Three SuperPowers Every Marketer Should Develop

Why Paranoia, Customer Intimacy, and Peripheral Vision are key skills for Product Marketing Management

If you’re going to be in Product Marketing - or in any company leadership position - I’ve found that the same 3 “superpowers” keep recurring in successful careers. These aren’t operational or functional skills per se. Rather, they are persistent perspectives that leaders with insight always keep in the back of their minds.

First, there’s always maintaining a healthy dose of Paranoia.  That is, you haven’t drunk the product Cool-Aide, that your product/company must be the best. Second, there is the requirement for customer closeness and intimacy - knowing your core buyers inside-and-out. Then finally, there is what I call Product Peripheral Vision - understanding your product/service in a greater customer and competitive context.

Embody these, and you’ll always add value to the company, to your product, and to your customers.  

1. A Super-Healthy Sense of Paranoia

Andy Grove - of Intel fame - literally wrote the book: “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.”  In this he famously pointed out that "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction... Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive”.  He narrowed-down this statement to 6 Forces, but in my opinion, a good PMM focuses on the following paranoia:

• Competition - assume they’re always trying to be better than you - and perhaps they already are. Don’t be complacent or simply dismiss the competition. Take them seriously, and always question whether you’re really more compelling to customers.
• Alternatives - your biggest disruption won’t necessarily hit you head-on. Customers always look for alternatives, including “good-enough” solutions that can invisibly displace you.  Always be on the look-out for the closest alternatives customers use… and why.
• Differentiation - while you probably *think* you’re differentiated, you’re likely not (at least, not as much as you think).   Take a cold-hard look at how really different you are from a customer’s perspective, and push to modify your offer as well as your marketing.
• Industry changes - while you’re focused on segment or category “A”, there’s always the possibility that a completely different industry imperative will shift customers to different categories. Be ready to adapt.

2. Super Closeness to the Customer, Customer intimacy

As a marketing leader - ensuring that your product has proper market fit with your target customers, you Must be the SuperPower expert about your customers. And you need to communicate these learnings back into the company, specifically back to marketing, product management, and sales.  

• Know the customer at every level - Know the decision-makers vs. buyers vs. users. The tactical reasons they buy, as well as the strategic business reasons. 
• Why they bought - You’ll need to get inside their heads regarding why they chose your product, how they evaluated it, how they use it - on a daily basis.
• Know Alternatives - Similar to the Paranoia topic above, you’ll need to know what alternative (and competitors) they considered during the process - and *why*. What was attractive to them, how they got the names, whether they’re *still* considering the alternatives.
• Ask the critical question - “How would you feel if you *didn’t* have this product?” The answer will be telling - indicating how well your “fit” is to the customer, how much they value the uniqueness, and how critical your product is to the customer’s outcomes. 
• Intimacy vs. Focus - There are subtle differences between customer intimacy and customer closeness.  Ensure you develop the right insights and relationships so you can serve -- and even better -- anticipate their needs. 

3. Maintaining Super Peripheral Vision

One of the best SuperPowers you can develop as a marketer or businessperson is the ability to see out beyond the myopia of your own product, technology, and even industry segment.  Always be looking for (worrying about?)  adjacencies, routes-to-market, partnerships, and the “Whole Product” aspect of your offering. 

• Think “Whole Product” - That is, partners, ecosystems, channels. Most B2B products simply don’t exist in a vacuum. They are bought with, or through, other technology partners, value-add ecosystems and channels. Every product exists and abuts other products and technologies.  Every decision you make has to take these realities into account.
• Focus on indirect competition / alternatives - The notion of maintaining peripheral vision also applies to alternatives and competition.   What other distant adjacencies are (or will be) intersecting with your own market? Are any of them potential partners - before they become competition? 
• Consider similar (but different) market plays - I always like to think about product and marketing analogies in different markets that either worked or failed… and whether those analogies apply to product /market.  Do they help reframe product positioning? Value propositions? Routes-to-market? 

Got any other suggestions on critical "Super Powers" ? let me know!

Digital Agility Gets a Boost with Identity Management

(A version of this Blog originally published on Auth0 Blogs) 

Apps are becoming componentized and API-based to facilitate reuse and agility; Identity management cloud services will help.

"In today's online-first, intensely competitive environment, creating a monolithic, inflexible CIAM system will quickly put the firm on the path toward extinction." ~ Forrester's Customer-Obsessed IAM Operating Model April 2020

There is an "old-school" view of Identity and Access Management (IAM) that sees it purely as a security requirement for apps and websites. Simply, IAM is there to keep the bad guys out and let the good ones in.

A more progressive view recognizes how IAM helps provide a better level of user convenience and app-level personalization, as well as lower-friction interactions. Plus, it can offer the business better CRM data, a lever for managing data privacy and compliance controls, and (if implemented properly) a consistent context-sensitive security perimeter across all apps/properties.

But there's a third level of benefit of IAM that IT often overlooks: A consistent, flexible IAM foundation can contribute to the firm's overall digital agility.

