Kim Su Lloyd

I don’t want to forget that there is still a massive issue with plagiarism out there.  Just because the buzz about SOPA has died down, and the social media giants think they have won, the problem is still very real.

I am a fan of Tumblr obviously.  But the flaws baked into its usage perpetuate the ability for people to steal others original works.  This needs to be addressed!

I am only asking people who legitimately re-use excerpts, quotes, and references to original work be behind a solution to this problem.  If you think it is okay to pass off another person’s work as your own, then my plea is falling on deaf ears. 

For every good person in this world, please don’t get on the anti-SOPA box without realizing what you are fighting for.

I have done an infographic illustrating the intent of SOPA, give it a read.

Trying to start your own business is hard enough.  But trying to do it as a mother while recovering from Lasix eye surgery, and with a husband who is traveling for business, and a sick son, makes it even more difficult. 

I woke up with a brainstorm this morning.  A business one, not the kind of brainstorm that wakes you up in a cold sweat with the realization you haven’t spoken to your Dad in months.  That was last week.

Came up with an idea that has to get a lot of moving parts coming together in this perfect storm of execution.  I was extremely excited about it, so wanted to jump on it.  Every minute that goes by in startup world is precious.  So making sure that everything happens efficiently and quickly is so important. 

How did I pull everything together for this brainstorm in one day with everything going on? Here’s what I had to do to juggle the day:

5:00am - Get up to go through my email box to make sure I followup with everyone I am supposed to follow up with.  I like to make sure my email box is “clean” before I start the week.  Makes it easier to keep up with communications on a day-to-day basis.

6:00am - Make sure my daughter is getting ready for school. Middle school requires a lot more prep than elementary school, that is for sure!  I really don’t remember wearing make up every single day of school.  Maybe that’s why I was so unpopular, lol.

6:10am - Collaborate with my coworker in the UK.  Love the schedule!  We get a lot done before most of the east coast is online.  Ran my brainstorm by him (sorry, can’t share the details, I’d have to shoot you).  He loves it, so we figure out a way of getting key stakeholders engaged.

6:40am - Embarrassed to say this, but even though the bus stop is just down the road, my daughter likes to be driven to the bus stop.  She says that walking the 700 feet to the bus is too creepy in the morning during the winter time.  Sigh.

6:45am - Prep for another planning call, this time involving my partner.  I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row on what we needed to do to get his buy-in and this project rolling.  Worked on the “scope”, and list of key collaborators.

7:00am - Determined my son was too sick to go to school.  Had to give him the “Are you faking it?” test.  “You know if you stay home from school today, you can’t play video games and you’ll miss your drum lesson that you love tonight.”  All clear.

7:45am - Conference call with all of us, running idea by cofounder.  Also loves the idea.  Prioritized list of industries, talked about network we needed to tap into, everyone left call with game plan on next steps.

9:00am - Phone call with friend going out of town for 3 weeks while my son is puking and I’m trying to get ready to leave for my post-op appointment.  Felt like a multi-tasking master handling all three things at once.  Friend doesn’t have kids, so although empathized with me, kept chatting, lol.  Love her though!

10:00am - In Doctor’s office waiting for my appointment.  While in the waiting room, sketched out a research template for the brainstorm.  Although I feel great (Lasix is amazing, I should have had it done years ago!), there is still inflammation, so need to go back for another follow up Friday.  Total bummer.

10:45am -  At the grocery store getting Pedialyte and items for my son’s school Valentine party tomorrow.  I am the lead room parent for the party, so I had quite a few things to get.  Luckily I had done most of the organizing the week before, so tomorrow should be easy.

11:15am - Made lunch for son, and put everything away, made sure he was all set.

11:30am - After being offline for a two and a half hours, finally got a chance to transcribe my template into a word document, and then post it to an internal discussion area for comments and feedback.  Also spent time reaching out to my network to get their thoughts on getting involved.  Trying to get two calls for this afternoon to get them working on this project.

