NOTE: The following is a guest post by John Mansour. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information

The words “strategy” and “strategic” are draped all over most B2B product management job descriptions like a cheap suit.  But many organizations don’t realize the consequences of hiring product managers with skills, talents and experience to be strategic, setting expectations accordingly, and then placing them in situations that require nearly 100% focus on execution.  It’s a reality for many product managers and it’s as counterproductive for organizations as it is for the individuals.

On the bright side, the fix is relatively simple.  The key is to recognize the difference between hiring a team of “strategic product managers” and structuring a product management team that’s strategic to the organization.

The Strategy Dilemma

Every organization needs its product management function to be strategic for obvious reasons. Ironically, the manner in which most product managers are directed, evaluated and compensated has little if anything to do with strategy.  Worse yet, too many people believe “the lack of strategy” is a systemic problem within the product management discipline when it’s really an organizational problem that’s amplified in product management.  Unfortunately, it goes largely unnoticed because no one thing seems to be horribly wrong.

Most organizations build a team of product managers with individual goals instead of creating a unified product management team that’s a strategic asset with a single organizational mission, and therein lies the problem. To that end, companies over-treat the symptoms – people, processes, skills, tools, etc. instead of the root cause – the fundamental structure of the product management function.  With a proper structure in place, the right people, processes, skills and tools accelerate and improve desired outcomes exponentially.

A Unified Team Structured for Outcomes

A product management team that’s strategic to an organization consistently meets two criteria that go hand-in-hand. They deliver solutions that help your target buyers/customers advance their strategic agenda in measurable ways, which in turn helps your company advance its market position in measurable ways.

For example, financial services organizations and U.S. healthcare providers have been inundated with regulatory requirements that drive up the cost of doing business and eat into profit margins that are already on the decline.  Strategic value arrives in the form of products and services that help organizations in these markets meet compliance requirements at a significantly lower cost.  Alternatively, solutions that offset those costs in a measurable fashion have equal value.  A strategic product management team attacks the compliance challenge from one or both angles and leverages multiple products and services for maximum impact!

If you consider how incredibly difficult it is for industry issues of this magnitude to be addressed by any one organization, imagine trying to do it with a product or two.  But this is what organizations expect product managers to do when they’re hired to be “strategic” without realizing it’s difficult if not impossible within the confines of an individual product manager.

The Complexion of a Strategic Product Management Function

A B2B product management team that’s a true strategic asset to an organization consists of two complementary areas of focus, markets and products, integrated within a single product organization.  Both elements make significant contributions to a single overarching market & portfolio strategy and both elements own execution of that strategy at a market or product level.  The results of those efforts deliver strategic value to the organization.

The Strategic Part

The market function, 10-20% of the team, uses comprehensive quantitative, qualitative and competitive industry data to “set the table” for the organization’s market strategy by painting a single consensus picture of target markets at a level that transcends all products. Team members in these roles have a full-time focus on markets with no product responsibilities.

The product function, 80-90% of the team, combines horizontal business-practice expertise (e.g. new methods for driving add-on sales via customer service) and product knowledge to “set the table” for the organization’s product investment strategy in each target market.  Individuals in these roles have a full-time focus on aligning new/emerging business practices to product solutions in markets that are strategic to the organization.

It’s a unified team that combines both elements to form the ideal market and portfolio strategy most suited to helping the organization meet its short and long term goals on an ongoing basis.  Senior executives ultimately make the decisions, but they’re doing so with a holistic integrated view of target markets and high-value opportunities mapped to proposed product investments across the entire portfolio instead of many competing versions for each product.

The Execution Part

The market function repurposes the same quantitative, qualitative and competitive information to ensure the organization’s differentiating value is communicated relative to each target market via marketing and sales.

The product function, now armed with comprehensive market data and guided by a single overarching portfolio strategy, no longer has to stress over “finding time to be strategic for my products.” They can more easily budget their time between product initiatives related to high-value market solutions (from the portfolio strategy) and the daily care and feeding of products that keep the squeaky wheels at bay.

As product management goes, so goes the rest of the organization.  When product management is structured with many individuals, each expected to be “strategic”, it results in an organization going in many different directions with competing influences, spreading its resources too thin to achieve a leadership position in any one area of strength.

The burden is on the organization to rethink the manner in which it structures product management if it wants an asset that has real strategic value to the organization. Most anyone who’s talented enough to be hired into a product management role is capable of being strategic.  They just need an environment that recognizes the key difference between a team of “strategic product managers” and a product management team that’s strategic to the organization.  Setting appropriate expectations during the hiring process can only help the cause.

Tweet this: What happened to all those strategic Product Managers we hired?  http://wp.me/pXBON-3g2 #prodmgmt #strategy #innovation

John Mansour is the founder and president of Proficientz, a company that specializes in B2B product  portfolio management. This article was originally published on the Proficientz blog in January 2012.

Related posts:

1. The 3 Biggest Hurdles to Greater Strategic Influence
2. Guest Post: If Product Marketing is so Strategic, why do I always get stuck in the weeds?
3. Questions for Product Managers
4. The Essential Pieces of Strategic Product Leaders

I had a couple of telling customer service experiences recently that I wanted to share. There are some lessons that all companies can learn from this experience. I’ve listed them out at the bottom of this post.

Incident 1 – You can backup, you just can’t restore

I use an online service to maintain backups of this blog. For a small monthly fee they automatically back up the blog and provide a flexible mechanism to restore. Thankfully I hadn’t ever needed to restore anything…until about 2 weeks ago.

Something got corrupted in the blog database. I noticed it on a Sunday morning and thought, “OK…Sundays are a bit slow, we get less traffic on Sundays, so it’s a good time to restore the database.”

