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Sitraka is a company that knows performance. A leader in the J2EE performance assurance field, Sitraka delivers advanced diagnostic solutions that help companies pinpoint and eliminate performance hazards in Java applications. But the company not only helps its customers tune-up their performance, it also focuses on sharpening its own.

Toward that end, the product management team at Sitraka is unwavering in its commitment to becoming more and more market-driven." At Sitraka, we work hard to understand our customers and their challenges," emphasizes Alan Armstrong, Director of New Products. "From the CEO on down, this market-driven focus is our mantra. And we have implemented a proven process for customer interaction that enables us to build successful products that resonate with the market."

Sitraka's market-driven approach to software development has been fueled by the lessons learned from in-depth seminars delivered by Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. In its high-impact training for high-tech, Pragmatic emphasizes strategic product management and offers a blueprint for product marketing that focuses on communicating with target market segments in order to address high-value prospect problems. Sitraka has commissioned Pragmatic to deliver the courses Practical Product Management and Requirements That Work.

For Sitraka, this focus on strategic marketing works. "One of Sitraka's greatest advantages is that it is a marketing powerhouse," says Josephine Coombe, Director of Corporate Marketing. "And we have a dominant brand in the Java industry. The Pragmatic Marketing methodology has been a key contributor to that success. It has informed our product marketing decision-making and helped us structure the way we manage our activities. It's enabled us to seamlessly bridge strategy and execution. And it's helped us build the right products for the right markets and launch them in a compelling manner."

Strategic Marketing Makes a Difference

For most companies with a deeply technical core, learning how to develop and market products strategically is difficult, at best. "I'm an engineer by training," Armstrong explains. "Over the years, I worked on many software development projects that ended up sitting on the shelf, or they landed in the market to a collective 'So what?' That's incredibly frustrating. In product management, you are responsible for P&L for a product line and for determining where you need to go with your products. Unfortunately, they don't teach you that in engineering school, and it is not trivial to do it properly. That's why we've come to rely on Pragmatic Marketing for its expertise in teaching us to think more strategically."

According to Armstrong, "Strategic marketing means understanding who your prospects are and the needs of your target market—both end users and business buyers. It means knowing what they think about you, your products, your company, your support, and your competitors. It means having a handle on your distinctive competence inside that market. It means knowing what people who haven't bought your product think and why they haven't bought. And it means understanding the best channel to deliver your products to market."

Pragmatic's seminars ingrain in product managers the importance of gaining hard market data in order to enhance their effectiveness. And the team at Sitraka agrees. "When you are making strategic product decisions, you better not bring opinion to the table. You better have data," Armstrong emphasizes. "It's pretty compelling when you present the results of a win/loss analysis that pinpoints a single factor as being at the root of 60% of your losses. It sure makes requirements definition easier in the next release."

Development Manager Doug Doe agrees, "As a developer, it's frustrating when the requirements change every few days based on the latest whim. It's tough on morale, you waste a lot of time, and the product winds up not really hitting the market. At Sitraka, when we are thinking through problems, our ability to cite real customer input gets our developers' heads in the game. It gives them an idea of exactly what kind of users they are writing the software for—rather than writing it for themselves."

According to Armstrong, a market-driven approach to product management makes everyone's jobs much easier."You don't have to make it up as you go along, because you know what people want. You can develop a problem statement for an actual 'persona,' versus writing nebulous feature specifications. All of a sudden, your ability to develop product requirements, to create effective marketing programs, to know how to sell that product and support it becomes easier."

This customer-focused approach has become second nature to the development team at Sitraka as well. Says Doe, "If you consistently talk about your customers and put names and faces to them, you suddenly notice developers talking to each other about this person as if they know him. In fact, we now have development folks saying, 'If I don't understand the persona and the problem statement, I can't write the requirements or the code.' Once you get it going, it just doesn't stop."

Creating Competitive Advantage

Last year, a new product development project drove home the impact of understanding and fulfilling market needs. Before the first attempt to define the requirements, Armstrong and Doe went on the road to interview a half-dozen or so customers and prospects. Without telling them what Sitraka had in mind, Armstrong posed questions about their business challenges. At each of those sites, the team heard nearly identical stories.

"Interestingly, that problem was a little different than what we had initially thought," remembers Doe. "What we were thinking about before we went on the road was not quite what we were thinking about when we came back. What's more, it gave us a solid idea of a long-term product strategy. Market feedback about the new product makes it clear we attacked the problem quite a bit differently than our competitors did. And it's easy to see what separates our products from the pack. That kind of competitive advantage is invaluable."

He adds, "In development, a good measure of success is employee motivation. Did the team create a good product in the least amount of time? From that standpoint, our new product has been an overwhelming success. We did some external research to see how we did with our code development. For the type of product and the amount of code, it turns out we produced it in about three-quarters of the amount of time that various industry tools predicted—using only two-thirds the number of people. That's what motivation does for you."

Accelerating Speed to Market, Boosting Productivity

Another benefit of implementing the methodologies espoused in the Pragmatic courses has been the ability for Sitraka to streamline the workflow between product management and corporate marketing. "The Pragmatic courses have enabled us to build a better bridge between market research and outbound marketing," highlights Coombe. "That bridge centers on our positioning document. Accelerating the translation of market intelligence between product management and marketing helps us achieve speed to market for our products and more quickly and effectively build the sales pipeline."

She adds, "Rather than addressing each marketing program or collateral piece as a standalone project that requires significant time and input from product management, we can go to the positioning document and create everything we need—knowing that they are all strategically on target. That process drives our clarity and consistency of message, as well as the impact of our marketing programs on our audience. We attribute much of our marketing success to our commitment to keeping our message consistent and targeted at the right audience, one that we have sought to understand effectively. In addition, the positioning document dramatically increases our product managers' productivity, because they no longer have to get involved with every detail of tactical implementation on an outbound marketing program or product launch."

A Roadmap for Best-Practices Marketing

At Sitraka, the Pragmatic approach is not only helping to build bridges among departments, it's also bridging the gap between strategy and execution. According to Coombe, "The Pragmatic Marketing courses provide a landscape that clearly breaks out the world of product management into its myriad constituent parts—which enables you to bridge strategy and execution. In this business, the seamless handoff from strategy to execution is really where the rubber hits the road. Other courses float around at a soft, strategic level, but don't really translate into operational execution. In my opinion, there's no such thing as a strategy that exists only on a whiteboard. It's only a strategy if it can be executed. The Pragmatic approach lives up to its namesake and makes that possible."

Armstrong agrees, "The Pragmatic courses are a must-have for product managers. They are incredibly practical and directly applicable. You walk in the office on Monday after attending a Pragmatic course, and you can immediately start doing things differently. The seminars are loaded with real-life experiences, war stories, and examples. And they are taught by instructors who have felt my pain."

That practical, real-world roadmap is invaluable to Sitraka. "Pragmatic provides an intuitive structure and way of mapping marketing best practices," says Coombe. "Looking at your organization, strategies, tactics, and goals through that kind of a lens sharpens your focus on the important issues in marketing and helps you operationally manage your resources against those imperatives."

Armstrong concludes, "Simply put, the Pragmatic Marketing approach has helped us refine our marketing best practices. It has raised the bar for product management and marketing here at Sitraka."

In 2003, Sitraka was acquired by Quest Software.
Go to Quest's home page for more information on their company and products.