Here's why: IAM systems have traditionally been embedded into apps and frameworks (think: React, Angular, JS, etc.). Using that approach, each app runs the risk of becoming an IAM silo unto itself. And when it comes time to integrate those apps with other identity-driven systems, the approach can create a massively inflexible infrastructure.

Worse, firms should expect that many of their custom apps will have to work alongside other enterprise apps — e.g., marketing, digital experience, privacy/governance, business systems, and of course, security and analytics. However, the reality is that the logical topology surrounding your IAM system will always be dynamic and distributed — plan for it. The nature of enterprise systems IAM needs to interface with will always change. But when business leaders don't plan a consistent IAM foundation, digital agility will be one of the big losers.

Identity Has Become a Foundational Component of Digital Transformation, IT Agility, and Infrastructure Modernization

Digital transformation initiatives are when progressive software-driven companies shift from rigid, monolithic IT infrastructures and apps into more componentized API-first architectures. These are more easily reassembled/rearchitected and reused (see this great blog about API strategies by Informatica). Component software also means that app updating can be done on a piece-part basis, without requiring the entire application to be retested and QA'd.

When shifting to an API-based strategy, there is often a simultaneous replatforming initiative for some (or all) of the components, shifting them into the cloud and/or onto serverless cloud platforms. These initiatives also help businesses respond more rapidly to fast-moving opportunities and/or competitive issues. The growth of API-first architectures and use of serverless execution platforms has been nearly geometric during the past few years.

Distributed and loosely coupled

In software design, a loosely coupled system is one where each component has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the other components. This could include the coupling of software classes, interfaces, data, and other SaaS services. Loose coupling is important because it allows you to rearchitect specific components in the future with minimal impact to other components.

Often, one of the loosely-coupled underpinning layers of these digital transformation initiatives is security and access management — certainly found at the application level, but also even at the component level. With potentially millions of such API-first distributed components being deployed, each component, app, and composite application must be reliably and consistently secured, embracing the capacity to be identity-aware.

Decoupling identity from the application and/or app component means avoiding inconsistent IAM stores/DBs, yet ensuring a consistent privacy model, reliable access, and a strong security perimeter.

An Identity-Centric Point-of-View: 

Your Identity Management functions should be componentized, programmable, and cloud-neutral

Many of today's IAM technologies are embedded in programming frameworks and therefore hardwired to apps. I believe these IAM functions must — and will — become decoupled from the apps they support. Decoupling IAM helps release customers from the bonds of vertical integration stacks that are inherently siloed, brittle, and fundamentally non-optimized for the complexity of today's identity needs.

IAM functions should also be released from mega-cloud lock-in. The market requires an IAM foundation that's open and customizable — rather than a foundation that binds customers to an Amazon, Azure, or Google agenda.

This matters because an IAM approach that's API-first, application-decoupled, and componentized also allows developers and their enterprises to rearchitect and dynamically deploy new updates, features, and functionality without disrupting the underlying identity infrastructure. That results in the ability to respond to business conditions and competitive situations more quickly and reliably.

“Using microservices in containers has also allowed us greater flexibility when deploying IAM solutions. Typically IAM solutions have featured larger, more monolithic services that are harder to scale and upgrade. Microservices allow the structuring of an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. This architecture then enables the continuous deployment of complex applications, as it is less complicated to update smaller services incrementally than larger ones. It also allows the scaling of particular components (e.g. databases, LDAP servers, etc.) to meet demand as required.”  ~ IAM DevOps in Capgemini, Terence Stamp

Some closing recommendations

For executives, technology agility equates to business agility. Work with your technical colleagues to understand what IAM underpinnings you currently have and how those will need to evolve to work alongside adjacent systems for marketing, digital experience, privacy/governance, business systems, and security and analytics. Urge technical partners to: 

• Seek to componentize applications, and underpin them with a consistent IAM infrastructure. Treat IAM as a reusable component service the way you use other reusable SaaS services (e.g., payments, databases).
• Measure and justify the benefits of IAM across your infrastructure. Collaborate with colleagues in security, customer experience, web, and CRM teams; assess where identity can yield quantifiable top-line revenue and competitiveness.
• Prioritize customer outcomes within digital transformation initiatives. Digital agility and transformation program outcomes must be driven by a focus on responsiveness to customer needs and expectations. Identity management foundations not only contribute to a consistent/reusable infrastructure but also help build a comprehensive customer 360°.
• Neutralize cloud vendor lock-in risk with an independent, cloud-neutral IAM system. Long-term agility and avoidance of high switching costs are further enabled by using an independent, cloud-neutral IAM service.

For technologists, it's time to apply IAM like other loosely-coupled SaaS services you commonly use. For example: 

• Use familiar API and microservices principles when adding IAM into your platform. Select a reusable, easily-integrated cloud IAM service that's compatible with a broad set of programming languages and frameworks.
• Reduce IAM time to production; simplify app reuse. Get your team started quickly with a solution offering SDKs, quickstarts, and implementation guidance.
• Consolidate user IAM systems and databases. Use an IAM solution offering a range of migration tools and customer DB connections to fit the user migration scenario best for you.