Role of marketing in project management for consumer software

As we all know, one of the key components of successful project management practice, whether for enterprise software or else, is the inclusion of the end-user into the design process. Projects that neglect this component often end up with products that fail to meet the desired functionality criteria and suffer from low adoption rates, if not get rejected as failed projects altogether.

An industry held back by project management

This holds especially true for consumer software. The examples I will use are from my favourite industry: video games. The design process of a game, which you can think of as consumer entertainment software, is fairly complicated. From the conception of a game idea to the end product, there is a long process with many tough decisions to be made about the final characteristics of the game. Project managers go through this long decision tree with the ultimate goal of making choices that will resonate most with the end users. Ironically though, most of the time they have to make these decisions without actually consulting with the end users. The role of traditional marketing in the industry is somewhat limited to focus group studies and beta tests of limited sample sizes. Given the length and complication of the typical project, however, it is very easy to misinterpret these limited directions over time, or to forget them altogether.

It is entirely for this reason that many games turn out to be commercial flops. At best such disconnection with the end-user needs results in a product that cannot sell itself to the consumer. Advertising and push marketing are typically employed to push sales, while advertisement spending reduces the ROI for the project. The perfect example to this situation is the biggest player in the market: Electronic Arts. It has been announced by the company very recently that they would lay off some 600 employees after millions of loss incurred, despite an increase in revenues. Obviously, someone has been doing something wrong.

A surprising example of best practice

Taleworlds is an independent video game developer of very recent fame. They owe their fame to the success of their game Mount & Blade. The remarkable thing about this game is that the development team consisted of only two people, Armagan Yavuz and Ipek Yavuz, and this game was their first ever project. Working with a shoestring budget and zero advertising, they achieved sales of 40,000 units from their own website, and their future sales potential is forecast to be around half a million units after they have been picked up by a well known publisher. In an industry where so many games with million dollar budgets and huge development teams with top notch talent nosedive in sales, their rate of success is unheard of.

They owe their success to their inclusion of end users into the design process. Their unique business model allowed them to start selling the game even as it was in pre-alpha stage, with the catch that purchasers would get all the future updates for free. Furthermore, they established an online community where the users could have a direct dialogue with the designers, and the end-user ideas could go directly into the game without any mediation. New ideas from the design team also got immediate feedback from the customers. The end result was a game with nothing but truly valued added features. Still some people in the industry cannot quite understand why a game that seemingly lacks graphical bells and whistles can sell this well. The answer is that they found the right bells and whistles that mattered to the end user, not to the gut sense of the project management team. Compared to the industry average, their ROI is staggering, all for this little detail in project management philosophy.

By Taylan Kadayifcioglu