I was interviewed on the IPG Podcast talking about how we’re building a publishing business in collaboration with Newgen Publishing in the UK and how to make partnerships like this work. I got the chance to talk about some of the big issues in academic publishing at the moment, especially around library delivery and access.
Access Models
2021 In Review: My Four Critical Observations
My writing in 2021 was focused on new product development, publishing, and licensing strategy with an occasional thought piece on the intersection of platforms, business models, and negotiating strategy. This piece is a departure from form in that I would like to share my four most significant observations from 2021 in regard to the higher education publishing, educational technology, and library product and services world.
Observation One: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is not Everywhere
I begin each day scanning news from Outsell, The Scholarly Kitchen, EdSurge, Linked In News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous listservs. Based on these daily feeds and the many new hire announcements I see on Linked In, there is no doubt that much attention has been placed on addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, publishing focus, and library collection development. But most of the “gains” I have seen have been in high-level appointments to corporate senior management teams, senior editorial roles conceived to shape the publishing priorities and agenda, and senior university/library roles with much the same intent as the corporate roles added; that is to influence future hiring, practices, and policies.
I do not personally hold that this is deeply meaningful progress; it is visible andnotable, but it does not necessarily produce change. I believe the progress we should be seeing and celebrating is in the quotidian announcements of new hires into roles well below that of vice president. And, from my very unofficial vantage point, I saw very little change in hiring in 2021. In my daily Linked In feed where promotions and new hires are celebrated, it was business as usual. And by that I mean white people hiring and promoting white people. I hope I am wrong and my “sample” is off. But we will only make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion when each of us white people and people in power, in our narrow operating space, change our recruiting and hiring practices and make a measurable and specific commitment to hiring for difference. And the difference needs to extend beyond skin color. Have you hired somebody with a disability, visible or invisible? Have you looked for candidates that had to fight through poverty in their youth? Have you recruited anybody that openly and without shame shared their mental health struggles? You will build a better company, a better library, a better publisher, when you build a team that looks like the travelers on any sidewalk in New York City rather than any walkway in the many private universities of the United States.
Observation Two: Print is not Dead
In fact print is thriving. Just ask any publisher with a substantial portion of revenue coming from print publishing. Supply chain woes combined with growing demand have created significant price increases from the printers coupled with delivery delays. Of course publishers that never had a significant print business did not feel the pain of the print shutdown during the pandemic, even as digital sales accelerated. But many trade and consumer publishing houses saw a swing to digital that is now swinging back to a revised but not entirely unfamiliar print/digital mix. What will this mean for print book prices in 2022? Will digital prices rise as a function of the print price (that the print and digital price were ever a function of one another is a legacy of little internal logic beyond publisher revenue forecasting and protection of known revenue). Will the surge in growth in digital textbooks continue apace? Or will libraries and students revert back to print textbook purchasing? I wager, barring another massive shutdown of physical spaces, the distribution of print to digital sales will resettle close to where it was pre-pandemic with a moderate rebalancing toward digital.
Observation Three: Open Access Has Little Room Left for Upstart Entrepreneurs and Innovators
Wiley owns Hindawi and Knowledge Unlatched. Read and Publish/Transformative Agreements are everywhere. I don’t tilt at windmills and there was never much likelihood that open access would find its way free of for-profit publishing except at the margins. But the acceleration and pace of announcements across 2021 signal, from my perspective, a future without author-processing and book-processing charges, and without much funding model innovation. And transformative agreements will create a context in which institutions are striking deals with all the major publishers to assure access to published output and authoring opportunities for their university faculty. How this will play out for economically disadvantaged institutions across the globe, and their faculty, will be a key question. But then the APCs and BPCs were beyond their reach anyway and wavers and discounts are a false balm. Subscribe-to -Open does seem to offer a potentially leveling effect, but still relies on wealthy institutions to underwrite access for the global community. And the model could influence publishing decisions in favor of the funding institutions’ faculties.