12:30pm - Met with our marketing consultant to give her the heads up, encouraged her to finish her current assignment so she could help us with this new one.  Win/win, she gets to work on something way more exciting than what she is doing now, and I get to give her a carrot to getting something done a little quicker. Another side note:  Found out through her that this odd bug my son has seems to be going around the area.  A relief that it’s not something more serious.

1pm - Social media break number 1.  I like to make sure I reserve at least an hour or 2 a day towards social media activities.  I can break it up however I want, but retweeting, blog writing, commenting on other’s posts, responding to direct questions, etc.  All are good.

1:45pm - Background reading for my part in the execution of the brainstorm.  How not to sound like an idiot 101 reading.  As you can see, it doesn’t work all of the time.

2:00pm - Business Development call number 1.  Initiatives are expensive, startups have no money, hence why you need partnerships.  Finding someone to help me with this idea who would also benefit from it.  Ideal synergy for people in my situation.  Luckily, he bought it.  Off to the races!

3:00pm - Business Development call number 2.  Unfortunately, this one wants some money.  Dangling a stage 2 barter in services plus throw in a back scratching offer to sweeten the pot.  Hmmm, going to start the process and see if the ROI is justified.  More work on this one.

3:45pm - Back to the store, son has a food craving that my $300 in grocery money that I spent this weekend was unable to satisfy. 

4:30pm - Filling out a template for the initiative to move the ball down field some more.  Fine-tuning the approach is the order of business over the next couple of days.

5:00pm - Back to social media work.  Block number 2.  Put in another hour of tooling around the web!

6:00pm - Conference call with a potential content creator for the initiative.  Trying to get her buy-in and convince her that this is the greatest idea since sliced bread.  Partial success, this is going to take more than just a single phone call.

7:00pm - Made dinner.  This consisted of “selling” the kids on eating some of the leftovers from this weekend.  Selling includes repackaging the leftovers in some kind of new and exciting way.  I can make fried rice with the leftover rice.  Or those ribs would be great with Jack Daniels BBQ sauce slathered all over them.  Okay, so I got them a couple of bowls of cereal.

7:30pm - Valentine’s Day cards and homework.  Have you ever tried putting a tattoo in a tiny little paper slot?  Luckily I bought a package of 36 valentine’s for 24 kids. 

8:00pm - Need to do a little more work before bed, so it’s guilty pleasure time.  Watching some recorded show while doing some work in the margins.  Normally, that’s a golf tournament.  Watching golf and doing work is very doable.  Anything with a story line is too distracting.  Tonight though, I had recorded the Grammy’s.  Perfect multi-tasking time.

Have to create a strawman project plan for this idea brainstorm.  Without planning too many things can fall through the cracks.  Even if it’s just an excel document or just an email list.  Something is better than nothing.  Also need to start planning for the next day.  Because that’s not the only thing I’m working on.

9:30 - Tell the kids to go to bed for the 3rd time.  Unplug every electronic device, as well as make sure there is no weird glow underneath the pillow from a cell phone.

9:45pm - Bitch, I mean, fill my husband in about everything that happened during the day. 

10:00pm - Write this blog diary. 

10:41 - Good night :)

I was invited to participate as a “Product” mentor by Christine Tate for the upcoming Tech Startup Weekend in Troy, NY the weekend of March 2nd. I wanted to share some thoughts about what I’ll specifically be looking for from the companies participating in this session.

I’m really excited about this opportunity because I think it is brilliant to take an idea from 0 to 60 in a weekend.  Getting the right stakeholders around the table to help get this to happen in a very short amount of time is a starting entrepreneur’s dream!

I just wanted to talk a little bit about what I’ll be looking for from a Product Management viewpoint.  Product is the lifeblood of a new company.  Although this is slanted towards web and software products, very similar strategies can be applied for industrial and high-tech businesses.

