How will you champion the customer?

This is not the start of some elaborate joke – it’s a bit of wisdom passed onto me early in my career and I still reflect on it today.

"Being a contemporary ‘product person’ will help you shoot for the moon in ways you have never imagined. It’s about curiosity. We still need to have a hunger to grow ourselves – and our propositions to customers - in multiple directions.”

In short - it’s all about knowing your customer and building propositions around them.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? So, why do so many companies get it wrong?

Often the problem is the ideas around what constitutes “modern product management” are so varied people get lost in a haze and their eyes glaze over.

To avoid these pitfalls, we need to be clear headed about what we want to achieve and how we are going to get there.

At ANZ our North Star is creating better financial wellbeing for our customers. To get there we must excel at creating new tools and propositions for our customers.

Which brings me to Neil H. McElroy and his bid to sell more soap.

From selling soap to launching spaceships

Careers often lead us in interesting directions.

I am now Group Executive, Australia Retail at ANZ. Before that I was Managing Director of Australia and New Zealand at Google.

But at the very start of my career, I worked in the fast-moving consumer goods sector at US giant Proctor & Gamble. I did  everything from overseeing marketing and design in Asia to being global manager of hair care.

This is when I first heard of Neil H. McElroy. In the 1930s, McElroy was a junior executive at Proctor & Gamble. He was in charge of advertising a soap brand - but faced a problem.

McElroy wanted to hire two new staff to help with the job. So, he dashed off a short memo to his bosses explaining some different ideas he had for managing the product.

To cut a long story short – he got the staff. But his memo also transformed how P&G and the larger business world thought about products - effectively inventing modern product management.

So, what was McElroy’s innovation around understanding the customer and building propositions for them?

He suggested the creation of what we today call the “product manager”. Back then this person was labelled the “brand man”. (Obviously gender was very different back then).

McElroy wanted his staff to look at what was being made for the customer in a holistic way. To act as a “general manager” of that product and always focus on the “voice of the customer”.

The idea took off. And as for McElroy, a few years later we would go on to help found NASA, proving he wasn’t a one hit wonder.

But exactly how do you develop and manufacture the right proposition for this particular customer? How do you place the proposition at the right place so the customer buys it? How do you promote it so the customer sees it? How do you price it correctly for them?

Back to the future

If this is beginning to sound like an episode of Mad Men, it should. Many of these ideas dominated advertising through the last century.

But as we know, as small institutions become larger institutions, some lean practices can be lost in the larger structures. This is what happened to McElroy’s idea.

As development and manufacturing became more complex, many parts of this system fractured.

The engineering department took over the manufacture and design part of the job and marketing took over the other three jobs. But then a funny thing happened, technology developed and made McElroy’s idea relevant again.

The need for speed

The speed of the technology cycle has accelerated so much that designing a proposition for the customer and delivering it can now again be brought back under the product manager.

Suddenly an idea from 90 years ago can explain the new age of product delivery in a digital era. We just use words like agile and human-centred design to make a similar point.

The product manager has returned to being what McElroy envisaged when he begged for two more staff in the 1930s, someone who is a general manager of the entire proposition for the customer.

What does this mean for you if you want to become a “brand person”. (Sorry Neil, your term needs an upgrade).

Being across marketing, software engineering and finance will create those opportunities. Switch industries to get experience, keep learning.

To be able to do these things well will require what Google calls a “whole brain thinker”. You need to be as good with maths and engineering as you are with other parts of your creativity.

It is a wicked and difficult thing to do well. But it opens doors and helps create incredible results.

Shooting for the moon

Skills across sectors aids creativity. Think of McElroy who started selling soap and ended up at NASA. Being a contemporary “product person” will help you shoot for the moon in ways you have never imagined.

It’s about curiosity. We need to have hunger to grow ourselves – and our propositions to customers – in multiple directions. It’s about continuously learning.

Being well-versed in technology and engineering means understanding and reimagining what’s possible – and being able to communicate these ideas to everyone.  

It’s about questioning assumptions. As an engineer, we cannot assume once something is built, the customers will come. Nor can we assume the customer has the same intuition and vision of what you have built as you.  

It’s about being deeply rooted in the perspective of the consumer. This means understanding human-centred design by always putting the customer and banker at the centre of the solution. Doing so helps us develop the empathy to understand the world of our target customers.

We can only get so close to the customer experience without seeing with our own eyes. So it’s important to get out into the world and observe first hand.  

Truly empathising with the customer is one of the many ways we can ensure large institutions, like ANZ, build trust and stay grounded.  

After all – what is ultimately important is the problem you solve, not the product you sell.  

Maile Carnegie is Group Executive for Australia Retail at ANZ