I logged into my account on the service’s site, selected the appropriate backup from several days earlier, clicked the Restore button and waited, and waited, and waited.

The progress bar sat at 0% for about an hour. I knew something was amiss and thought, “OK, user error, let me try that again.”

I tried once again, and once again the restore process sat at 0% for a long time. After a couple of hours I decided something was definitely wrong and sent an email into the Support Team at the company. The Support team doesn’t work on weekends. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but for something mission critical like addressing problems in a database restore, it was a big problem.

Late Sunday evening, I gave the restore process one last try and let it run overnight. I got up the next morning to check on the restore and it was still at 0%. At that point, I sent several harsh emails to the company expressing my frustration with the process.

Later in the day on Monday, the problem was resolved and the restore happened and the blog was back, minus a few comments that had been posted since that backup had been done.  But why didn’t the restore work in the first place?

Turns out I had encountered a “bug” in the restore process which they’d fixed to allow my restore to work.  I’d really love to know exactly what the “bug” was.

Keep in mind that this service does exactly 2 things — it backs up a database and it restores a database. That’s it. No other extraneous features. It’s simple and that’s why I chose it…assuming it actually worked! What was I paying them for every month?

Incident 2 – Oops, our typo brought down your blog

About a week later, as I checked the blog in the morning, I saw that my blog was down. It wasn’t displaying posts, I couldn’t log into the admin area and the error message pointed at the backup service as the problem. I immediately went to Twitter to see if others were affected. I found 1 or 2 tweets from people indicating a problem with their blogs. No tweets from the company. I also checked the company’s blog to see if they’d posted anything. Nope. The last blog post was from the previous week.

So, I send a couple of urgent emails into their Support team to get help. Several hours later they fixed the problem and my blog was back.

It turns out that overnight the service pushed out a patch to “a small number of customers” — their words –to close some security holes. But, there was a “misspelling of a word in the code that caused a PHP error”– again, their words –  and it brought down the blogs it was sent to.

When I found this out, I was livid. Last week, I couldn’t restore — because of a “bug”. This week a typo in their patch brought  the blog down.

And while they apologized via email and credited 1 month of the subscription, their view that the issue only affected “a small number of customers” and thus no public announcement on Twitter, their blog was required.

4 Ways to improve customer service in critical times

There are many things companies MUST do to provide REAL customer service. Sadly, many companies, while well intention, fail to understand the basics of customer expectations and what they need to do to help customers through rough waters, especially when it’s the company’s fault!

1. When there are problems, OVER communicate

Large or small, when customers are impacted by the service provider’s mistakes, OVER COMMUNICATION is required.

A single email to individual customers impacted is necessary, but it is NOT SUFFICIENT. There’s nothing wrong with admitting to mistakes. As the Support Engineer wrote to me when I reminding him of the restore problem the previous week:

We all make mistakes but our team will always be transparent and correct issues as fast as possible. We can’t guarantee that we won’t ever make a mistake but we always try our best to prevent them.

Transparency is good, but there’s transparency that primarily benefits the company (e.g. sending private emails) and there’s transparency that benefits the customer and the company (e.g. being public and proactive). It’s the latter that is better and more important.

Be public with your errors. I will trust a company MUCH more that is open and up front, and I’ll give them MUCH more leeway if a problem occurs. Why? Because I can clearly see what happened, know why it happened and know they are or will actively work to fix it.

2. A “small number of customers” is BIG, if I’m part of it

Don’t ever say that “it only affected a small number of customers” as a reason for not following rule #1. It’s only a small number of customers if I’m not part of it. If I’m part of that small group, then it’s a BIG number!

Bean counters, lawyers and hack PR people use phrases like that to try to diminish the impact and thus culpability (legal or otherwise). Being part of a “small number of customers” that were impacted makes the problem worse for me, not better. How unlucky was I?  Why did the problem impact me? Why not other people. Trust me, that phrase doesn’t help in the least.

3. If you’re going to compensate, go the extra mile

My blog was impacted for well over a day by incident 1. It was down for an unknown number of hours due to incident 2. Neither of these were the result of anything that I did incorrectly. And these incidents happened within a week of each other. I spent several hours of my time trying to understand what had happened and trying to fix the problem. Crediting me 1 month of subscription service and an email saying mistakes happen is a far cry from a satisfactory resolution.

When addressing these kinds of issues, just like it’s better to over-communicate, it’s better to over-compensate for the customer’s loss or inconvenience. Not only will this stop customer griping, but it would likely turn that potentially disgruntled customer into an evangelist for your company. Imagine the glowing blog post I would have written had the compensation been a bit more generous.

4. Service IS the new Marketing

If companies don’t understand this, they don’t understand the economic and social pathways to success. Service has ALWAYS been important, but now good AND bad service stories will be shared rapidly and repeatedly. I’ve even done that on occasion. Bad customer service is just the nudge most people need to start looking at your competitors. Think about that.

There are many stories of great and not-so-great customer service experiences. It is claimed that the “United Breaks Guitars“ saga had a material impact on the stock price of United’s parent company. Every time a customer faces problems (whether “user error” or not), there is an opportunity to create a POSITIVE memorable experience that that customer will share and broadcast. Given the broad set of options most people have for products and services, it’s shocking that more companies don’t empower their employees to — in the words of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh – deliver happiness.

Saeed

Tweet this: 4 Ways to Improve Customer Service in Critical Times http://wp.me/pXBON-3fb #prodmgmt #custserv #service

Related posts:

1. Is Customer Service dead?
2. FutureShop – A woeful tale of customer (dis)service
3. Unexpected down time
4. 5 Practical Ways to Improve Executive Communications

A few weeks ago, I posted 4 Mistakes to Avoid in your Product Management Career. In that post, Shardul Mehta, Veronica Figarella, Ninon LaForce and I shared some hard lessons learned; hopefully to help you avoid them yourself.

