How to Turn Challenges into Opportunities Using Whole Product Thinking

Welcome, Introductions, and Housekeeping

Rina Alexin | 00:00:00–00:04:30

Hello everyone, welcome and good morning. My name is Rina Alexin and I am the CEO of Productside. Thank you so much for joining us for this great webinar.

Today we will be discussing how to turn challenges into opportunities using Whole Product Thinking, and I’m joined today by Roger Snyder. Roger is the VP of Marketing at Productside and he’s also one of our principal consultants and trainers. He has over 25 years of experience in high tech, first working in development, project management, and business development before finding his true passion: product management. Thank you so much for being here today, Roger.

Thank you, Rina, and thank you for taking over the host role that I normally play. So I’m excited to be back in the content position this month and really appreciate you hosting us.

Thank you. I’m excited to host as well. Thank you everyone again for joining us. And Roger, I hope everything’s okay in the Bay Area now.

We’ve had seven inches of rain in 48 hours up here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, so it’s been a little bit wet for sure, but knock on wood, power and internet are still on and all goes well.

Well great.

All right, thank you everyone, and just before we get started with the content, I want to go over a few housekeeping items. You see here on the slide that we are inviting you all to join our LinkedIn group. After this webinar, we encourage everyone to stay engaged with each other in any online community that you find valuable.

In our LinkedIn group you’ll be able to network with your peers, share leadership best practices, and discuss the importance of product management with each other. The link is right now pasted in the chat, so you can go ahead and sign up.

At Productside we love interacting with you, and so during this webinar we really encourage you to ask questions throughout the talk. We will leave time at the end for Q&A, and I’d like to take this time to answer the two most popular questions we receive. First: can you watch this later? Yes. All attendees will receive an email with a link to view the recording after it has ended, and so you’ll be able to come back and view the content and the slides at a later time.

Before we begin, I’d like to first take a minute and introduce what Productside is all about. At Productside, our first and foremost mission is to empower product professionals with the knowledge and tools to deliver and build products that matter. This is our reason for being—why we get up in the morning.

And we at Productside absolutely apply Whole Product Thinking to our products and services. We have developed, over the past 20 years, a suite of services that help us build a custom solution for product management teams. Whether it is advanced training, strategic consulting and advice, or foundational training, we are really here for you.

Now I want to tell you again what we are doing today. We have interviewed and surveyed several of your peers to come up with a series for product management leaders. The series goals are intended to help you grow as a product management leader and improve your product management or product marketing team. Our ultimate goal, of course, is to help you enable your team and company to build the best products for your customers.

Today’s series—or today’s webinar, rather—will focus on two themes: how to transform my team, and implications of change.

And today’s audience: this is a snapshot of who we expect to see today. As usual, about half of the audience are Product Managers or Product Marketers. We have about 20% who are VP or Director level, and of course a good number of people who have submitted as “Other.” That includes a lot of people interested in product management as well.

As we know, product management really involves everyone.

All right, well, you can kick it off.

What Is Whole Product Thinking?

Roger Snyder | 00:04:30–00:11:00

All right, I’ll take it from here. We’re talking about the Whole Product concept, so we’re going to lay down a little bit of groundwork here before we get into deeper ideas.

The Whole Product concept has actually been around for quite a long time. It was first introduced by Regis McKenna and Theodore Levitt, but it really came into its own in Geoffrey Moore’s seminal work Crossing the Chasm. That’s where the concept really came out into wide usage.

This definition I’ve got over here on the left—even Wikipedia now has a standard definition for it—but what I want to emphasize is that it’s looking at more than just this idea of the “out of the box” features of your product and thinking about the entire experience of a product. From the very first time that a potential buyer thinks, “I’ve got a problem to solve and I need something to solve it,” and they start looking at your product, all the way through the actual purchase of the product, the use of the product, and then when they have challenges with the product, talking about customer service—it’s all of these different aspects that come together to make this Whole Product concept.

Now, in the original definition of it there were these five different layers of the Whole Product concept. At Productside, we borrowed from some work that was done at the University of North Carolina because we thought this really does a good job of simplifying the idea a little bit. Here what we’ve got is this concept that there are three aspects to the Whole Product that you really need to concern yourself with as a Product Manager.

From my experience of leading Product Managers for over 20 years, most of the time Product Managers spend the majority of their time really worrying about what we call the “actual product.” I’m hoping you can see my little laser pointer here, but 80% of the time that’s where Product Managers spend their time. They’re all thinking about: What are my features? What’s the packaging going to look like? What’s the quality like? What’s the style? Depending on what kind of product you’re talking about, this is where Product Managers spend the bulk of their time. To a certain degree, that’s the right thing to do. However, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to really differentiate your product in the marketplace, and potentially find new ways to help your customers, when you miss thinking about these other two aspects.