1) A Cool Feature Is Not Enough Of A Differentiator

There will be some people who disagree with me on this point.  How many businesses were started because someone was using a product and said, boy, if only it could do this.  In my mind, that’s not good enough to build an entire business that scales and is defensible around.

I once had someone who wanted my advice on their product.  The entire business idea came from the fact that they thought they could build a better feature to handle presenting return flights than Travelocity.  There were a couple of other bells and whistles, but that was the major feature they were hanging their hat on.  What happens when Travelocity builds that feature in?  Or applies their dollars to build out the feature way better than the small startup? 

A cool feature, or a series of bells and whistles is not good enough of a differentiator.  I’m going to follow up with a series of posts highlighting some really brilliant product examples and why.

2) Market Entry vs Nirvana Roadmap

Everyone knows what their ultimate dream is.  But if it were that easy to build, then I doubt you would be trying to build a business around it.

You could get a bunch of VC dollars so you can afford to go dark for a year or two to build a kick ass product that blows everyone away when it is unveiled.  Or, you can think about how to “stage” your product so the early version gets customer dollars in the door as quickly as possible.  Even though it may not be what you ultimately want to build, this strategy does a few things really well:

- Gets customer dollars to fund the growth of the business.

- Allows you to incorporate customer feedback into the early product lifecycle to adapt it accordingly.

- Helps you scale product on the same rate as growing pipeline, building marketing channels, establishing your business and more.

3) Cheap Proof of Concept

For anyone starting a new web business, please do not hire anyone who says that you have to build everything in Java from scratch.  This person should not be leading your product development efforts.   You will spend more time arguing with this person as to why you aren’t seeing any product go out the door, then discussing customer feedback from the field and how that should be addressed in your products or your business process.

What technologies can you use to professionally pull something together to test the product viability.  Most of us have heard the term, Minimum Viable Product.   That’s code word for, “Get something out the door we can sell fast!”.

As soon as you have the dollars, you can parallel build the scaleable, robust platform you truly need to bring your company to the next level.  But if it takes you a year or two to even get on first base, you might as well have never showed up to the game.

One of my favorite examples to this approach is described by 37 Signals, the manufacturers of Basecamp, in their book “Getting Real”.

4) Methodology for Fine-tuning Based on Early Customer Feedback

You need to have a plan to incorporate early customer feedback into your development cycle.  Not as a seperate process, but completely integrated into the build phase.  Every chance I get, I tout Steven Gary Blank’s book, “The Four Steps to Customer Epiphany”.

It completely changed my viewpoint on product management best-practice. 

Also, this slide from Tara Hunt demonstrates what happens when you don’t do this better than any way I can describe.  This is from her slideshare presentation, “The 10 Mistakes I Have Made So You Don’t Have To”.

So my quick set of advice for the companies I will be talking to.  Can’t wait!

I had the honor of being invited to the White House to participate in a discussion and listen to the President and Mrs. Obama speak on the importance of Workplace flexibility and balancing home and work life. Not only was it informative, but it was supremely cool to be there.

The Invite

When I first got the email from Valerie Jarrett, a Senior Adviser to President Obama, I thought it was a complete and utter hoax.  I was pretty impressed with the inventiveness of this particular spammer and how he/she managed to spoof the White House’s email address, who.eop.gov.  I was equally as disappointed at how lax our government had gotten to let this happen.

So instead of my usual auto-delete habit, out of curiosity I emailed this alleged spammer back and asked “Is this a hoax?”. 

I received a response within 30 minutes from a Jenny Kaplan, Deputy Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, assuring me this was not a hoax and that they had heard good things about Bright Hub and thought we would be perfect for this forum.  Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director of Amplifier Ventures, followed up with me to let me know that he had me put on the invite list.  It’s good to know people in high places!