In this post, we each share a success story, but this time in hopes that the insight would help you gain success.

Feel free to use the comments section to share a success story you had in your career.  I’d love to hear from you.

—-

Shardul Mehta – Always continue to innovate

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked on many new ideas, be they new products, new services, new processes, new ways of doing business, or even new businesses. Some have seen the light of day, many others have not. But I am convinced that one of the reasons I have enjoyed success in my career is because I was never satisfied with the status quo and always pushed for change.

Has it gotten me into trouble? Has it caused folks to be annoyed at me? Has it made me feel like an island at times? Absolutely. Has it possibly at times limited my advancement opportunities in the short term? Perhaps. Do I regret any of it? Not one bit.

I’ve learned that innovation represents change, and in order to affect change, you have to help people through their change curves. This takes a lot of work. Human beings by nature resist change. The status quo is familiar, comfortable, safe. Different is not.

I’ve also learned that when it comes to successful innovation, in the end most often people don’t dwell on the turmoil of the journey, but rather remember the result and the impact it had on them. That is incredibly gratifying. And why I continue to sign up to do it again and again.

Ninon LaForce – Be an early entrant into a market

The first product I managed at a telecom startup was an audio conferencing product for wholesalers. It helped that the audio conferencing industry was just at the beginning of the growth stage so everyone wanted to get into the action and there was very good money to be made.

I worked with an amazing team of developers and telecom engineers. I was the primary contact for large wholesalers of our services and worked day-to-day with amazing product marketing managers at those organizations. I learned a ton from them. It was energizing and exciting. This kind of success does not happen everyday so I was and still am, very proud to have been part of it, and being and early entrant into what became a large market was a big factor in the success.

Veronica Figarella – Have a well supported Product Marketing plan

As I continued learning about the importance of knowing your market and your customers, I got better at understanding the market’s opportunity and building my products’ unique value proposition.

On my latest job, my first task was to build a Product Marketing Plan. The product was almost ready for launch (so they said) but had no clear positioning.

In the past, I would have hurried to complete the plan after learning everything about the product and its features, attributes, possible improvements, etc. After many mistakes, I realized that it is better to start analyzing the market, the consumer and the competitors instead.

The result was a well rounded Product Marketing plan with a clear calculation of the size of the opportunity, measurable and achievable objectives and a plausible marketing budget. Everybody was happy.

Of course learning about the product benefits is fundamental in building a Product Marketing plan, but without knowing what problems the product solves it is difficult to answer and sustain: “How many of these are we going to sell?”

Saeed Khan – Fully align your company to your target market

Many years ago I did some consulting for a startup. The company had a lot of things going for it. The management team was solid, they were well funded, and they had good core technology. My consulting efforts were focused on helping them refine their product strategy. At least that was the objective going in.

After many discussions and meetings, what I recommended was not a refinement, but a redefinition of their product, their go-to-market and in fact, their target market.   The market they were originally aiming for was big, but very crowded with established companies. The new market segment was smaller (but still large) and had no dominant players. After I delivered my report to the CEO and we reviewed my recommendations, I moved on to other projects.

I found out a few years later that the CEO had taken my recommendations and implemented them, almost wholesale. They rewrote large parts of their product, refocused on a different market segment, repositioned themselves and found success. I still keep in touch with people from that company today.

Although my contribution was small — I was just a consultant — , the impact was enormous. I credit the CEO for implementing my recommendations. A lot of CEOs wouldn’t have taken that risk.  But I see it as a big success both for me, as  well as for the significant value Product Management can bring to a company.

Tweet this: 4 Product Management Success Stories – http://wp.me/pXBON-3ez #prodmgmt #innovation

Please share your success stories in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Win/Loss Analysis MUST include wins (success stories don’t count)
2. Product success is not easy….part 2
3. A Model and Metrics for Tracking Product Success
4. Go-to-Market and Organizational Metrics for Product Success

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Blathnaid McGill. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

You don’t need to be an academic scholar to know that much has already been said and written about leadership. You could fill a small library with books on leadership development and related topics. Nevertheless, the world continues to look for qualities that define a leader. There are, quite obviously a few must have’s. A leader has to lead by example, his/her actions must be decisive and must reflect a certain level of integrity, his/her dedication and commitment towards the ultimate goal must be able to inspire followers and his/her humility should bring out the best in everyone.

Manager vs. Leader
Having listed these qualities, a distinction needs to be made between a manager and a leader. Essentially, a leader has to be much more than a manager. While a manager’s primary concern is strategic deployment of work, a leader has to be innovative even when it comes to administration. A good leader works with a long term vision in mind while a manager usually focuses on an immediate goal. Quite simply then, a leader has a much more challenging role to play than a manager.

Leadership Skills
First things first, anyone hoping to develop leadership skills should choose the niche they are most comfortable with. This choice depends on factors both emotional and rational. It goes without saying that you must feel passionately about your chosen field if you hope to excel as leader in it but at the same time, your choice has to be guide by practicality as well. Ask yourself if you are suited for the particular field or if your personality is more conducive to some other field. Once you have made this choice, you can start working on the required attributes particular to that field.

Leadership Impact
Having said that, leadership development is not merely about following a set of prescribed rules; it has a lot to do with evaluating and contextualising a particular situation and devising a plan according to it. To have a greater impact, a leader has to be flexible. She has to have the ability to prioritise the larger goal above all other concerns. So, a good leader may adopt a style of leadership she is otherwise not comfortable with if the situation so demands it. The key lies in striking a balance between what you want to do and what is expected of you. It is not really an either/or choice between your personal preferences and contextual requirements, you have to blend them in just the right proportions.

