We are in Austin, Texas at the 2008 TellerLogic User Group or Innovation 2008. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, I'm Michael Lester. I'm the Senior Product Marketing Manager for our Focal Point product, which does product management, product portfolio management, and addresses the needs of how do we make decisions around what should we do. You sort of have gotten into what I always think is an interesting discussion in the enterprise software world, what exactly portfolio management is. It's always interesting as we talk to people, what is your meaning of product management, product portfolio management. Everybody has a different thing, but the way we look at it is really taking these things that you're spending a lot of time and money on and treating them as investments. If you think about traditional portfolio management, financial portfolio, what you're trying to do is pick an optimal set of investments for a certain type of reward, and you're going to accept a certain level of risk. And so how do you look at your products, your lines of the different products you have, and figure out how do we make the most money? And part of it is looking at the ideas or the potential things you could be doing and starting to think about trade-offs. Like you were saying, there's many different definitions of doing it. And so what's sort of like the focal point? One thing we realize is that everybody has a different way of doing this. A lot of organizations are, as I said, have different definitions, so we want to be flexible in the approach that we take to people. There are other vendors who, you know, they have an approach of what we call bottom-up portfolio management. Right. Where they're coming in and saying, okay, let's collect all your resources, all your projects, and that will tell us what your portfolio is. But all that does is tell you what you're doing. It's kind of like looking backwards. Right. And what you're trying to do with the portfolio is look forward and project, okay, three years from now, what do we want to have? And if you're thinking about a rapidly changing market, you know, you've got to have a portfolio that's ready to adapt for that. And you've got to look forward and say, okay, do we have things that are going to, you know, if I'm building pharmaceuticals, you know, these patents are going to expire. Let's plan for what are we going to bring to the market at the next time. So we like to take a top-down approach and say, okay, think about it from the strategic direction the company's going.
2:01Where are the market opportunities? And then start lining up and say, okay, then we need these types of products or these lines of business. And then start breaking it down, deconstructing it from the top rather than going bottom-up and saying, okay, this is what we need. And essentially what you're getting at is strategy with the software that you have. Right. And figuring out being prepared for things that are going to happen in the future. And, you know, a little more so than just like delivering on the things of today or whatever, right? Which is important. Right. But you want to have, it helps you achieve that sort of flexibility for doing new things. What we find is a lot of companies can't even look forward and say, okay, that's what it's going to be. But there are many others who are, well, we've set this path, kind of like the Titanic. They can't change direction because they don't have the ability to kill things. A lot of those sort of things like planning for the future seems like sort of a cerebral sort of thing. Like, you know, you're sort of sitting there staring at the wall thinking about connecting these things together. Right. And so I'm curious, I mean, you have a tool focal point that is essentially not your brain to help you do this sort of stuff. And so how do you use the tool to sort of map trying to, you know, grow the investments in stock? We realize that, you know, companies have all these data silos all over the place. Right. That make up the information that you need to understand your products. You know, you get your financial performance information, you've got project management, you've got engineering systems in place, you've got sales systems. Bringing all that information together in one place, you can actually look at it and say, okay, you know, here are the things how they are in development. Here are how things are in the market. Right. And start to visualize it. And that's really one of the strengths of focal point is it's got some really unique, powerful visualization capabilities. Oh, right, right. So you can easily look and go, oh, look, this is where our priorities are or here's how our product pipeline fits together with our resource availability. What are those things, those data points that you're gathering? I mean, are they sort of requirements that people have expressed or capabilities? That's one element of it. Yeah. You know, because those things, you know, requirements, however people express things, whether it's a sales guy saying, you know, if I had this capability, we could sell a lot more. Right. You're going, oh, the market's really jazzed up about this or you've got a customer who's saying, I hate this about the product.
4:05It would be nice if you guys fix this. All those things come together. But you also have market research. You have competitive intelligence. You've got financial performance. You've got market segmentation information. Sure. So all of that information comes together rather than just thinking about in the context of what does it take to build these things? You want to think about why should you be building these things and understand how would it fit in the market? I guess on the one hand, like you're saying, you know, from the sales guy or the marketing person or the customer, you have sort of potential things you could be doing. And then on the other, another pile that you have of raw stuff are sort of potential markets that you could sell into, ways you could make money with those potentials. Right. And then mixing them together, like, you know, you could, I guess maybe that would be one of the things you would visualize is, like, here's an overlap that, like, are the most valuable things that you could invest. And that's exactly what people are trying to do is look at it and say, okay, where are these market opportunities? Right. You know, looking at it and say, okay, well, we have these products today and we realize that three years from now or however long we want to forecast out, there's going to be this market opportunity. What does that market opportunity mean? And then you go out and you start asking the market, collecting information about, okay, are there any competitors in that space? How are they dealing with this problem? How are they addressing it? Right. What do they need to be competitive in there? And what do the customers in that space value? So we build the things that they value. And that's one of the things we focus on is, let's don't build anything that isn't going to add value. Right. Because oftentimes as engineers, people are prone to, oh, let's put some cool things in there that are fun to make or I think would be cool. Sure. Like racing stripes on cars. Exactly. It doesn't add a lot of value, but it looks mighty cool. That's right. And so we have a tendency to do that with all kinds of products. Right. And so with FocalPoint we want to help people focus on that value. Along the lines of making decisions, right? I'm always curious about how tools like this, like how they have a feedback loop that helps you sort of learn from your successes and mistakes. So one of the things it has is this plan capability. And you can basically take the typical constraints, looking at resource availability, time, money, and looking at it and say, okay, here are the things we can stick into that bucket. Then later, you know, using that to say, okay, here's our hypothetical release or product or whatever we want to build.
