 Hi, everybody and welcome. My name is Dave Richards and I will be leaving our webinar session for today. All right So I'm gonna get this kicked off Today we'll be discussing the engagement life cycle of a product in B2B and and B2C users So a little background about myself again, as I said, my name is Dave Richards I started my career in finance and accounting at PricewaterhouseCoopers And then I transitioned to sales and marketing at Google Also focused on UX consulting for publishers Then I first moved into product at BloomRage, which is a B2B software as a service e-commerce platform Where I focused on our search marketing and analytics products And then for the last few years, I've been a product growth manager at Facebook with our business partnerships team Outside of work, there's really only so much you can do during COVID lockdowns So I resorted to some new projects and you could probably say I've tortured myself Attempting to assemble half-destroyed jungle gyms or installing attic insulation Attempting to drywall or even sadly torturing my children attempting to have them wakeboard with me Though as frightened as he looks, I can assure you no child was hurt in the process He left feeling the experience and his words was awesome. I wish I could say the same about my other projects Well getting things kicked off. So let's discuss the customer engagement cycle This is what a normal customer engagement cycle looks like. It's very neat. It looks nice So let's kind of go through a few one example of what this is So let's assume we're an e-commerce store that sells recreational equipment The customer first becomes aware of the e-commerce provider through ads or Expressing a need in a Google search and finds them in a result The customer then considers the e-commerce equipment provider among others as well Then proceeds to purchase the products from the equipment provider Chooses Those products are then fulfilled and delivered to the customer The customer then engages with that equipment looks for assembly instructions connects with support To resolve issues or returns the product as well If please with that engagement then the customer shares their experience with about that product and with others is Made aware of other equipment and so on looks fairly neat looks very nice and sequential But the reality is much different This is really the path to acquisition. It's complex it varies by each person and It doesn't necessarily come from one place to another So consider when you were to make a significant purchase like buying a car You get feedback from your friends. You check current listings for new and used cars You check your budget then you proceed to maybe one or many dealerships negotiate customized weight you get the idea You'll even see that people have caught on to this complex purchasing experience And have created some purchasing apps to cut down on that buying process, but it still comes in a premium Really the holy grail of marketing is often called attribution knowing what marketing channels actually influenced the product acquisition And there's complex models trying to determine that the point is all of these channels and touchpoints matter and depending on your product Some of these will matter more than others, which is why you need to run experiments to understand which is performing best But for simplicity, we'll use this flow which works well enough for understanding consumer and business products Now the reason why it's important to understand all these customer touchpoints as a product manager Is that it greatly affects the experience of the consumer regardless of how well your products are designed How effectively or efficiently you're solving the consumers problem? For example, if they see negative reviews, they'll give you less trust If it takes too long to receive the promised goods or they're damaged, they'll not return as a loyal customer Though this seems simple enough engaging customers through this full cycle. It really is neglected Nearly 88% of marketing budgets go to the top of the funnel or the awareness strategies Most of and most of those people bleed out and newly acquired customers on down to the engagement wide And in fact only 20% of companies spend their marketing across the entire customer lifecycle So that's taking all them through all these stages and then back around So if it's being neglected in their marketing strategies, it's often neglected in product development as well So for any given product you manage there are several teams across a business who are also working to optimize the experience at that stage There are also vendors You'll potentially leverage to deliver those solutions such as if you're an e-commerce a catalog management solution a point is a point of sale system If you're a physical store location and there are also external influences that will touch on the customer's experience as well All of these teams vendors external factors that touch the customer will greatly affect the perception and experience of the product So as a PM you can't manage all of these touch points That is what the whole business you're a part of is doing But you need to understand first of all how all those components play into your product experience Secondly determine the gaps in the market currently in that engagement life cycle Three focus on delivering a solution Which leverages your core competencies and addresses industry gaps And then lastly if possible and especially in your long-term strategy try reducing those dependencies and Bring more of those experiences into your product so they can be within your control And what makes companies very successful comes down to more than just the product interface experience All successful companies need to be proficient in each of these engagement phases But the ones who really rise to the top excel above the competition in one or many of these areas And goes beyond just good product development a few examples of this Apple has an incredibly strong advocacy and loyalty among its users It's also very committed to its brand cohesiveness and it is the most recognizable brand on the planet Even still they advertise more than most other tech companies Google's search Point of acquisition is when you discover and click on a relevant search result As we all know the relevance and speed that they're able to deliver on that is unparalleled For Amazon they didn't dominate the e-commerce space for an amazing online shopping experience It was actually quite dull But they invested heavily in excelling and logistics achieving a new standard of same-day delivery that is really hard to match For Facebook we're all familiar with the news feed which drives continued consumption by optimizing its users The user generated content in a feed to match your interests And for someone like Dropbox they focused on a strong referral program And provided free additional