I keep reading everywhere that ‘this year is the year of the Entrepreneur’ and if it is then that’s fantastic news.  I love working with new businesses as they very rarely have the bad habits and crushing politics that established corporates can have so I’m very happy about it all.  However, if it’s the year of the entrepreneur then it’s surely also the year that everyone talks about Imposter Syndrome as where there’s a budding entrepreneur there’s almost certainly someone suffering from Imposter Syndrome.

Wikipedia describes Imposter Syndrome as “a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be”.

Make sense?  Sound familiar??  I would imagine to a huge amount of people it does so the big question here is: how do you overcome it?  It’s a matter of putting things in perspective.  I don’t think there’s a prescribed answer but there’s a lot of great advice out there when you search for it.  In fact I think the best advice I can give you on this is to definitely do a search on it see what comes up because, not only will you find some excellent articles and recommendations on how to deal with it, you’ll also see that there are literally thousands and thousands of people all feeling the same way, all worried that they’ll get found out too for no reason whatsoever.  If that doesn’t help you get some perspective and see that there’s nothing to fear and you’re fab at what you do I don’t know what will.

I’d welcome advice and links on this subject as it affects so many of us so – all comments greatly appreciated!

Question:            When do you start to launch your solution?

Answer:                 As soon as you can.

Remember you are delivering a solution not just software.  A lot of companies make the mistake that they are purely building software and as soon as the software is ready, then they can release.

But the solution is greater than just the software, it is making sure your business and wrap around services are ready as well. This includes:

• Training materials
• Consultants prepared
• Ordering process tried and tested
• Marketing campaigns understood and ready to action. Advocates ready to help with communication, organise your PR
• Sales enablement complete and sales teams trained
• Support Desk trained and the SLA’s (Service Level agreements) and OLA’s (Operational Level Agreements) are in place
• Software ready. Are you going to trial/pilot?
• Solution feedback mechanisms are in place
• All teams are trained and ready to answer customer queries and evangelise about the solution, using the right value proposition

As soon as you have had the approval for the project to go ahead, and you have secured the budget for development, next step is bringing together your stakeholder group from around the company.  They will help you launch internally and to their peers.

Build a checklist of all the activities and add owners from the stakeholder group.  Have the stakeholders keep you updated with the current progress of their actions, you are not to deliver on their behalf!! The success of the solution will depend on the support of the business, so make sure you have it!

As EdTech companies grow and the nature of technology evolves into the world of SaaS and apps, there’s often confusion around where Product Management should sit in the organisation.

Traditional consumer organisations have had a tendency to consider Product Management in the same arena as Marketing.  However, the danger here is when Marketing is actually ‘Marketing Communications’ (sadly often the case in EdTech) – it means that no-one is involved in defining and delivering the products.

In a lot of Tech companies, the Product Management function tends to be viewed in the technical arena, lumped in with the Development Directorate.  The problem here is that the Product Managers can get tied up in functionality and requirements. They can spend so much time building products that there is no-one engaging the customers to understand their problems; no-one looking ahead and strategising as to what the business needs to do in the future to continue to be successful

To drive the maximum success from a Product Management team, you need to understand exactly what their role is.

A successful Product Management Directorate looks at the needs of the entire business and the entire market.  It’s broadly comprised of three main focuses:

• Product strategy
• Product marketing
• Technical product management

The Product Management Directorate will focus the product management team on the business of building solutions for needs now and into the future.  The team will:

• engage and communicate with existing and potential customers
• articulate and quantify market problems
• create business cases and market requirements documents
• define standard procedures for product delivery and launch
• support the creation of collateral and sales enablement tools
• train the sales teams on the product

Within the EdTech market the truth is: if you want better products in the future, and for the product management team to be held accountable at organisational level, then it must be represented at Board level in its own right.