Top athletes duke it out to outperform their opponents; usually only winning by a slim margin. That margin is what matters, and part of having a competitive edge means having high-value information on what your competitors are doing. Crayon offers competitive intelligence and product marketing to its customers, and Erica Jenkins, their Chief Product Officer, shares that doing this well requires great communication.

Main Takeaways

• Data Insight Helps Create Magical Products: There are a million different problems and a million different software products that could help solve them, but resources are limited. Using data to help determine where the needs are greatest can help you as a product leader to guide your team towards the most profitable product solutions. 
• You Need to Repeat Yourself: Some would say repeating yourself, even often, is necessary. Repetition helps other people remember important information and act correspondingly if acting is required. For Erica, rephrasing her ideas is a way to know if her message is being communicated correctly. 
• You Need to Spell It Out: Don’t assume that just because the product you’ve built looks shiny and seems intuitive, people will readily understand how to use it. Even if it is painstakingly user-friendly, it never hurts to spell things out. Take advantage of creating walk-through tutorials for your products. It creates more value for your customers and highlights the features of the product.

For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.

Article

Top athletes duke it out to outperform their opponents; usually only winning by a slim margin. That margin is what matters, and part of having a competitive edge means having high-value information. Crayon offers competitive intelligence and product marketing to its customers, and Erica Jenkins, their Chief Product Officer, shared that doing this well requires great communication.

“If I could give advice to anybody who’s trying to break into product and it’s something new,” Jenkins said. “Don’t be scared of it, but you gotta be hungry. You gotta teach yourself a little bit. You’ve gotta be curious if you don’t know the answer. Don’t be ashamed to ask questions. I have engineer counterparts that I share information with them. They share information back and truly, product success comes down to being a rock, solid, transparent communicator. Different stakeholders have to hear different things. You need to tell it slightly different ways so that they can understand it. If they’re not technical or if they are technical, they need to know enough of the details without getting worried and knowing every reason and rationale of how it got built. It’s all about context and communication and that’s the secret to product success.”

Jenkins didn’t start in the product-arena, however. She was a real estate agent who was an early adopter of utilizing tools like YouTube to market her business. The marketing she was doing for her real estate business gradually evolved into the idea for a new software product. She had lunch with Expion founder Peter Heffring to share her idea, and see if there could be a solution.

“I said, ‘“Listen, if we could build a software that would aggregate this information and if you could pull all the comments back [to one place,] I’d pay money. Because that would save me a ton of time.’” “That was on a Friday,” Jenkins said “Peter had never used social media at that point in time. [Nevertheless] by Monday, he called because he had built a CRM system that [could do this] that he sold for a large sum of money.”

Peter asked her to join his team, and she ultimately became the SVP of Product Management. Even though she wasn’t as technical as her peers, she had a different advantage. 

“I knew Facebook inside and out,” Jenkins said. “I knew Instagram inside and out; [that is, I knew] the backend of them. I knew the business.”

In her current role, Jenkins knows the tools that she needs in order to get the job done. She was specific about a few of her favorites. 

“When it comes to customer usage, [you need] an app, or a walk [through] type of guided tutorial within your product that helps drive adoption,” Jenkins said “You also need to have [tools that measure] usage, whether it’s a Heap or a Pendo. [With them] you’re able to actually look for user patterns. That’s [getting] back to that data-driven [concept]. You could build an entire management system [acting as] kind of an action log. You’d like to be able to figure out what people are doing.”

It’s always great to hear a specific use case to get a better understanding of why having relevant data and being able to interpret it is so important. 

“You have to put data behind every single thing you build,” Jenkins said. “Great example: [imagine a] customer says, ‘I need more emails.’ ‘Okay. Do you really? Because your workforce is actually spending time in Slack these days or spending time in Teams.’…Using data to try to inform why we’re doing things is paramount to any product success; not just, ‘It looks really sexy.’” 

To hear more about how Crayon is helping their clients understand their customers better, check out the full episode of IT Visionaries! 

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