6:11And then coming back later because you're pulling in the financial performance information. Right. You're pulling in information about project development part of the process, feeding that back in so you can then start to compare it against it. One of the things we find is it's only a small percentage of companies that are actually mature enough. Right. To plug those two things back together because oftentimes that forces an accountability question. Absolutely. And so it's a hard one culturally for a lot of people to take on. But that's the intent of doing this is so you have the visibility into there so you can start. Right. And a lot of the telelogic discussions that I find myself involved in, we end up talking about systems engineering and systems programming and things like that. Right. And so far, I mean, the conversation that we've had is just general portfolio management. I mean, it's not particular to embedded devices or, you know, software and physical devices or systems. Right. And I wonder if that's -- I mean, is Focal Point more focused on systems things or is it more general portfolio management? The users and customers today are around, let's take consumer electronics. You know, they're in industries. Obviously, systems are a component of embedded components. Right. It's in the products that end up going to those fast changing markets. Mobile phone devices. You know, building mobile phones, the market's constantly changing. Right. And so you have to be aware and thinking about, okay, nine months from now, this product's going to be obsolete. What's going to take its place in the market? Right. Where's the market going to be? And so we find the majority of our customers are those type of companies. Whether it's, you know, mobile phones or medical devices or, you know, in some industries, ISVs. Different types, but they're all in this fast-paced, still have a complex thing to manage. We just want to make sure that what we do is the right thing. It seems like one of the common attributes they have is they're always introducing something new. Right. Instead of, more in the software world, a new version of something. Right. Yeah. That's interesting. To that end, I mean, do you see Focal Point as being sort of helpful in the software world or do you think the software development world is more interested in sort of like requirements management? Because it seems like requirements management, as I know, is sort of below what I would, you
8:11know, what we're talking about in portfolio management here. Exactly. So one of the things we see in software, you know, organizations are building software as their product, is they're kind of taking these portfolio management techniques down to the role of a product manager. Right. And he's doing portfolio management rather than across the mix of products. He's doing it across his requirements, the scope elements, his features, his requirements, whatever you want to call them. He's looking at it and saying, okay, I need to make sure, because there's 9,000 things I have on my backlog, I can fit 20 in this next release. Yeah. How do I figure out what the 20 are that are most important? You know, and to date it's usually the loud voice in the room or whoever's got pictures on the product manager, that's how the decisions are made is they're not based off objective market information. Anytime software's involved in a company, eventually you get to this idea of aligning the technology with the business. And it seems like for the most part that those efforts sort of fall flat, you know, for the reasons you were saying, but also because it's extremely difficult to actually get a dollar figure on sort of a technological decision. Right. And then sort of track that. And I mean, of course, as we've been talking, that's one of the promises of portfolio management is you can finally link together like, you know, I'm exaggerating. Sure. 50 lines of code, $500. You know, like whatever value it is. And I'm curious how focal point, like how do you get, to what degree does that monetary valuation of technology come in? Is it sort of like at the unit level, like we sold this many units of this phone? Some companies have different approaches to it. I can give you an example from my own background of how I've done it is, I was working with a particular customer and they had, it was a noisy, a lot of feedback kind of customer. Uh-huh. And they kept pushing back on me. They're like, we've got this button in the user interface. It's blue. We'd like it to be orange. And I was very dismissive of it. I was like, it's cosmetic. Don't really care. But they kept coming back with it. So finally I was like, okay, let me understand what's going on here. And they said, well, the reason why we need it to change is because it blends in with everything else. You've got a blue motif here. It's hard for users to notice. We take a lot of help desk calls about where do I say, where's the button?
10:14What do I do next? And if it was a strong contrasting color, we'd have fewer support calls. Right, right. And then what would lead to is wider user acceptance. So the way we quantified that was looking back and saying, okay, better user acceptance, happier customer, fewer support calls. We can quantify it in the dollars that that would save to that particular customer. Exactly. We multiply it out. And so it's just, I think it's just an exercise actually having to go a step farther. Right. Beyond trying to identify here's the problem or, you know, oftentimes customers just express things as a solution. You know, instead of trying to cost up that solution, it's hard to understand the value of that and take it around to 90 other people. Right, right. But if you can get down to the problem and say, okay, well, if that's what it will save you, let's multiply that out times everybody else and assume, you know, most of them will have the same problem. Here's the cost savings to them. Right, right. And then you can start to quantify even at a feature level or a request level. And what happens is I've actually taught a lot of my customers to do that. So that they're starting to express things back. You know, a lot of the cosmetic things go away and they're like, you know, if we had this particular capability, it would mean this to us as an organization. Right. And then, you know, in my head I'm thinking, okay, if that means that there's, you know, 90 other licenses sitting over there. And I can express back to me in our decision-making process, okay, there's the potential for more products. As you get up into those decision-making meetings, everybody in that room may not understand your market or understand your products or understand how you do it. But everybody understands money. Right. And so if you can start to express these things in a monetary way, everybody goes, oh, I get how that is more important than that. Yeah. That tele-logic and rational, you know, are together. I mean, what do you see as sort of the future roadmap that you'll be taking focal point? We're only looking at the other products in there because they have presence in some domains that we're not in. Right. And looking and say, okay, you know, these products are prevalent in IT where we've been more systems-focused with the tele-logic products. And so there's an opportunity to take this story about let's have value-driven portfolios on top of IT because IT's got the pressure to, how do we demonstrate value of IT back
12:15to the business? Right. And so at this point, this date, you know, has taken that same bottom-up approach to their portfolios because they don't have the business pressure. Right. You know, the commercial product side of the business does have. And so let's apply the same principles there and see what benefits we can get. Thanks for taking all this time. Thank you very much.