Winners take most of it

This is a departure from the classic ‘Winner takes it all’, when applied to emerging markets that are dominated by an information-intensive age.

The most visible impact of the information age (PDF), according to me, is the levelling of playing field in a trice. And, if you look at history of successful businesses in this age, the ones that make winners out of its customers are the most successful – Microsoft (created a large number of successful companies building Windows apps, a large number of individuals and groups that learnt how to use a PC and evolve in life), eBay (created a new group of people who started businesses and made money from that) etc…

In essence, the company either explicitly or implicitly focused on creating winners out of everyone who was their customer. If they’d focused on taking it all, they may have been quite short-sighted. Imagine if Microsoft did not expose Windows APIs for people to build apps and decided to do it all by itself.

That led me to think that where efficient markets are at work, any player has to get its customers to rally around itself, since it’s net perceived value (NPV?) is the sum total of the value each customer places on it. And, unless the customer feels like a “Winner”, having sided with the ‘perceived winner’, s/he will not place high value on the company, which means, the company’s net perceived value will be low.

So, in the information age, the ‘Winners take most of it’!

Update:

Ravindra, my colleague passed on an interesting comment:

“To Win in a Market, create the Market”

Where does Product Management live?

I’m a fan of Martin Cagan’s Product Management Newsletter and find them quite precise and illustrative. He doesn’t regularize his newsletter as weekly / monthly etc, but writes as he feels like it and has enough meat to offer readers.

In his latest post, he writes about where Product Management should live, in organizations today. Given that Product Management acts as the bridge between market opportunity and company product portfolio, and is a very crucial function contributing to the art of making business decisions, this post comes as a nice awakening to the PM community (including myself).

Martin starts with analysing the prevalent structures in organizations today, where PM is part of Engineering or Marketing. When coupled with Engineering, the PM tends to become a custodian of the PRD versions while coupling it with Marketing, the PM is likely to be more concerned about Product Marketing.

His assertion is, PMs play a role in converting market opportunities into tangible and saleable products & services. This means, having a say in the investment decisions of the company, which implies access to the executive team, without being colored by the influence of technology, delivery pressures or sales & marketing.

Interesting thoughts. I tend to agree with most of these. In my own experience, I’ve observed that in smaller startups and technology product companies, the Product Manager could very well be wearing the Engineering hat too (I did that in my previous job, working with a Technical Architect or a Principal Engineer). I had colleagues who came from programming / development backgrounds and assumed Product Management ownership. We were fairly successful at churning out high quality products for an international customer base.

Nevertheless, as companies grow bigger in size, product efforts become specialized. In such a context, the Product Manager has to be the torch-bearer of the User Experience that can significantly impact the saleability and acceptance of a product, more so in the case of a consumer-targeted product rather than a business-targeted product.