Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

03016 Soft Skills: Practice Factuality

One thing that gets clearer with every new discussion I have with a Product Manager is that there may be nothing more important than your soft skills. You may find they’re the only tool you can rely on to create change, improve coordination between Marketing and Engineering, prepare the sales force to effectively sell the product, or speed up the pace of new features and capabilities.

In an earlier topic called “Why is the Soft Stuff So Darn Hard?” I mentioned a concept for approaching teammates with problems and sticky issues in an effective way. I call it practice factuality.

So here’s a little more guidance to help you practice factuality. Use the nine rules below to make critical progress that is so hard to measure but so necessary if you want to reach the goals and aspirations you have for the product.
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03015 An Interview With Alyssa Dver

Alyssa Dver is the author of the book Software Product Management Essentials

Today’s issue is devoted to an interview with Alyssa S. Dver, author of the newly published “Software Product Management Essentials, A Practical Guide for Small and Mid-Sized Companies.”

“Often, we Product Managers get so caught up in what we have to do, that we don’t have the luxury to do what we’d like to do to make the product successful.”

In this interview, Alyssa explains why she wrote the book and talks about her software product management experiences, giving some useful advice to those Product Managers who find themselves facing similar challenges.

Ms. Dver has many years of experience in software product management and is currently VP and Chief Marketing Officer at SEDONA Corporation. In addition, she teaches the material found in the book at business schools and professional associations. You may have read some of Alyssa’s recent articles in Business Week on topics such as Real-Time Enterprise (RTE) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

The book is a hands-on guide complete with time-saving checklists and templates for every stage of the product life cycle. It is published by Anclote Press, which is run by Peter Fingar, author along with Howard Smith of the pioneering work “Business Process Management, The Third Wave.”

The book has endorsements by presidents of the PDMA chapters (www.pdma.org) in New York and Washington DC, and of the Boston Product Management Association (www.bostonproducts.org), not to mention the co-founder of the AIPMM (http://www.aipmm.com/), Steven Haines of Sequent Learning Networks and Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing.

While the book will soon be available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I encourage you to order it directly from the publisher at www.anclote.com, to support a business that is bringing pioneering and truly useful works to the software industry.
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03014 Committing to Fixed Release Dates

At some of the software companies where I used to work, I remember the silence that would fall — not to mention the faces — every time some disgruntled bearer of bad tidings let it be known that yet another software release date had slipped. Sometimes there was a reason, like our biggest new customer wanted a certain piece of functionality by yesterday.

And sometimes there was no reason at all. It was like the weather. It just happens that way. Software always winds up delayed. What can you do?

It turns out there’s plenty you can do to set up a situation at your company where software is released on planned, publicly announced dates — dates that don’t slip.

Yes, it is possible to set software release dates and meet them every time. And the benefits this brings in terms of predictability and stability lead not just to better software development but more motivated employees in any number of departments.

It’s worth every minute of your effort to move your company onto a development schedule with fixed dates. Read on for some suggestions about how to go about it, and what to expect.

Note: A past issue, The Development Plan: a Dose of Reality, provides tips for dealing with hard to schedule development tasks.

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03013 Become an Industry Subject Matter Expert

One of the conundrums for Product Managers is that in many ways, their area of expertise is product management of a software application, yet companies increasingly require them to have experience in the industry that uses the software.

There are good arguments for doing it this way, and equally strong ones for having Product Managers whose specialty is not industry-specific, but stems instead from the skills and competence required to be a Product Manager. You can argue that only someone who has worked in, say, a bank can understand what a bank employee needs from their contact management application.

On the other hand, why would you rely on someone to do product management because they have good banking industry experience, which probably translates to experience in three or four different banks, maximum, out of a total of thousands? How does that industry experience improve the likelihood that they can be an effective Product Manager, with all the tasks, skills, and perspective that entails?

It’s a mistake to rely on a person’s industry experience to guide them for years after they have transitioned to the software industry. Plus, their perspective needs to be broader and more comprehensive And those Product Managers who have not worked in the industry, whose are hired because their expertise is in software product management, need to develop a full understanding of the industry they serve.

Use the eight tips below to develop your understanding of the business environment and needs of your customer base, so that you become an industry subject matter expert (SME). Your expertise adds a critical dimension to your product management activity, especially when it comes to product positioning and strategic direction.

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