So I want to go to the top first and talk about the core of your product. In particular, if you’re a Product Manager—like I’ve had to do a number of times—who inherits a product that’s already out in the marketplace, you’re hired on or you move into the Product Management organization and you take over a product that has already been out there for a couple of years. You just kind of assume you understand what the product’s about.

But it’s a good time, when you’re taking over a product—and I even think if you started this product—to revisit your core every year and think about: What are the key benefits that my product really offers? What is it that I’m helping my customer do? It could be as simple as “I’m helping my customer have enjoyment” if we’re talking about a product that’s a toy or Netflix, or it could be—if we’re talking B2B—that this is a product that really helps improve productivity or helps that customer increase their revenue.

You’ve got to be thinking about that benefit first and foremost, because that should then inform all the decisions you make about the actual product and the augmented product. In a couple of slides I’m going to help you revisit this idea of benefits in a little more depth.

Then there’s this other aspect, this third aspect of the Whole Product concept, which is the augmented characteristics of a product. Oftentimes this is where you think about things like standards, installation, integration services, how you price the product—but also how you allow people to purchase the product. Are there finance options available? Are there some other elements outside the main product that you need to add to make that main product more effective or more accessible? And of course customer care.

How many of you have a service where, when you actually need help, that’s when you feel horrible about the product because the customer care experience is not great? That overall feeling then carries back to your feelings about the core product itself as well. So having good customer care is an essential aspect of these augmented characteristics.

To explain this a little bit better I want to come up with an example. Let’s talk a little bit about Uber. With respect to Uber, the service there—the benefits—are the same as a taxi. Your benefit of using Uber is to get from point A to point B without having to drive yourself, particularly if you’re in a city that you’re not familiar with. So you’re hiring someone else’s vehicle and that driver to get you from point A to point B—same thing as a taxi. So the core benefits of Uber versus taking a taxi are the same.

Core, Actual, and Augmented Product

Roger Snyder | 00:11:00–00:18:00

Second, the actual product itself is pretty much the same as well in terms of a taxi driver and their vehicle versus the Uber driver and their vehicle. All of those characteristics are the same as well: four tires, typically, and a car taking you from point A to point B. Uber doesn’t differentiate itself between taxi service and Uber in either the core or the actual product.

The place where Uber actually shines, where it’s different, is in the augmented characteristics of the product. That’s where they’ve made such a big difference in the industry. I mean, they disrupted the transportation industry by providing an app—that additional software and hardware—by being somewhere where you can call for Uber the night before with a scheduled call, or you can do it from a lobby when you’re nice and safe and warm inside the hotel. You don’t have to step out on the curb and do the whole hailing-the-cab thing like in New York City. All of that is different as well. And then the way you actually pay for the service is different. You pay afterwards, when you’re again safe inside on your way to your meeting. You’re able to pay for it in a different way as well.

So Uber did not differentiate itself in either the actual product or the core. All the differentiation of that service was down here in the augmented characteristics. That’s why when I’ve been leading Product Management teams I hammer home the idea: you’ve got to look at the augmented characteristics of the product, because that can be where you can really make a big difference in the whole solution and differentiate yourself from the rest of the market.

Rina Alexin | 00:18:00–00:19:30

Roger, I just want to cut in here and say when you focus on the augmented aspects of the product, that’s not to say those aspects don’t provide true benefits for the product, right? That’s kind of the point we’re making here: you get to uncover new benefits when you take a different perspective on what the whole product is.

Roger Snyder | 00:19:30–00:21:30

Yeah, absolutely. So this is definitely connected. You’ve got to start at the core, understand the problems your customers have or the benefits that your customers are trying to realize, and then look at both the actual product and the augmented product and find out, in this whole mix of things, how can I best satisfy those customer needs, deliver those benefits, and be different from my competition. If you spend all your time in the actual product, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities to provide more value to your customers.

Value, Pain Points, and Benefits vs Features

Roger Snyder | 00:21:30–00:28:30

All right, so let’s dig in a little bit deeper on those key points. Customers pay for value. That value can come from various different places in terms of perception. Oftentimes your value is in comparison to a competitor’s product—how much better or worse are the characteristics of your product versus a competitor’s? Also, many times there’s the old way of doing things—the status quo. That’s the delta from the current solution: “This is how I do it today, and how will this new product help me do it better, more effectively, or with more fun?” depending on what kind of product it is.