The Event

I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Details on the agenda were very sparse.  As a matter of fact, I only knew what was described in the flexibility forum press release.  Upon arriving at the prescribed entrance of the Eisenhower Executive Office, we went through a brief, but thorough, security process and were shown to the White House press room.

• 1:15 - 2:15 PM Opening session
• Welcome Remarks by Valerie Jarrett
• Remarks by Michelle Obama (the First Lady of the United States)
• Discussion led by Clair Shipman (Senior Correspondent, “Good Morning America”)
• 2:30 - 4:00 PM Discussions on Workplace Flexibility
• 4:25 - 5:00 PM Closing Session
• Remarks by John Berry (Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management)
• Remarks by Barack Obama (President of the United States)

Sitting in the the press room with the White House emblem emblazoned on a royal blue curtain was a pretty exciting feeling.  You see it so often during televised press conferences, that it just seems like background noise.  But when sitting in the room and seeing it first hand, you can’t help but be struck by how powerful all the pomp and circumstance truly is.

Valerie Jarrett did a great job describing why were there.  That very day, The White House had issued their report on Work-Life Balance and The Economics of Workplace Flexibility.  The 100 or so folks invited represented a cross-section of small and large private business, government family policy makers, as well as thought leaders in the country representing low wage, family, women, elderly rights, and workplace productivity.  One of her key messages was that companies that hire and retain women have a healthier bottom line.  In addition, we must do better to leverage work place flexibility as a key to competitive advantage internationally.  Didn’t quite know what she meant at that point, but that’s what I was here to find out.

Next up was the Mrs. Barack Obama herself, Michelle. The last time I saw an her on TV, she was receiving the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award for “The Cutest Couple”. That was less than a week ago, and I was struck at how gracious she sounded in her acceptance speech and how it was pretty awesome that kids around the age from 3-12 also thought she and the President were the bomb. Okay, enough of that, now back to the speech…

In a very straightforward and honest way, she told us about how she and Barack had struggled with balancing their responsibilities to work and family throughout their careers. Michelle Obama felt that if she’s not able to give 120% to both her family and her work, she feels like she is failing. And although they were not as bad off as other families in the same situation with inflexible bosses and no resources, they still struggled and therefore felt the personal importance of this issue. 

A breakthrough for her came when she received a call to interview at a hospital for a senior position. After unsuccessfully scrambling to find a babysitter for their infant daughter, Sasha, Mrs. Obama had to bring her to the interview. The senior guy she was interviewing with at the hospital completely understood, also having a newborn in their household. Needless to say, she got the job and felt a profound gratefulness for that opportunity.

Mrs. Obama closed with the consistent theme. Helping workers balance home and work life does not result in less productivity, but in fact the exact opposite. Increased productivity and healthier bottom lines for businesses.

At the end of the session, we all had to find our escort to take us to the breakout session rooms. Somehow I managed to get wedged in the door after being herded by Secret Service to clear the way for Mrs. Obama’s exit. As Michelle Obama walked by me, I felt awkward sticking out my hand to shake her hand. But she managed to acknowledge my presence with a comforting touch on the shoulder. I tried not to be starstruck but I felt like I had just been blessed by the pope!

The panel led by Claire Shipman was good.  The panelists included: Dr. Christina Romer, Chair, Council of Economic Advisers;  Douglas Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup; Elizabeth Jolly, also of Campbell’s Soup.  Last but not least, Secretary Hilda Solis, U.S. Department of Labor.  We all remember the appointment of Solis?  She made history as the first Hispanic cabinet member.   Solis didn’t have a lot to add to the discussion, so it felt more like she was supposed to be there in some kind of political sense, but really everyone did an excellent job. 

I was most impressed with the folks from Campbell Soup.  Douglas really talked the talk and Elizabeth was there to give her firsthand account of how it had helped her advance her career and also kept her loyalty to Campbell’s strong.  Douglas talked about how creating a high performance and high trust environment in support of workplace flexibility has been the primary contributing factor in improving the growth of sales 10% year over year even throughout a downturn economy.  Pretty impressive for a manufacturing company which in general sees single digit growth in good times and double digit declines in bad times.  The quote I loved from his was, “You can’t expect employees to value your company’s agenda, if you can’t value their agenda”. 

