest in this deep work. Nobody wants to dedicate the time to think through product strategy holistically. The idea that you’re going to spend 2-4 weeks having these really wide-sweeping conversations is antithetical to how startup folks work on a daily basis. But if you spend a few weeks approaching this work in an intensive way, you’ll avoid doing a half-assed job over the next two years,” he says.
“Creating a product strategy without a thorough understanding of the company strategy is like going to the grocery store with a list of ingredients to buy, but without a plan for the recipes you want to cook.”
"Oftentimes when crafting a strategy, the company focuses too much on itself and what it wants to achieve, and not enough on what’s best for the user.”
“Anyone who’s going to be touched by the product strategy — whether that’s design, engineering, user insights, data science, marketing, sales, etc. — should have at least one leader involved in crafting the product strategy documentation. Yes, that means there are going to be a lot of cooks in the kitchen. But ultimately a product strategy will succeed or fail based on the support across the broader company.”
“If we don’t decide the most important buttons in the app to use, our users need to figure out whether to click this button or that one. It’s really important to have a clear set of choices, make sure everyone in the organization understands what those choices are, and deliver something that is clear and opinionated to the customer.”
#3. Cookies or not cookies
Marketers still aren’t ready for a world without cookies from a (sponsored) article published in Adweek in March 2022. Takeaways from a survey conducted by Epsilon with 259 U.S. marketers.
Third-party identifiers (3PIDs) are standardized data points like third-party cookies (3PC placed by a web domain on your web browser), mobile ad identifiers (MAID placed on your mobile), emails, or IP addresses.
Only 23% of companies have a post cookie targeting solution in place.
54% of US marketers admit they are only somewhat or not very prepared for the new digital advertising reality.
70% feel the industry is headed in the wrong direction as they think that there will be little or no improvement about consumers controlling their personal data. They also trust Google and Apple even less and they think the ability to personalize consumer journeys will go backward.
Marketers are now putting a higher priority on preparing for the cookie deprecation and here are their top-3 moves:
67% are building a customer data platform (CDP),
62% strategize around first-party data,
60% are building out a private ID graph.
#4. Build a product vs. ship features
12 signs your’re working on a feature factory from a blog post published in @johncutlefish’s blog in November 17, 2016. Takeaways were written in 2022.
Here is my top 3 selection from this expert advice. I took the liberty to phrase them positively; I am not a big fan of scaring to drive attention:
Measure the outcomes of shipping features or new products. No matter what you develop, data is what proves that your feature/product is being used by the customer.
Ship small increments to clients: many companies tend to develop using the agile method but… the customers only see the evolution as a large chunk of your product release that regroups multiple sprints.
Keep time to strengthen your product and make sure it works properly. Taking care of your dev debt may mean that you should fear shiny objects and beware of developing for winning businesses.
Golden tip: Make sure you are always in connection with core business stakeholders at the customer organization you address.
#5. Ukraine Tech
Prominent tech comanies that originated from Ukraine from an article published in Analytics India Mag (AIM) in March 1st, 2022.
We should have started with this summary. Finishing with it is our way to make sure we keep thinking about Ukraine.
Ukraine has been an important maker of IT engineers in Europe. “The country produces over 130,000 engineering graduates and 16,000 IT graduates annually.” This is twice as many as Britain annually.
“Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is the largest IT hub in the country and is home to over 1,000 startups and product companies.”
Companies such as Grammarly or Trace.AI were funded by Ukrainian founders.
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