Observation Four: Private Equity is Stacked with Cash and Loves Ed Tech
I wonder what teaching principles of micro and macro economics to college undergraduates must feel like today. A glut of cash in the global economy leads to increased demand for scarce resources, which drives up inflation, which leads to interest rate increases. Right? Wrong. Money is cheap and plentiful and the debt issuance markets are working well and there is no sign of central banks tightening significantly the flow of money. Private Equity has been active in education technology for more than half of my time in the industry dating back to 1999, but the pandemic lit a fire. Investment flowing into education is a good thing so long as that investment is deployed by thoughtful product managers building better solutions. I expect the PE acquisitions and combinations will continue and innovation will not necessarily slow down. I am less concerned with the role of private equity in educational technology until the point at which PE makes a decision to sell an asset to an established publishing, library services, or aggregation business and the inevtiable inovation-choking integration effects take shape. And this will be the mark to watch for in 2022 and beyond as the pandemic-induced edtech acquisition boom looks for its exit.
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Developing Content-Based Products for Learning and Research Part 8: Iterate
How many times have you heard a seasoned product manager describe their product failures as a learning experience? In job and client interviews, in podcast and press interviews, and over drinks at conferences, I told the story of an early product failure of my making. The specific product and the failure itself are less important than the larger lesson I took from the experience, albeit many years later (and if you want to know the details, reach out to me at the contact link at the end of this post). Here is what I eventually came to understand: big product failures are not okay and not “glory day” stories to be shared. Big product failures follow from a flawed development process focused on major product launches, months or even years in the making. Small failures are okay and even good and necessary.
My perspective on new product development is based on constant interaction with customers on an iterative basis, with the goal of introducing and testing new product solutions with those same customers. This is an iterative new product development process based on bringing the minimal, salable product to market with the understanding enhancements are coming. When an organization commits to iterative product releases following the validation of a minimally viable product (MVP), and after releasing for sale a product market fit PMF), (You can find definitions in Part 6 of this series for: Product Market Fit and Minimum Viable Product), it has committed to cementing into its organisational structure and strategy a new product development practice that will not yield big failures.
Iterative product releases in the context of new products for learning and research are not random. The customer discovery process will reveal features and requirements of varying importance and value to customers. The first launch is built to satisfy early adopters and subsequent iterations will widen the customer base beyond early adopters. Iterations will also be undertaken to address different market opportunities.
Possible Product Features and Requirements
Engagement with customers and users of the products your team launches will yield an endless supply of possibilities for features, tools, solutions, and improvements to the product. I never reject any item that my product team feels worthy of discussion and consideration for testing and/or a future release. But I am relentless in my focus on prioritizing release of those new features, enhancements or fixes that are most likely to move the needle in terms of new sales, higher usage and/or improved customer sentiment scores. There are many sources of information that will lead to the selection of the biggest needle movers: number of customer requests, number of customer complaints, number of inquiries from the sales organization, competitor product releases, etc. And, of course, product feature testing, such as releasing a proposed feature to a subset of customers to produce an A/B test can be used to prioritize a next release. Regardless of how the list of possibilities is generated, tracking and recording is critical, especially in anticipation of the launch of the MVP and the PMF. I recommend using some version of the following chart to maintain a record. And, of course, there are excellent tools built for product managers that do just this. Check out www.monday.com for a great example of helpful roadmap and iteration tracking tools.
Feature | Date Entered | For MVP/PMF | Critical Post-Launch | Parking Lot | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
“Rate This Video” | May 2018 | X | Impact measure loved by dev partners | ||
“On Screen Annotation” | Dec 2018 | X | Much verbal support but A/B tests, so far, have yielded no usage engagement |
Moving Beyond Early Adopters
A successful product launch is achieved when the most basic version of the product can be brought to market for paying customers. These early adopters will be satisfied with the launch but will expect an improving experience and soon. This is the “critical post launch” category of feature releases that cement the early adopters as customers and advocates with the wider customer community. As you broaden beyond the early launch and subsequent releases, you will engage with customers that are further and further out on the new technology or new product adoption curve. These customers will be less forgiving of technical hurdles or feature deficits than the early adopters. What is “nice to have” for an early adopter will be a “must have” for this broader group of customers. For example, early adopters might purchase a new subscription video product without searchable transcripts, but the wider customer base will not. The product team must be very clear what these “must have” features are and use the validated product launch with the early adopters as a platform to justify the investment in bringing critical post-launch features to the market.
