Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

04017 Product Management As a Counterbalance

The ideal company grows in such a way that it contains a balance of all the various strengths it needs: marketing, sales, technical knowledge, customer service, and management. Each function, such as Marketing, has its inherent strengths and weaknesses. One function’s weaknesses are balanced out by strengths from other functions.

Well, that’s the ideal, anyway. But we have all seen companies that are out of balance, due to a lack of manpower or ability in one of the necessary functions. This leaves them exposed to major failings.

Product Managers are in a unique position to act as a counterbalance when they find themselves in a company in such a situation. This is because the nature of their position calls for them to cross between functional boundaries in order to get the many moving parts to work together as a whole.

Read on below for some ideas on how to help improve a company situation when it is out of balance.

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04016 The Sport of Support

Of the many activities at a software company, customer support or customer care is one of the toughest to provide. Sometimes I think that to avoid burnout, you need to approach the whole business the way an athlete deals with a sport. Realize that it’s a team effort, and that you will win some and lose some. In fact, you may lose by falling flat on your face some days. But a losing game is just one part of a longer season, and the support of teammates helps you pull through.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of function towards which people gravitate, does it? So it is with most Product Managers. They understand the necessity of customer support, but breathe a big sigh of relief that they’re not the ones who have to provide it.

Yet when a Product Manager participates in customer support, right on the hotline with struggling users, it can bring tremendous value to the product. Manning the support lines is an intense way of living the customer experience, with no watering down of the struggle, time expended, and confusion that comes with working with a software product.

Read below for some guidance on how you can enrich your understanding of the customer experience by actively participating in the customer care effort at your company, and as a result develop great requirements for new product capabilities.

With the tips provided below, you can have the confidence to go outside your comfort zone into the customer service trenches (a war zone if there ever was one).
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04015 Launching a Product: It’s Not Development

Something I have seen software companies struggle with again and again is understanding the difference between product development and product launches. In order for a software product to not just work, but succeed, you need not just a product release, but a product launch.

The product launch, like Requirements, is one of the very few of the multitude of activities at a software company that a Product Manager owns outright.

Read on below for some thoughts about the effort to launch a software release.
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