Reposting since I fat-thumbed the delete button on Venkat’s comment:
“Grabowski’s notion of marketing is actually much broader than market research and requirements/specs. The key is to orient around Drucker’s idea that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.” The Steve Blank lean startup crowd almost got it right when they framed it as “customer development” in parallel to “product development” and focusing on pioneering customers who are already improvising solutions similar to your product. But it’s much more than that. You don’t want to be “customer-driven” and focus on who the customer IS. You want to create a new archetype enabled by the product for the customer to BECOME. The urgent customer will always ask for a “faster horse” and you have to transform that into the specs of “automobile.” This is more than an act of attentive listening. It’s an act of creative psychoanalysis and mind-shaping. So the “marketing” in Grabowski’s sense has to prepare the ground by creating a want that only your future product can fill. “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”
This is the single most important piece I've read on what is wrong with higher ed right now -- not the politics of the faculty but the rigid mindset of administration that is promising "increasing returns" on investment. Too many universities are now path-dependent on "returns" rather than education. I am seeing good universities fail with this bad strategy already.
Universities are in a tough position. Wage growth outstrips labor productivity growth in that whole sector AFAIK. The default response is to accelerate down the existing path in order to increase rate-of-return. You have to beat the Baumol Effect somehow. That's the quickest win, but then your switching costs go up *even faster*.
Obviously this looks like a structural problem at the macroeconomic level, but do you think if it's a cultural problem at the level of the university?
I'm only adjacent to the sector but I imagine that administrations' rigid mindsets are rooted in intense risk aversion. I bet if you surveyed employees, they would rather go down with their ship while staying the course than crash the ship trying to execute a change in bearing...
Quality content absorbed rather than quantity metrics explored, to offer lifelong value vs metrics that carry the ball to different goal posts. Your passion for education is inspiring.
"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad. Marketing allows you to “fail” a bad product before making it. Perfect never taught anyone, but there are cheap ways to be imperfect, and then there are expensive ways to be imperfect."
Love this part. And fully agree. As my co-founder and I discovered, the best way to test demand for a product is to get the idea out in front of an audience and see if anybody cared. In all the cases where we loved the idea and had much better versions of a product lined up in our head, it didn't matter if people weren't interested in the most basic version.
You know in a way the dominance of agile in the software is a sergo spoon is really just another way of conducting marketing in a more tightly coupled and integrated fashion. Thanks for sharing. Will share chess thoughts below
Yes for sure, I agree about the tighter coupling and integration. That said, it's still not necessarily Grabowskian. Agile focuses on meeting the needs of existing customers (even if they're early adopters) rather than creating a whole new segment of customers that didn't exist before – for anyone. Deep marketing is about giving people a *new* archetype that they want to become
Perhaps the extrovert friendly “marketing” should be rebranded as “requirement gathering” to encourage more introverts to adopt the 1:1 ratio for successful engineering projects?
100% – basically the same thing, but should also include discovering stuff like willingess to pay. Also depends if the introvert is an engineer or not. Calling it market research might help them course correct more towards talking to the right people if they're an engineer type. Calling it requirements gathering might help a less technical person pay attention to the technical specs that are being brought up.
Reposting since I fat-thumbed the delete button on Venkat’s comment:
“Grabowski’s notion of marketing is actually much broader than market research and requirements/specs. The key is to orient around Drucker’s idea that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.” The Steve Blank lean startup crowd almost got it right when they framed it as “customer development” in parallel to “product development” and focusing on pioneering customers who are already improvising solutions similar to your product. But it’s much more than that. You don’t want to be “customer-driven” and focus on who the customer IS. You want to create a new archetype enabled by the product for the customer to BECOME. The urgent customer will always ask for a “faster horse” and you have to transform that into the specs of “automobile.” This is more than an act of attentive listening. It’s an act of creative psychoanalysis and mind-shaping. So the “marketing” in Grabowski’s sense has to prepare the ground by creating a want that only your future product can fill. “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”
Creating customers feels like Main Character work vs the technical NPC roles of marketing and requirement gathering.
I suppose this can also be achieved through extending time horizons at the cost of lower momentum and more challenging fund raising environment.
This is the single most important piece I've read on what is wrong with higher ed right now -- not the politics of the faculty but the rigid mindset of administration that is promising "increasing returns" on investment. Too many universities are now path-dependent on "returns" rather than education. I am seeing good universities fail with this bad strategy already.
Universities are in a tough position. Wage growth outstrips labor productivity growth in that whole sector AFAIK. The default response is to accelerate down the existing path in order to increase rate-of-return. You have to beat the Baumol Effect somehow. That's the quickest win, but then your switching costs go up *even faster*.
Obviously this looks like a structural problem at the macroeconomic level, but do you think if it's a cultural problem at the level of the university?
I'm only adjacent to the sector but I imagine that administrations' rigid mindsets are rooted in intense risk aversion. I bet if you surveyed employees, they would rather go down with their ship while staying the course than crash the ship trying to execute a change in bearing...
Quality content absorbed rather than quantity metrics explored, to offer lifelong value vs metrics that carry the ball to different goal posts. Your passion for education is inspiring.
"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad. Marketing allows you to “fail” a bad product before making it. Perfect never taught anyone, but there are cheap ways to be imperfect, and then there are expensive ways to be imperfect."
Love this part. And fully agree. As my co-founder and I discovered, the best way to test demand for a product is to get the idea out in front of an audience and see if anybody cared. In all the cases where we loved the idea and had much better versions of a product lined up in our head, it didn't matter if people weren't interested in the most basic version.
You know in a way the dominance of agile in the software is a sergo spoon is really just another way of conducting marketing in a more tightly coupled and integrated fashion. Thanks for sharing. Will share chess thoughts below
Yes for sure, I agree about the tighter coupling and integration. That said, it's still not necessarily Grabowskian. Agile focuses on meeting the needs of existing customers (even if they're early adopters) rather than creating a whole new segment of customers that didn't exist before – for anyone. Deep marketing is about giving people a *new* archetype that they want to become
10000000%
Bishop d5? That seems practical though perhaps not as cutting and clever as usually is the case for one of these chess puzzles
Perhaps the extrovert friendly “marketing” should be rebranded as “requirement gathering” to encourage more introverts to adopt the 1:1 ratio for successful engineering projects?
100% – basically the same thing, but should also include discovering stuff like willingess to pay. Also depends if the introvert is an engineer or not. Calling it market research might help them course correct more towards talking to the right people if they're an engineer type. Calling it requirements gathering might help a less technical person pay attention to the technical specs that are being brought up.
Check out Venkat’s comment here. Useful nuance to your point