On Product Management

Creating a product management playbook

Steve Johnson — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:46:20 +0000

Back before we were all online all the time, I kept a notebook of all the living documents for my product. Nowadays I keep these documents in a shared folder but sometimes I miss the old notebook. It held my positioning, pricing, and personas; it had my business plan and the requirements for the next release of my product. My product notebook had every answer to any question. And when I was in a meeting or just walking down the hallway, people would stop me with a question and I always had the answer somewhere in my notebook.

How does a new product manager or product owner get up to speed in your organization?

Imagine you’re a new product manager. What company-specific knowledge do you need? Is there a standard template for positioning or for a business case? Where is it? Once you fill it out, how do you share it and store it? And with whom?

What you need is a product management playbook, a collection of the templates and tools tailored for your organization.

You’ll want to create company-specific versions of all your planning templates including “institutional knowledge” like where templates can be found and stored online, the key contacts in each business area, the standard distribution techniques such as distribution lists and discussion forums.

Here’s a list of fewer than 10:

Portfolio roadmap
Buyer profiles
Product profile
Financial plan
Product backlog
Marketing backlog
Launch plan
Profitability retrospective

Plus

Distribution lists
Discussion forums
Online locations for storing development, marketing, and sales information
Key people you need to know with contact info

The trick is to make sure the procedures and methods are grounded in reality. Some teams create “ideal” processes that don’t work in real life. They tend to favor cross-functional teams from all areas of the organization rather than just a few key decision makers. They prefer perfect information—and who doesn’t? But getting precise information isn’t always possible.

What would you put in your product management playbook?

About the author

Steve Johnson is a recognized thought leader and storyteller within the technology product management community. As founder of Under 10 Consulting, he helps product teams implement strategic product management in an agile world. Sign up for his newsletter and weekly inspirations.

Diagnosing Org Health – Take the ONPM poll

Prabhakar Gopalan — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 01:07:08 +0000

Sometimes pictures can say more than words. Here’s a simple flow chart to help diagnose organizational health and a quick poll.

The top part of this chart is where culture and leadership matters most. The bottom is where capability matters most. The two need to work in sync for a healthy firm. If your firm’s problems are at the top – it’s a leadership problem.. If it’s at the bottom, it’s a capability problem. Employees at most large firms spend way too much time arguing about the bottom – Strategy, Plan and Action when the problem might be elsewhere. (fish rots from the head)

Take a look at the chart below and please take our poll below the chart. What’s your firm’s problem area?

Please vote:

View This Poll

About the author

Prabhakar Gopalan is an entrepreneur and growth strategist. In 15+ years, he has worked in a diverse set of roles including consulting, systems engineering, IT architecture, product management, product marketing and corporate strategy. He speaks on management, innovation and strategy. Follow Prabhakar on Twitter.

Product Management vs. Systems Analysis

raspler — Sun, 19 May 2013 03:39:40 +0000

By Rivi Aspler

It still surprises me that people confuse system analysis with product management.

Surprise is one thing, totally harmless. The risky thing is hiring a systems analyst when you actually need a product manager and then being surprised with a failure product.

This post offers 2 main questions that can assist you in understanding what does your product mostly need, a System Analyst or a Product Manager.

The most important question, in my mind, is:

Are you developing an off-the-shelf product, or are you customizing a system to fully match specific customers’ requirements.

A system analyst analyzes the specific requirements of known customers and designs a system that fully matches their requirements.
A product manager analyzes the requirements of several target customers (B2B) or usage statistics of a population of customers (B2C) and suggests a features set that meets the target market needs.

This may not seem like much of a difference, but a systems analyst is committed to a specific customer; as opposed to a product manager that is committed to an target market, i.e. can in-fact disappoint a specific customer whose needs are not fully met.

Next question is the following:

Are you investing R&D effort in creating a product based on key differentiators?

Clinging to one of the bests, Henry Ford’s famous quote is most relevant here,

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

If your product is mature enough (the ‘Milk It’ phase of the Product Life-Cycle) and your product investment has gone down to a minimum, or if you are in the business of selling customized developments, you do not need a product manager. A systems analyst would do a much better job.

