Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

05016 Pushed and Pulled: Development vs. Production

Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to move customers up to the newest software, where the priority has to be doing it at the right time, and doing it right.

When you provide hosted software, you add yet another dimension to the mix. Unlike installed software, where you can send out CDs and let the customers drive their own upgrades, you have to deal with both conflicting priorities, namely Development and Production, because your company has taken on a role that software companies didn’t traditionally have to deal with. That is the role of implementation and production manager, which entails very different priorities from a software developer.

Read on below for a discussion of how these two priorities push and pull you in two different directions and how to handle them.
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05015 Degrees of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management

Product Management is not a job that people can go out and get a degree in. You can get a degree in Computer Science that covers the knowledge you need in order to start out as a programmer. You can get a degree in Marketing that gives you the basic foundation to get started in Marketing or Advertising. But there’s no college level degree that I know of out there in Product Management.

This makes it a real challenge to find, evaluate and hire good Product Managers. With so few objective external indicators, you have to define the Product Manager position very clearly and scrutinize candidates to see if they are a good match.

So what do you look for when you want to hire an ace Product Manager to champion your product and move forward relative to the competition? After some years doing Product Management and many more before that doing things that all tie in to Product Management, I see the ideal candidate as having a combination of four critical elements.

Read on for a discussion of what to look for to find a good Product Manager, and questions to ask to better judge whether they’re Product Manager material.
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