Moving Into New Markets
A special case in new product development for learning and research solutions is moving out of the core market for which the product was initially conceived. For example, a product built to serve the higher education library market may well have potential in the K-12 or public library market. Or a product built to serve the North American curriculum and learning market might have potential in the UKI or Asia Pacific region. I pose this as an iteration issue because, very often, I have seen product teams struggle with balancing a release strategy designed to more deeply penetrate a core market when challenged to consider an adjacent market. This is an issue that should be solved by assessing the market opportunity, which is a function of the size of the adjacent market and the product feature change, addition, or enhancement requirements. If the product team knows the customers in the adjacent market and knows what is required for an early adopter launch, then the calculus is simply where best to iterate for the desired mix of new sales and increased usage against the investment needed.
No Big Product Failures
This concludes my eight part series on new product development for the research and learning market with a specific focus on serving the higher education library. Returning to where this article started, there is no reason to have major product failures on your resume and there is no reason to wear big product failures as a badge of honor because you “learned so much.” Small failures, product feature tests gone awry, bungled feature releases and missed delivery dates are all okay and to be expected. Share these stories with me and I will tell you all about my one, big, embarrassing product failure!
Please subscribe to get a simple notification when new posts publish. I invite you to read the complete series here: New Product Development for Content-Based Products.
If you want to work together on your new product development strategy, contact me directly.
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Lived Places Publishing: Our Founding Mission
Affordable Course Readings, Library-Friendly Access, and Giving Voice to Social Identity in Context and Place
By David Parker, Publisher and Co-Founder
Lived Places Publishing launched in April 2021, guided by the belief that our team of editors and authors can innovate both in terms of content and with regards to access and affordability. Our enterprise is committed to delivering curriculum-ready content that allows students to engage with global author voices exploring the intersection of social identity and place or context. And we are developing a library-first purchasing model that supports unlimited user access without restriction, interlibrary loan, and open access.
What do we mean by the intersection of social identity and place or context? Our co-founder and Black Studies Collection editor Chris McCauley says it best:
“Lived Places Publishing is guided by the belief that story-sharing can both shorten the distance that separates us and increase our collective efforts against thinking and policies that penalize and exclude far too many people for simply being who they are. By “Lived Places” we mean more than geographical or physical locations, but also the social and institutional ones that we have been forced to inhabit and those that we have claimed and embraced.”
During the summer of 2020, when the world was ablaze with awareness, we began asking how the global higher education curriculum is representing the voices at the intersection of location and lived experience. We did in depth analysis of dissertation and theses publishing and course reading lists and syllabi across the social sciences. And we discovered that scholarship is especially focused, through the lens of discipline or interdisciplinary study, on social identity and place. And as we dug deeper into assigned readings and materials we saw that instructors explore these themes with students most often through scholarly readings, journal articles, and their own writing. Our insights empower collection editors to build disciplinary or interdisciplinary collections of course readings that can be assigned weekly, written by academics and activists across the globe who are concerned with the intersection of social identity and lived places and spaces.
With our content vision and mission in place, we turned to the question of pricing, access, equity, and affordability. Every Lived Places title will be available as a single title in print and digital formats at affordable price points. While some students will choose to purchase individual titles, we decided to focus especially on building an annual collection of titles that institutions can purchase for a set price tied to the local budget and economic context. Our model will provide access to every title in the collection at a fraction of the single title price and delivered without digital rights management restrictions and perpetual ownership. In addition, for libraries that wish to support interlibrary loan, the Lived Places collection will include an option to upgrade to single title interlibrary loan rights for all titles held with unlimited access. In other words, unlimited institutional access for the purchasing library and simultaneous single title loan rights to another institution.
We believe in and support open access and open educational resources. And we believe in returning a high royalty to our authors and editors. 35% of each sale will be allocated to royalty and funding for open access. Individual authors will be given the option to choose publishing open access or earning a royalty. Equity, in our view, requires fairness in royalty, support for open publishing, pricing that allows every global institution to purchase and, by extension, support the Lived Places mission to support open access and author royalty.
- We are actively seeking collection editors: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/collections
- We are actively seeking book authors too: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/call-for-authors
And if you just want to connect and learn more, you can reach me here directly.
And if you want to follow our blog and learn what our collection editors and authors are up to, please subscribe here.
Peace to you,
David Parker, Publisher
P.S. You can also follow our progress on Medium and Substack.
This post was originally published by David Parker on the Lived Places Publishing blog.