Essential Leadership Qualities
Much is said of humility as an essential leadership quality. Every person who wants to improve his/her leadership skills must learn to temper this humility with ruthless practicality. If you try to please everyone, you are basically writing your own recipe for disaster. Begin by accepting that your actions might offend certain people but this must not stop you from making the right choices.

Product Management
In terms of product management, leadership qualities play a big role. It is easy to assume that product management is isolated around the product itself but it involves possessing cross-functional leadership skills. Improving on an existing product, for example, cross–functional managers need to be able to interpret the company’s business plan as well as recognise the skills of employees in addition to establishing what the customer/market needs. It is about expanding the existing tools you have and using them to improve your product.

Finally then, there is only so much that can be formally taught about leadership. A lot of it comes from instinct and experience. Every time you are faced with a difficult situation, try to remember if you have handled anything similar before. Take tips from your own past but remember to modify your course of action according to present demands. And if you find yourself lacking information or unable to make a decision, never be afraid to seek help. After all, every leader started out as a novice.

Tweet this: Tips for Improving Impact and Presence as a Leader http://wp.me/pXBON-3dc #prodmgmt #leadership

—–

Blathnaid Magill has an MBS in Electronic Business from University College Cork and has an interest in business and technology trends. Blathnaid is currently writing on behalf of QA who are current frontrunners in leadership development.

Related posts:

1. Becoming a Triple Threat Product Leader
2. A tale of two companies: The discounter and the price leader
3. Guest Post: Improving Product Management the Agile Way
4. Guest Post: 8 Important Points about Marketing Strategy

NOTE: The following is a guest post by John Mansour. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information

Wearing the “strategic” label in one form or another has been the Holy Grail for as long as I’ve been in the product management and marketing profession.  But despite years of ongoing group therapy via blogs, meet-ups, associations, ProductCamp, social media, training courses and various other forums, the strategic-influence needle for product managers and marketers has barely advanced, if at all.  Why?

It’s ironic when I think about how the profession has grown in recent years but I have a theory that comes from many years of observation, as both a practitioner and a consultant.  The top three hurdles preventing product management and marketing teams from wielding greater strategic influence are the following:

1. Product Ownership is All-Consuming

Product managers with direct responsibility for one or more products have two chances of being strategic – SLIM and NONE.  It’s not that product managers don’t have the knowledge or skills.  There are simply too many issues coming from too many directions that suck product managers into a rat hole to the point of no return.  It’s not enough to be strategic for a few hours here and there or for the occasional offsite meetings, sales calls or customer visits.  To be strategic in a manner that’s valuable to the organization, it has to be a fulltime job for a select few.

2. A Growing Influx of Technical Skills

More and more product management and marketing professionals are coming from roles with strong technical backgrounds.  While those skills are highly valuable, they don’t make for a “natural” transition into product management and marketing roles where there’s no exact science to most of the activities, extroverted type-A personalities are preferable, and soft skills such as persuasion and schmoozing are paramount.Consequently, teams overloaded with technical skills naturally gravitate to their comfort zone to deal with issues that are more black and white, the tactics.  While tactics are an enormous part of the success factor, the macro effect on the organization is the lack of a unified grand plan that transcends all products.  It’s a root cause of poor execution on all levels.

3. Strategic at a Product Level is a Misnomer

Strategy can only go so far at a product level.  With very few exceptions, it’s difficult to solve problems that have broad strategic impact (as measured by your target buyers) with a single product because the scope of problems and the solutions are limited by the product.  Furthermore, in B2B companies where many products target the same markets, the highest impact solutions usually involve multiple integrated products and address a broader set of related customer activities that go beyond the scope of a single product.  Throw in the fact that product managers are motivated by product performance incentives and you have practices that simply aren’t conducive to identifying and solving problems that have high market value.  The “product CEO” mentality flies in the face of a cohesive strategy that transcends all products.  Result: a team divided!

It’s worth noting that these issues have little to do with the individuals in the roles.  They’re more a by-product of organizations not changing the structure of their product teams to reflect larger, diverse and more complex portfolios.   In one way, shape or form product teams have to be structured to be strategic beyond individual product strategies and unite the organization behind a common strategy that transcends all products.  That strategy has to be defined at a more granular level than revenue, profitability, market share, etc. so that the entire collection of product and marketing initiatives create greater momentum together than they would individually while making the best utilization of resources.  It’s a much easier way to meet the organization’s strategic goals.

What’s your take?

Tweet this: The 3 Biggest Hurdles to Greater Strategic Influence http://wp.me/pXBON-3ec #prodmgmt #strategy #innovation

—

John Mansour is the founder and president of Proficientz, a company that specializes in B2B product  portfolio management. This article was originally published on the Proficientz blog in January 2012.

Related posts:

1. What Happened to All Those Strategic Product Managers We Hired?
2. Guest Post: If Product Marketing is so Strategic, why do I always get stuck in the weeds?
3. Product Management, the new Executive of Influence?
4. Customers – How to Work with Product Management and Influence our Product Direction

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Didier Thizy. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information

Across all industries, product managers are waking up to the power of user experience design. They are realizing that a great design can differentiate a product in a field of competitors, reduce development churn, and sell more product.

And most product managers agree – teams need to include “a designer”.

But did you know that there are not one but three very different types of designers? Design researchers, interaction designers, and visual designers. Each is about as distinct from the other as sales, marketing and engineering.