If your product has not yet reached full maturity or if you are in the business of selling an off-the-shelf product, you better hire a good product manager that can analyze market trends and competitive offerings so that your product has enough “car-quality” features, when all the others are still selling horses….

Making a long story short, the attached table can assist you in understanding your main skill-set (whether you are a product manager or a system analyst) or what position should you fill in if you are the hiring manager.

Rivi

Tweet this: Product Management vs. Systems Analysis http://wp.me/pXBON-3RF #prodmgmt

About the author

Rivi is a product manager with over 15 years of product life-cycle management experience, at enterprise sized companies (SAP), as well as with small to medium-sized companies. Practicing product management for years, Rivi now feels she has amassed thoughts and experiences that are worth sharing.

The Whole Product Manager

Prabhakar Gopalan — Wed, 08 May 2013 02:16:55 +0000

By Prabhakar Gopalan

Walk into an established software company and you see these product management and product marketing silos. [note: startups or well run product organizations don't have this problem at all - see last paragraph in this skeptical PMM view]

hole not whole. Picture credit: iStockphoto contributor MISHA

To begin with, product managers and marketing managers are saddled with two divisive documents – PRDs and MRDs. Move a little further there’s the big question of ownership. Product managers want to ‘own’ the product. They’ve conveniently added the suffix Owners, sounding important all of a sudden. So we now have ‘Product Owners’. Bear in mind nobody really reports to the product managers for all that ownership. Who’d want to is a separate discussion. For proof, ask the engineer sitting next to you.

But back to the product manager. When you start your PM job you are told this very important fact in big companies – “product managers build products through influence, engineering doesn’t report to product management”. Just that very statement gives Cialdini’s book an instant spike in sales. What about marketers? Ah, they’ve become ‘revenue marketers’ now. Revenue marketing has been in vogue for a while. It is when marketers have finally figured out what they are actually supposed to do. As if the word market didn’t really give enough clarity about revenues they added this powerful prefix Revenue to their title. Nice job marketing yourself! But wait, no market, no revenues. It’s that simple.

So what’s the current state really? Product Managers are ‘Product Owners’ and Marketing Managers are ‘Revenue Marketers’. I don’t know how you could have ownership without owning revenues or revenues without having ownership. And therein lies the problem in the tech industry.

What are the daily complaints in the above set up? Product managers accuse Marketing managers of having no clue about the product, having no technical understanding of APIs, programming, not being able to log into the console and make a demo of the shitty product that lacks half the features the nimble startup across the street is pumping everyday. And Marketing Managers? They talk about how product managers don’t have a clue about the market, the buyer personas, the users, or even describing what the heck the product is supposed to do for whom. Not just another feature release please. Tell me why would anyone value this feature? And not every feature really has to go on CNN and Fox and if it didn’t it is really not marketing’s fault!

Here’s a simple solution to this situation – start becoming a Whole Product Manager. That means start becoming the founder of your product. Yes, it is very hard to do both product management and product marketing. And yes, it is not scalable, blank, blank, blank…(fill in the blanks with other enterprise words). It’s no longer about one side of the equation. Want traction? Start thinking end to end – become the system thinker, the Whole Product Manager. Learn everything for the sake of your product and do everything for the sake of your product. It’s your baby. If you can’t raise it, don’t expect others to raise it for you. And the reality is they’ll do a poor job of raising it or you won’t be happy with it.

For the 99% of us that can’t do that, here’s some advice. Suck it up and do your job really well and show us why you are awesome, not why your peer in product management or product marketing sucks.

Of course, if you are the lucky 1% in a startup that will do everything from writing code to hanging in the clouds to get your VP of Product [blank where blank = Management or Marketing depending on the day] 1.5% equity materialize in the minor event of an extremely unlikely exit through a soul crushing acquisition, just do what you already do – build that awesome product!

- Prabhakar Gopalan @PGopalan

Tweet this: The Whole Product Manager http://wp.me/pXBON-3Rd via @PGopalan @onpm #prodmgmt

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Strategic Product Management – Job Responsibilities or End Results?

