The road to product success is winding and ever-changing. In one lane, customers and market innovations demand faster product introductions. While in the other lane, economic and labor uncertainty tightens resources and moves slowly on launch timelines.
So how can teams add speed and power, while simultaneously reducing resources? Let’s take a lesson from the world of cycling and zero in on the power and efficiency of tandem bikes.
A Cycle Hypothetical
Imagine a scenario where you have two cyclists—Patty the product manager and Matt the marketer. They are each riding their bikes side by side from their factory into the town nearby for lunch. At times, Patty and Matt ride side-by-side, shouting directions to each other about which way to go.
Sometimes, one rider makes a determination that the second implicitly knows to follow. Even when they both know the direction, it is ultimately the strength and stamina of each individual rider that determines how fast and how far the pair can go together.
Both Patty and Matt are pushing the full weight of their bikes, using energy to navigate the terrain, and fighting headwinds separately. Although they try their best, staying together is proving to be difficult, especially when the road gets challenging.
A few days go by and Patty and Matt decide to take a tandem bike to lunch in town instead. While it requires more coordination to properly balance and pedal together, they find that the collaboration is far simpler than riding separately.
Sitting on one bike together, they can chat constantly throughout the ride and easily synchronize their efforts. Since the one tandem frame is lighter than two solo bikes, their combined power gives them a big speed advantage—20% faster according to the British Journal of Sports Medicine. With the tandem bike, Patty and Matt benefit from each other’s strengths. This new streamlined approach results in them making it to lunch faster and far less winded than ever before.
Winning the Race to Customer Adoption
Many lessons can be learned from that hypothetical scenario. New product launches benefit from tandem teams that synchronize manufacturing and marketing within a single product platform to race together for success.
According to Inc’s proven techniques to accelerate product adoption, one of the biggest challenges is just informing customers about the new products. “Coupling a new product with a marketing and awareness campaign is critical. It’s simple: if they don’t know about it, they can’t buy it.”
This begs the question – do marketing teams even know the product? If they know it, do they know it well enough to market it properly?
Too often teams are battling strong headwinds in finding out the right information to successfully market a product. And if they don’t know it, or don’t understand it, they can’t sell it.
Traditional launch cycles give the appearance of coordination, but waste effort, just like the two single riders in our example above. They wait until a product is complete, fully defined, and released for production to start building the marketing campaign and narrative. Then, the handoff of information from manufacturing to marketing is the equivalent of shouting into the wind.
Often, basic specifications are put in a spreadsheet and emailed or loaded into a shared drive. All context around the product is lost. The nuance of what makes the product unique and special is often lost.
Marketers then have little information about target customers, inspiration, intended use, or benefits, so they recreate the wheel. They enter a new customer-facing version of product content into a separate system with descriptive copy, selling attributes, and digital assets.
Riding side-by-side leaves each team to have separate workflows and bear the full weight of data management. When inevitable twists and turns happen product information is often lost because the teams are disconnected.
Companies Should Work In Tandem
Having one single platform provides a significant benefit in the journey of creating a product.
Increased speed: Combined with the time saved on skipping the hunt for product data, marketers also start to craft the customer experience earlier—in conjunction with product development, rather than as an afterthought.
Increased longevity: Customer-facing content is not only developed faster, but the resulting deliverables are richer because they were derived from in-platform contextual collaboration with full visibility to accurate, updated information throughout the entire product lifecycle.
Success over the competition: Working within the same platform allows product teams to access continuous customer feedback tracked by sales, marketing, and service teams. Development teams can therefore improve products and services based on direct customer needs, extending the product-customer relationship.
The digital marketing world is fast-paced and ever-changing. If a company can provide a richer customer experience in a faster fashion it will have a significant advantage over the competition. Running a launch process in tandem is simple when people and products are properly connected. https://converged.propelsoftware.com/events
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jill Mueller,Product Marketing Director at Propel
Jill Mueller is the Product Marketing Director at Propel, where her passion for bringing brands to life drives strategic growth. Her experience in both retail and manufacturing provides a strong balance of marketing, development, and production knowledge. Prior to joining Propel, Jill worked with private-equity-backed firms to identify and execute market growth opportunities, including channel expansion, product category launches, and global supply chain improvements.
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