Successful companies like Google, SalesForce.com and Facebook involve all three design skillsets on their projects. If your process does not, you may be missing out on a serious competitive advantage.

3 Design Disciplines

• Design Research. Design researchers specialize in uncovering user needs. They train for years to learn how to interview and observe end-users, and communicate those results to the other two designers. Their findings often yield fascinating insights that can be used to determine the exact point in the workflow where users are abandoning your product, or even help you uncover the next big innovation in your product line.

• Interaction Design. Interaction designers are the masters of information architecture, intuitive workflows and content prioritization. They work with product management and design researchers to obtain market and user research and translate it into a draft of what the product will look like, how it will behave, and how it ties back to the user’s goals—usually in the form of sketches called “wireframes”.

• Visual Design. Visual designers are graphical experts that specialize in tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to add the right visual “wow” to software. Good visual designers can provide users with an instant emotional connection to a product even before they start using it.

From my experience working with many designers, it is quite rare to find “a designer” who is strong in two, let alone three, of these areas. Each skill set is so different from the other that companies are often best served involving even part-time help from a specialist in each area rather than trying to find a jack of all trades.

The Usual Suspect

Most often when a team has “a designer”, we find out that what they really have is a visual designer, who is in charge of making their product “look good”. Great visual designers are essential. Good ones know how to present visual information in a way your users immediately “get”. They help make the potentially confounding analytics graphs in your product easy to understand. They design icons that help your users instinctively understand what to do. But there is a lot more to creating a design users love than visual look and feel.

The Unlikely Hero

Of all three disciplines, the most overlooked is the Design Researcher (also known as the User Researcher or UX Researcher). Product Managers are responsible for a lot of research, and as such they (or their bosses) don’t always see the value that a design researcher could bring.

From our experience, product managers are very busy. More than any other role in a software organization, they are thrust with a myriad of responsibilities, from strategic planning to sales calls to working with marketing on launch strategy and collateral. Of all these responsibilities, the one that most often gets deprioritized is talking to real-world users.

Design researchers are specialists at drawing out insights from end-users using a variety of techniques, from contextual interviews following a formal protocol to card sorting and triading. They are also trained in communicating those insights to interaction designers and visual designers.

As such, a design researcher can be an extremely valuable partner for a product manager.

Design researchers can:

• help product managers glean insights from end-users, especially as they pertain to
• the product design and workflow
• act as a bridge between user research and the interaction and visual designers
• act as the voice of the customer in technical team scrums, particularly when the
• product manager is away with marketing and sales
• present user research results to executives to support the product manager’s strategic  plan

Most importantly, having even a part-time design researcher on the team ensures the critical task of getting real-world user input is not dropped.

In an industry where B2C and B2B vendors are setting the bar higher and higher every quarter with design, it is no longer enough to recognize you need “a designer” on your team. Recognize all three design skillsets. Incorporate each at some level in your process. And be amazed at the true power that design can bring to you and your product.

Tweet this: There’s no such thing as “a Designer” http://wp.me/pXBON-3dm #prodmgmt #ux #id #design

—

Didier Thizy  is Director of Market Development for Macadamian, a global UI design and software innovation firm. You can find more information on Macadamian’s blog.

Related posts:

1. On Product Design
2. Guest Post: Do Product Managers just take credit for great UX design?
3. Forget research, let's build something! – Redux
4. Lessons from Harry Potter

Late last year, we had a group post on Lessons Learned in 2011. It was well received so we decided to post another one. This one is also about lessons learned, but focused on mistakes we made in our careers . Hopefully this advice will help some of you avoid making the same mistakes we did.

Veronica Figarella – Wrong analysis, Wrong pricing!

A few years ago I started a new telecom job managing a group of related products. Although I was excited about the challenge, I was working under great stress and juggling too many projects with too little time to prioritize. Typical PM situation.

I was asked to quickly re-launch one of the company’s products (an internet + voice + mobile pack) as its sales had declined quickly in the previous quarter. As I started analyzing what changes needed to be made in order to increase sales, I overlooked some important market information and ended with an uncompetitive pricing strategy.

To make matters worse, my bosses didn’t question my pricing strategy and I didn’t realize my mistake until the changes were ready to go live. I had to stop all the go-to-market activities, admit I’d made a mistake and work hard to correct it.

I learned that no matter how tight your timeframe, you always have to dedicate time to know the market your product is playing in. It is far more expensive to make a pricing mistake than to take an extra month to re-launch. On the personal side, I learned that it takes courage to admit one’s mistakes.

Shardul Mehta – What got me here won’t get me there

When taking on a new role, be it a different set of responsibilities, a promotion or a new job, believing what made you successful in the past is what will make you successful in the new role is a mistake.

“They gave me this job because I’m good at what I do, so they must expect me to do more of it here,” is typically how the reasoning goes. So you focus on doing what you know best, which makes you feel confident, in control and safe. But it’s a delusion. You’re actually setting yourself up for failure and limiting your opportunities to advance your career.

Even accomplished senior executives have fallen into this trap. The terrific book, The First 90 Days, gives the example of Douglas Ivester, who was promoted to CEO of Coca Cola in 1997 and thought to be the perfect fit, only to be forced to resign two years later, because he continued to act as a “super COO” rather than fully embrace the strategic and visionary role of the CEO.

As I’ve enjoyed success in my career, I often go back to that saying, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” This doesn’t mean ignoring past successes, but recognizing that my performance is now being measured by a different set of metrics. I admit, it’s something I’m still trying to crack the code on.

What this means is re-learning how to learn. It means letting go of the past, understanding how past success can actually be a barrier now, and what new perspectives need to be developed. There is much truth in Yoda’s wise teaching: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Ninon LaForce – No career focus, no advancement

I am not sure if it is a mistake but it took me a long time to realize that Product Management & Marketing was what really interested me.

