The first thing they taught at Product Management school was that if you want to create a successful product, you first needed to focus on the need it was filling, not what it was going to do, and certainly not how it was going to do that. Define the problem first, then figure out the solution.

This is pretty straightforward stuff, and while many people know it, they don’t act on it. Instead, they try to come up with a solution that’s not right for their problem, then they go and find someone to implement that solution, hoping to solve their problem.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a favorite topic for me recently, and it has some great examples of this. We’ve been approached by several companies recently looking for SEO services. As part of our exploration of the project, we dig a little deeper to find out what they are hoping to accomplish with this project. Most of the time, they are looking to “sell more,” and they’ve just randomly decided that they need to optimize for search engines in order to sell more. And the funny thing is, that’s not usually the case!

If they had approached their business from the beginning asking, “What do we need to do? What’s the best way to do that?” they’d be in a great position. Instead, they read about SEO somewhere and decide that’s what they need to do.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 8:19 am and is filed under Blog, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.