storage for new referrals So switching gears from B to B B to C to B to B Understand some of the nuances between these two sectors But also understand how product management applies in each of these areas the key nuances look out for our first How the needs are defined So in B to C There is a lot of noise and the audience doesn't necessarily match their behaviors with their expressed needs Which is why you need to experiment multiple solutions But for B to B you can actually get that feedback directly and it's more reliable So contacting sales teams or communicating directly with those businesses will provide that clarity on what those needs are Second is identifying and influencing those decision makers So for B to C this is much easier as the person making the decision is often the same user who's converting In B to B. This is definitely more complex The buyer is maybe an executive or manager and is likely not engaged in the product at all Also, the users of the product often represent one or more other roles In a company with their own goals So you need to take those user parties into account, especially how you can influence the buyer off product as well Third is your flexibility for feature releases So for B to C This this audience often responds well to frequent changes and incremental improvements But in the B to B The business user team will have become accustomed to the current version of the product And possibly have built internal processes around this So when releasing a new product version You should batch features and provide the necessary guidance and training to transition them to these new iterations of the product Of course, if there's a bug or an issue those should be resolved immediately Now a fourth bonus one i'll mention that isn't listed here Is also the size and dynamics of the user base you're building for so in B to C You'll often be dealing with a very large user base that is moderately engaged with the product and each additional user Will provide marginal gain from the other last person And the product development will likely focus on this large consumer base Now for B to B you'll have significant variants in terms of the business size and the impact on the product Very often 80 of your business could be coming from like the top 10 enterprise clients Depending on your business strategy, you may focus on a binary one Which is driving more loyalty with that top 10 percent and then driving growth with the other 90 percent Now let's assess this engagement cycle and that B to B space Firstly, as I mentioned before you'll need to consider building for a variety of stakeholders Some of which will engage on and off product and the buyers which often make their decisions will be off product You also will have many other teams which engage with the business outside of your core product development team That includes sales teams, integration teams, customer support, business marketing, legal, so on So you'll need to understand each of these teams goals as well as what the challenges are for those teams in each of these stages So sales will be focused on driving more business support on satisfaction integration on scalability and stability Now let's go through another example of a business analytics product and its interaction at each of those stages At the beginning of the cycle channel marketing and business development teams help drive awareness for your product with potential business users Sales then completes the acquisition with the decision maker Then the technical implementation team will service the new business to integrate their infrastructure into your analytics product At which point the new client can then engage with your analytics product Which may be the first time you as a PM will see the client in this engagement cycle Now if you ignored in your product development all the steps before the onboarded to your analytics solution You will have neglected important factors that will affect their product experience. So for example It's possible the business development and sales teams were selling solutions about your product, which are not accurate or don't even exist Setting up the wrong expectations with the business Also the integration requirements for your product might be so complex Then it takes several quarters to finally get onboarded at which point the user team are completely exhausted or disengaged And then the support team might be dealing with resolving significant bugs and reporting which is hurting your product credibility To be a good PM your job doesn't just start and end with an interface It needs to understand and influence all parts of the business which touch the customer's engagement So also like in the example provided you'll discover there are more dependencies in this cycle The less you have inside your control or in the sphere of influence of your product So let's let's take that last example It's possible you could provide a live demo A live demo tool for sales to accurately reflect the product's capabilities A light version potentially to reduce the integration time Or a debugging interface for users to use when building reports One more example, which is related to my current work on the partnership side of the advertising business Was understanding how these how these interactions made a significant difference in our product design In the digital advertising space the logical assumption is that most Businesses which choose to advertise on publisher sites Namely google and facebook twitter Will go directly to those sites to advertise. So in other words if you wanted to buy google ads You go to google's ad product or buying facebook ads you go to facebook's ad product But upwards to half of all advertising dollars that's including digital advertising are channeled through third parties It's going to be hard to influence the business's advertising decisions on our product interfaces When they will never in fact see it This other half of the advertising business Is going through this audience This visual only shows the top players. There are tens of thousands not included here The first impression for publishers like google and facebook Is that they should just provide accessible tools to end marketers and cut through the noise of this third party exchange But that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the value these third parties provide for more complex marketing implementations Or if there's a lack of resources for the business to manage the marketing themselves This shouldn't come to too much of a surprise even as a p.m. You might white label a third party solution We're building that capability in your product is not part of your core strategy such as adopting a third party chat bot for Providing support So in this industry many businesses would rather focus their resources to their core products or services and leverage a third party And their expertise