I started my career in sales at Dell Computers with no idea of what I wanted for my career; I was only doing sales because I needed a job to pay the bills and all my friends were working there. Dell gave me great product and sales training.

Three years later, I left Dell and joined a startup in a sales role. I made some good money (finally!) but the problem was that management got to know me as a sales person and did not help me in developing my career in other areas. The company was doing well and growing by leaps and bounds.

I wanted to be involved in strategy, in partner development, and in marketing. I just enjoyed being challenged by complex problems and working with a team to solve them. I envied the marketing and product management people as they were dealing with, in my opinion, the most challenging and creative problems.

So, I took marketing classes at night with the hope to move to marketing one day. After many years with that start up, I quit and took a big pay cut to follow my passion for marketing.

I eventually found a good marketing position in a telecom start up.This job was great because I was the first and only employee in marketing so I got the chance to grow a marketing department.

Three years later, the president promoted me to lead for Product Development. I stayed with this company for 9 years until I moved to my current role in Product Development & Marketing.

This is a long story to say: it helps to know what you want early on and to focus on it so you can develop and move up faster.

Saeed Khan – Not understanding how to “manage up” early in my career

The second word of Product Management is “MANAGEMENT”, and its really important to keep in mind that the “Management” is multidimensional.

Yes, the obvious work is the product work, whether related to requirements gathering, working with Engineering or Marketing or Sales or customers or prospects etc.

But when working with executives, there’s a whole set of management skills that need to be applied, and unfortunately, unless you’ve learned them somewhere else, you’re likely to have to learn them the hard way, like I did.

“Managing up” means different things to different people. Some people look at it as doing what your boss says to make her happy. And that actually works for some people. But managing up starts with understanding the context that your boss, or executives work in, and aligning yourself with that context. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, or in fact what accomplishments you feel you’ve achieved, if those aren’t important to the goals and objectives of your boss or the executive team.

In my case, in one job, I did what I believed was in the best interest of the products I managed. But my decisions were not in synch with what the president was looking for. I pushed hard to get investment in an underfunded product, but the president was not interested in investing at all. And I grew revenue, instead of cutting costs as the president wanted, on another. The goal was to increase profitability and my view was that the better way to do it was by increasing revenue.

In the end, I left the company disappointed that my accomplishments were not recognized. Years later, I found out that the next Product Manager implemented my plans for another set of products but did it by managing up and having alignment with the executives. He was rewarded for his efforts. Lesson learned.

Tweet this: 4 Mistakes to Avoid in your Product Management Career http://wp.me/pXBON-3dL #prodmgmt #career #prodmktg

Related posts:

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2. 5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Performing Market Validation
3. Career paths for Product Managers
4. 5 steps to building a great Product Management organization

By Saeed Khan

I can’t believe it’s been over 3 year since I first wrote this piece. It was intended as a counterpoint to all the agilists that were decrying how Product Management wasn’t “agile” (or “Agile”). I found (and still find) the whole argument somewhat baseless, but it still persists amongst agilists (look at this example of what “Product Owner” is turning into), and unfortunately, even within the Product Management community.

Those who talk about “Agile Product Management” as some unique form of Product Management are not doing anyone a service. “Agile Product Management”? As opposed to what? “Sluggish Product Management”?

Just because the technologists have latched onto something that seems to be having benefits for them — and believe me, the bar was set pretty low for many of them — that doesn’t mean Product Management needs to latch onto that as well. Yeah, that’s what we always preach– see something and create a “me-too” solution. Right?

Product management, like business management, is dynamic, open to change, should focus on people etc. Those companies that are static, put process ahead of progress etc. quickly die off.

So, here’s the original piece from October 2008. It was originally titled “Is Product Management Agile?” but I decided the new title was a better fit for the reprise.

————

There’s a lot of talk about Agile Product Management these days, and for obvious reasons. The thinking is that because of Agile development, Product Managers need to change how they function and adapt themselves to a new way of developing software and become “agile”.

But the reality is, Product Managers have always been agile, and finally the software developers are coming around to OUR way of thinking!

Yes, you read that right. Agile is the result of engineers finally understanding what’s really important and making a bold declaration that they now understand. But of course, being engineers, they won’t give credit to Product Management. They’re taking all the credit themselves for this tremendous insight and seachange in their profession.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove that Product Management has always been “agile” using the Agile Manifesto itself.

The Manifesto has 4 elements. They are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

OK. Let’s take one at a time and apply them to Product Management.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Most product management teams are understaffed. In fact, in many companies you’ll only find individual product managers working alone with teams of developers. They have no choice but to interact face-to-face. And not just with Development, but with every other group in the company and many parties outside of the company.

“Hub of the wheel”? You know what that translates to in the real world? Meetings, and lots of them, with the primary objective to keep all teams aligned and aware of progress, status and plans. Those cross-team meetings aren’t for the benefit of Product Management!

As for processes and tools…well, most PMs will tell you they do what it takes to get the job done, and the only tools they have are usually email, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, possibly some crappy (free) wiki software and Post-it notes. No fancy (or even basic) requirements management tools for most Product Managers. Individuals and interactions: Yes. Processes and tools: Not much. Score: 1 for 1!

Working software over comprehensive documentation

What PM doesn’t want working software? If only the final product that came out of Dev and QA was guaranteed to always work as expected. PMs want working software so much they perform QA, file bugs, run beta programs and hound the testing teams to ensure all the important use cases actually work.