IMAGE CREDIT: Michael D Beckwith, used under the Unsplash License
Developing Content-Based Products for Learning and Research Part 7: Go-To-Market
In part six of this series the concept of Product-Market-Fit was presented as a “market ready” product; that is a product that has the minimum necessary set of features and attributes required for a customer to begin using and/or begin paying. Of course this is not the end of product development (product improvement is iterative as will be discussed in part eight of this series), but it is the beginning of active go-to-market.
The very best product managers are the chief executives of their products, and this means working as closely with the marketing and sales team as with the finance, user design and engineering teams. At launch, a successful go-to-market effort, guided by the product manager and product marketing manager, will have detailed the follow through with the development partners and the many potential customers and reviewers who offered feedback along the way. The go-to-market plan will include clear sales messaging based on the solutions designed into the product and the role of product management in training and supporting sales. And the go-to-market plan should include a content marketing communication plan designed to leverage industry publications, conferences, blogs and other forums to amplify the new product messaging.
Engaging the Development Partners and Other Customer Contributors
Your team is launching a new product to solve meaningful challenges your customers face. You know you are launching a new product that will achieve the customer acquisition and revenue targets you set because you have sought constant learning and validation. The development partner panel – between six and 10 partners – has committed to working alongside your product team across the entire new product process. Development partners join into a partnership with the entire organization because they feel the pain that you have proposed a product solution to address. These are your early advocates and first customers. Your first job at launch is to ensure that your entire development partner panel is on board to use the product and supports the claims of the marketing message and sales approach. The successful product manager will have been in weekly and often daily communication with development partners so there should be no surprises. These are your first buyers, first users, first advocates and best source for lifelong product feedback.
Development partners are a special breed and are discovered in the ongoing outreach and customer engagement process. Over the course of early product discovery and as a function of the daily role of being a product manager, you will speak with hundreds of prospective buyers. These many interactions will occur as structured interviews, user feedback sessions, surveys, and focus groups. Each of these sessions must be catalogued with important comments, questions and observations noted for later follow up with the customer that provided the feedback and insight. As the product team nears launch with the product-market fit, the product team should return to these many providers of intermittent feedback with an update on the impending product launch and with detail on how their individual questions, comments and observations are or are not addressed. This level of interaction will enable a powerful first sales call by the account manager and, more importantly, will be received by the customer as proof that his or her earlier interaction with the product team was meaningful.
Sales Messaging and Sales Support
I want to make a bold statement: The new product sales message must include solutions framed as questions to which a prospective customer will respond positively. In other words, the discovery process, if legitimate, will have unearthed real problems in need of solutions. And the product launch will address these problems head on. The product manager, working with the product marketing manager, will convert these product features into sales collateral and messaging centered on the original problems that drove the entire product development process. It is an unfortunate reality that many products are launched with superficial product messages that do not resonate with customers. Every salesperson you know will vividly recount the many new products they were asked to promote that fell flat with customers. Follow the process described in this series and you will launch products customers need and salespeople are pleased to promote for having done real and meaningful good in the customers’ life.
It is not enough, however, to have developed a solid product with reliable and validated sales tools and customer-facing sales questioning tools designed to highlight the product solution; the product team needs to get on the road, or on the video call, alongside the account manager, to model the effective sales call and the manner in which the focus is directed to the new product solutions. Immediately after ProQuest acquired Alexander Street, the product team responsible for the streaming video product, Academic Video Online, went on the road with each of the 30+ ProQuest account managers to model solution selling. The product team proved that the sales tools and tactics worked and that the problems the product was designed to address were real and meaningful. Academic Video Online quickly became one of the fastest growing, most popular products in the ProQuest portfolio.
Content Marketing
The final piece in an integrated and long-running new product go-to-market plan is content marketing. In much the same way that the new product development process reveals the challenges and needs of the customer that ultimately inform the sales tactics and tools, the customer discovery process will yield abundant qualitative and quantitative data to underpin valuable content marketing.
Content marketing is synonymous with the sharing of product research data, processes and results. It is “marketing” only in that the desired outcome is advocacy for the uptake and use of the new product. In this sense content marketing is unabashedly biased, but it is a bias informed by real and validated customer feedback developed across the new product development process, launch and subsequent refinement and improvement of the product solutions, and supported by legitimate data.
