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A Theme For This Week

The theme that emerges with today's request for advice focuses not on the front end of the product development lifecycle, with product roadmaps and requirements, but on the back end, namely the launch of the product. When a new software release is completed, I always liken it to product coming off the assembly line in a factory. It's inventory that you've invested a lot of money in building, and the last thing you want is to have it sitting on the shelf. You want to be ready to sell and implement new software as soon as possible after it has been developed and tested.

So let's see what our readers have on their minds.

Inaugural Column: Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Dear Product Manager,

I am a product manager for a highly specialized inventory and distribution/logistics application for a niche industry. The company is small but we're an established vendor in our market. I was hired about two years ago as their first product manager in over five years. When I was hired, they were developing a major new release that would run on a new, up-to-date platform. Although the release was due to be completed just a few months after I started, there were delays, and development was not really done until a year after I began. We have a lot of different departments to handle training, implementation, support, and marketing, and it has now taken us months to get those other departments to accept the software and support it with customers. There's lots of criticism about missing functionality and lots of people blaming other departments and pointing fingers. The sales reps are reluctant to sell it because of all the negatives they're hearing about it not being ready, bugs, departments not being ready to support it, etc. Is this normal, just something I have to live through, or is there a way to make the adoption of this new release go more smoothly? Not to mention that it makes me wonder about how secure my job is.

— Please Withhold Name

Dear Please Withhold Name,

Don't worry, I won't be publishing anybody's name in this column! It's a safe place to ask questions and get advice. What I've picked up on is that this is a small company without a lot of established procedures or standards for new product releases. Also, that there are a lot of departments operating relatively independently of one another. I will avoid specific recommendations for such things as regular meetings, progress reporting formats and frequency, and how to escalate issues, because I think you'll need to craft your own way of doing those activities in a manner that is suitable to the company, its management, and its culture. But I will say that it sounds like you feel like you're the only one who has a vested interest in getting the release out the door (and a fear that yours is the only job on the line, which may be true). What you need to do is work with all the players individually to uncover what's holding them up and address those causes. Often what's holding them up is a concern about missing functionality or difficulty supporting the expected functionality.

I would go as far as putting those concerns on paper for everyone who is involved in the release to read, discuss, and most important, solve. By getting the objections out into the open and doing something to resolve or improve matters, you can coax the various departments toward a point where they, too, feel responsible for the success of the launch. I strongly encourage you to emphasize that while you are responsible for coordinating the release, each of them is answerable to the whole team for coming through on their portion of the product launch. This may be a messy, non-linear process at first, but I have seen it turn similar situations around more than once.

(Note: You can gain an unusual but very helpful perspective on this by looking into the Strategic Selling methodology of Miller-Heiman. One important concept is that of the Win-Result, which in this case would be the positive impact on a department's business processes when they successfully launch the product (the Result) combined with the personal gain that benefits each manager's self interest (the Win). By figuring out and satisfying each team member's Win-Result, you can get them to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and support the launch.)

— Signed, Product Manager

Dear Product Manager

I am the product manager at a software company that has decided to adopt a more agile software development methodology. I say "more" agile because as near as I can tell, the development team has picked and chosen which elements of Agile to implement. It's working because we're getting requirements defined faster and more clearly, and seeing them go into the product a lot faster. But once the software is coded and tested, the development team pushes it out to our customers (the software is hosted or SaaS, so that's easy to do). They say that we don't need a launch process because we're agile. Do you think this is right? There are a lot of complaints from various departments who don't think they're being kept in the loop.

— To Agile For My Own Good

Dear Too Agile,

My, but this idea about the product not needing a launch process sure sounds familiar! Indeed, the phrase "same old song" comes to mind. Software developers (and others) have thought this long before agile development came around. While I think agile development is a successful improvement for the software industry, its adoption doesn't mean that all the old ideas get tossed out the window. On a side note, I am fully supportive of the idea of a "more" agile methodology rather than the full-blown Agile – sometimes a company must adapt certain aspects and practices to fit agile into their culture, or adopt new practices in increments and phases. But just as before agile, software companies find themselves contending with shortcuts and quality issues. Product development and product launch are not the same thing. And the agile method of implementing requirements quickly in little increments, with plenty of feedback from customers and tweaking by developers, still requires the rest of the organization to be involved and understand. In fact, trainers, consultants, support staff, marketing and salespeople are significant consumers, if not customers, of the product as well. They still need to be able to sell and explain your software. So I would push for incorporating a market rollout process that is coordinated with your agile development efforts. Focus this process around making sure that customers understand the new capabilities, so that they'll adopt them. Come to think of it, the best way to deal with this in an agile environment might be to incorporate some of the launch needs into the requirements. For example, add requirements to build in "What's New" explanations right into the software screens that automatically show up after an upgrade. I see stuff like that all the time when an upgrade is pushed out for the SaaS products I like to use myself.

Signed, Product Manager

Dear Product Manager,

Our company does not have a product manager. I am the Marketing Manager, and have been given responsibility for the go-to-market strategy of our product. At other companies, I have not had to be so deeply involved in things like making sure that online help is written, trainers are ready, installs are working, and the consultants understand the new functionality. There have been lots of delays and it seems like new problems, that nobody was expecting, crop up all the time. In this company, the Development Manager's job stops "once the software is coded and tested" as he put it to me. The product doesn't even have updated online help. So what do I do to make sure we can go to market with new releases?

— Go-To-What?

Dear Go-To-What,

(Whoa, if it hadn't been me who came up with that nickname for you, I would have been shocked by it! 😉 ) It looks like this duty has fallen upon you, and I see two things for you to do that are critical to making this successful. The first is basically to administer a good, strong dose of project management. Develop a list (by doing a whole lot of consulting with all the departments involved) of everything that each department needs to do in order to get the product ready for market. List what Training has to do, what the consultants have to do, and what has to be done for online help. Don't forget things like updating sales contract templates and the like. List everything that will take you from coded, tested product to the first sale. Use this list to estimate the time required for each task, identify the dependencies and predecessor tasks where applicable, and put together a plan for what must get done when. This is basically classic project management, and if that isn't your forte, you can look around the web for project management advice.

The second issue is the online help. Work with the Development Manager, and escalate this as appropriate, to try to get online help included in his basic responsibilities. The best practice I have seen is for Development to be responsible for coding, testing, and documentation. It just seems to work better. If that doesn't work, you want to get as much assistance as you can from Training to select an online help writer — probably a contract writer — to update the online help and work with development to incorporate it into the product.

— Signed, Product Manager

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