Refining the Product Vision

One advantage I gained when I went independent for over a year was to consider how to be an effective Product Management leader with a fresh perspective. As a Product Line Manager, it’s very easy to get caught up in the product, the enhancement of various features and dig deep into the technical aspects. All of this is fine, but may overlook opportunities to go beyond the product itself and work with a broader team to build more success in your target markets.

In this post, I’ll discuss an example from my own experiences of how Product Management can be transformed to go beyond the product and create new success stories. In particular, let’s consider an example of refining the product vision and then creating additional marketing tools to support that.

In my last product management role at Dialogic, we had a media gateway product which was doing well in the marketplace, but most of the sales were for the traditional use cases of translating between circuit-based networks based on Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and the newer SIP-based Voice over IP networks. When I did Google lookups for related search words, the presence of our product was much less than I would have expected based on our market performance of being #2 in the market for low density trunking gateways sold to service providers and related customers for several years running.

To address this, I worked with marketing colleagues to build an updated marketing plan. A core element of the plan was to look at use cases and create content which would explain why the use case was important and how the right kind of media gateways could help provide a solution.

For example, SIP Trunking has been a major driver for growth in the Voice over IP market for several years running and is usually tied to the sales of Session Border Controllers (SBCs). With SIP trunking, enterprises communicate with the outside world by connecting from their enterprise campuses to a service provider. Traditionally, service providers made this connection using ISDN trunks, which needed a fair amount of advance setup time to establish. Since SIP trunks run over IP and don’t require dedicated circuits, the time to deployment can be much faster and the price to the enterprise customers are reduced. As a result, the payback time for moving to SIP trunks can be  very fast. But… Yes, it always seems there is a but.

But, in order to make this change, the enterprise needs to either change their existing phone systems so that they are fully IP-based or establish a transition plan. In the latter case, the transition plan needs to enable them to use their existing TDM phone system infrastructure within the enterprise, but still connect to SIP trunks and gain savings in operating expense. This was consistent with industry data which showed that 40% of enterprises still had investments in TDM-based infrastructure. And it turns out that a media gateway which can manage that transition from TDM to SIP could be a valuable part of that strategy.  As a result, we created a white paper which talked about SIP trunking and why Media Gateways were an effective solution for the related TDM to IP use cases. In addition, we updated our marketing collateral on the web and in our product presentations to make sure this SIP Trunking use case was highlighted.

Within weeks after the new content was posted, we started getting much more visibility in our search rankings on the web and many prospects were downloading the new white paper. In turn, we were also hearing about related business opportunities which aligned closely with this refined product vision. We also highlighted the revised strategies in a webinar.

This was just one example of how we expanded the product vision and re-focused the sales team on a broader set of opportunities for this product.

In summary, in this post we reviewed an example of expanding the product vision to highlight an important high growth use case and then implementing related marketing content and tactics to reinforce the vision.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, please leave a comment. If you’d like to explore how similar approaches might benefit your company’s product strategy, you can reach me on LinkedIn .