Content marketing can take many forms, but in the context of content-based products for learning and research, I suggest focusing on industry publications, white papers, conferences, blogs, and online discussion forums. The very best of these outputs will be jointly authored/presented by a member of the product team and a customer or customers. The backbone of the report or presentation will be data collected in product discovery amplified by broader, contextual industry data. For example, the product manager and a development partner will present data on the search efficacy/accuracy of a new search tool grounded in industry data on the need for general improvement in search efficacy.
Please subscribe to get a simple notification when new posts publish. I invite you to read the complete series here: New Product Development for Content-Based Products.
If you want to work together on your new product development strategy, contact me directly.
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Developing Content-Based Products for Learning and Research Part 6: Product Market Fit and Minimum Viable Product
In part five of this series on new product development for content-based products for learning and research, I focused on the management of the road map. The overriding objective of carefully managing the road map is to ensure the delivery of a product that meets the most basic and essential requirements of a paying or using customer audience. If the road map expands because of scope creep, or if the road map is delayed for competing priorities, delivering the product as defined in the business case suffers. With this in mind, part six will discuss, differentiate and contextualize the two terms used in product development that capture the essence of delivering a most basic product a customer will support: Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Product Market Fit (PMF)
Minimum Viable Product:
A MVP is a product release that is fully functional, with all features presented in the business case as essential to launch available for use by the customer. The MVP is the most basic product that can be released to early users, lead users, or development partners with the objective of learning as much as possible for as little time and effort invested as possible. A well-designed MVP will accurately represent the feature set and user experience described in the business case for product launch. The early users or development partners will have a high fidelity product experience and be able to offer the product team validation that the promise of the business case can be achieved. The purpose of the MVP test with the lead user group is to validate the confidence of the business leaders and the product team in the development of the business case product concept. A successful MVP will trigger added investment, marketing and sales attention and focus for the coming product release and will validate the standing product roadmap.
An MVP can be a very early release of a fully-functional product, or it can be a wireframe or other mechanism for delivering a high fidelity experience to the development partner panel. This is a critical distinction. The MVP does not have to represent a saleable product, ready to integrate across platforms, acquisition models or library or university workflow solutions. The MVP must give the lead users a “true” product experience but it does not have to be market ready and it is not a product to be sold.
Product Market Fit:
A PMF is market ready. The MVP validation process triggers the “full steam ahead” of the product team and the drive to deliver the product to the market; the product-market fit (PMF). In the business case the features that differentiate the product will have been described and the market sizing and opportunity will have been stated. The PMF is the meeting of the ready-to-sell product with the target market and the product features fully developed that differentiate the new product from the competitors’ products. A PMF that has achieved its mandate will resonate with the target market. The intended customers will be able to describe its differentiated features from the product they are currently using. And, further, customers in the target market will be willing to, if not eager, to learn more about and trial the new product. The hallmarks of a successful PMF are an energized sales and marketing team, customers advocating for the product with peers, and, critically, lead generation, trial usage and lead conversion in line with that promised in the business case.
Product Market Fit is not the end of the story. The PMF launch is a ready-to-sell product inclusive of the most basic user experience and set of requirements a customer will pay for. The product roadmap will assume iteration toward functionality and user experience that is critical to the success of the product but is not required to launch and generate sales and usage. This is a critical point. The launch of the PMF is further validation of that achieved with the MVP, but done in the context of delivering value and utility to customers. With the PMF in the market being used, the product team is receiving daily, real-time user feedback that allows for correction and adjustment to the product and prioritization of the features and enhancements to release in the iterative product development process.
Across my career in new product development and product management, I have heard the terms minimum viable product and product market fit variously and, at times, incorrectly used. Precision in terms is important if the true value of each step is to be derived along the new product process. The MVP is a full-fidelity representation of the product intended for launch that lead users and development partners can test and evaluate; but it is not a ready-for-market, saleable product. The PMF is ready for market, saleable, and inclusive of the feature set and user experience validated in the MVP. In both cases, the product team is focused on the core feature and user experience necessary to launch and generate sales and usage. Of course, this is only the beginning of an iterative process that will refine, improve and enhance the product across its life-cycle.
Please subscribe to get a simple notification when new posts publish. I invite you to read the complete series here: New Product Development for Content-Based Products.
If you want to work together on your new product development strategy, contact me directly.
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