In the technology company, cooperation between many players with different specialities is essential for success in the markets in the face of competition.
Among these cooperations, the one between the “technical point of view” and the “customer market point of view” is central, both points of view including of course the fundamental issue of competitiveness seen simultaneously from the point of view of performance, customer market value and costs.
However, this cooperation is not self-evident, as the initial training, the background and the “mental wiring” may be different. Although the individuals are all willing and feel that they are all serving the same goal, which is to succeed in the market in the face of competition, the desired cooperation can run the risk of turning into a muted struggle for influence or even open conflict.
The frequent case of product definition or improvement
A very common example is around the very definition or improvement of a product: should a function be added or the level of performance improved, or should new services be added and/or the transaction model changed, bearing in mind that each type of decision will have consequences for both value and costs? The answer lies both in technical feasibility, in understanding the improvements in customer value over the competition that the different options would bring, and in analysing their respective costs. The right answer or the right trade-off is impossible without close and cooperative exchanges between technical and marketing people, whatever their location in the company and their job description respectively.
It is not a question of knowing who is right or wrong in the proposed solution, who has the most influence and who wins, but of determining the best compromise between the different possible trade-offs. Just as there are different trade-offs between functions or levels of performance for a given product, there are different trade-offs that include all the dimensions of the customer market and competition.
Facilitating cooperation between the two viewpoints
What actions are likely to facilitate cooperation between the technical and marketing points of view? Some personal opinions from practice are given here.
- Firstly, and this is a prerogative of general management, it is necessary, whatever its level of technicality, to make the marketing point of view exist and to support it within the company, in its various aspects of market/customer research, contribution to decisions and support for implementation. It can be called something else if you don’t want to use the word marketing in a technical world, it can be attached to a strategic department if you don’t want to create a marketing department, but it is imperative that its usefulness is affirmed at the highest level, and that it is allowed to exist and to be heard.
- Secondly, a minimum knowledge of strategy and marketing tools and principles needs to be disseminated to the technical population so that they are better able to understand and take into account these views. Competition against the competition is not limited to a competition of technical performance, although performance is an essential element. Notions of market strategy, product strategy and overall value of the offer, for example, must be taken into account even when making purely technical decisions. Thus, every engineer, because he or she serves common market, product and competition objectives, because even his or her purely technical decisions will have direct consequences on the market, the customers or the competitiveness against the competition, should know, for example, what strategic situations and models are and how to apply to the particular universe of markets, products and technologically advanced offers the basic tools of segmentation, targeting, positioning, marketing mix, customer value and value proposition construction, for example.
- thirdly, the network of essential cooperation around products and services must be organised. This can be done in different ways, but frequently concerns the position of the product manager in the technological world and the way in which he or she must organise and lead his or her network of internal cooperations.
