Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

03034 TLC for the RFP

One of the biggest headaches for software companies of all sizes is the creation of RFPs. RFPs are labor intensive, exhaustive and exhausting efforts to tout the product. The effort to produce RFPs can be a drain on precious resources in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. And Product Managers get involved more often than they wish they did.

The blood, sweat and tears expended on an RFP is all the more frustrating because you’re left in doubt about whether it really makes any difference in winning the sale. Often the RFP is a cruel exercise in jumping through hoops for a prospect that is using you as “column fodder.” You’re column fodder if your purpose is to provide a point of comparison, a systematic review with the pretense of objectivity that only serves to back up an emotional decision, made long ago, to go with a product they like - somebody else’s product.

Yet despite what they tell people in sales training, you can’t exactly blow off the whole RFP process and still hope to win a sale. While it’s up to the sales rep to make sure that you have not been selected as column fodder, your company must create an RFP that:

Stands out from the others,

Demonstrates the uniqueness of your product,

Wins over the doubters, and

Gets you to the next step in the sales process.

So if you’ve got to do RFPs, how can you make the whole experience a little less painful? How can you streamline the process so that fewer resources are spent on what is arguably an ineffective way to make a sale? Read on for some guidelines to focus the RFP process.
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03033 Setting Prices: Dark Art or Evil Science?

Setting prices for a software product is definitely one of the more daunting tasks for a Product Manager. While it’s a little easier to set the price for shrink-wrapped, mass-marketed software for consumers, finding your way to a satisfactory and satisfying price for enterprise software is like finding your way through a labyrinth.

It’s hard to tell whether coming up with a pricing scheme is a dark art, bordering on witchcraft, or an evil science, combining a methodical, experimental approach with cynicism about human nature.

In the end it’s the gut that decides it. Maybe that’s why the whole exercise seems so mysterious.

Read on for tips on setting software pricing, advice based not on how things ought to be, but how they really are.
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03032 A Sales-Driven Product: Perversion and Conversion

Remember the good ole’ days, the days of the dot.coms? People didn’t just build software. They set out to build the best transformational software ever.

Development groups held meetings that never had action items and talked excitedly about how they were going to apply cutting edge technologies. They didn’t plan to upgrade the existing software (when there was any existing software). They planned to tear up the code and throw it in the trash, and replace it with a whole new set of code, built from the ground up to be technically awesome.

And it all was going to take two years, at least, but you could be sure they were going to do it right!

But the luckiest programmer of all was the one whose project was officially designated “Research”. He got to sit in an office by himself all day, and work without deadlines. His project was to build a user interface that took the form of a life-size hologram of Princess Leia, who functioned using self-learning neural-networked artificial intelligence with fuzzy logic and speech recognition.

Imagine how amazed the market for warehouse software was going to be when all inventory transfers could be conducted by speaking to Princess Leia, who would carry out your commands, and even supply helpful recommendations on how you could work more efficiently.

(Like I really want to hear yet another opinion about how I should do my job!)

Well, that was a time when the rallying cry could easily have been “Reality be damned!” But reality reared its ugly head, and here’s the reality for software companies of all sizes, just like it was long before the dot.coms:

It’s hard, hard work to improve your product. And your first priority is to make sure you bring enough money in through new sales and maintenance fees to keep afloat. That means that many times, your company must dedicate its resources to whatever it has successfully sold. Some of those great ideas are going to have to wait.

Yes, if you did things differently, you’d be better off in the long term. But there isn’t going to be a long term if you don’t survive in the short term.

And that means doing whatever you can sell.

But this leads to a product direction that wanders all over the map, including one-off cul-de-sacs and reversals of direction. It’s an unfortunate but necessary situation.

So what can a Product Manager do to shepherd the product towards improvements that continue to push it in the best direction long-term, when it’s vital to build based on the short term? Read on for some ideas.
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03031 The Interrupted Life: Time Management Tips

If I could point to a common trait of Product Manager positions, whether the focus is technical or marketing, it’s that Product Managers spend much of their time in what I call interruption mode. Interruption mode is when it seems like everyone, from the CEO to the UPS delivery man, pops into your office to ask you questions or seek your help on projects as varied as requirements, RFPs, press releases, and collateral.

These kinds of interruptions could easily take up your entire workweek. I’ve had days which were nothing but interruptions, by phone and in person.

But Product Managers also have critical components of their jobs which require extended concentration to produce. Projects such as requirements documents, user stories, articles and presentations all demand blocks of time where you can create and polish them.

The struggle, then, is to figure out how to carry out these two conflicting aspects of your Product Manager job. Read on for tips on how to carve out concentration time for your bigger projects and yet be available as an as-needed resource for teammates who need your help to get their work done.
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