Everything Campbell’s Soup does to accommodate the lifestyle needs of their employees proves out in the numbers as well as an energy at work that is almost, in Conant’s words, ”palpable”.  In a company the size of Campbell Soup’s, 1 for every 12 people are looking for a job.  At Campbell’s that statistic is only 1 in every 23 people.

At that point, we all broke out into groups.  I am not sure how many groups in total there were and what they discussed, I can only speak for the session I attended. It was lead by the Karen Mills, the Small Business Administrator.  She was a great moderator.  Trying to manage a discussion with 20 type A executives and industry representatives was a lot like herding cats, but she did it in style.  The other thing I can tell you, is that I heard from a close friend of mine, that it was streamed live over the internet.  The back of my head was one of the main attractions in the internet broadcast.  Extremely comforting to know :)

Everyone shared their perspectives.  I discussed how important it was for us to retain a competitive advantage by employing freelance workers, but how powerless we felt sometimes in being able to help this budding freelance community in getting benefits and perks.  At that point, Obama’s health care reform came up.  Now this community finally has access to affordable health care!  Great, but that’s only part of the battle.  Left me a little unfulfilled, but you have to realize that sometimes the government can be a bit behind the curve.  The needs of a flexible workforce vs workplace is not the number one agenda and may still be on the horizon in their minds. 

There was a lot of conversation around the best practice that Ari Weinzweig from Zingerman’s employs.  With 550 employees, not a small business in my mind.  But as someone pointed out to me, that may be small business from the government’s perspective.  He touted an “open book” policy, i.e. sharing the financials and metrics of the business with the employees for shared accountability.  He turned the corner by getting the employees to drive the solutions rather than coming up with the solutions to problems and handing them down.  A key area that they invest in is training for their employees. 

My favorite quote of the day was his when he described someone asking him, “Aren’t you afraid you are going to invest in training for someone only to have them leave?”.  His response was “I’m more afraid if I don’t invest in training and they stay”. 

Some other key points made in this discussion were:

• Forcing employees to stay within a 40 hour work week and to take vacation has actually resulted in an Alfred P. Sloan award
• Universal design in workplace flexibility (building it into the foundations of a business) are critical to its success
• Can’t just be a one size fits all solution (manufacturing vs IT)
• Flexibility has to become the norm to compete internationally
• More research and documenting beneficial impact is important
• Infrastructure and tools is important (Broadband for everyone seemed to be a consistent theme touted by the Obama camp)
• A lot of small businesses might be leaving tax credits on the table.  2/3rds are eligible.

The Director of U.S. Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, spoke first.  A prerequisite to the job must have been the skill of being able to keep a smile plastered on your face for at least 15 minutes straight, but he did seem like a respectable guy.  It was great that he spoke, because Berry’s point was that he was charged by President Obama to “make working for the government cool again”.  By putting its recommendations to the test, Berry has a pilot to 400 employees led by the recommendations of new hires and creators of ROWE (Results Only Work Environment),Cali and Jodi. 

By the time President Barack Obama was on stage, I was feeling the affects of a 4:30 wake up call and travel by plane, train, and cab.  But you can’t help but be impressed when you’re less than 10 feet away from the President.  He made it clear that this isn’t just about working parent(s) with kids.  Workers going back for an education, sons and daughters taking care of aging adults, and the elderly in the workforce are also crucial to take into consideration.  He called the family of today the “Juggler” family.  Everything is a high wire act and scheduled down to the last second. 

Obama is trying to break the stigma that being more flexible is equal to less profitable.  In addition, quality of life is important.  A higher quality of life and work balance means a more productive employee.  “Work is what you do, not what you are”.

