Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing writes the messaging—the facts you want to communicate to customers—and gets the product sold.

But from my experience that’s a grievous mistake. Those are, and should always be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.]

I learned storytelling from Steve Jobs.

I learned product management from Greg Joswiak.

Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower—the superpower of every truly great product manager—is empathy.

He doesn’t just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. He can shake off his deep, geeky knowledge of the product and use it like a beginner, like a regular person. You’d be surprised how many product managers skip that hugely necessary step—listening to their customers, gaining insights, empathizing with their needs, then actually using the product in the real world. But for Joz, it’s the only way.

So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs—except one: battery life.

Nobody wanted their iPod to die in the middle of a flight or as they were DJing a party or going for a run. But as the product evolved from the classic iPod to the iPod Nano, we were in a constant tug-of-war—the smaller and more elegant it became, the less room there was for a battery. But what’s the point of a thousand songs in your pocket if you have to keep taking them out of your pocket to recharge?

One charge had to last days, not hours.

Battery life mattered to customers. And it mattered to Steve Jobs. You couldn’t just come to Steve and say, “The next version of the iPod is going to have a twelve-hour battery instead of fifteen like the last version.” You’d get thrown out of the meeting.

So Joz and I didn’t bring Steve numbers—we brought him customers. Commuters like Sarah only use the iPod going to and from work, students like Tom use it throughout the day, but in short bursts between classes or basketball games.

We created typical customer personas, then walked through the moments in their life when they used their iPods—while jogging, at parties, in the car. And we showed Steve that even if the number engineering gave us was twelve hours, those twelve hours actually lasted most people all week long.

The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.

Joz always, always understood the context and was able to turn it into an effective narrative. It’s how we were able to convince Steve. And reporters. And customers. It’s how we could sell iPods.

With ten countries representing 85 percent of profits, P&G had to focus on winning in those countries. We asked where consumers expected P&G brands and products to be sold, that is, mass merchandisers and discounters, drugstores, and grocery stores. Core became a theme in innovation as well. P&G scientists determined the core technologies that were important across the businesses and focused on those technologies above all others. We wanted to shift from a pure invention mind-set to one of strategic innovation; the goal was innovation that drove the core. Core consumers were a theme too; we pushed businesses to focus on the consumer who matters most, targeting the most attractive consumer segments. Core was the first and most fundamental where-to-play choice—to focus on core brands, geographies, channels, technologies, and consumers as a platform for growth.

The new, blank-sheet-of-paper approach required a different way of thinking about innovation capability. Traditionally, in diapers and elsewhere, the emphasis had been on cutting-edge technology. Here, the R&D teams had a different challenge—to address the specific, differentiated needs of consumers in emerging markets within specific cost parameters. It was a different way of thinking about and using the core innovation capability—but one on which the R&D teams were able to deliver. The result was market leadership in China in a rapidly growing category.

The company introduced Crest Pro-Health, Crest Vivid White, and a set of sensory Crest Expressions offerings, with flavors like cinnamon and vanilla. It took a decade, but Crest was able to reframe the business from toothpaste to oral care, to understand consumer preferences and unmet needs, and to broaden the product line in light of a richer

understanding of industry segments.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.163) “Attractiveness:

Once you have articulated existing and new segments, you must understand the structural attractiveness of the different segments. Other things being equal, a firm would want to play in segments that have higher profit potential based on their structural characteristics. To understand structural attractiveness, we can turn to Mike Porter’s seminal five-forces analysis and ask about the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the degree of rivalry, the threat of new entrants, and the threat of substitutes (figure 7-2).

Porter’s framework is a very useful aid to understanding the profit potential of markets and segments.

One example: The segment of IBM that produced applications for distribution and manufacturing customers set a stretch goal to increase sales by $50 million (from a base of about $100 million). It ran ads and promotions and sales contests, and it hit its target. In the process, it alienated every software company in that segment of the market. Those companies, in turn, stopped recommending our hardware and contributed directly to a $1 billion decline in sales in one of our most popular products.