Using Old Technology to Win Product Battles

Newer, faster, shinier - these are all things that every product manager wants their product to be. Our hearts are filled with product lust when we see other products, in our space or not, that have the latest & greatest bells and whistles. Oh if only our product could have that cool new technology also. Hang on a minute, it turns out that our products might actually be more successful if they don't have that cool new technology...

Life Support For Products

If we can get over that new technology lust thing, then perhaps we can talk rationally about this. It turns out that if you really want to help your company's bottom line, then what your product might really need is incremental innovation, not revolutionary innovation.

I'm not a dreamer - I know that VHS tapes, typewriters, and CRT televisions are not going to be making a sudden comeback anytime soon. The harsh, cold reality is that the technology that your product is based on is eventually going to up and die one day. A product manager's job is to realize this and to attempt to push that day off into the future as far as he / she possibly can.

Harvard's Dr. Mary Tripsas has looked into just how this can be done. She believes that product managers can work to proactively manage the innovation endgame.

What this means for your product is that continuing improvements to extend the life of its technology, particularly once you realize just how attractive the profit margins on the old technology are, can be a wise business decision - and not necessarily a reflection of narrow-mindedness of a product manager who is unwilling to see the future.

Making The Technology Jump - Or Not

Ultimately a product manger is responsible for the success of his / her product. When it comes to the technology that the product is build using, the product manager's #1 goal has to be to find ways to extend the life of the product while still continuing to make the maximum amount of profit.

As a new technology arrives on the scene, the product manager needs to keep the old product alive long enough that the company can design, develop, and launch new products that contain the new technologies. The key is to finding out HOW to go about doing this.

Customers Come First

The secret to knowing how best to time your jump to a new technology is to watch your customers. Our customers come in all shapes and sizes and they all have different levels of tolerance for dealing with the risk that new technologies can bring to the table.

What you need to realize as a product manager is that your customers are all going to be moving at different speeds. Sure, some will start asking about a new technology the first time that they read about it in a trade rag; however, the vast majority of your customers are more focused on running their business than what technology your product is built on.

Generally, adopting a product that is built using new technology will require a little or a lot of investment on your customer's part in order to be able to support the new technology. The larger the investment, the longer most of your customers will want to put off making it.

How Product Mangers Can Balance Both Worlds

It is the responsibility of the product manager to come up with ways that your customers can gradually move into the future using new technologies on their own schedule.

One way to do this is to borrow ideas from the new technology and start to incorporate them into the existing old technology product in order to extend its life. An example of this would be the Toyota Prius. It's really a gasoline car that has a battery that it can use some of the time. The world is not quite ready for an all electric car and so by adding new technology to the type of car that we already have we will be able to get a little closer to the future.

Old products can also be used to create a bridge that will allow customers to travel to the future. These types of products combine elements of both old and new technologies. I own a great example of this type of product: a hybrid VCR / DVD player. As DVD players started to take over the market, I was hesitant to get one because of the enormous investment in children's movies on VHS tape that I had made. However, the VHS / DVD combo player was the perfect solution for me - I could continue to play my VHS tapes while at the same time I could start to buy DVDs.

Final Thoughts

Product Managers don't have to rush to incorporate every new technology into their products. Instead, understand your customer and learn when THEY need new technologies to be made available to them.

In the end, a product manager needs to keep a careful balance between the technologies that his / her product currently uses and the new technologies that are arriving on the scene. Your career and the ultimate success of your company depends on the success of new products, but they have to be funded by making keeping your current products successful.

Don't think of your older products as being so-called "cash cows" that exist to be milked of their profits until they can be discarded. Instead, view them as stepping stones to future products that should be maintained and upgraded for as long as is reasonable in order to maximize profits while at the same time buying the firm time to get products that use the new technology right.

Product managers who can balance the arrive of new technology with extending the life of products that use older technology will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Dr. Jim Anderson
http://www.TheAccidentalPM.com

Dr. Jim Anderson has been a product manger at small start-ups as well as at some of the world's largest IT shops. Dr. Anderson realizes that for a product to be successful, it takes an entire company working together. He'll share his insights and guidance on how to make your products a fantastic success.

Subscribe to the FREE Accidental Product Manager newsletter to get the information that you need to have a successful product and a successful career. Go here to to get your free subscription: http://tinyurl.com/p4ru9d

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Switch Scenarios Dynamically using Slicers

Slicers are my new favorite feature in Excel. Introduced in Excel 2010, Slicers are like visual filters.

A simple example of slicers:

Let us say you have a sales report (pivot) for multiple salespersons. Since you want to show the report by one person at a time, you used report filters in pivot tables to display this. But you find that switching between regions is a pain using the report filter.

Enter slicers.

Now, you can just click the region name to show the report for that region, like this:

Using Slicers to Switch between Scenarios Dynamically:

Now, we can use slicers creatively to make an interactive scenario manager in Excel, some thing like this:

This technique gives the same outcome as the Display and Select Scenarios using VBA article, but easier to implement

How to use slicers to switch between scenarios?

Step 1: Set up various scenarios in a table

You need to define various scenarios in a table, like this:

Step 2: Create a pivot table from your scenario data

Select the table you created in step 1 and insert a pivot table. Use variable name as row label and variable value in value field area.

Step 3: Insert a slicer for the scenarios

Select anywhere inside the pivot. Now, from options tab, click on Insert Slicer button. Click on Scenarios field to insert a slicer.

Step 4: Create your model, in our case a break-even model

I will skip the explanation of model creation as that is not relevant here.

Once the model is set up, just refer to the pivot table for each of the variable values.

Step 5: Move slicer to Model

Go to the pivot table worksheet and Select the slicer, click CTRL+X to cut it.