Saeed — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:50:29 +0000

By John Mansour

Is your reference to “strategic product management” more about job responsibilities considered to be strategic or product initiatives that produce results with strategic impact?

I ask the question because product managers almost always refer to strategic product management as job responsibilities considered to be more strategic than tactical. But when I listen to executives, their definition of strategic product management is almost exclusively discussed in terms of end results or impact. Strategic as it appears on most job descriptions is somewhere in the middle.

I use the following two guidelines as it relates to strategic product management:

Product initiatives are strategic if they advance the strategic initiatives of your target customers. If they have that kind of impact, they’re strategic to your organization because of they’re high value to one or more defined market segments.
Strategic product management isn’t about the management of products or skills of individuals who manage products. It’s an organizational discipline that’s consistently capable of uncovering and solving bigger problems than the competition in a simple, clear and differentiating manner to establish and maintain a market leadership position.

Both of the above guidelines eventually come back to the makeup of your product management discipline. But it’s less about the skills of the individuals on the team and more about structuring your team around the skills you have to consistently produce results with strategic value to the organization.

Does your organization define strategic product management in context of job responsibilities or results? Why?

John

Tweet this: Strategic Product Management – Job Responsibilities or End Results? http://wp.me/pXBON-3QV #prodmgmt

About the author

John Mansour is a 20-year veteran in high technology product management, marketing and sales, and the Founder of Proficientz, a services company focusing on product portfolio managment.

Does your content have a clear purpose?

Saeed — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:01:25 +0000

By Saeed Khan

Content marketing is all the rage. Well written, targeted content can propel your website traffic, can deliver more leads, can increase your perception as a thought leader etc. And so companies have joined the content marketing fray and started corporate blogs, posted videos on YouTube, and created targeted micro-sites. Companies also create brochures and whitepapers for download, chalk talks and recorded webinars for viewing etc. And each of these is usually measured for clicks or views or likes or downloads etc.

And while all of this content is generating a lot of activity — “Hey, our latest ‘Harlem Shake’ video just went viral!” – is there thought given to a clear purpose and target audience for each piece?’

More content is not definitely better than less content, and more “views” or “likes” are not necessarily better than less.

Optimizing Content + Marketing

“Content Marketing” has two parts: the actual content that is created and the marketing of it. i.e. getting it to the right people at the right time for the right purpose.

And it’s that last sentence that is key. When you create content, do you first identify who it’s targeted at, why it’s needed and when it would be used? If not, then your content marketing efforts are being wasted.

Someone asked me for my opinion of a white paper recently, and I said that before I could give feedback, I needed more context. In particular, I wanted to know the following:

Who is it targeted at? Role/persona?
What questions/concerns is it intended to answer?
When during the sales cycle would this be best utilized?

If those 3 questions aren’t clear, then why create the content? In this case it was a 12 page whitepaper? But it could be a video, chalk talk, customer recording etc. It doesn’t matter.

Content without clear purpose is noise.

Brandon Hickie at the Openview blog wrote a great piece that puts structure around this idea. He talks about defining a “content matrix”. It’s purpose is:

to help your company’s director of content strategy prioritize content production to ensure that his or her team is focusing on the content production activities that matter.

I actually think that a content matrix is much more than that. It’s a standard and structured way to maximize results for content creation, publishing and use. It helps you decide what to and what not to do, and if the matrix itself is published (internally), it helps those people who use the content understand what was created and why.

I discuss a similar — though more general concept — in my presentation on Lean Communication.

A lot of content is created and published without a clear purpose in mind. Use the 3 questions above, or tools like the content matrix or principles of Lean Communication to help maximize the impact of and return on your content marketing efforts.

Saeed

Tweet this: Does your content have a clear purpose? http://wp.me/pXBON-3Qu #prodmgmt #prodmktg #contentmarketing

About the author

Saeed Khan is a founder and Managing Editor of On Product Management, and has worked for the last 20 years in high-technology companies building and managing market leading products. He also speaks regularly at events on the topic of product management and product leadership.

