On Product Management

T-shaped skills and more

Prabhakar Gopalan — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:21:47 +0000

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Last week I was at a strange meeting: Three guys in a room asking me a number of questions about how I hired talent into my team. I told them I typically look for T-shaped people. The audience composed of hyphenated types (will explain in a bit what that means) didn’t get it. So I shared what I learned and my own interpretation of the well known definition for T-shaped people types and a few others. Since then I’ve scribbled it in cocktail napkins more than three times this past week explaining to a friend or colleague the same subject. At this point a revisit of the topic in a blog post is overdue. So here it is…

T-shaped, I-shaped, hyphenated and A-shaped…what do they all mean?

If you Google or lookup Wikipedia, you’ll find plenty of links on the subject (see Wikipedia for T-Shaped skills). The CEO of design firm IDEO is a well known advocate and adopter of recruiting people with T shaped skills. There’s even a book on the subject of T shaped people sparking creativity and innovation. Here’s a topical summary of the subject of people types and shapes nevertheless.

I-shaped people types are those that have a very narrow, but expert domain skills in one specific area. A researcher who has spent his entire life in science in one area is more like an I-typed person. These are the people that can solve a problem like a ninja – focus and specificity.

T-shaped people types are those that not only have the strength of a specific domain area (i.e. the I-shaped), but a broad set of other domain skills too to collaborate and build things with others.

If you are exceptional with two domain specific skills, and have broad cross domain skills as well, you fit in the A-shaped type. (A modern day Da Vinci or polymath)

Hyphenated people type is for those that have no specific domain skills of full competence, but have a broad range of skills across domains. Examples of hyphenated people types include career project managers or general managers at large organizations who have never built anything but a project plan.

So why know or understand these people-shape types?

The first reason for the above is to figure out what kind of an organization you are in and where you’d be better suited to be at. Startups for example need to have lots of T-shaped people because there’s no place in a startup for a hyphenated person – dollars are scarce, time (to market) is usually short, and if you want to attract outside investment, you better have an A-class team. Stellar professional services firms too develop their teams this way – where you have a lot of domain experts with specific industry knowledge, sometimes in more than one area, and can operate across domains.

Contrast that with working in a large stodgy firms. Over time, the same people that have risen through the ranks to executive positions, either loose focus on what got them there (their I’s) or fail to develop new I’s and simply become hyphenated people. And that breeds a culture of more hyphens throughout the organization as they start to hire or encourage and retain more hyphens. Quickly, this can lead to a culture of mediocrity where domain knowledge disappears and the organization simply fills itself with groupthink.

The second reason is to assess and plan your own career development. If you are an I type today, you could plan to expand on your domain knowledge and become more well rounded in other domains and become the T-type. If you are a T-type, your stretch goal is to get to an A type polymath (here’s a recent HBR post on the value of being a polymath now). If you are a hyphenated type, it is time to spend the time learning and practicing a craft.

There is a third reason outside of planning your own career development or knowing which type of organization would best serve your needs. And that is figuring out where to compliment your own team by developing your team, including yourself, or hiring the right set of people in your team. Few people recognize or master this concept. Insecure managers often have difficulty hiring smarter talent because they feel threatened by that while smart managers embrace talent to challenge the status quo in their otherwise or soon to be mediocre organization.

This is particularly important for product managers and what separates them from being or becoming hyphenated project managers. Product managers that collect tasks around the room, track status or relay information amongst product development teams will perish if they don’t have deep domain skills or broad cross domain skills. Because, product management is a strategic T-shaped role. As the folks at Pragmatic Marketing would say, Own it, no excuses.

A couple of years old but still relevant: IDEO CEO Tim Brown: T-Shaped Stars: The Backbone of IDEO’s Collaborative Culture

- Prabhakar (@PGpopalan)

Tweet this: New post by @PGopalan Reviewing T-shaped skills and more http://wp.me/pXBON-3ge #onpm #people #culture

What Happened to All Those Strategic Product Managers We Hired?

Saeed — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:15:48 +0000

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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.

Truth over Harmony

Saeed — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:14:12 +0000

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Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony http://wp.me/pXBON-3fM #culture #truth #trust

A few days back I hired someone for a short term project. Before the start of the project we met a couple of times where we discussed the requirements, what assistance I was needing and how the expert I was hiring could help me.

A few days later, this person sent me a report that was four pages long and an invoice for the time worked on the report. At this stage we had not even started the actual project and here I was staring at a bill. I knew she had worked hard and spent time on the project, but the work was not what I really needed or what I communicated. I wanted to hire this person and get the project done, but also make it clear that I was not happy with the preliminary report which I felt wasn’t even necessary to start the project.

