04014 Where Should Product Management Report?

This week’s topic is an exciting one: where is the best place to locate Product Management in an organization? Bring it up at your company if you want to spark a lively debate.

It’s a sign of the immaturity of the profession of Software Product Management that there doesn’t seem to be a standard job function where Product Managers report. Companies are all over the map when it comes to which part of the organization is in charge of Product Management.

So often Product Management is not viewed as a vital function at a company, since its purpose and focus is poorly understood. If you read about the management team of a startup, or even a larger software company, you would be shocked if it didn’t include a Finance or CFO function. You’d be pretty surprised if there were no Marketing function. But I’m willing to bet that a large number of experienced venture capitalists and entrepreneurs wouldn’t notice if Product Management weren’t mentioned in the job descriptions of the management team.

And because Product Management for software is as young as it is, you would find very little consensus in the industry about where the Product Management function belongs in the org structure.

Yet if you take a systematic, consistent approach to Product Management, the answer to where the function belongs becomes clear. Read below for a discussion of the various areas where Product Management reports today, with the associated strengths and weaknesses, and where the function belongs in a well run organization.

When it comes to determining where Product Management should be located in an organization, there are a number of issues to consider.

04012 Worry: A Product Manager’s Best Friend

I am a person who worries. That has been the case for as long as I can remember. I’m quite sure I’m not the only one.
Like so much of our psychology that confounds us in modern times, worry had a vital purpose way back when: survival. Every mother who worriedly watches her toddler’s every move is using a trait that was essential when we walked in the forests and a child could get badly hurt at any moment by falling in rough terrain, eating a poisonous plant, or getting attacked by a wild animal.
Worry is the habit that kept us paranoid enough to be ready to run in case we found a bear or wolf or wildcat around the next bend.
Like many other characteristics that helped us out in a very different environment, worry can be pretty counterproductive in these days of plenty of food, general safety and homeowner’s insurance. It is easy to worry needlessly.
These ingrained traits from the past can’t be eliminated, but they can be channeled into useful avenues for today’s world. Since worry is a big part of my personality, I try to put it to productive use at work as a Product Manager.
Read on below for ideas on how to apply worry usefully to prepare your software product to thrive in tough situations that may arise.

04008 What Is a Product Manager For?

When I tell people at parties that I’m a Product Manager at a software company, the response is usually: “Oh, that’s nice … what exactly is a Product Manager?”
That’s only natural, but what’s pretty unusual is that you’re just as likely to get that question from a software company colleague. I suppose this stems from the nature of the product - software, in an industry that is not mature. I don’t think this is the same issue in other, much more mature, industries like household products.
So I find myself explaining what a Product Manager is for, and I try not to launch into an article-length speech. My answer always boils down to something along these lines:
“A Product Manager fills in the gaps between different functions and departments in order to make sure that the product develops and makes progress, with the aim of making the product perform better relative to the competition.”
So what are some of those gaps? Read on for a list of potential gaps you’ll encounter at your company.

05005 Built to Order: Making Product Management Fit

In the previous issue, Fits and Starts: Creating Product Management at a Startup, I explained that Product Management is a custom solution every time. While it would be great if you could pick up the established methods and launch cycles that worked so successfully for you at a prior company, and plunk them down ready-made [...]

04005 Product Road Map: the Real and the Ideal

Like so many of the tools used by Product Managers to make the software product successful - the Requirements documents come to mind - the Product Road Map takes many different forms at different companies, and needs to be customized to suit each company. While it may seem that no two of these are alike, in every case the Product Manager struggles to balance the ideal with the real in putting together a road map.
In addition, the Product Road Map deals with information at different levels of detail. And what looks realistic from 30,000 feet may seem a little idealistic once you get down to ground level.
How do you balance the real and the ideal in your product’s road map? Read on for a look at the types of content to include.

04004 Faster! Gaining Product Momentum

We all heard people, during the dot-com era, bypass tried and true business concepts to champion untried - and untrue - concepts such as “The Internet changes everything” and “The company with first mover advantage wins.” While there is some truth to these concepts (and I think we will learn where to apply them correctly) [...]

05003 Setting the Product Direction: A Mechanical Approach

One of the central reasons that companies hire a Product Manager is to make sure that they have someone who sets and drives the direction of the product. In a world where there is never enough time to implement all the ideas that come along for great new features, you need to choose the right [...]

03038 Product Roadmap to the Promised Land

Before the testing and bug fixing, before the technical design and product plan, before the business and technical requirements, comes the Product Roadmap. And as we speak, Product Managers are asking themselves the question: “Just what is a Product Roadmap?”
It’s a good question, one for which I’m not sure there is any single answer to [...]

03036 Two Good Product Management Websites

Articles from Product Management Challenges have been published on a couple of websites recently. These sites focus on product management and marketing, and have useful information and links for Product Managers.
One has a salary survey for Product Manager positions, and the other looks like a good place for exchanging information with others in your field.
Click [...]

03023 Virtual Product Manager: When No Body Will Do

Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.

Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.

What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.

As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.

Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one