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Some Thoughts on Roles and Responsibilities — On Product Management

To be honest, I’ve struggled with roles, responsibilities and differentiation. I often think we fixate on titles and ownership versus roles and action. In The Strategic Role of Product Management, Steve Johnson states; “Titles are meaningless; actions are meaningful.”

via onproductmanagement.net

Ah, I love being quoted! Holland offers a new look at roles and responsibilities plus a quick tool to help you align activities with titles.

The Importance of Differentiated Product Management Roles — On Product Management

And while there are certainly individuals who can do all this, the fact it, it can become an impossible task for most people, and leads to both individual and organizational failure. So here’s a simple solution. Understand the needs of these different groups and create differentiated roles WITHIN the Product Management organization and STAFF THEM appropriately. This will help create a scalable effective, and focused Product Management organization.

via onproductmanagement.net

Saeed explains the differentiated roles of Product Management as a follow-up to his post on How to Create an Effective Product Management Organization. As I like to say, "Just because you know the product doesn't mean that others don't have to." Great read!

Product manager = president of the product?

Is the product manager the "president of the product"? It a common metaphor.

In many ways, the product manager role seems similar to the president of a small company.  The president has an initial product idea and starts a company. In addition to focusing new folks on his vision, he sets up the email and web servers, and comes in on Sunday when those servers are down. He runs the backups and puts the backup drives in the trunk of his car. He investigates and purchases the security systems for the office.  He reorders hand towels for the rest room. He puts together a presentation for himself but shares it with others. He stays late on Friday to finalize payroll—or stays while his spouse does it. He is “all other departments.”

But this analogy falls apart when we expand the company. As the company grows and other departments come into existence, the president can no longer do payroll, and IT support, and development, marketing, and sales. He has people now with those responsibilities. And he holds those department heads accountable. If the servers are down, the IT department works through the weekend to get back online; the president no longer takes the responsibility nor is he really able to do the work since he wasn’t the one who set them up. When payroll is messed up, he expects the head of finance to stay late and fix it; he doesn’t do it himself.

And of course, a good president fires those department heads if these problems occur too frequently. A problem that occurs once or twice is an accident; a problem that occurs frequently is a trend. He replaces those who can't do the job with qualified people.

Maybe it's the “product manager equals president” mindset that causes us to micro-manage others. And maybe it causes us to enable the dysfunction of others. But unless we can fix the people and the process, product management is often just hiding the real issues.

If we see a problem and hide it, we’re part of the problem.

Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.

5 Steps to Building a Great Product Management Organization

A reality of Product Management teams is that they are usually relatively small, particularly when compared to larger departments such as Engineering, Marketing or Sales.  And perhaps it is because these teams are small, that not much thought is given to how to best structure them.

But given the critical cross-functional role Product Management plays, having a well structured, scalable and properly staffed team is absolutely critical, and can make a huge impact on the top-line of a company’s balance sheet.

Here are the 5 steps to building a great organization.

via pragmaticmarketing.com

Another fine article by Saeed. Nice job!

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Leadership, Trust and Pronouns | Rich Mironov's Product Bytes

A thoughtful choice between “I” and “we” and “you” is a reflection of the workplace emotional temperature: are managers and executives motivating line employees to do their best, or “throwing them under the bus?” Are we rewarding cross-functional cooperation and market impact, or angling for promotion and impressing our peers?

via mironov.com

What I listen for is "they" as in "they won't let me" or "they don't do that here." As if "they" aren't also "you and me."

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Get a professional

Roz Ho is corporate vice president for Premium Mobile Experiences at Microsoft. She has been responsible for the integration of Danger Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in April, 2008.

I don't know what Danger Inc did but have you ever seen a worse case of editing on a photo? Looks like it was done with an ax.

Here's the original: 

With today's tools, anybody can do the basics. But even using today's tools, a professional's work is clearly better than an amateur's. True for photography, graphics... marketing, product management, development, sales... you get the idea.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

check your emails

I received a confidential internal document today via email... sent to the wrong recipient. It seems like today's email programs should be smart enough to question this. Imagine a new feature: when I mail a document with "confidential" in the text or attachment, check that all recipients are in the same domain as the sender. If not, warn the user and also send a log record to the IT staff.
The feature would catch mistakes but also rat out people (I'm thinking "Kevin") who send confidential documents to customers.

Until that day, always check your email addresses a second time whenever you send confidential documents.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The Pragmatic Marketer Volume 7 Issue 5

Some notable articles are featured in the new issue of The Pragmatic Marketer including Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ written with Jim Foxworthy and an update on our popular article on The Product Management Triad. Also Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience and The Strategic Product Manager and the CFO.

Read more in The Pragmatic Marketer Volume 7 Issue 5.