Last chance: Help influence our 2011 content

Market research is easy. Visit customers

Steve Johnson — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:28:12 +0000

By Steve Johnson

Market research is easy. Visit customers, with or without sales people. Go on sales calls. Go to user group meetings. Go to conferences. Call a few customers on the phone and ask how they are using your product, where they find deficiencies, and what direction they are taking their own businesses. Listen.

You don’t have to hire an agency; you don’t need to spend a lot of money. A quick phone call or Skype meeting is often all that’s necessary to get in sync with your customers.

The job of product management is straightforward: find a couple of key customers and just do what they tell you. Find out what is needed and build it. That’s the idea behind “customer development” and the “minimum viable product.”

I was asked to evaluate a local charity’s workflows and systems, looking for ways to improve the process for the volunteers. I determined that another configuration would best fit their needs and spent a few hours implementing it.

I asked, “What else?” but they couldn’t think of any other area where my technical assistance was needed.

Willing to help in any way, I joined the team keying information into the database from requests for information. While I worked, I heard these very nice people using not very nice language. I asked what was wrong and they complained bitterly about bad information in many of the database records. Looking at a few examples, I realized someone had converted the database from one format to another and many of the fields had become corrupted.

I quickly set up a macro to move information from the incorrect field to the correct one, and asked, “Would this help?” They were thrilled! Time to market: 10 minutes.

The volunteers were performing manually a process that the computer system could do automatically—if only they had known. They didn’t have any problems that they knew of, but I discovered a big problem with a simple solution just by observing and working with them. I knew the technology but I had to “walk in their shoes” before I could see their problem.

This market research technique is what Luke Hohmann calls “The Apprentice,” in his book Innovation Games.

Do the job to understand the job and its challenges. In most cases, the customer doesn’t know he has a problem. A product manager must understand the customer’s situation better than the customer does, and use that knowledge to develop a solution for the customer.

Product managers build internal credibility by having up-to-date knowledge about customers. Spending time with customers and potential customers reveals problems that need to be fixed. Then work with your team to fix them.

Many strategic product managers make calls every day: to prospects, customers, and non-customers.

Do you?

Tweet this: Market research is easy. Visit customers http://wp.me/pXBON-3Pk #prodmgmt

photo credit: nocklebeast via photopin cc

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Positioning, messaging, and ownership

Steve Johnson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:01:15 +0000

Who defines product positioning? Product Management or Marketing Communications?

Product managers are responsible for the features of the product and its positioning in the marketplace. The Marketing Communications (marcom or marcomms) organization is chartered with delivering the product message to the market. Product Management defines the positioning and Marcom delivers the positioning.

Here’s a crazy idea. What if we thought of marcom as a development organization?

A product manager wants to develop a new brochure to use at a product launch in two months. Marcom says, “Yes.” The costs are estimated for production and a bid is given to the manager. If her budget allows, she will go ahead with the new brochure. Marcom is in effect an inside agency, doing all the design, layout and production work—synchronized with the company branding.

Another product manager needs a brochure in two weeks. Marcom’s answer is still “Yes.” However, in this case, the price is probably much higher. In addition to the standard production costs, Marcom must bring in additional resources to perform the service—producing a brochure on a tight deadline probably can’t be done using only internal staff. The estimate for delivering the brochure is given to the product manager. If the costs are greater than the budget will allow, the product manager will have to say “No.”

As a service provider, Marcom decides when to do things inside and when to use outside help. The costs are all passed back to the product’s promotion budget and the product manager decides whether the promotion is warranted.

Is this too crazy to work?

Fundamentally, the product manager should evaluate promotional materials based strictly on their support of the positioning. Leave the creative work to the creative people. Ask yourself: does it support the position?

You should be able to describe the position or the statement you wish to make to your marcom contact and trust them to deliver the message.

Another fine distinction is the contrast of product positioning and messaging. Positioning is what we’ll say; the messaging is how we’ll say it. Marcom generally owns messaging while product management generally own positioning.

I once shared a positioning and persona document plus a drawing on a cocktail napkin to our marcom group. They were able to create a go-to-market campaign and product brochures based entirely on these items.