So I sent her an email that I would pay the full invoice amount and hire for the whole project, but that I was not happy with work I had not asked for. I got an email back from her that she would not charge me for the report and was happy to go forward with the work as originally intended. She said she prefers Truth over harmony. I paid her the full invoice amount.

This was the first time I came across that phrase. I googled and found it is widely used in business partnerships and parenting. I loved it. The concept is simple. If we pursue truth, harmony will follow. If we pursue harmony, truth isn’t guaranteed. In fact, often we see “status quo”, “work around”, “evolutionary approach”, “slow grinding”, “beating down”, “win-win”, and various other strategies as the direct outcome of ignoring truth over harmony.

So here’s my question. How often are you able to pursue truth over harmony at work?

- Prabhakar

Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony http://wp.me/pXBON-3fM #culture #truth #trust

Truth over harmony

Prabhakar Gopalan — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:03:32 +0000

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Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony http://wp.me/pXBON-3ff #culture #truth #trust

So here’s my question. How often are you able to pursue truth over harmony at work?

- Prabhakar

Tweet this: New @onpm post by @PGopalan: Truth over harmony http://wp.me/pXBON-3ff #culture #truth #trust

4 Ways to Improve Customer Service in Critical Times

Saeed — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:56:09 +0000

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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

4 Product Management Success Stories

Saeed — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:15:23 +0000

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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.

Answering your calling

Prabhakar Gopalan — Wed, 02 May 2012 03:47:40 +0000

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Tweet this: New @ONPM post: Answering your calling by @PGopalan http://wp.me/pXBON-3eI

It has been an interesting, or should I say serendipitous week, that I came across a couple of very good articles about career choices even as I have been working for a while (years!) on my own calling.

First was this really good post in HBR blog: Make Your Job More Meaningful

It talks about the differences among the three – job, career and calling. Job is something you do for a fixed period of time in a day and charge for it – e.g. waiting at a table in a restaurant. Most jobs are in-between things you do before you figure out what you REALLY want to do next.

Career is working from one job to another job, up the ladder (if you are lucky), mostly in the same company and/or industry. Some mistake a job for a career at places where the outcome even after many years turns out to be just a job, despite a lot of energy and time spent there with no real path to what was promised initially.

Calling is when you know your purpose is beyond sucking up to your boss or doing the same thing over and over with no good result. Calling is about building something, creating meaning for yourself and others. Calling has very little to do with money, position or power. It is about making real change in whatever you are after. It’s about delighting yourself and others around you.

The second blog post I read was on Victor Cheng’s website: The Decisive Advantage in Career Choices. I know Victor, have used his training material and followed his posts for a long time. He is an incredible teacher and a great guy. Victor minces no words when he says these two things – 1) NEVER compete in a competition where you don’t have a major advantage over the competition. 2) Get OUT of any market that you’re ALREADY in, where you have no decisive advantage.

In other words, drop your ‘me too’ strategy and figure out what your real strengths are compete on that basis. And also know not to compete in places where your strengths won’t work. The latter is very important, more important than the former.

For example, if you are an innovation driven product guy (or gal), don’t go and look for a position where product (or service) innovation is secondary to the firm. That’s just a plain misfit. Even if you have a lot to offer, you are simply not going to make sense to the people around you or the firm.

But if you want to just keep a machine running, e.g. flipping burgers (a job) that’s a different story. There’s always going to be people wanting to eat at undifferentiated burger chains. These burger chains solve the simple known problem = feeding hunger at $1.99/burger (let’s leave the question of health out of the picture for now). There’s nothing wrong with these places. They serve a real need in the market – low priced meat+bun packaged and sold in convenient drive-throughs/accessible locations (e.g off highway service roads).

Working at these burger chains for some can be mind numbing. If your mind comes up with ideas like these: what about coming up with better customer service, better ingredients, better menu and so on, you have lost the race for the job. These burger chains can be innovation killers for those that work in the line jobs. They focus on one thing really well – their model – flipping burgers fast to feed the hungry at $1.99/burger (or even less if they give you a deal).

And here’s a twist: Just as the candidate (because flipping burgers is a job) is aware that this is going to be a job so should the burger chain owners know that they are not looking for real innovative talent or demanding loyalty to fill their vacancies. Once that understanding is reached, both sides can happily go about flipping the burgers. It is the lack of understanding there that results in most firms and employees confusing themselves on what they want from each other.

Clear that understanding and we will all have more meaningful work.

- Prabhakar

Tweet this: New @ONPM post: Answering your calling by @PGopalan http://wp.me/pXBON-3eI

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Tips for Improving Impact and Presence as a Leader

Saeed — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:59:43 +0000

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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

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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.

The 3 Biggest Hurdles to Greater Strategic Influence

Saeed — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:09:32 +0000

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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

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There’s No Such Thing as “a Designer”

Saeed — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:46:09 +0000

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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

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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.