This episode features CX Insider Rich, a Commercial and Strategy Product Manager, who details his demanding role. He argues that solid process trumps technology and criticizes the industry’s focus on building complex "Swiss Army knives" without ensuring they are consumable and adopted. Rich also highlights the extreme difficulty of building viable business cases amidst the risky, unclear pass-through charging models for AI.

 

Key takeaways:

 

• Process Trumps Technology: Product success relies on having the People, Systems, and Process (PSP) in place, with the process being much more important than the technology itself. Companies must ensure they can sell, support, and bill for a product before taking it to market.

• The Adoption Focus: The industry emphasis must shift away from simply deploying products to ensuring they are adopted and used. Vendors often miss this critical step by focusing solely on the initial sale, building capability without sufficient thought to real-life use.

• The AI Pricing Risk: Current AI models often use pass-through charging, which Rich views as lazy product management. This practice creates an undefined and unacceptable financial risk for businesses, making it nearly impossible to build predictable and justifiable business cases.

• Knowledge Velocity Problem: The exponential speed of technological change (products changing twice a week) creates a knowledge velocity problem and a deficit of genuine experts. Vendors must educate buyers by articulating clear, real-life use cases or scenarios, not just features.

• Keep It Simple: Vendors must stop over-complicating things and focus on clarity and simplicity. Rich notes that if a vendor cannot clearly explain a complex product to him—an experienced product manager—they cannot expect him to successfully explain it to internal stakeholders or customers.