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July 30, 2004

You're A Product ... Planner?

So (ack! I said it! The word!) I've been meaning to write this post for a while. I've had enough people - friends, relatives, fellow MBA students, Microsoft people, the crazy guy on the bus - ask me this question that I thought it was worth addressing:

"So, what exactly is a product planner, anyhow?"

Put succinctly, planners help guide product evolution. (Caveat: this is how planning is done in Office; if you're a planner elsewhere in Microsoft, such as MSN or XBox, your mileage may vary.) We generate new ideas, identify trends, keep an eye on competitive products, and try to help provide thought leadership on products. We are, in effect, the "voice" of the customer.

Planners straddle traditional marketing and development responsibilities. In Office, the planners are coupled to the development team; planners in other parts of the company are usually part of marketing.

Here's why planning is important.

Let's say you're a developer. You are in the process of building the next release of the best-selling Widget 9.0. Naturally, you've got a laundry list of features in front of you that you can implement. Some of them consist of direct feedback from customers, others are things you wish you'd had time to "do right" in the current release. There's another bucket of stuff you have to implement because a competitive product has it, and it's become important. And finally, there's a class of "cool" features that you'd love to put in. Underlying all of this, however, is the stark reality that you have only so much money, only so many people, and only so much time. What do you do?

Now let's say you're a marketer. You have just been told that Widget 9.0 is complete. At this point, your job is to sell as many copies of Widget as possible. To facilitate that, you would take a look at the product's features and capabilities, and assess what problems might be solved by employing those capabilities. You then figure out which segments of the population experience those kinds of problems, and begin the long process of positioning Widget so those people a) know it exists, b) believe that Widget can solve their problem, and c) choose to buy Widget over alternatives (such as a competitive product, or choosing to buy nothing at all). Of course, your job is made much easier if you know, with certainty, that Widget was designed with certain types of customers in mind.

Enter product planning.

The planning discipline is an ounce of prevention - as opposed to the pound of cure. Planning brings a marketing sensibility and a research budget to the development process. We give our Widget developer the data she needs to make smart prioritization decisions. We also help our intrepid marketer know what segments will find Widget incredibly valuable, and why. Planners are interdisciplinary glue. Here in Office, there's a planner for every product in the suite. There's a planner for Outlook, OneNote, Access, you name it. There are also planners for categories of products, or who specialize in certain types of technology. These people are smart, creative, thoughtful, holistic, and, most of all, credible. They do their homework. And they care about customers.

Planners get to work on cool stuff. My summer planning project consists of some blue-sky exploration of a problem area that crosses product categories. Essentially, Microsoft has hired me to make them a map of the problem area that they can use - over time, it will be updated and filled in as more people explore the territory. When I got here in June, my instructions were essentially this: "Microsoft is interested in studying this subject. We know it's a problem, and we know it's a problem our customers experience all the time. We don't have any real sense of how to attack it, but several people in the company have taken a shot at it. Go talk to those folks, do some thinking, and then let us know how you think we should solve it."

We go to primary research in early August.

Speaking of research: I'm in San Francisco early next week for some customer stuff, so updates might be light. I'll post when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 30, 2004 5:14 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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