What we label here as most important, though, are these pain points and these benefits that also include brand. Sometimes brand can actually be a big influencer on the value that people perceive. Think about luxury products, for example, in cosmetics, in fashion, in vehicles. All of those areas are where brand really is a part of the value that’s perceived in the product. So don’t forget that.

But really, pain points for me is the big one in terms of: can you help solve problems that customers are having? Your pain points can also be boredom—especially during the pandemic that’s been a pain point—or mental health challenges. So think broadly when you think about pain points. How are you going to help solve customers’ problems and solve their pains?

Those are the important things to be thinking about in terms of value. Now, who are your customers? Oftentimes when you’re in a B2C circumstance it’s fairly obvious who your customer is. In B2B it’s a little bit more sophisticated. You have to think about not just the end user, but also the folks inside the organization that make the decisions about purchases, the folks that make decisions about “How is this all going to work together with the rest of the solutions that we are taking on board in our company?” and even influencers.

Influencers affect B2C as well as B2B. You’re listening to the news every day where they’ve got little consumer segments about great new products—those are influencers. You read fashion magazines—those are influencers as well. In B2B it’s more about industry associations or particular analysts. So there are, in either B2C or B2B, multiple segments of potential stakeholders that you need to be concerned about, not just the end user.

As you’re thinking through all of this, Whole Product Thinking can give you the perspective of: how can I better satisfy everyone who’s going to be involved in the purchase decision and eventually using this product?

Oftentimes Product Managers struggle with this idea of features versus benefits. You noticed earlier that we had features in the actual product. Features are your avenue, your channel, to deliver benefits. You need to have features—and I’m using the example of a Tesla here, where these are all features that are important to have—but really what your customers care about are the benefits.

So again, getting back to the core of your product: as a Product Manager, spend a little less time worrying about each one of the features of your product and start from “What are the benefits that my customers actually care about?” Those benefits are going to be the things that you want to deliver on. To do that, of course, you need features. If I want to make my car get better every month, then software updates is a way to do that. But it isn’t about the feature; it’s about the benefit. It’s the fact that Tesla drivers really love the fact that their car gets better every month.

I just saw an F-150 commercial the other day where they emphasized that they’re updating their software in their trucks now. So this benefit is now trickling into major manufacturers’ vehicles as well, and they recognize that’s a valuable benefit to the point that on national TV ads they’re talking about, “We keep providing more value in frequent updates.” So be thinking about benefits first—getting to the core of your Whole Product—and then think about the features that will deliver those benefits.

Customer Research, Journey Mapping, and Tools

Roger Snyder | 00:28:30–00:35:00

We’ve talked a lot about needing to understand the benefits that you deliver to your customers. How do you go about doing that?

Now, this webinar is not a webinar on how to go about doing voice-of-the-customer research—although we’re going to do that topic later this year—but I just want to give you some quick tips. Techniques to uncover problems include customer journey mapping, the jobs-to-be-done framework, and story mapping. All three are very powerful techniques to get out and get into the perspective of your customer. Get into their skin, into their line of sight, into their shoes and walk their mile.

Understand all the things that are going on in terms of how they need to operate in their job—in this case it’s kind of a B2B example—then how they interact with the rest of the organization, and how the organization has to deliver its own customer experience.

We actually have a customer journey mapping tool and it’s a nice template. The link to that template is in the chat so you can download it. We have a couple of blog posts and webinars on this topic as well, and we’ll be revisiting the voice-of-the-customer topic again this year.

This is where you start: look at your customer’s journey and figure out what are their problems, what are their pain points, what do they see as value. Remember the value slide. Then come up with the benefits that you really could offer that match your company’s capabilities, and then you can think about: “Okay, how am I going to deliver the most benefit as a whole product and really satisfy my customers now?”

Whole Product Examples: Uber and Automotive

Roger Snyder | 00:35:00–00:43:00

Let’s start down the journey of doing a couple of examples. I’m going to assume here that we did this work—we did all the market research and we looked at, “Okay, what problems do we see today with vehicles?” We came up, as a result of all this good work, with four problems that typical customers have with vehicles.

It starts with: they don’t like the purchase experience. The used car lot is the example I used here, but any in-person experience of buying vehicles has always been… it’s almost as bad as going to the dentist. People have definitely got an opinion that this is not a fun experience.