1)  Workplace Flexibility Works

The numbers are impressive. The Economics of Workplace Flexibility report from the Council of Economic Advisers, along with the testimony of many business owners illustrate the viability of this approach for businesses of all sizes.

The benefits of adopting workplace flexibility arrangements can outweigh the costs by reducing absenteeism, lowering employee turnover and increasing productivity.  There is a belief that the U.S. economy can benefit as a whole by adopting workplace flexibility in order to keep ahead of competition internationally.  The next innovation in achieving labor productivity gains.

2) Freelance communities are still little appreciated

Although flexible workplace was the theme, incorporating the needs and challenges of working with freelance contractors working part-time at home didn’t seem to be prevalent.   Offering flexible hours for this population is not the issue.  How can you cost-effectively give them benefits and not perks?  How can we help deal with isolationism that this population might feel.  Hold on to your hats though, maybe this is next?

3) The Obama administration can get things done

I was impressed with the drive and passion of every member of his administration.  During a time when we are in a war on multiple fronts, the economic crisis, the health care bill, terrorism and lots of other issues, this seems like a small step.  The fact that this effort was tackled as one of his administrations agenda’s shows that President Obama can keep his eye on the big picture, as well as the detail work.

1) How did I pass the background check?

When you realize that you are conscientiously going to be reviewed for a background check, a lot of thoughts go through your mind.  You panic for a second trying to think, did I use the word “dirty bomb” anywhere inadvertently in email?  Do they know about the candy that “accidentally” fell into my pocket at the store when I was 3?  Luckily Big Brother isn’t always watching :)

2)  Am I really a Democrat in Republican clothing?

I have always believed in teaching a man to fish vs giving him fish for a day.  But President Obama’s views really don’t seem that different from mine.  Our New York State government is a mess.  Too many embarrassments and ineffectiveness have been demonstrated at all levels of our state government this past year.  I’m ashamed to call myself a New Yorker right now.  We need to clean house in our State government and start over.  But the federal government gives me some renewed hope, I’ll keep my political views in check for a while.

3) The Obama’s are way cool

When both got up there and spoke, it felt genuine.  Sure, it was a from a teleprompted speech, but you can’t fault them for being prepared!  They weren’t afraid to elude to their marriage troubles with full-time jobs and two children.  They weren’t afraid to tease each other, including a mother-in-law joke done in love by President Obama.  It’s easy to see why they won the cutest couple at the Kid’s Choice Awards!  

Going to the White House rocks.  If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend it.

For every business I am involved with, I plan on taking this initiative to heart. As a matter of fact, I’m building a business around workplace flexibility with Rock The Deadline. Can’t wait until I can say that I’ve made a difference in people’s quality of life while earning an income at the same time.

I’m looking forward to the next discussion and the evolution of work-life balance!

Is your product offering struggling? Having a sound Product Management strategy can help prevent you rebound when things like the economy goes bad, or your market starts shrinking, or customers start leaving.  If you’d like to figure out how to change that, here is some information to help you proactively manage your products better.

Managing Expectations

Product managers seem to always be on the hot seat when things are going poorly.  Whether it is an irate customer, a development team that continuously misses deadlines, or in this case, the economy sucks!

Unfortunately, there is no way to get around that kind of scrutiny, but here are some ideas to help you proactively manage expectations with your business stakeholders and your customers.

Here are some recommendations for Product Managers including end of life Product Management, retiring products, finding new markets for products, and other advice for Product Managers looking for help in this economy.

1) Gather market data

What are similar businesses and products in our industry seeing from a growth/decline perspective?  One of my favorite Product Management resources is a website from a company called Pragmatic Marketing.  They have some great methodologies and training, and doing a quick market analysis is one of them.

In addition, gather sales data for your product offering.  Comparing your data to the current benchmark/industry data will help you determine what options to consider.