to deliver their marketing In our particular case facebook was touching many of these partners directly by our relationship management teams But we hadn't created products and solutions Which could programmatically service support and incentivize this third party audience at scale The solutions were as simple as creating a new interface or online tool for the third parties to log on and view It required collaborating with engineering data science marketing sales legal customer support business ops measurement creative service teams to build a holistic program Which could provide scaled education and support for these third parties measurable performance benchmarks to To access additional resources And even live events to drive engagement and advocacy If I was to overlay this engagement cycle for this scenario, you'll see that These stages in the journey all have a middleman that needs to be considered And how best to influence and facilitate those decisions to provide what is needed for the end consumer in this case the advertiser In order to achieve this we needed to partner with those cross-functional teams who are subject matter experts in their domain This is such a critical component of being a successful pm Each of these teams will also have some level of touch points with your audience and their own kpis as well Business education focuses on certification support and response time marketing on sentiment Each of these operating independently to address specific areas of the engagement cycle But not working holistically for that same audience As a pm you have the opportunity to articulate The audience's need across this entire engagement cycle and what solutions would help us better influence The audience's decisions But as a pm you don't actually build anything You also don't get to dictate what those teams do So in this scenario as well as in any other b2b or b2c production solution You help the team of Executors be that engineers marketers service teams Understand the vision of the holistic customer engagement solution So if you've done your job right These supporting teams understand that vision the business requirements Market needs and constraints and are empowered to design and deliver the right solution against those criteria In this in this specific example We needed to think Of our product as a hybrid of journeys combining both digital and human interactions Especially in this case all the decision making on advertising spend was happening offline So that challenged us to think about how we could influence that behavior within our products Which led us to leverage our data science and business operations team to implement a performance Benchmark and an ascending reward system Or in another case working with our sales and marketing teams to have key performers Featured in case studies or spotlights In each of these scenarios the information and tracking was delivered in the product And then that was disseminated offline within the third parties of businesses In other cases third party account management teams Were primarily engaging in our interfaces to discover best practices and also get support Working with our support and education teams we surface both the collateral they needed in their client interactions live support And expert consultations into the same place and in a flow that matched their current work plan Though we may not have had all the bells and whistles of other comparative third party programs We were surprised to see how well this third party audience responded For making this engagement cycle as holistic and as accessible as possible So to wrap it up I want to bring it all together into how these principles play into becoming a great p.m There are a variety of backgrounds in product management space as you can see It came from a finance and marketing sales and then product So some people can become glorified techies whereas others are all about market and positioning Then you have some who are just business analysts Um, and then others are consumer consumer-centric idea powerhouses What makes great product managers is they manage to combine all of these traits together So this includes firstly knowledge You are the central knowledge expert about your audience and can articulate the market needs and the engagement cycle You also understand and define business requirements and existing constraints for those execution teams Secondly is skill So the skill to first synthesize complex processes or systems That includes having an ability to understand how all the touch points connect in a complex user journey Just like what we discussed It can get very complex the whole thing you help disseminate all that information to make that accessible for the greater team You also have an ability to provide clarity on what are the key priorities for the business and what are not What essentially needs to get done and what can get left behind Your communication needs to be frequent and crisp up and down management chains and laterally to cross functional and stakeholder teams And lastly you have the ability to synthesize all these inputs into a simple and actual strategic plan Or sometimes also called a roadmap Lastly, you need to understand. What is your role? As a p.m. You often wear many hats I've written contracts created one-sheeters written code designed interfaces and even sometimes at facebook But that is not the role of the product manager. You are not the executor. You're also not the boss You are the coach You're not the player on the team who's creating the customer experience You bring the guidance and strategy so the team can execute successfully Like a good coach you enable the team to maximize their individual and collective potentials by lighting everybody on a product strategy You have to influence their decisions and get them on board The best way to do this is to make them part of the solution process So giving cross functional teams clear direction On the customer journey the market signals the goals we want to reach and the constraints to getting there You can harness innovative solutions from those subject matter experts who will be executing against that work I first came to that realization Of a team's potential in my early p.m. Days I was sharing with our product engineering team a business users experience and how they were using the data from our product To create an offline visualization. That was a core function to their job With little suggestion on my end on what to build The engineers quickly prototyped a new feature to replicate that offline experience And in our product and it actually ended up being the most engaged feature in the product So understanding where your role starts and ends can multiply your impact and ultimately drive your product success That's all for this webinar. I want to thank you for joining me today And learning more about the product engagement lifecycle