The second thing that we uncover is that folks don’t like driving in traffic. There is less traffic lately, but this is going to be a recurring problem when we’re all back out on the roads again. “I hate driving in traffic” is another problem that was uncovered by the market research.

The third one is that folks want to stretch their dollars. They want total cost of ownership to be as low as possible, so gas, maintenance, repairs, and total cost of ownership. By the way, that isn’t just dollars and cents; it’s also your time. If your vehicle breaks down frequently or if the experience of having to get your vehicle repaired takes a lot of time—where you have to get out of work, you have to be able to get a babysitter, or whatever it might take in order to get your vehicle serviced—that is part of this total cost of ownership. So when you’re thinking about total cost of ownership, don’t just be thinking in dollars and cents but also thinking about what other dimensions of value are important to your customers. In my example here, valuable precious time.

Now, more recently we have seen, as a result of the pandemic: how do we go about this whole purchase and use of the vehicle and keep it safe? How do I choose a vehicle, how do I try it out, and how do I purchase it safely?

If these are our problems, now we’re going to take the Whole Product framework and talk about how it can be applied to solve these problems. So let’s put the concept to work.

We’ll start by tackling the first pair of problems: people don’t like the purchase and delivery experience, and now with a pandemic this has been amplified in terms of just really wanting to be able to choose, try, and purchase a vehicle safely.

With Tesla, their whole concept is that you’re able to now order your vehicle online. They’re kind of a pioneer in this, but there are many companies now that are doing this—allowing you to completely configure and order your vehicle online so that you don’t have to go to a showroom. You’re able to experience the vehicle and see the characteristics of it online. Not completely experience it—and I’ll talk about that, because somebody’s already added that service as well—but this online experience, adding the additional software of being able to figure out what model you want and configure it yourself with the color you want and the options you want, and then order it and have it actually delivered to your driveway, is a powerful evolution.

Companies like Carvana popularized having the car delivered right to your driveway, or even the “car vending machine” that you might have seen. In practical terms, most of the time it’s just: they put the car on a trailer and they deliver it right to your driveway.

This has, again, been amplified by the pandemic—this need to be able to pull up the vehicles of interest, narrow it down to the one that you really like, configure it the way you want, order it, and then have it delivered to your driveway. This is an amazing evolution, and it addresses both of these things about the purchase and delivery experience not being great, and now with the pandemic, the additional problems we’re trying to solve.

Pandemic-Driven Change: Factory Safety Example

Roger Snyder | 00:43:00–00:49:30

Now I want to, for our B2B audience, also talk a little bit more about a Whole Product example, and this one relates to the pandemic as well. In this example—and I really like this example a lot—this was about a company that offers a whole set of products and then found that they needed to provide some additional hardware to solve a new pandemic-related problem. As it turns out, it actually spun off an entire new product line. Sometimes what starts out as a Whole Product problem to solve can turn into a whole new line of business.

Heron Group, based in Austria, makes automated equipment for factory floors: CNC equipment that does precision drilling, precision part alignment, or produces a part out of a cut die. They provide a number of different products. Look at this example: there’s a lot of folks working together on the factory floor, and then you have a pandemic. Instantly, immediately, a lot of these factories—because they were not essential businesses—had to shut down. That presented a problem for Heron, because how is Heron going to continue to sell more product for factory floors and get their service revenue for everything that’s on that factory floor if those factories are shut?

Heron Group identified this new problem and said, “Okay, our products have to be safe to use.” There was no safety issue with respect to the pandemic of their product itself—it was just being together in a factory that was the problem. So Heron put their thinking caps on, went to their innovation labs, and they came up with a whole new product that would enable their core products to be in use again, to be for sale, and they would get service revenue again.

They came up with something called “Safedi”—a clever name with “di” at the prime. Safedi is a little physical tag that you place on the jacket or pocket of each worker. It allows for both secure and private access; it doesn’t require an app as well, so it was another thing where too much technology wasn’t needed. They just needed this little tag. If someone then comes up positive, they are able to contact trace where that person’s tag was all day long on the factory floor. You see the little rack at the bottom where you only pick up your tag when you come in to work on the floor for a shift, and you put it back in the rack at the end of the day. Your own personal privacy is not being affected.

This was a whole new product line that was an augmented characteristic for their core business of all of their products that they sell into the factory, but it became a whole new product line that they are able to sell, and quite successfully from what I read. Now they are helping companies avoid shutdowns, prevent lockdowns, and be able to have all of their equipment being used. The factories are productive, and that means they’re generating revenue and they’ve got revenue to buy more Heron Group products. So it’s a great virtuous cycle here by solving a characteristic of a product—a secondary characteristic of a problem—and creating a whole new product line as a result. Very exciting to see this kind of work going on, and it comes from Whole Product Thinking.

