When product development and marketing work together

I recently read a blog posting from Seth Godin, that really hit the spot with me. Selling to business (particularly to small business) can be particularly challenging. Not only will they want exceptional value for their investment and ensure low costs, but they are extremely sceptical.

More so than consumers. This can be particularly daunting as it requires the seller to jump through a number of hoops to make the sale. Seth’s blog hit some quite topical areas about how to plan the strategy around this, and how product marketers and product developers need to work together.

In my experience (particularly in software), this is left too late. Developers come up with a great product, and then marketers are told “productise it!”. Turing a ‘thing’ into a ‘product’ is part of the lifecycle, and as a developer, I know the importance of working with the mrketing guys to understand fundamental aspects such as;

• Who is going to be our market?
• How do we reach out them?
• What is the problem we are solving for them?
• How will we provide the “exceptional value” and “low cost” that they are after?

In a recent project, using a Guerrilla development technique where we put together 2 developers, a designer and a product lead (who doubles as a tester), the product lead was a marketer. Apart from being an strongly opinionated and visionary individual, they provided a new perspective on t he product development that  helped getting it to market sooner.