People who are really, really good at Marketing look at the world in a way which is vastly different than a general consumer of marketing (most people). The same can be said of designers - the way they look at and perceive the world is unique. Now think about the role of Product Managers at your organization. Do they understand Marketing and Design? Are they able to accurately take in and prioritize these stakeholder needs?

Now hold that thought for a moment.

Have you ever gone in to a room full of executives with a carefully laid out roadmap and see it blown up by a sales, finance or operations leadership? If that has not happened to you yet, it will. Usually, when a roadmap is blown up, it is because of a HPPO (pronounced like "Hippos" and it stands for Highest Paid Persons Opinion). These are exactly what they sound like - they are opinions of executives. When those opinions intersect a proposed roadmap, often things can "blow up" ... Product Managers walk away from these encounters with a pile of new work to do and, often, an ego that is black and blue.

Back to marketing and design. These are two areas which I find often clash with HPPOs from areas like Sales, Operations and Finance. Something a product manager takes as a basic understanding of how to run a product may be understood in a very different way from an executive who is 20+ years in to their career and respective field.

It is very important to remember that these opinions are generally not wrong. What it means is you have a very successful person providing you with a complex analysis, reflected in an opinion, usually in the span of minutes. If these are trustworthy executives, that analysis includes information which you are not privy to at the time. If the executives are patient, hopefully they will take the time to explain their reasoning to you - give you that insight which helps you to understand their thinking. Maybe they say to you "some other things are happening right now which mean we shouldn't be investing in that area." They can't tell you what is happening, but now you know that some systemic change is occurring which would make R&D investment in this area a waste of money. End of discussion, you can move on. Maybe they tell you "another business unit is not performing well right now and so we have to make tactical trade offs. I understand these strategic objectives will be critical 9 to 12 months from now, but the business needs us to do focus on just the next two quarters." Again, you now know that finances may be changing in 9 to 12 months so the executive is choosing to forgo long-term investment for short-term returns.

Sometimes HPPOs are not from trustworthy sources. Sometimes they are for a political or personal agenda. Those are the hardest to accept, as you want what is best for your product. Seeing value decreased for reasons which don't return value to shareholders or subscribe to the company's mission statements can turn the stomach of the most passionate and hard working product managers. I've seen extremely talented product leaders leave for exactly these kinds of reasons.

If you don't know about it, take a look at Wikipedia's page on the Kano innovation model.

This model is now over 25 years old. Created before the Internet, before Agile, before software really had graphics even. Like Lean principles, it is an extremely powerful tool which is the source of many derived methodologies.

Why do I mention this? If I go back to Marketing and Design and the situation of a roadmap review by executives, Kano can give you a basis for defending and changing the minds of HPPOs who would otherwise change your priorities. You can use the principles of things like Basic Needs to explain "such and such an activity, while it does not appear to improve sales, has actually been defined by this market as a basic need." Or when thinking about long-term innovation, you can say things like "the lead time on this innovation is 12 months if we build it, 6 months if we acquire it. I believe it will be a basic product need in 18 months, so we have 6 months left to make a decision. After that, we should assume market share will be lowered.If we invest now, we can be sure not to lose market share, and may even have the possibility to gain market share from these efforts."

In the area of Design, styles go through cycles of popularity. If your software looks old, it will be perceived that way and the UI can actually be a feature which is a "Must Be", instead of the "Indifferent Quality" which a lot of Operations and Finance executives think it might be.

In the area of Marketing, I generally think "the Story is everything". They are looking for "Attractive Quality" and "Reverse Quality" items from competitors, or features you create, which they can study and exploit. For example, a HPPO may be one-sided in the case of a "Reverse Quality" feature conflict. "Why should we spend huge amounts of money to have a wizard to do this task when it only saves our customers 2 hours? Take that off." What that person has just done, unknowingly, is cancel a "Reverse Quality" feature which kills an entire marketing motion, and a percentage of possible sales. If your explanation for the feature described two buyer or influencer persona types, and showed that you exclude a persona without this feature set, then the HPPO from that executive might be quite different.

In extreme cases, such as startups or product turnarounds, Kano can become very difficult. More on that in a separate entry.