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Building the "A" Team
Creating an effective group with the right skills measured by industry best-practice performance metrics.
For many, a lack of a common set of company goals combined with disparate skills leaves team members and department leadership vulnerable to short-term “deal-of-the-day” reactionary tasks supporting Sales and Development. Product managers and marketers complete one tactical activity after the other with no coherent plan, or understanding where each task fits with company goals and strategy. Managers and department heads don’t know how to effectively measure a team’s performance because there is no common reference framework or skill set to compare current performance with industry best-practice.
Measuring product management and marketing performance with ROI, profitability, revenue or other “lagging” indicator of success, is at best a months or years timeline. Instead, product management and marketing departments should be measured against “leading” indicators.
Much more relevant and definitely more quickly established, “leading” indicators provide an early indication for success that will ultimately appear in those “lagging” indicators. Examples of leading indicators (of success) are:
- How many visits to customers or, more importantly, non-customers are conducted?
- Are positioning documents written in a timely fashion so Marketing Communications is empowered to create effective messaging?
- Are requirements handed off to Development with the necessary context/problem statements so they can create the products people want to buy?
- Is market evidence being used for prioritization of new feature development?
The Pragmatic Marketing Framework provides the industry’s best-practice framework for documenting and supporting company strategy and for teaching the skills necessary for effective, strategic product management and marketing. With the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, executives responsible for product management and marketing gain a clear understanding how their team supports overall company goals and objectives. And can identify the skills needed along with how to measure the execution of those skills for the people on their teams.
