Product Management Lessons Learned From P90X

5 tips for increasing your product management and marketing intensity

Odds are that you have heard of the self described extreme home fitness program P90X developed by fitness super start Tony Horton. P90X is the flagship offering from Beachbody a company specializing in a wide breadth of at-home fitness programs, and has radically harnessed the power of precise infomercial execution as well as network marketing infrastructures (find links that discuss their coach process). As a loyal a Beachbody customer I try to do about two full rounds of P90X a year, and constantly discover new offerings from Beachbody that augment my personal fitness schedule. I absolutely love what the company does, am continuously impressed with how CEO Carl Daikeler leads the business, and have learned an invaluable product management and product marketing lesson from two 30 second segments in one of the most difficult P90X workout videos – Plyometrics.

Plyometrics is a cardiovascular routine that involves lots of jumping up and down. It is wonderfully brutal and, like the entire P90X program, gets harder as your improving level of fitness allows you to go at the workout with more intensity. The routine includes six rounds, each repeated twice, of four moves 30 seconds in length. The product management and marketing lesson is learned in one of the moves towards the end of plyoX called lateral leapfrog squats. To describe the move think of a basketball player in an active crouch aggressively moving from left to right and then back again.

In my experience when I started my first round of P90X this move was one of the ‘easier’ and I looked forward to it because at this point in the workout I was pretty wiped out. So an ‘active break’ was sort of how I handled it. Over time, however, my perspective on lateral leapfrog squats changed. As my fitness improved and I began to tap into the energy I needed to intensify my participation in the Plyometrics workout, I came to see lateral leapfrog squats much differently. Now, when I reach this point in the workout, I imagine that the 30 seconds for each round of lateral leapfrog squats is not an active cool down, but instead the make or break moment at the end of a big game. I’ve never played basketball but the posture and movement is so similar to a defensive basketball move I visualize defending opponents in a zone defense at the end of the most important game of the year. In this visualization I come to feel as though this is training for that big game, and that my opponent is at that very moment training just as hard. It becomes motivation for me to go at it as hard as possible in order to be prepared for the actual moment when he and I meet in the waning seconds of the championship where the difference between winning and losing just very well may be who better handles fatigue.

Corny? Maybe, but what I can tell you is that this lateral leapfrog move which used to actually decrease my heart rate now sends it soaring which is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

The lesson? Intensity in the small matters lay the foundation for success.

Product managers and product marketers need to approach even the most tactical and mundane aspects of their job with a certain degree of intensity and passion. No matter the marketplace competition is fierce, and the opponent is taking his or her responsibilities seriously. Therefore it is imperative that as professionals who advance the strategic development of product or the productivity of the sales effort we do so with the intensity that will have us prepared at the most critical moments of the process.

Here are 5 suggestions for translating the lateral leapfrog mental visualization into some basic product management or product marketing practices. Where is your intensity?

Market Analysis: Create habits that help stay in touch with every aspect of the technical, environmental and economical landscape in which your service or product participates. Formulate opinions on the impact of these factors and seek out debate offering alternative perspective or confirmation of your conclusions. Develop an insatiable appetite for reading and learning everything there is to know about your marketplace on a daily basis.

Voice of the Customer: Evaluate what you are doing to talk with current and potential customers. Measure your professional network and note possible networking weaknesses and invest time to improve them. Constantly reconcile current focus and direction against the aggregated feedback received from your network. Create goals for the number of customers you want to interact with on a weekly basis. Force yourself to achieve those goals.

Define Requirements: A requirement can never be over defined and use cases can never be too detailed. Far too often product managers put off writing use cases which leaves the requirement under-defined and opens the intent of the requirement up to too much interpretation from the developer who must deliver it. Consistently and constantly provide narration of the story for the requirement and help connect its delivery to applicable and measurable sales objectives. Keep running lists of colorful anecdotes and story tell in use case development and in conversations with development.

Direct the Solution: Product marketers must also create the story for the marketplace. The story of how the product or service impacts the user’s objectives and goals. The narrative must be meticulously created and constantly communicated across all channels to the target market. Create monthly, quarterly and annual themes on top of which you can tell the story of your solution. Schedule period evaluations of the results and course correct as needed.

Provide Cross Functional Leadership: Far too many product marketers do not concern themselves with the operational realities that exist when their product or service hits the marketplace. It must be the product manager or product marketer’s job to understand all the operational elements that are inherent in the proposed solution and work with leadership of these internal functions to ensure that the solution as packaged can be operationally executed. An internal narrative must exist and more importantly must be bought into by every department that has direct or indirect impact on solution delivery.

What are you doing to increase the intensity and passion that you bring to your day to day execution? Or as Tony Horton would say, how do you “bring it”?