Go back to your model worksheet and paste the slicer.

Step 6: Format the slicer

Excel slicers by default show an option to remove the filtered slicer. You can get rid of this button by,

1) Right click on the slicer

2) Go to slicer settings

3) Un-check Display Header option

See aside.

Step 7: Use the slicer to interactively switch scenarios

That is all, our smart scenario switching slicer is ready. Now, you can extend this in many ways. For example, you can write some clever formulas to handle selection of multiple slicers. You can compare between one scenario and another when more than one option is chosen from the slicer. So much more is possible. But I will let your imagination run wild.

Download Example Excel File:

I have made a simple example to demonstrate this technique.

Please download the file and open it in Excel 2010.

Examine the worksheets “Scenario Pivot” and “Model” to understand how the slicer is setup and how this works.

Do you slice?

As I said, Slicers are my new favorite feature in Excel. I have been using them as much as possible because they are simple to use and very powerful.

What about you? Do you slice often? What is your experience like? Please share your ideas and tips using comments.

More examples on Slicers & Pivot Tables:

1) Creating a Dynamic Dashboard in Excel using Slicers

2) Creating a Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table Report Filters

3) Remove Duplicates and Sort a list using Pivot Tables

4) More on Pivot Tables & Modeling

Generated by BlogIt

BlogIt - Auto Blogging Software for YOU!

Comparing Lists of Values in Excel using Array Formulas

Last week, we had a home work on Calculating Donation Summaries using Excel Formulas. This is a good case where array formulas can help us. So today, we will learn how we can use Array Formulas to compare lists of values and calculate summaries. Towards the end of this post, you can see a video that explains the solution to Donation Summary Calculation problem.

Comparing List of Values – Different Scenarios

There are 2 scenarios when we compare lists of values.

1. Comparing a list of values with a single value (or condition)


2. Comparing a list of values against another list (array comparison)

Comparing a list of values with a single value (or condition):

This is the most common and easiest comparison. Examples of this are – count of all values > 20, sum of values between 5 and 23, count of employees in purchasing department etc.

We have built in formulas in Excel to help us do this easily.

Formula	What it does?
COUNTIF	Counts all the values in a range that meet a criteria. Example: COUNTIF(A1:A10,”>10″) Count of all values in A1:A10 more than 10  Help
SUMIF	Sums all the values in a range that meet a criteria Example: SUMIF(A1:A10,”>10″,B1:B10) Sum of all values in B1:B10 where corresponding value in A1:A10 is more than 10  Help
COUNTIFS*	Counts all the values in a range that meet multiple criterion Example: COUNTIFS(employees, “a*”,departments, “Purchasing”) Counts the number of employees in Purchasing department whose name starts with letter a.  Help
SUMIFS*	Sums all the values in a range that meet multiple criterion Example: SUMIFS(salaries, employees, “a*”,departments, “Purchasing”) Sums up the salary of employees in Purchasing department whose name starts with letter a.  Help
SUMPRODUCT	Gives the sum of product of various lists. This formulas is very robust and can be used to compare lists and check against multiple conditions Example: SUMPRODUCT(salaries, departments=”Purchasing”, join_date>datevalue(“1-May-2009″),join_date<=datevalue(“1-May-2011″)) Sums up the salary of employees in Purchasing department who joined between 1-May-2009 and 1-May-2011.  Help
AVERAGEIF*	Average of all the values in a range that meet a criteria Example: AVERAGEIF(A1:A10,”>10″,B1:B10) Average of all values in B1:B10 where corresponding value in A1:A10 is more than 10
AVERAGEIFS*	Average of all the values in a range that meet multiple criteria Example: AVERAGEIFS(salaries, employees, “a*”,departments, “Purchasing”) Average salary of employees in Purchasing department whose name starts with letter a.

* these formulas do not work in Excel 2003 or earlier versions.

Comparing a list of values with another list (array compare):

This is where it gets interesting. You have 2 lists of values, like in our last week’s problem. And you want to calculate some value, for eg. Sum of all donations where Amount Donated < Amount Pledged.

How do you go about this?

Well, this is where we use Array Formulas.

In the above case, assuming we have amount donated in lstGiven and amount pledged in lstPledged,

We can use the array formula =SUM((lstGiven)*(lstGiven
Note: You must press CTRL+SHIFT+Enter to get this formula work

How does this formula work?

1. The formula checks for lstGiven < lstPledged and returns a bunch of TRUE, FALSE values.


2. When you multiply this with lstGiven, Excel would convert TRUE, FALSE to 1 and 0 and then multiply.


3. Since 0 multiplied by anything would 0, we end up with a bunch of donation values where donated amount is less than pledged amount.


4. Once all the values are there, the SUM would just add them up.

More examples & Illustration:

Look at below image to understand how we can compare lists of values in Excel using Array formulas.

Solution to Donation Summary Calculation Problem:

I have made a video explaining how you can solve the last week’s homework. See it below or on our Youtube Channel.

Download the Excel Workbook for this.

Click here to download the Workbook with partial solution as shown in the video.

Click here to download the solution workbook and play with the formulas to learn more.

Share your tips on Array Formulas

Array formulas are quite powerful and robust. I use them all the time and love to learn more. So please share your tips and ideas using comments. Go!

Learn More about Excel Array Formulas:

• Advanced SUMPRODUCT Queries in Excel


• Calculating Sum of Digits in a Number


• Check if a List is sorted or not using Array Formulas


• Lookup Second Occurrence of a Value in a List


• Find the Second Highest Number in a List that Meets a criteria


• … More Array Formula Examples & Tutorials

Generated by BlogIt

BlogIt - Auto Blogging Software for YOU!