Much business time is spent waiting…and sometimes you’re waiting on someone who is procrastinating.
Itamar Shatz, PhD provided several examples of business procrastination. This one caught my eye:
“Delaying marketing your new app, because you’re a developer or a designer and marketing is outside your comfort zone.”
But it’s not just developers or designers who delay product marketing efforts.
Two reasons why product marketers don’t market
While it’s easy to blame the techie, non-techies can also delay a go-to-market effort. Even product marketers can and do delay a go-to-market effort. Not because of comfort zone issues, but for two other reasons.
Reason One: The good is the enemy of the perfect
The first was cited by Shatz in another context:
“Delaying launching your new product, because you want to make sure that it’s absolutely perfect, even though it’s already good enough for your purposes and it would be better to just launch it already.”
In the same way we want our product to be perfect, we often want our product marketing to be perfect. Thus the A version becomes the B version which becomes the C version until we run out of letters at Z and have to employ the Excel solution and create version AA, AB, and so forth.
Reason Two: Being on the wrong level of the three levels of importance
But there’s another reason for the frustratingly endless revision cycles: you can’t get all the reviewers to look at the first version, or the second.
Why not?
Because the go-to-market project is important.
We’ve all encountered situations where things that are critically important to us are merely important to others. I still remember the time when a company executive talked about how important a particular project was…and then left the room, conveying an unintended message.
And when things are relatively unimportant, they don’t happen.
And because of the delay, your product’s impact is diluted.
(Image of bus stop shelter in Chandigarh, India by Sarbjit Bahga, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bus_stop_in_Chandigarh.jpg )
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