Product Arts Blog
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Need Help with Your Product Management?
A new book has been published that helps companies and product managers understand the responsibilities and activities typically associated with the role. It's called the ProdBOK for short, or The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge. The ProdBOK was a multiyear activity spanning some 60 contributors. As one of those individuals, I'll provide a view of some of the goals and challenges of the book.
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I read a very rousing blog post this week by April Dunford @ RocketWatcher - "Why Most Marketers Suck", (note - she's a product marketer) and which was commentary on yet another post. She did a good job of laying out the problem when trying to hire a good marketer. I saw direct parallels to hiring product managers.
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Late last year I ran an informal poll that asked "What are your top activities?" & "What are your most important activities?". A meager 22 PM's responded, but the surprising result was that half of the respondents were in companies with less than 100 people, and another quarter were in those with less than 500 people. There are some other surprises, too.
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Establishing Credibility & Building Relationships
The PM roles (Product Manager, Program Manager, and Project Manager) all need to lead cross-functional product efforts without having direct control of resources. A common phrase heard is “I have all the responsibility but no authority”. Last month at the Seattle ProductCamp, brainstormed in a session titled “Responsibility without Authority” to get ideas on how to establish credibility and influence your organization. Here’s a quick discussion of those notes generated from about 25 attendees. It includes identifying the major stakeholders, the roadblocks to influence, and suggestions for gaining credibility and the ability to influence.
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The Importance of Organizational Environment
In a previous guest post at OnProductManagement, we interviewed executives about product management and asked whether product managers met executive’s expectations. We got a resounding SOMETIMES. Executives expected product managers to deliver against current business objectives but also acknowledged that the environment has a great deal to do with product manager success. We’ll explore this environmental issue in more depth, specifically what do execs and product managers need to be doing to make the role successful. This discussion applies equally to other “PM” roles, including project and program managers.
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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:
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I admit it. I’m an online shopaholic. My addiction started over a decade ago when Amazon delivered my first book right to my doorstep, painlessly and effortlessly. From there I progressed to flowers, gift baskets, electronics, shoes, travel and practically everything else. The major reason I got hooked was due to my overall positive customer experience. The web has come a long way since then and my expectations on the level of service delivered to me have increased, largely due to some innovative companies raising the bar. This discussion is about paying attention to your customer’s full lifecycle experience, not just product features, to develop true loyalty.
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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.
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By Understanding Where Things Go Wrong
Developing a new product is risky business and a big part of the problem lies in planning and delivering the right product. In the book New Products Management, Crawford & Di Benedetto give 3 primary reasons for why new products fail:
- Customers had no compelling reason to buy
- The product did not meet customer expectations
- Customers did not get the product message
This short article focuses on the early pre-launch activities (items 1 & 2 above) and where things can go astray.
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One of the main drivers of post-V1 Development activities are Feature Requests, both external and internal to the company. The process of managing these requests is far from standardized, resulting in many products with a weak pipeline of ideas or a roadmap comprised of less-than-compelling functionality. This article discusses ways to optimize the process to acquire and select the best options for your customers and your company. In addition, we also look at a few leading companies using social networks to improve their results.
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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?
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Have You Considered Asking for LESS?
As a product leader, your success is dependant not only on your ability to drive the right products into the pipeline but also on the rest of the organization to be able to build and support them. Sometimes (or perhaps often in your case) no matter how hard you push, nothing seems to happen due to bottlenecks in your organization. This can be a high source of frustration for the product management team (and other executives) and the cause of much conflict in your organization (this I know personally). So what can you do about it?
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Prioritizing Strategic and Tactical Activities
A major challenge for many companies is realizing the full value of Product Management within the organization. The reason this is challenging is due to product management not being a clearly defined role with specific activities and responsibilities across the industry. This makes it very easy to have product managers performing the wrong or incomplete set of activities, limiting your product's potential.
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And Are You Delegating Your Company's Future?
Where do you find most product management teams organizationally within companies or divisions? The two most likely scenarios are within the Development organization reporting to the CTO or VP of Development, or in the Marketing organization reporting to the CMO or VP of Marketing.
The question is: Is this the right place in your company for this function?