2) Come up with options

The next sections of this article describe some of those options.  There are lots of things to take into consideration when choosing some alternatives.  This is keeping with that old business saying, “Don’t just come to me with a problem, tell me what the solution is.”  Obviously these options require a great deal more due diligence, but it will be worth the effort. 

Make sure you vet these options with a couple of people on the product team you can trust.  Your Product marketing manager, your development lead, etc.  Make sure they understand that no decision is being made, that you are just presenting the business with options.

3) Schedule a sit down

Once you have all the appropriate background material and potential courses of action (make sure you are ready to defend your preferred option), meet with your manager to discuss them.  Your manager should be able to get you to the decision point and help you come up with a plan to get it reviewed and approved by the executives and/or senior management (CEO, VP, etc).

4)  Create an internal and external communication plan

Depending on the option you choose, this may or may not be a needed step.  If it’s just more marketing spend, hooray!  If it’s a less popular option, then you will need to carefully message it.  Leverage product marketing and PR to come up with an appropriate communication plan.

Reduce Number of Product Releases

There is a great deal of cost associated with each product release you do.   Whether you are doing a release to your website, creating a downloadable package, or cutting your product to DVD.  Testing, build and configuration management, documentation, and launch marketing are all cost overhead associated with any given release.  By reducing either number of major releases you do a year (from 1 a month to 1 a quarter), or the number of minor releases (from 1 a week to 1 a month) you can realize a great cost savings.

Some of you are probably thinking that you should actually increase the number of releases.  The more upgrades, the more revenue opportunities!  But in a lot of cases, if there is an upgrade cost associated with your release, there are a number of companies using that as a cost-savings measure.  Skip an upgrade and save your company $$$.  In this kind of economy, it is not a given that your past upgrade sales numbers are going to be met.  So make sure you get an idea of how much your key customers are budgeting for upgrades this year before you make a decision.

End of Product Life Management

If you think the time has come to retire the product, then there are a lot of product retirement planing steps to go through.  More than can be discussed in this article.  But here are a few items in a quick checklist for you to go through:

Customer segmentation.  What is the true number of customers affected?  The customers that faithfully upgrade, or at least are on the most current release.  Each segment of customers may require a different retirement planning tactic.  All customers are important, but the ones you really care about the most are the ones that continue to keep current with your technology.

Product team.  Where are they going to go?  Is there another product that everyone can migrate to?  Human Resources is your partner in this effort.  Make sure they are a partner in this process before any communication is leaked.

Customer migration planning.  If you had proprietary data storage, did you provide an easy way for their data to be exported to a standard database format?  If not, a utility might have to be built.  Is there a competitor product they could be using?  Your customers will appreciate your proactiveness here.  Although the product may be defunct, you have a reputation to protect.

Communication and PR.  Always a key component of any major product occurrences.  They can help you smooth the inevitable bumps in the road.

Shift or Increase Marketing Spend

According to a Marketing Sherpa study, marketers start spending more marketing online vs traditional marketing methods.  So The reason is because the return on investment becomes more demonstrable.   38% of marketers surveyed are increasing their online marketing budgets while 36% are decreasing traditional marketing spend.

Also, online publishers are more willing than ever to work with individual clients to reach their marketing goals. With many different custom options and cost per action (CPA) campaign opportunities, it is much easier to justify spend online vs other, less tangible result driven marketing. 

Diversify with a New Market

New market?  This seems like it would be opposite of what should be done in cost saving mode!  Sometimes though, necessity breeds invention.  A perfect example is an injection molding company, TNT EDM, a supplier of small components for cars.  With the state of the automotive industry, they realized they had to find new markets.  TNT discovered that their products could also be used for the airline industry.  According to this NPR report, TNT’s business was comprised of about 25% in aerospace-defense last year; and that by sometime next year, it will be up by 50 percent.

Find a move like that one, and you will definitely be a hero!