Periodically—and very carefully—we update the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ to align with current practices for marketing technology solutions. Having trained more than 60,000 product management and marketing professionals, some of these changes are the result of our training efforts and some the evolution of the product management discipline in 21st century technology businesses. Over time some things become more important, some less.

We’ve seen an escalation of the importance of buyer and user personas. Social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are key elements in today’s marketing efforts. And e-books have become the preferred method of communicating thought leadership with a soft-sell orientation instead of traditional white papers and other “selling-oriented” materials.

So in June 2009, we revised the Pragmatic Marketing Framework—some items were moved, others renamed,  a few added, or deleted—to reflect today’s best practices in product management.

Improved workflow

The horizontal orientation of the Framework has not changed. The activities on the left side are still strategic; the activities on the right still tactical. It’s been that way for more than 15 years.

We’ve streamlined the categories of activities (columns) to better flow from strategic to tactical. They now reflect the way many implement the Framework, from market to strategy to business and planning, to market programs and readiness, to on-going support. These sets of activities are now labeled Market, Strategy, Business, Planning, Programs, Readiness and Support.

Think about that logical structure for a minute. You spend time in the Market trying to uncover unsolved market problems, right? You try to determine whether or not the problems you’ve discovered are pervasive and urgent, and if people are willing to pay to solve them. And then you bring that inside the organization and start a comparison to your existing Strategy. Is this a fit with our strategic initiatives? With our portfolio of products? Is this a business we want to pursue at our company?

Once you get past that test, Business analysis begins. Is this a good investment for us? Do all the financial numbers associated with the investment work? Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, it’s time to begin the process of Planning the actual solution you’re going to create. From there it’s all about go-to-market, so we plan out our Programs, Readiness, and on-going Support.

Let’s cover the Framework changes, one column at a time.

Market

In the Market column we’ve always had an activity called Market Problems, and as you know if you’ve been to our seminars, that particular activity is the absolute preeminent starting place. So we’ve moved it to the cornerstone of the entire Framework. We combined Market Research with Market Problems since after all, that’s the reason you do market research: to discover market problems. Next to Market Problems is Win/Loss Analysis; a form of discovery research, specifically focused on those who have recently evaluated your products. This activity is becoming more and more important, and Pragmatic Marketing’s 2008 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey shows 37% of product managers are actively performing win/loss analysis. This has increased significantly from 17% in 2000 when we began surveying product managers. And remember that when you do win/loss analysis, you learn at least as much about the buying process as you learn about the product people were trying to buy.

Strategy

Market Sizing was renamed Market Definition. Defining the market is much more than just counting the number of opportunities in a segment; it’s about understanding all the different details about that segment and why you should pursue it.

Distribution Strategy is a new activity in the Strategy column. It’s just as important to understand how you’re going to market and deliver to the people who are planning to buy it, as it is to think about the product itself and whether or not it’s a good investment for you. The buyer may want to be sold differently and receive solutions differently. Where once technology companies determined distribution based on their existing channels, it’s now more important to understand how the buyer wants to receive solutions. More and more, product management is determining pricing and packaging, on-premise versus hosted, direct sales versus multi-tier versus web-based sales. How technology solutions are distributed is a part of the strategy, not an afterthought or driven by history and habit.

We moved Product Portfolio and Product Roadmap to this new Strategy column. This is where you compare your new product idea to your existing portfolio and current roadmap to evaluate whether or  not this idea, in isolation, fits  with the overarching goals of  what you’re doing as  an organization.

Business

Once you pass the  hurdles of your product  strategy, it’s time to run the numbers. In  the Business column, Business Case is now called Business Plan. It’s a small change, but Business Case is just an artifact; planning is much more than that. Business planning includes at least two artifacts and a number of inputs. We have always covered these topics: now the activity  is more aptly named.

Pricing, Innovation, and Buy,  Build or Partner are still part of the Business column.

We’ve always encouraged you to look at Product Performance and Operational Metrics and the reason, of course, is so you can create a profitable product. We’ve combined these into a single activity, Product Profitability, in the Business column. Product Profitability is the ultimate measure of a good business. Development is accountable for functionality and schedules; Sales is accountable for revenue. Product management should obsess about creating profitable products. It’s vitally important that marketing managers understand their role in a “soft sense,” as the president of the product. If you’re the president of the product, the one thing you should be held accountable for is product profitability.

