What’s an objection? As Merriam-Webster defines it, an objection is “an expression or feeling of disapproval or opposition” – and too often, our customers will have objections to our product.

Therefore, to be effective product managers, we need to know how to deal with customer objections and convince our customers to stick with us. This skill is called “objection handling”.

Why Does Objection Handling Matter?

Objections are natural. A truly engaged user who is committed to using your product is trusting a part of their life to you. Therefore, they’ll want to push you to introduce new features, or complain about gaps within your product.

This is a good thing! Feedback enables us to build better products.

At the same time, however, we shouldn’t just cave to every single request. Our job as product managers is not to be people pleasers – we need to know how to say “no” to low-value requests and to push back against unreasonable demands. Continue Reading

In the first and second article in this series on value propositions, we discussed how to craft a value proposition, and how to execute on it. For our final article in the series, we’ll share advanced tactics for value propositions based on years of experience.

We’ll discuss how to trade off against time, how good value propositions kill misaligned features, and why “customer surprise and delight” may not actually be desirable.

Trading Off Against Time

In the previous articles in this series, we dove very heavily into an ideal workflow on creating and validating a value proposition. Of course, executing against such an ideal flow can be incredibly time consuming.

As product managers, we rarely feel like we have enough time to dive so deeply. We have so many other tasks to juggle, after all! Continue Reading

Previously, we dove deep into creating a value proposition that is based on both meaningful customer research and thoughtful consideration of the benefits and costs that your organization will offer.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to validate your value proposition before actually building against it. Then, we’ll show how you can execute faithfully against your value proposition.

Validating Your Value Proposition

To validate your value proposition, put it in front of your proposed customers and users. There’s nothing better than live data to confirm your hypothesis.

Be sure to select only customers and users who fit within your target segments. In my experience, the easiest way to get started is to ask the same people that you interviewed when you were originally identifying your target customer segment. Continue Reading

Product managers provide value to their customers through their product offerings.

Our primary objective is to create so much value for customers that they choose us, stay with us, and recommend us over any other alternatives.

Yet, we often build products that do not provide value.

This bad practice is extremely dangerous for the following reasons.

1) We lose the opportunity to ship a product that would actually provide value. Growth is compound – by losing the opportunity to provide value this time around, we’ve stunted all of our future growth permanently.

2) We lose out on potential revenue, which brings us closer to running out of profitability or cash reserves. That means we may lose resource allocation, or investors might flee, or the business comes one step closer to bankruptcy. Continue Reading

Regardless of background, we as product managers are obligated to know how to ship effective B2B (business-to-business) products.

After all, technology continues to evolve rapidly, enabling existing businesses to penetrate new customer segments and enabling new entrants to innovate. As businesses of all kinds expand their capabilities, they look to outside products to enable them to do more with their current resources.

Because technology is creating so many new opportunities, B2B products proliferate at an exciting pace today, and much of the demand for product managers comes from the B2B space.

To successfully ship B2B products, we need to understand the key differentiator of all businesses: process. Continue Reading

Over the past few years as a business-to-business (B2B) product manager, I’ve learned when it comes to the success of a B2B product, process matters far more than technology does.

What, exactly, do I mean? I mean that the way in which users accomplish an outcome is much more important than which tools they use to accomplish the outcome.

Businesses with stellar processes and subpar tools will generally beat out businesses that have subpar processes and stellar tools.

This learning is counterintuitive. After all, with consumer products, “if you build it, they will come,” regardless of the user’s existing processes.

That’s because consumer products have the freedom to set entirely new processes and behaviors. Continue Reading