Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

03025 Breaking Through to New Technology

Implementing new technology in the product is a task that often stymies software companies. Because the change frequently goes to the very core of how the software works, and developers are on unfamiliar ground, there is lots of potential for your company to get stuck delaying the use of new technology year after year.

The key difficulty is that software is made out of technology, so changing the technology it uses - such as migrating to a new platform, transforming to object oriented code, or cracking open a product to work with many standard databases - is the equivalent of making a manufactured item out of new materials, say, going from wood to composite plastic.

If you decided to switch to building a product out of a new material, the engineers would be hesitant to launch into the initiative. The uncertainty of the outcome would make them unwilling to make a leap of faith, hoping they’d land safely on the other side.

This makes sense. Leaps of faith aren’t good engineering.

Yet there is a way to approach technology changes so that engineers can get started, keep moving, and break through to the other side. A Product Manager can serve a pivotal role in successfully implementing this approach, through requirements, so that the product takes the technical lead over the competition, and continues to widen the gap.

Read on for an explanation of this approach.
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03024 For Sales: Dispatch to the Front Lines

One of the key contributions that a Product Manager can make is to provide regular, bite-sized input to the sales force about product benefits and competitive advantages.

So often, sales reps are thrown into quarterly (or even less frequent) product training sessions consisting of more than an hour’s worth of material poured into a single hour’s worth of time. Nobody wants to take up too much of the sales reps’ time with training when they could be selling. And force feeding a bunch of information in one sitting may simply be counterproductive.

So what can be done to remedy that? A Product Manager can send regular dispatches about the product, geared to sales reps’ need to understand product benefits and competitive comparisons. Instead of Dispatches from the Front Lines, these are Dispatches to the Front Lines, where the sales force is engaging prospects as the competitive bullets whiz by.

Read on for guidelines on what to include in these training tools to help your company sell more.
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03023 Virtual Product Manager: When No Body Will Do

Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.

Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.

What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.

As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.

Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one
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03022 Straining the Trainer: Training the Sales Force

Of the myriad responsibilities that Product Managers take on, probably the most challenging one is training the sales force. It’s like teaching at a troubled inner city school. You have to create all your own learning materials. You get no support from the people who run things. The class is disobedient and out of control.

Then, just when it looks like you’re starting to get somewhere, time’s up and the students have forgotten most of what you taught them by the time the next term rolls around. As the teacher, you are left alone to figure out how to deal with frustration and unrewarding results.

Teachers at inner city schools would find a sympathetic audience among Product Managers who have tried to provide software product training to the sales force. By its nature, software is a technical product. Successful sales reps, on the other hand, are people who are great with people, but not necessarily good with technical subjects. What’s more, they make their money by spending time with people, not spending time learning software.

Yet it’s critical that the entire sales force master the product to the point where they can talk knowledgeably about some of the details when they get asked hard questions by prospects. Most software sales include a thorough review by IT or technical individuals. The best way to answer questions so that you lay doubts to rest is to provide facts, and that means that sales reps need to have a lot of facts at their disposal. That means training with a certain level of detail is necessary.

And the most appropriate individuals at your company to provide this training are usually Product Managers. They understand the product technically, and can translate that understanding into a discussion of benefits and business issues that the sales force needs when speaking with prospects. You can’t expect the sales reps to take technical information and translate it themselves. They won’t.

Read on for tips to make product training of the sales force more effective and less of an uphill battle.
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03021 (FREE) Product Champion: What Does That Mean?

(This article is currently available for free to non-subscribers.)

You often see job listings for Product Managers that describe the role as “product champion.” It sure sounds interesting, but what exactly does it mean? Just what do you have to do to be the champion of a product?

Product Managers are also often described as the “owner” of the product, or the “product CEO” (that’s CEO of the product, not the company - don’t go there!). That’s a more comprehensive description of the Product Manager position. Just as one of the roles of the company CEO is to be the champion of the company, so too one of the roles of Product Manager is to be the product champion.

In an earlier topic called “The Two Types of Product Managers” I discuss how companies often split their Product Manager roles into a technical and a marketing flavor. If this is the case for your company, each type of Product Manager still takes on the role of product champion - only the specific champion duties are either more technical or more marketing oriented.

Read on to learn what it means to be the product champion.
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