Chasm Group on Product Management Last night I attended a talk by Paul Wiefels of the Chasm Group, the author of The Chasm Companion [amazon] for the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. Paul's book is a field guide that complements the Crossing the Chasm [amazon] series by Geoff Moore.
The book is a must read for us technology adoption lifecycle geeks, but also for anyone dealing with the challenge of selling and marketing discontinous technology today. Filled with post-bubble updates, frameworks, strategic checklists, practical insights and worksheets.
I won't repeat much of what is available in the book, but highlight other insights with pointers to additional content.
Buyers don't believe that IT provides competitive advantage [another survey showed this too], so drop it from your lexicon. Today's market is characterized by:
- An overhang in technology capacity relative to other sectors.
- Sellers are competing for marginal budgets, there is no line item left for you, they have all been blurred. Further, 40-50% of budgets are for maintaince [see MS CIO survey post]
- "Some Assembly Required" is driving a customer revolt
- Increasing focus on the Investment portion of ROI. Key measure is payback period, followed by bottom line (EBIT) monthly impact. TCO is overhyped, remember that the product with the best TCO doesn't necessarily yield a return. [see whitepaper for another take on this subject]
- Pain-based messages resonate. Focus on fixing leaky pipes (broken critical processes).
Product managers must:
- Perform a strategic assessment (are we vulnerable to market change, what is our category fitness and trend, market share, viable strategy, ability to understand these issues and execute),
- Recognize that discontinous innovations require infrastructure to be adopted and montetized. When a technology is completely diffused, it is the adoption of a new infrastructure/platform/standard. Make a list of who is for and against the new standard.
- Focus activities according to the technology adoption lifecycle (e.g. when and how to fulfill the whole product concept)
Two most common false assumptions of the technology adoption lifecycle/diffusion theory:
- The distribution is not a timeline
- There are chasms between segments
In a question, he confirmed my view on how the business cycle effects the technology adoption lifecycle. Buyers have become more conservative, a population shift in the psychodemographic segments of the lifecycle.
10:43:46 AM 
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