As being responsible for product development and product strategy, I spend a lot of time thinking about the numerous competing interests in spending R&D money and what we need to do in the next 6, 12, 24 months as well as the next 5 years. We have a strategy that stretches out till 2010. The fundamental rule I apply to managing resources is path to revenue.The closer to revenue achievement the better. What I mean by that is two things. Firstly does the feature/service bring US closer to a substantial revenue stream and secondly does it bring our customer closer to a revenue stream or business problem resolution that is stopping them from getting more revenue. So if my customer is a bank, does the problem we solve allow them to get more revenue (through improved service) or meet a compliance or QA need they have. Without that clear understanding then it is really something that we need to deal with at the moment. Which comes to my problem with Unified Communications in it’s current manifestation and this is from an article ‘UC struggles for acceptance’:
The need for increased employee efficiency and productivity is driving uptake of UC across the region, according to Audrey William, research manager for Frost & Sullivan. “Having a converged network has driven more organizations to deploy IP to take advantage of and enable easier management and maintenance,” says Williams. “UC offers feature-rich applications such as presence, mobility, unified messaging, conferencing and collaboration.”
The statement “…need for increased employee efficiency and productivity….” is a political one sided statement. It is like a politician saying “….I’m am for healthcare and education for all children….”. Who isn’t?. We are all for this. My problem is that it does not answer the question of how do we achieve this?. It is nice for a politician to say this because they then avoid the HOW question but for product management the result is that customers just don’t spend money on this problem (ie Unified Communications). The challenge of Unified Communications is making itself relevant in a clear and distinctive way that clearly demonstrates the path to revenue for the customer. As long as UC defines itself in holistic terms and does not do the hard part of matching the features /services to customer needs then we will continue to see articles talking about traction for UC. What does this mean, it means look for a controversial speech from me at the VON conference next month in Boston……