Owning the Whole Product Inside Your Company

Roger Snyder | 00:49:30–00:55:30

All right, so let’s talk about putting all of this into practice. A lot of Product Managers feel like, “I don’t really own the whole product.” Maybe you don’t own delivery or installation, you don’t own customer service, you don’t own finance options or pricing, or you feel like you don’t own anything beyond product features. Or maybe your company doesn’t offer augmented services at all.

A couple of tips on how to address that. Number one: bring the data. If you can provide examples—and what I find typically here is that competitive examples are a good source—if you can find a competitor where some of the augmented characteristics of the product seem to be how they are differentiating from your products, that’s something that you want to get some good market research and data from. Customer surveys can help with that as well, as can talking to prospects or customers that use the competitive product.

Get that data together and then demonstrate to the executive staff or your leadership that, without thinking about these other characteristics, you’re missing the opportunity to be more powerful versus your competitors. That’s very important.

Second, as an individual Product Manager or as a Product Management leader, you should be working on your influence skills. We have a couple of blog posts on this where it’s important for you to have the data, but you also have to be persuasive. One of the techniques we often use there is thinking about “What’s in it for me?” from the other person’s perspective. What matters to the people you’re talking to, and how do you connect your proposal to that?

If you’re talking to the customer service team, you might say, “Wouldn’t you want all of us to see more revenue for this product as a result of improving customer service? That would benefit everyone in the company.” Or if you can improve customer satisfaction and the customer sat numbers go up and you can tie that to having better customer service, that’s going to make the leader of customer service look better too. You’re helping their career as well. So think about things where you can influence what matters to the people you’re talking to, and then you’ve got to have real data that shows that by thinking about the Whole Product you can actually deliver a better solution and garner more market share or generate more revenue.

For those of you who feel like your company “doesn’t work that way,” where the culture is very siloed, competitive examples are important here too. Demonstrate a return on investment: roll up your sleeves, get a spreadsheet out, and show what, say, a one percent increase in customer satisfaction might do in terms of the number of new customers you could garner in a year. If you actually roll up your sleeves and get some data—you’ll have to use some assumptions, of course—and provide an actual ROI, that’s going to be very motivating, particularly for finance. Go get help from the finance team. Finance folks love to see ROI, they love to see actual numbers: “If I invested this amount of money in improving customer service, I could get this return.” They’re going to be on board.

Then you get multiple constituencies starting to surround this idea of, “Wow, okay, let’s think about this Whole Product and get better at that.” Honestly, I’ve done this a few times when I ran Product Management teams at various companies. This is not a short-term win. This is a long-term play. It is something where you are definitely going to have to be patient and persistent in how you go about doing this.

Find maybe just your biggest pain point inside the company—in terms of a particular area where you really think, “If I just focused on that one aspect of my Whole Product, I would be able to get a big win.” Focus on that one area, demonstrate that win by getting the data, providing the ROI, thinking about what’s in it for the other partner inside the company, work together on that, solve that problem, and demonstrate the actual value. Then you start getting this flywheel going where you’re able to expand more rapidly your reach.

Q&A and Closing

Rina Alexin | 00:55:30–00:59:30

We’ve got a lot of really great questions coming in. For the ones we don’t get to live, we’ll try to respond after the webinar. Roger, thank you so much for walking us through these examples and frameworks. I love hearing how you’re describing some of the additional issues that are coming up from the pandemic. Obviously we’re several months into it, but there are still many of these opportunities out there. We’re seeing companies continue to respond to the ever-changing landscape and the new challenges, so I really love this talk.

We hope this webinar was helpful in giving you practical ways to apply Whole Product Thinking, to reassess your own products, and to identify where you can add value beyond features—especially in times of change.

Roger Snyder | 00:59:30–01:01:00

Thanks, Rina, and thanks everyone for joining us today. I hope this was helpful. Like I teased, we’re going to have a Voice of the Customer webinar coming up that will help you with the front end of the Whole Product experience—understanding what your customers’ needs are so you can get at those core benefits that you need to offer.

Come to Productside.com, check it out, and stay tuned for more in our Product Management Leadership series. I look forward to seeing you again.

Rina Alexin | 01:01:00–01:02:00

Thank you all for joining us this morning. Please join our newsletter and look out for future webinars to come. Thank you so much, everyone. Take care and have a great day.