How We Measure Time In Product Development

Summary

If we use our product development to measure sales and marketing, we are missing a vital component to success. The customers. Trying to predict customers is tricky, so involve them early on.

How We Measure Time In Product Development

There are many problems with using product development to measure when we will sell our product, but the biggest problem of all is that this approach doesn’t involve customers. Here’s what your team would traditionally do and why this approach is wrong.

Measuring sales

Your sales department are going to follow the lead of product development and they’ll see when they need to get a sales team ready for those first customers. They’ll then see that the date of first customer ship dictates when they need to be ready with sales organisation. They will do this because they know they need to be generating sales immediately, and they need to be selling in numbers at that point, right from the get-go. What’s wrong with this? Well, it’s all well and good having dates and forecasts and sending your product out into the world as soon as it’s ready, but customers are an unpredictable bunch and just because your sales plan says they will be ready to buy in this date, doesn’t mean they will. If your business plan relies on customers buying in large numbers, you’d better make sure they will first.

Measuring marketing

Your marketing team will leap into action even earlier. Looking at your launch date your marketing team will see that they need to start building that important buzz early on, early in the product development process. Marketing will be working from the other end and looking ahead to the product launch. They’ll organise interviews and press events, they’ll advertise and promote. This sounds great, right? You need that early buzz. So what’s wrong with this? Again, the lack of customer involvement at this point is the crucial point. Your marketing team will be in action before customers start buying the product, so there is no customer feedback to work from. Think about it, when will your marketing team find if their approachto the product is working? After customers start buying. Once that feedback starts rolling in you’ll know if your campaign has soared or died.

What happens if you get this wrong

If you get these approaches wrong and you are predicting the way customers will behave wrongly, your costs could be crippling. If the sales you predicted aren’t there you have to quickly try to fix this, and that costs. If your company doesn’t understand its customers you won’th it the sales you predicted, and your sales team start to panic. Marketing will attempt toc ome up with something better and will only confuse your sales team, who now don’t knowhow they are supposed to be selling the product. It’s chaos and it usually signals the death of the product and maybe the company.

It sounds gloomy, but this is only a look at what can happen if you get your launch wrong. There are ways to avoid such a catastrophe and at the heart of all of this is the customer. Your understanding of your customers is crucial. Start with this as your narrative, and you can make it work.