Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

05021 Feature Police: Following Through On Requirements

If you have ever watched people playing on the tennis courts, you see two, or four, players in a game, actively running around and hitting a ball back and forth. Many rackets, one ball in the game.

Have you ever taken a look at the edge of the court? There are tennis balls, lots of them, scattered around in little clusters all around the outer edge. All through the game, when someone misses a ball or serves one out of bounds, sometimes the ball ends up so far away that the players just go get another one from their bags. Before you know it, everyone has lost count of how many balls have rolled off.

That’s what it’s like at a software company, too. Only the players are developers, and the balls are requirements. In the heat of the game, with deadlines looming and tasks to complete, requirements get cut, skipped, or forgotten. They roll off the playing field.

And the person who is best positioned to notice those many requirements that have been left for another day is the Product Manager. If you ever wanted a snappy and memorable definition of a Product Manager, it’s this: “The Product Manager is the person who makes sure that the requirements don’t get lost or forgotten.”

Read on for a discussion of how Product Managers can play a vital role as the Requirements Police, making sure that important requirements are not forgotten.
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05020 Big Talk and Small Steps: Implementing Strategy

In many companies, the management team, Marketing, and Business Development are full of ideas about where to take your product. They come up with all sorts of potential applications for it, applications that would be competitive and profitable.

These ideas sound great, but they have to be implemented before they’ll make any type of substantive difference in revenue or profits. And once your team attempts to implement new ideas, it meets lots of resistance from the technical folks who are charged with that task.

Yet not expanding your product, not finding new avenues for revenue, not making changes that increase profitability, will only hurt your product and the company over time. The market and the competition is busily striving to improve and gain market share against you. Inventing new strategies, and then implementing them successfully, is a requirement, not an option, to keep a company viable. If you’re not moving ahead, you wind up falling behind.

As with all new strategies, the chances for failure are high. If you want your product to grow and succeed, you must learn how to make strategies and ideas a reality. Read on for a discussion of how to maximize your chances of success.
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