In my work with both marcom and agencies, I have learned that most of the project time is spent in “planning” which is really time spent trying to figure out the product position. They interview the various product people and then create a positioning document based on their understanding of the product. From that document, they build their promotional plan.

There’s nothing wrong with developing a positioning document with a marcom group as long as you know that’s what you’re doing. You run into trouble when a promotion meeting is spent trying to define the positioning.

If you don’t know the positioning, you’re not ready to begin your promotion.

Need help? Ask me about my positioning workshop, part of my Pragmatic Marketing assistance.

About the author

What Type of Product Manager Do You Really Need?

raspler — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 04:17:23 +0000

By Rivi Aspler

Saeed recently spoke at Product Camp (Silicon Valley), where he presented a presentation, named, How to truly manage your product like a CEO.

This post is related to Saeed’s presentation, especially slides 21-22 of it, offering a way to choose the right product manager for the Product Life Cycle stage that your product is at.

Just making sure that everyone is on the same page, I’m attaching images of these 21 and 22 slides out of Saeed’s presentation.The first slide presents the product life cycle objectives and the second slide explains what should a company focus on when addressing the challenges of each objective.

Assuming that we agree on the objectives and the different focus of each of them, it now becomes interesting to see what type of product manager should lead the product at each of these stages.

Using the two differentiated objectives: “Build It” and “Scale It”, one can see below the different skills set orientation that you would like to make sure that your product managers are leveraging.

For the “Build It” objective, which focuses on the building of a new product for a specific use case, for a specific market, one can see that a product manager should possess good engineering skills and an innovative mindset. Other skills are less important when building a new product.

The other example is of the “Scale It” objective.

For the “Scale It” objective which focuses on product and customer base expansion, one can see that a product manager should posses good management and marketing (inbound and outbound) skills. Other skills are less important when scaling and expanding an existing product.

Summarizing it all, I could simply say that finding your next product management dream job or hiring that next great product manager is about understanding the product management objectives that you will be pushing for the next 2 years and only then finding the person that posses the right skillset to best achieve those goals. Rivi

Rivi

Tweet this: What type of Product Manager do you really need? http://wp.me/pXBON-3Qb #prodmgmt #career #recruiting

Avoiding the “best of both worlds” mindset

jduncan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:49:17 +0000

By Joshua Duncan

Take a close look at the picture to the right. It’s the 1899 Horsey Horseless, considered one of the worst cars of all time (source Time.com). Note the fake horse’s head on the front to give it a “familiar” look to those used to riding in carriages pulled by horses.

Transitional products, like the Horsey Horseless, can be quite problematic and there are a number of such products over the last century that have failed.

Do you have a favorite example of a product that tried to tackle two markets at the same time and failed?

You might have a product problem if the value proposition of your new product sounds something like this:

Our product bridges the gap between the old and new
It is the product of today with the all power you need for tomorrow
It has all the features you could ever want and all the agility you could ever need

Sound familiar? Is so, it is a good sign that you are trying to create a product that is the best of both worlds.

What does this mean?

You are trying to compete in two markets simultaneously by finding benefits that overlap between the groups. Why win in one market when you can have two with a single product?

This is where theory often gets run over by practice. What sounds like a reasonable idea in a PowerPoint pitch deck turns into a complete mess of a product. Instead of a winning combination you are stuck with a product that doesn’t compete in either markets.

You are too expensive, complicated, slow, or all of the above compared to the new entrants. You have too many features, require too much training, and look outdated.

Or on the other side of the coin:

You don’t have enterprise integration, security, and management to compete head-to-head with existing market leaders. You don’t have the extra capacity, the APIs, or the service organization needed to deliver value to an entire organization.

When you are just getting started, finding the right features and benefits (not to mention product messaging) is tough enough for one market. Don’t fall for the trap and try and tackle two at the same time.

Have any other examples that you think failed because they were trying to tackle two markets at once?

One of them may be the recent effort to turn J.C. Penny into, “the Bloomingdale’s for Middle America“?

Josh

Tweet this: Avoiding the “best of both worlds” mindset http://wp.me/pXBON-3Pq #prodmgmt #marketing #innovation