Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

06017 No Job Too Big: Cutting Your Job Down to Size

We’ve all heard of the “No job too small” attitude, where a person considers nothing beneath them or too trivial to tackle as part of getting their overall job accomplished. Well, it seems to me that Product Managers have to deal with a very different challenge, the “No job too big” issue, where it seems as if the Product Manager position has been defined to cover the scope of three, four, or five full time jobs. Product positioning? Marketing collateral? Sales tools? Demos? Requirements? Release planning? Quality Assurance? No job is too big for the Product Manager to tackle!

This means that a Product Manager is faced with a truly challenging situation. How can anybody possibly cover all the ground that needs to be covered? Is it a setup for failure?

Yet there are ways to deal with the “No job too big” challenge that Product Managers have used, consciously or not, to manage to do their oversized job successfully. Read on for some ideas about how you can accomplish the Product Management mission despite the fact that it seems entirely too much for one person to fulfill.

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06016 More Performance Anxiety: More About Performance

The previous article on Improving Product Performance must have hit home, because I received more responses to it than any other issue. This reinforces my belief that product performance is an area where there is very little guidance out there.

Not only do developers struggle with performance and scalability, often flying blind, but it spills over into product management, where it’s a struggle to figure out where performance issues fit in with the product roadmap and requirements.

Readers made some valuable points and asked some useful questions, and so today’s article provides a little more about improving product performance so that your software remains competitive.

Many thanks to those of you who wrote in!

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06015 Performance Anxiety: Improving Product Performance

One aspect of a software product which every company that develops software struggles with, all with very little outside guidance and standards for support, is product performance. A user’s impression of how fast your product moves from screen to screen, how quickly it calls up lists of records, how seamlessly it performs tasks when you click a button, all this forms one of the cornerstones of opinion about the quality of your product.

Perhaps even more than other aspects of their job, Product Managers must wrestle with how to approach product performance on their own, with few standards in a world of quickly changing technology. As they work with Customer Service to determine the severity of the impact on customer satisfaction, and with Development to determine what can realistically be done, they have scarce objective advice to go on.

Read on for some advice, based on 17 years of experience working with software, on how to approach the performance tuning of your software product so that you build a reputation for quality and satisfied customers.

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06011 ROI and ROR: Return on Requirements (03039)

This article is a reprint of an oldie but goodie about Requirements. It will help you measure the expected return from Requirements so that you can reconcile competing needs and prioritize new capabilities for your product.

Read 03039 ROI and ROR: Return on Requirements for ideas on how to prioritize requirements.

06010 Make Your Product Succeed: What Will It Take?

As a Product Manager, your scope of responsibilities calls upon you to get involved across the board in all aspects of the product. There’s plenty of work to be done for product requirements, Marketing, Sales, Development, and Professional Services.

In order to be effective as a Product Manager, you need to identify those areas in your organization where there are weaknesses or gaps, and bring your talents and efforts to bear to fill in those gaps. In fact, that idea of “filling in the gaps” might be one of the best ways to define a Product Manager and to provide the answer to the question you get from nearly everyone you meet: “What exactly does a Product Manager do?”

But pursuing a strategy of filling in the gaps can be a recipe for working harder, not smarter, if there are too many gaps to fill. And usually there is no shortage of these. As with all endeavors where there’s too little of you to go around, you need to prioritize your efforts and choose the top priorities.

For those of us who do not have the good fortune or luxury of getting to prioritize based on what we like to do most, it becomes necessary to prioritize based on where we can be most effective in making our product more successful. This takes some thoughtful analysis of your product’s – and your organization’s – situation to determine what factors are most important to its success right now. Then focus your efforts on those factors.

Because there was always something I could contribute to virtually every aspect of the product, I struggled for years to try to determine what I should contribute. It’s hard to see through the details and the noise to figure out what will make the biggest difference, what will give you the biggest boost. It’s easy to see why everything could be done, but your challenge is to determine what should be done, and done now before you bother with the finer points.

Read on below for some examples of different products at different organizations and in different phases of their life cycle to understand how you can apply careful analysis to figure out what it will take to make your product succeed.
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06009 Holding a Successful Customer Conference

Note: It has been a month since my last article. Those of you who know me would know that it was hard for me to be silent for such a length of time! But don’t worry, today’s issue is probably one of my longest yet, about an effort that is both hard to pull off and vital to your product’s success.

