ProductMarketing.com

ProDuct manager != proJect manager

As the Wikipedia definition states, the product owner cannot be the ScrumMaster. For non-agile folks, that also means that the proDUCT manager cannot also be the proJECT manager. It’s the fox in the henhouse. It says the person who owns the scope of the project cannot also determine the schedule. And besides, it’s a different skill set. Project managers typically work with a product for one iteration or release; product managers work with a product throughout its life cycle.

ProJECT managers focus on scheduling the deliverables for a single release.
ProDUCT managers focus on the business over the product's (multiple) releases.

 

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.

 

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.

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.

You Might Be a Product Manager If... | Product Beautiful: Building Product Management by Paul Young

Since we at Pragmatic Marketing just released our 2010 Product Management Survey, the time is right to revist one of my favorite topics: You Might Be a Product Manager If…  In the spirit of the American comedian Jeff Foxworthy (“You Might Be a Redneck If…”), this year, product managers around the world contributed to the #YMBAPMI list over Twitter, LinkedIn, and this blog.  And the results were excellent.  So without further ado, I present the 2011 list:

via productbeautiful.com

You might be a product manager if you use the term "requirements" in discussions with your spouse and children.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The Most Important Characteristic of Innovative Companies — On Product Management

For a company to do this once — i.e. have one successful product — can mean they have created an innovation, but it doesn’t mean the company is innovative?

Why?

Because to be an innovative company, means to be able to repeatedly identify and create new products and have them succeed in the market.  A lot of companies can do it once, but to do it 2, 3, 4 or more times is what it means to be innovative. It’s a characteristic of the company, not simply an activity the company engages in.

via onproductmanagement.net

Nice piece from Saeed at On Product Management. Yes, to be an innovator more than once is the trick. And it has to be baked in to the company culture.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

You can build it, but can you market, sell and support it? | On Product Management

Let’s assume (and this is a big assumption) that the company has the skills, internal experience and discipline to build version 1 of this more complex product.  That’s great, but it’s only 1 part of equation.  Let’s look at everything else that needs to happen:

via onproductmanagement.net

If you build it, will they come? And if so, can you market it? Sell it? Support it? Saeed asks some challenging questions in this insightful post.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

First step: focus

My daughter has started a business. She's seen a huge interest in homeschooling and is now focusing on it full-time. With a market of 3+ million families, she's got a target rich environment. Everyone we meet knows someone with homeschool kids.

The challenge? Focus.

As with any job she has more to do and only so much time. Where to begin?

I've given her a new rule: allocate one day per week to each of the Pragmatic 'P's. Problem, product, promotion, place.

Monday is for problems: Interviews, reading, reviewing existing research, planning new research. Honing her buyer and user personas.

Tuesday is for product: Updating, reviewing, assessing the products she offers.

Wednesday is for promotion: Participating on blogs and discussion forums, writing ebooks, evaluating promotional opportunities, attending trade shows and events.

Thursday is for Place (sales): distribution strategy, evaluating wins and losses, comparing the sales cycle to the buying cycle.

In other words, a product manager or entrepreneur should not spend every day in sales mode or development mode but be sure to spend time planning and researching too.

In my first job as a product manager, I was based in Virginia but my developers were in California. Once a month, I traveled there for a week of development planning and review meetings--what we'd now call demos and retrospectives. They'd show me what they were working on, solicit my ideas on the prototypes and initial designs; I'd tell them what I had learned from the market since my last visit. Updates on wins and losses, current revenue for the quarter, results of interviews and surveys.

And with that, I would leave them alone until next time.

In the remaining three weeks I'd allocate a week at corporate to work with marketing, support, finance, whoever and a week allocated for sales calls and customer visits. That left a week in my home office to do the writing part of product management.

Whether you do this on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, successful product managers focus on every aspect of the business of their product(s). Don't get caught up in sales support or working with development to the detriment of the rest.

What techniques do you use to focus on the business?

 

Be #1000 and win a mug

I've got lots of good data already in the annual product management survey and  need just a few more responses to make 1000. Amazing! Almost 1000 in less than a week. Sweet!

But I want a few more sooo...

If you're the 1000th person to respond to the survey, you'll win our most popular Pragmatic Marketing mug. A mug! Of your very own!!

 

BTW, One of my favorite comments so far:

"if you could say one thing to your company president without fear of reprisal, it would be..."

It's not strategy if it changes weekly.

How Apple Cracked the Top 5 in Global Handsets: Tech News

Just over three years since introducing its first phone, Apple is now among the top five handset vendors on the planet, passing Research In Motion for the fourth spot, although still well behind the incumbents of Nokia, Samsung and LG. Research firm IDC noted Apple’s leap past RIM, based on reported third quarter sales.

via gigaom.com

Think you've got the market covered? Be watchful of a new contender who ignores the status quo and builds something that makes the others irrelavent. Amazingly (even to me, an Apple fanboi), Apple went from nowhere to #4 in only three years.

Cable lost an amazing number of customers to satellite. Many of us bypassed blue-ray to go straight to streaming. Amazon's Kindle doesn't really compete with B&N's Nook e-reader or Sony's PRS-505a; it competes with paperbacks.

