Product Selection Process Course: The #1 Question

 

Wow! I’ve been overwhelmed with the level of interest that the product management community has been showing in the new Product Selection Process (PSP) course. I’ve been getting a lot of questions sent my way and I’ve been doing my best to get answers back to people as quickly as possible. One question that I’ve been asked over and over again seems to be so important to everyone that I wanted to take just a moment and write a blog post so that I can quickly get the information out to everyone who is interested in it.

The #1 question that I’ve been asked so far is: if the secrets on how to select the correct product that will meet your customer’s needs are made available to all product managers, then won’t my competition start to select the right products just like I’m going to start doing and won’t that mean that we’ll both start to create exactly the same products?

This is a good question. I’ve been spending some time both thinking about this question and talking with a number of my friends who are product managers about it. On the surface it seems like it might be a real issue. However, in our discussions we believe that we’ve come up with some reasons why this may not be that big of a deal.

The first reason has to do with numbers. In the U.S. alone, there are over 90,000 new products introduced every year. Think about the global picture and clearly this number becomes much, much larger. With that many new products out there, there has to a lot of product managers in charge of them. The Accidental Product Manager family is quite large and growing larger every day, but by no means do all product managers belong to this group. What this means for you is that there is a good chance that you may be the only product manager in your market space that has access to the Product Selection Process course. This can give you an unfair advantage!

Another reason that we think that this may not be that big of an issue is because even if your dreaded competition was a member of The Accidental Product Manager family and did end up investing in a copy of the Product Selection Process course, they would still have to work with the rest of their company to make their competing products available to your customers. Since you would know that they were trying to do this, you could simply get your products to market faster than they could and you’d still win the customer.

That’s my thinking so far. I understand that some of you may still have some concerns about too many product managers having access to this powerful information. Here’s what I’m going to do in order to try to put these concerns to rest: I’m going to limit the number of copies of the PSP course that I sell right now to 350. When I hit that number, I’m going to pull it off the market and no one else will be able to invest in the course. After that happens I’m going to take a look and see what goes on with the people who purchased it and those who were not able to get in in time. After a month, I’ll make a decision about if the PSP should ever be made available again.

 

– Dr. Jim Anderson