Product Strategist:: Views of Values, and Value Dynamics.

Value has many different dimensions. Users, firms, markets, architectures, products, and use provide different views of value. Each view hints at the drivers of value, either gained or lost.

A user's view would consider the degree to which the user can access the value through the use of the feature. Training is a signficant drag on the acquisition of the underlying value. Training might not provide full use of the feature. It may take experience, and other enablements beyond training before the full or maximum value can be actualized.

Firms will see a feature set from a perspective of economic indifference. When a firm buys, the economic buyer makes the purchase. Criteria and intentions include issues beyond the users of the product. Users in different roles use different subsets of features, and their frequency of use varies. The value delivered will vary from role to role. Some features are used in Markov chains. These features converge to specific outputs. Other features, divergent features, like macro facilities provide delayed spaces where use goes well beyond intended use. These are used by small populations users, outliers. Still, this user-centric view does not account for the value derived by the firm in the firms contexts and expectations of competitive advantage.

The value the firm is acquiring also has some relation to the firm's place in the market, particularly in terms of their place on the technology adoption lifecycle, determined by the firm's risk tolerence, or that of the economic buyer(s). Early adopters pay more and expect more value. Late mainstream, pays minimally, and only buys to keep up with everyone else. Competitive advantage has been squeezed out a product before they reach the late mainstream.

Markets effect value as well.  When a vendor releases new functionality, it may take some time for the fast followers to do so. In the meantime, the initial vendor gets a premium. As each subsequent vendor releases approximately the same functionality, the value falls. Every vendor in the category catches on, so the releases occurr quicker, and the value falls with increasing rapidity until it is no longer valuable competitively. Points of difference are rapidly converted to points of parity.

Infrastructural technologies provide value. That value is dynamic. Vendor functionality is built on top of infrastructure. Vendor value sits on top of the dynamic infrastructural technologies value. Most of the time a vendor sublimates the infrastructural technologies to obtain independence from the infrastructure vendor, and to widen their market. If an application requires Oracle, it will soon support MS SQL Server, and MySQL amoung others. The database functionality provides value across all of the infrastructures it supports.

 Constraints drive technology research. Development converts research into products, solutions, and services. The buyer pays for these things because they enable them to do something they never did before, or to do something they already do in an improved manner. The ultimate purpose of a product is task enablement. Improved task performance results in cost reductions. Task enablements cost money to implement. Those costs will include all the things included in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and other costs that are to implicit to include in the TCO.

Use itself provides value in both explicit and implicit form over the life of the features involved in an instance of use. This is tied into the user's view presented earlier. Ultimately, the user's knowledge of the features determines whether the use is explicit or implicit. The allocation of use to these categories has nothing to do with the quality of the user, and is really an indicator of the fitness of the features to the user's domain subcultures. Users doing work focus on work product, not tools.

Use can include not just products, solutions, and services. I can include operational aspects of the vendor's company. Operational aspects can include upgrade purchases, subscription renewals, shipping, customer support. Operational aspects can include marketing, as in the marketing towards upgrades and renewals, essential to the capturing of the firm's increasing returns, and marketing for retention through expertise development, which includes training, technical support, and documentation.

Keeping in mind that the best upgrade and renewal processes are unconscious or implicit, this implies that the best use is also unconscious, as in unconscious knowing. The worst use would be conscious unknowing where the majority of users stop using the application. The need to remain unconscious extends across the operational aspects.