How many times have we taken a pre-release build and found that it doesn’t install properly, or fails when upgrading from a previous version, or has licensing problems or runs really slowly using real world data sets. Ensuring working software gets out the door is top of mind for every PM, and even though helping QA the product is not technically part of our job, many of us do it anyway to raise the probability of actually delivering working software.

Regarding comprehensive documentation, we don’t tell Dev teams to create 50 page spec documents. They choose to write them and then PMs are forced to sit through endless “spec review” meetings to ensure Dev has taken the requirements and translated them properly into something THEY understand.

As for creating comprehensive documentation, PMs can never be accused of that. What’s the most common complaint from Engineering about Product Management? Answer: “The requirements aren’t detailed enough.” ‘Nuff said. Score: 2 for 2!

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Too easy. Really, do I have to explain this one? OK, I will. “Product Management: Voice of the Customer”. How often have you heard that phrase? Meaningful phrase or not, Product Management focuses extensively on customer insight and collaboration. It’s another core aspect of the job.

But, there are countless true stories of Engineering VPs who exhibited disdain for what customers actually want or need. These people are so smart they know what customers need, with little if any input from the customers themselves. Case in point.

A survey of 500 customers showed clear priorities for a number of big ticket items that needed to be added to a product. Capability <A> was ranked #15 by customers but was a pet project of the VP Eng. Capability <B> was ranked #2 by customers. We only had the resources to do one of those 2 items, along with everything else that was planned.

PM: We’ve laid out the requirements in priority order. < B> is critical for the next release and given the target release date, resources and survey results, we’ve deprioritized <A>.
VP: Hold it a minute. Are you saying that <A> is not important?
PM: Well, it’s not as important as <B> and the other things we’ve prioritized for this release.
VP: I was talking to MegaBankCorp last week, and they really emphasized the need for <A>.
PM: Yes, I spoke to them too. But they’re one of only 3 companies who have indicated they have an urgent need for <A>. I’ve got 50 companies that need <B>. <B> is more important than <A>.
VP: I don’t think you’re talking to the right people. I hear people asking for <A> all the time. Our major competitor has <A>, and we’ve lost deals to them.
PM: We’ve lost 1 deal to them on <A>, The sales team agrees that <B> is much higher priority than <A>, and the 500 hundred customers I surveyed agree as well.
VP: Don’t you realize <A> is strategic? Don’t you even read the industry news? You know what the problem with Product Management is?
PM: I’m sure you’re going to tell me.
VP: You talk to too many customers! You don’t talk to enough people who don’t use our product.
PM: People who don’t use our product also don’t tell us what they want added to the product. But, if you have the resources to do both <A> and <B> in this release, then be my guest. But <B> is top priority if you can’t do both.

Result: VP storms out of the meeting. Sends and email the next day indicating that after analyzing the effort and resources, both are not possible in the coming release so only <B> can be done.

Of course, not all Dev leads and VPs are as stubborn. But when it comes to wanting to work with customers, as opposed to sitting in meetings trying to get Engineering to buy-in on what is needed, Product Managers have always advocated for that. Score: 3 for 3!

Responding to change over following a plan

Next to “The requirements aren’t detailed enough“, the most common complaint that Engineers have of Product Management is that PMs regularly “change their mind“. Most PMs don’t simply change their mind about things, but reprioritize what is important based on new data, new market conditions, new company objectives, or other external changes that take place. That’s core to the role of Product Management. The world is a dynamic place, and when your competitor is bought out by and industry giant, or you find that you’re losing deals because of product gaps, action must be taken.

Yes, there are some flaky PMs who don’t have a clue about things, but that can’t be helped. Most capable PMs are reasonable people who need to focus on the business and leverage the engineering resources to help drive business benefit. It’s hard enough to predict what will happen 3 months from now, let alone 12 months from now.

But if a development cycle will take 12 months to complete, Product Management must be collecting the data to define that release many months in advance. Hey, we’re smart, but we’re not the Oracle of Delphi. We make decisions. Decisions are based on the information we have today. If something material happens after a decision is made that requires a change in product plans, the change must be made. Product Management always understood that. Engineering seems to be finally realizing that. Score: 4 for 4!

Conclusion

So there you have it. QED — quod erat demonstrandum.

Product Managers have been living, breathing and advocating the elements of the Agile Manifesto for years before the Manifesto was even a firing synapse in the brains of any of it’s authors. Developers though were set in their ways, with an “engineering” mindset, pushing back on Product Management for changing priorities, not providing enough detail in requirements etc.

I’m glad, even if they don’t want to admit it publicly, that Engineers are finally seeing the light. Now, if we could only get Management to allocate more headcount to Product Management, life would almost be perfect.

Saeed

Tweet this: Product Management has always been “Agile” – http://wp.me/pXBON-3cA #prodmgmt #agile

Related posts:

1. Is Product Management Agile?
2. Worth Repeating: Rules of the Product Management Jedi
3. Worth Repeating: Devil’s Dictionary for High Tech
4. Agile/Scrum Software Development and Product Management part 2

By Saeed Khan

At ProductCamp Austin, someone, and I apologize, as I don’t remember his name, came up to me and asked me the following.

I really want to become a Product Manager. How can I make that move?

I wrote about this a while back in Open Question: How did you get your first Product Management or Product Marketing job?. Some readers also gave their experiences. But taking a step back, there’s a more fundamental question here.

How do you enter a field, where there is no singular definition of the role, no standard preparatory courses, and few defined hard skills to measure against????

Other fields are not as bad as Product Management.

Sales gets 2 out of 3 (i.e. there is a singular definition of the role, and a very clear measure of success (sales generated), but few if any standard courses).