Planning

Positioning and Use Scenarios are still part of the Planning column—that hasn’t changed.

There’s a new addition to the Framework—the Buying Process.

Many marketing managers worry about the sales process and the associated sales tools, yet our research reveals many sales processes are out of alignment with the buying process. Let’s change that now! Product managers and product marketing managers should understand the way buyers buy and create tools to instrument the selling process accordingly. What matters is not how you want to sell but how they want  to buy. And if you understand how they want to buy, the steps they go through, then you should mirror that with how you sell.

For most vendors, buyers don’t use and users don’t buy. Buyer and user personas have been cornerstones of our seminars and webinars since 2000 and continue to be important for technology companies. A deep understanding of both Buyer Personas and User Personas help companies build products buyers want to buy and users want to use. Buyer personas focus your marketing efforts because a product won’t succeed if you can’t get people to buy it. Not only do you need to understand how they buy, you need to understand who the buyers are and why they buy. Equally important are user personas. Selling your product doesn’t matter if people won’t use it—and recommend it to their colleagues. User personas are critical to the development process of your product because they reveal how users differ from buyers—and also how they differ from your developers, your sales people, and your own executives.

Lastly, in this column, Release Milestones was renamed Status Dashboard. Release Milestones was focused on the key development tasks to deliver products to distribution; Status Dashboard is something more. A status dashboard communicates overall organizational readiness. Not only is the code or device ready, but the organization is ready to deliver it to customers.

As the “single throat to choke” on product status, we encourage product management to maintain the dashboard for their products, whether on the intranet, a wiki or a periodic e-mail, showing the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and current project status.

Programs

There are only three changes to this column.

We added an activity called Program Effectiveness. You’ve probably heard people say “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Should you continue going to the big trade shows and conferences? Or should you start doing more webinars, podcasts and social media programs? Should you do both? Program Effectiveness answers that. Once you begin measuring, it’s easy to see what programs make sense and which should be discontinued.

If you’ve attended our Effective Product Marketing™ seminar, you may recall the story about a young marketing professional who got promoted, ran into his senior executive in the hallway and got the following advice. “Don’t focus on your efforts; focus on your results.” Meaning that it really isn’t important how many leads came from a particular marketing program, what matters in the end is how many leads produced how many dollars of revenue.

Thought Leaders was renamed Thought Leadership. It seems like a small change in words, but it reveals that you’re no longer just working with thought leaders; many of you now are the thought leaders. You’re providing thought leadership directly to your markets with blogging and other social media like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. With today’s new rules of marketing, marketers don’t have to rely on the media and industry analysts to be the thought leaders to tell their story; marketers can now tell their own stories directly to buyers.

The last activity in the Programs column is Referrals & References. It replaces Success Stories as a broader definition of how to leverage customers in your selling process, helping prospects evaluate your solution  with people who already have experience  with your organization.

Readiness

We moved Sales Process from the Product Planning column to the Readiness column. The sales process should mirror the buying process. Collateral, such as white papers and e-books, are external documents that your sales teams provide to the buyer persona; Sales Tools, such as competitive write-ups and ROI calculators, are internal documents your channel uses to be more effective in selling.

Support

The Support column remains the same with the exception of renaming Answer Desk to the broader Channel  Support.  

So there it is: the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, updated for 2010 and beyond, based on enhancements that came from the market (you). We’ve tested this revision with current and potential customers, and received great responses. We know you’ll find it aligns with the reality of product management in your organization.

If you’re new to us, come to one of our seminars to learn how you can use the Pragmatic Marketing Framework as a systematic approach to define and deliver products to market. To create products that people want to buy.

If it’s been a few years since you attended a Pragmatic Marketing seminar, come back for a refresher (New slides, new tools, new stories!).

See the new Framework with definitions for all the activities and download a copy to use in your internal presentations. Buy the poster to hang on your cubicle wall.

   [Available as PDF]

Steve Johnson is a recognized thought-leader on the strategic role of product management and marketing. Broadly published and a frequent keynote speaker, Steve has been a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for more than 10 years and has personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams on strategies for creating products people want to buy. Steve is the author of the Product Marketing blog. Contact Steve at sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com.