Where's YOUR next competitive threat coming from?

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Marissa Mayer on product management

When I met with Googlers in Haifa a few months ago an engineering manager commented that most product managers were idiots at all other companies where he had worked but at Google the product managers were all smart and technical.

via managinggreatness.com

Some great ideas about products and product management Marissa Mayer of Google. She is one of the more visible product management advocates in technology.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Chris Moody: Five questions in five minutes with Steve Johnson

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

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

Focus Product Managers on Product Management!

Want your product managers to do a good job at product management? Then let them focus their time on product management!

via voximate.com

I just posted a comment on this excellent article.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Is Product Management the Voice of Sanity?

In a company there are all of these voices claiming to know what the next thing the company should do is.  Sales talks about what "everybody" (read: "last person they talked to").  Development talks about what can build and how cool it is.  Senior management talks about their "new visionary feature that will spring board the company to the next profit tier."  (How's my C-level speak?  I've been working on it.)

With all of these voices, does it seem like Product Management's job in a company is to be the Voice of Sanity?

via pmblog.perryzoo.com

Nice!

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

How will you make money?

The recent demise of Wave causes IT buyers concern. What else might Google discontinue? While it seems unlikely that they’ll stop offering Google Apps what if they did? As a result, IT buyers are reluctant to put business data on any of Google’s apps.

It once seemed logical to put all employees on Gmail instead of hassling with Exchange but now I don’t know.

Say what you will about Microsoft, it’s clear that they will continue to support the business products that they offer--Outlook, Exchange, Sharepoint--and it’s not always so clear for other vendors. Can I trust Apple’s MobileMe? Can I trust Google’s Gmail? I know I can trust Microsoft Exchange.

Your buyers are asking these questions too… about your products. Should we go with [new thing that is better] or stick with [old thing that is stable]? Perhaps that’s why roadmaps are so popular with enterprise buyers. They want to see that you have a plan beyond the current release, for at least a couple of years. See Creating the Right Product Roadmap for more on this.

I love Posterous (rhymes with “preposterous”), the tool I use to dash off blog entries with embedded photos, video, music, attachments of any kind; my blog entries are forwarded to my “official” blog at www.productmarketing.com. But what is the Posterous business model? How will they make money? How will they survive as a business? I love the tool but can I run a business on it? (I’m told they make money from adding their referral codes to product links so if you’re not getting revenue from Amazon and others, they will.)

Sure, the product is valuable but is the business sustainable?

Pricing has to do with the value that you deliver today; roadmaps reveal the value into the future. For business products, evaluators of business solutions need to understand both. Do you deliver enough value now? And will you be around after they’ve committed their business to your product?

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Another excellent job description

Product Manager is a critical role in our organization.

and

Knows Pragmatic Marketing’s Framework, and the Ultimate Question. If you have to ask, this job may not be the right one for you. Sorry.

via careers-sage.icims.com

Another excellent job description. Written in the language of the "buyer"--in this case, HR is looking to "buy" a product manager. Product management is indeed a critical role in a thriving company and it's great to see companies that appreciate it.
Of course, we're always pleased when Pragmatic Marketing is part of a job listing (as it is... frequently.)

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The Ugly of Product Management | On Product Management

Another common issue in most Product Management teams is around staffing. I’ve never heard anyone say, “We have way too many Product Managers!”. And given the cross-functional nature of the job, as well as the general lack of clear definition of the PM roles, it’s not surprising the PMs feel overloaded.

via onproductmanagement.net

I find that the missing element of product management is, due to the nature of the job, product managers become subject matter experts. Most of the time pressures seem to come from other departments who have not staffed for product expertise and assume that the product managers can fill their understaffing. That’s why product managers are in such high demand in non- product management activities.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

More on Switch

Want people to switch from <old product> to <your product>? Create a strategy that encompasses development, marketing, sales, and implementation. 

This Tivo banner ad is great but it fails to solve the fundamental problem with TiVo: implementation. In my experience, TiVo is better than anything the cable companies offer but it is (or appears to be) harder to implement. Call the cable folks, convince them that you know that they offer TiVo functionality in their junk DVR, beg them for a cablecard (they're required by law to provide it), wait a bunch, explain it all again to someone else, and then install it all yourself. 

Or, call the cable company, say "yes I want a DVR" and they'll send you a ready-to-use system. Gad, that is easy.

Yes, TiVo is better but you gotta work for it.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

job description of a product manager

My pal David has just posted a word cloud for job descriptions of the product marketing manager. In the interest of fairness (or just to be a copy-cat), here's a similar word cloud for the job description of a product manager:

And for another look at job descriptions see: 

Sample Product Manager Job Description, 

Finding the Right Product Manager and

Product Management Job Titles

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Rules and Laws Product Managers Should Understand (part 1)

there are a whole set of laws and rules that virtually all software product managers should know.

via onproductmanagement.net

Saeed looks at laws from Newton, Pareto, and others that apply to product management. Nice post!

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management