Marketing get 2 out of 3 (singular definition and standard prep courses – yes, hard skills — not so clear)

Engineering gets 3 out of 3 (clearly defined, standard prep courses, and well understood and measurable hard skills).

I’ve actually never thought about it this way before, but now that I have I can more clearly see the issue for people wanting to move into the field.

For an outsider, it’s really unclear how to make the transition. So here’s my first attempt to put some structure on this task.

What do they mean by “Product Manager”?

One thing to keep in mind is that because there isn’t a commonly understood definition of Product Management, some companies say they want a Product Manager, but really want something else.

e.g. a Project Manager, an “Agile” Product Manager (e.g. you’re sitting with Engineers all day), a Business Strategist  (this is Microsoft’s view), or a superhero who does everything (which is what a lot of startups want).

So first, get a clear understanding of what they actually want when they say they want a Product Manager.

What do YOU mean by “Product Manager”?

Within a mature Product Management organization, you should find a number of different roles. If not, but it’s a large organization,  then it’s not really that mature.  These roles can include Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Solution Specialist, Analyst etc.

Think about what kind of role in Product Management fits best with your background and skills and pursue that type of role. e.g. If you are a much better communicator than technologist, then Product Marketing may be a better fit.

Qualities of Product Managers

In my Open Question, I did indicate that the following were important skills for Product Managers, though not necessarily in this order:

• Domain experience
• Communication skills
• Decision making ability
• Business understanding

There are other skills that are useful as well, though some are harder to measure than others. Technical knowledge is definitely useful. Empathy is also important. Judgement (related to but not the same as decision making) is another. Negotiation skills and sales skills are two more.

Match your skills with an appropriate role

But the question really is, what does a hiring manager need to see if they decide to hire someone with no formal Product Management (or Product Marketing) experience into that role?

Want to know the answer? Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. What would you look for? And how could you position yourself?

Look at the table below. I’ve listed out a number of different roles who I’ve seen move into Product Management (there are of course many others not listed), and the TYPICAL strengths of people in those roles. (Your mileage will definitely vary).

(click image to enlarge)

Now, see if your skills are similar to those shown, or whether you are stronger (or weaker) in areas. For example, a QA Tester maybe a good fit as a Technical Product Manager, but without stronger domain experience (e.g. market/customer/competitor understanding) and stronger business skills, they may not be a good fit as a Product Manager.

Just to be clear, this table is provided as a high-level reference to give an additional level of clarity to different roles in Product Management departments. It’s not meant to pigeon-hole anyone or any roles. And as mentioned before, there are many other roles people have that could lead them to Product Management. For example, I’ve met former Sales people who became Product Managers.

So, if you are thinking about moving into Product Management, think about your skills and background, but also about what kind of Product Management role is a best fit for you. While this won’t guarantee you a job in Product Management, it may help you narrow down your search and help you leverage your strengths and minimize any gaps that hiring managers may use to disqualify you for a certain role.

Let me know what you think.

Saeed

Tweet this: How to move into Product Management http://wp.me/pXBON-3cj #prodmgmt #career #prodmktg

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By Saeed Khan

One question that came up at ProductCamp Austin, and that comes up often in discussions about Product Management responsibilities, is how to manage (and deliver) on all the demands made on product managers and product marketers.

I have a simple rule that I follow, and have followed for a long time.

If I’m not adding value to a situation or process, then I have no business being a part of that situation or process.

I can observe of course, but I should not be an active participant.

As an example, during my first month at a new job, someone from Engineering came up to me and asked me to get the latest version of HP-UX as Engineering had some work that needed that latest version.

I looked at the person, and said, “Why are you asking me?”

He said, matter of factly, “Oh. The product manager before you used to deal with all this and get us 3rd party software.”

I responded, “OK. That may have been what the previous product manager did, but that’s not my responsibility. You should be able to get that directly from HP without my help.”

The conversation ended and I don’t recall ever being asked for new OS versions again.

While a minor incident, this example is repeated far too often by people who, just wanting to help, or not knowing how to say “No”, acquiesce to tasks where they simply add no value. It’s time wasted that could be spent on more productive work.

Don’t confuse process with progress

On the flip side, there are people who think they are adding value, but in fact more than often than not, are actually impeding progress. These are people who confuse following a process with making progress, or are simply acting as a checklist monkey.

I’ve seen people like this. They send lots of emails, schedule lots of meetings, keep elaborate spreadsheets of activities, and yet, when you look back at the results of all those activities, it’s shocking how little value they’ve added overall.

• What positive change have they made to the product or sales/marketing process?
• Does their net contribution (i.e. minus the emails, meetings, spreadsheets etc.) “move the needle” in any significant way?
• Or are they simply a middle-man (or woman) handing off tasks to others and making excuses when the spotlight shines on them?

Are we adding value yet?

It’s a simple question we should all ask ourselves. Are we adding value? And if so, how much? How could we improve ourselves so that we can add more value in the future.

And we need to be honest, because even the best of us has room for improvement.

• How many customers do you speak with every month? How can you raise that number?
• How many prospects are you in contact with (while working with Sales) every month? Is that sufficient?
• Is your market knowledge, understanding of the buyer and competition better this quarter than it was last quarter? If not, why not?
• How well do you enable other teams to do their jobs better every quarter? Can you do better?
• Are you easy to work with or do you force others to bend to your way of doing things?
• What gripes do your coworkers have about your performance? How could you improve yourself in those areas?

These are all fundamental questions we should ask ourselves. We need to be in a process of continuous improvement, and only by doing that can we continue to add value in our roles.

Saeed

Tweet this: Add value or get out of the way! http://wp.me/pXBON-3bl #prodmgmt #prodmktg #innovation #pcatx

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