Bridging Concept to Solution

A recent search on Monster.com for similar job title openings nationwide yielded about 800 Product Managers, 150 Product Marketing Managers, 1,000 Project Managers and 1,000 Program Managers.    What’s a Program Manager?

The role of Program Manager in many industries acts in the capacity of super-project-manager - coordinating multiple interrelated projects towards a common goal and often from a business manager perspective.     In high tech, the Program Manager role has evolved along very different lines, especially in software development.   This article explores this product development role, how it differs from other Product Manager roles, the value it brings to the development process and where things can also go wrong.

The Executive Viewpoint

There have been plenty of discussions about how to measure and demonstrate the value of Product Management within companies.    From posts on other sites:

• VP of Engineering has a mandate. You need one too.
• Product Management Metrics (part 1)
• Proiduct Management Metrics (part 2)

and from a recent roundtable at the October Seattle ProductCamp, there’s an obvious challenge for the profession.

I decided to follow the prescribed Product Management protocol – I went out and talked to my customers. Here’s the feedback from some senior executives running technology companies to the following questions:

An online poll was conducted in early May 2009 asking Product Managers to select their biggest challenges from a list or providing their own selections. The poll ran for just over a week and a total of 24 Product Managers responded and provided 63 different selections. The aggregated results are provided in this article.

Assessment & Ideas for Improvement

As a product manager, do you know how you impact the bottom line or major objectives of your company or division? Do you even know how your activities are tied to objectives? As an executive, do you feel your product managers are delivering high value to the organization? Do you even know what they are doing?

Product Management has such a broad definition and set of responsibilities within a company that it can be difficult to assess which activities are truly delivering value. It can also be difficult to determine how to measure product management since their actions may not directly affect the core business metrics of revenue, costs and profits. This article presents a high level means of assessing whether your product management team is delivering all of the value it could, some reasons why it may not be, and some suggested steps to take towards maximizing your team’s contribution.

An Overview of Product Management Roles

What do your product managers do? Are you aware of all the things they could be doing?

This paper gives a brief overview of the typical activities that product managers get involved in and some potential issues that can crop up. The goal is to provide awareness of the possibilities to product leaders and product managers for assessment of your situation and opportunities.