This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on-demand here.

I had mentioned somewhere that Market Sensing was about conversation, not just listening. We always want to be aware of the fingerprint we leave behind. In fact, there are Market Sensing methods whose only real purpose is to leave a message, under the pretense of gathering data. Of course many methods of Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, and Customer Satisfaction are about just listening.

In today's webinar review, we're looking at a type of Market Sensing that puts a twist on traditional assumptions. SEO can be a lot of things, "Search Engine Optimization" is technically correct. Methods focusing on SEO construction are about how to help the market find you. Methods focusing on SEO measurement are about determining how well the market finds you. The one concerned with this also may have the job title of SEO. But in this webinar we find a more important reason why the product management team needs to be aware of SEO principles, and why someone on the team should have SEO responsibility. No this is not an addition to the 37 activities of the Pragmatic Marketing.

Jessica Bowman talks about how to make SEO efficient by integrating it into your development lifecycle, and how to create accountabilities throughout the organization so that SEO becomes part of everyday business activities. By doing so, the Product Management team can increase efficiencies, improve their relative cost-position, and build competitive advantage. Turns out that good SEO also increases message clarity, which improves differentiation, which in turn builds competitive advantage.

Jessica talks about why accountability is important for product SEO and how the Product Management Team can make people accountable. She identifies and discusses how to:

• Establish "lines of defense"

• Incorporate SEO into everyday activities, and

• Push back when SEO isn't included in deliverables sent to you.

Jessica then points out the efficiencies in doing these things, but also suggests ways to leverage the Product Management team's knowledge of the in-house product lifecycle. She points to integrating SEO into the development lifecycle, and including this thinking in product feature definition. She asserts SEO is everyone's job.

Within the SEO lifecycle, SEO has intense demands and can make the most impact, but as time moves forward, SEO involvement declines. This is why the Product Management team can have such a major impact on SEO.

Jessica suggests that for each Product Management team or business unit, there should be an SEO ambassador who receives mentoring and training. This role provides support to the team as everyone accepts SEO responsibility, but is committed to do the long-term heavy lifting for the group.

In general, SEO isn't typically thought of as an activity of Product Management. Maybe it's not, but this webinar makes a compelling case for introducing this as a standard operating procedure within the ranks of Product Management. The more the Team does this, the better they become and the less intrusive this type of thinking becomes. In this way, SEO is much like the other horizontal disciplines of product management like systems thinking, portfolio management, fiscal responsibility, and so on.