Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

03042 Sales Calls: Reading Your Prospects

Product Managers often bridge the gap between technical understanding of the product and the ability to present its benefits to non-technical individuals. Therefore the sales force calls upon their assistance to present the product during visits to prospects.

If you find yourself a member of a team that is calling on a prospect, you can provide valuable insight to the sales rep by helping read your audience’s reaction to the information presented.

Sales pros are good at this. When a sales rep and a manager and a sales engineer review their visit to a prospect, they pool their observations of the company and the people they met, to form a clearer picture of where they stand and how qualified the deal is.

You can help with this effort as well by carefully reading the people you meet with.

Read on below for a few tips on reading an audience.
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03041 Achieving Objectives: Go For the Goal

Product Manager. It’s the job where you get involved with everything, managing by influence across departments rather than direct authority via direct reports.

This is a job where you really, really need to figure out how to achieve goals. There are too many tasks coming at you from too many directions and priorities pulling you every which way.

A friend of mine who is a management consultant has a method he has practiced for years to make sure that he reaches his goals. He gradually realized that his approach to making something happen was markedly different from the approach most people seem to use. It’s almost the reverse of what the majority of people use, a majority that struggles mightily to reach their goals, and misses the target as often as not.

My friend learned to appreciate the uniqueness of his perspective and taught his approach to others. It’s called Working From the Goal.

Read on for an explanation of how to use a Working From the Goal approach to attain a whole lot more of your goals than you otherwise would.
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03040 More TLC for the RFP

A recent issue of the newsletter was called TLC for the RFP. It was all about creating materials along with a system and roles that would allow a company to generate high quality RFPs with less effort.

A subscriber writes in with an interesting question about the best length for answers to RFP questions. Many questions can be answered with a simple Yes or No. Is this a good answer or should you offer more detail if it is a strong suit of your product? What about if it’s a weak point? Also, if you don’t know if you’re a serious contender for the business (rather than column fodder), should you take the time to expand on an answer?

These are important issues to consider. Given that there’s the potential for a Product Manager to spend significantly more time writing responses when they go beyond one word answers, it’s crucial to determine how much effort should be put forth at the expense of other projects. Read on for some tips on how to answer RFP questions.

03039 ROI and ROR: Return on Requirements

As a key part of providing requirements to Development, Product Managers must justify and prioritize their requests for new capabilities for the software. There are always more items on the wish list than there is time, people, or money to do them. This means that hard choices are inevitable.

This is where measuring ROI, or Return on Investment, plays a vital role. ROI guides you in selecting those requirements that are most needed and most helpful out of all the requirements which you and many other teammates and customers have dreamed up.

In a world and a company with limited resources, a Product Manager wants to push the specific requirements which will provide the most benefit to the product and the company. By measuring ROI or ROR (Return on Requirements), you have a consistent scale or score by which to compare and select requirements.

Read on below for some pointers on measuring Return on Requirements.
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