Few things have more power to build customer loyalty than holding a customer conference. Just as true, few things require as much preparation, on-site work, and expense. The customer conferences your company holds can be critical to the long term health of your product and your company.

The headaches, expense, and staff time required for a conference are guaranteed. But the payoff is not, and that’s why it’s so important to assess your product – and your organization’s – situation and goals and determine what your aim is for a customer conference, then make strategic and tactical decisions accordingly.

Product Managers can provide good input on customer needs and preferences, as well as what your company needs from its customer base, to ensure that important decisions are made to create a successful customer experience.

Read on below for ideas about holding a successful customer conference that enhances the reputation and success of your product.

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06008 The Value of AIPMM’s PMEC Conference

I have just returned from the Product Management conference provided by the Association for International Product Marketing and Management. The 2006 west coast conference, called the PMEC, or Product Management Educational Conference, was held in Indian Wells, California (near Palm Springs) for two days on April 20 and 21, with an optional day of pre-conference workshops.

The conference theme was “The Way of the Product Manager” and the conference was organized around four tracks: Plan, Build, Launch, and Sustain. It was as inspirational, forward-looking, all-encompassing, and fluid as the profession of Product Management itself.

I was nominated for the 2006 Product Management Excellence Award for Thought Leadership. The award went to Linda Gorchels, author of The Product Manager’s Handbook, and I am honored and humbled to have found myself in such company through my work on this newsletter.

Read on for more information about what it was like to be at the conference and for a list of great resources for Product Managers.

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06007 Software Development Pitfalls: Planning

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there.

When Product Managers push to accomplish their goals for a product – more sales, more customers, more profit – they must struggle to identify and overcome the obstacles and limitations of their individual product, team, and company. Each company’s weaknesses are unique, and require careful focus and willpower to overcome them with a solution whose uniqueness matches the problem.

But problems that are unique to a company are relatively easy to spot and solve compared with weaknesses that are common to an entire industry, such as the software industry. Industry-wide problems create a situation where there are few people to turn to who even see beyond the blind spots, let alone can point to models for a solution.

In the previous issue, I wrote about what I consider the software industry’s greatest weak spot, namely creating product requirements for software development. In this issue, I’ll tackle another major shortcoming, which is none other than planning software development.

As a Product Manager, chances are you find yourself working with a software development function that is challenged when it comes to planning. And so much of the success of reliable development of competitive capabilities depends upon good planning.

Read on below for a discussion of how to better understand the planning of software development — and how to overcome some common hurdles.

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06006 Software Development Pitfalls: Requirements

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there.

Every culture has its blind spots and weak points that can trip it up despite its strengths and clear-sightedness. So, too, every industry struggles with common shortcomings that seem to grow out of misperceptions and failings learned at many companies and steadily spread across the industry.

For a Product Manager, who is usually deeply involved in all the major workings of a company, from sales and marketing to product development and the business model, it can be a sobering experience to try to overcome widespread weaknesses with few positive examples for guidance. Like personal failings, a company’s flaws, especially when typical of the whole industry, can prove fiercely resistant to improvement.

Today’s issue is an ambitious – perhaps overly ambitious? – discussion of common pitfalls that I have seen in the software industry when it came to attitudes towards and understanding of product requirements.

Read on below for a discussion of how to better understand software requirements - and how to misunderstand them a little less.

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06005 Creating a Great Trade Show Playbook

Exhibiting at trade shows is a staple of marketing a software product. As part of a mix of marketing activities to reach your target market, trade shows provide visibility for your product, build familiarity, and bring in sales leads.

Trade shows are also costly, not only in terms of sheer dollars but also in terms of time spent by skilled employees to plan for the show, prepare for it, and man the booth. Because of the cost, your company has to limit the number of shows where it exhibits, so it has to make the most of each show.

One tactic that I have used to get the biggest payout from a trade show is to create a Playbook. Like a playbook for a football team, this document succinctly provides all the information your trade show team needs to act effectively. While having a written guide seems like a no-brainer, I have only seen a small number of the most organized and focused trade show planners who took the trouble to create one, much to everyone’s benefit.

Read on below for advice on what to include when you create a Playbook for your trade show team in order to maximize your company’s return on a trade show.

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