Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

06004 Push-Me-Pull-You: Reconciling Maintenance and New Releases

One challenge facing a Product Manager is how to balance limited Development resources between the need for maintenance work on the one hand and for new capabilities on the other. Devoting too many resources to one or the other can cause your product to be out of whack and lose ground to competitors who do a better job of mastering that balance.

With limited resources, it is always a struggle to determine what portion to devote to maintenance over new features. It’s a little like trying to fight a two-front war: each front draws precious attention and time, and requires careful consideration of priorities. Too much spent on one front may cause you to lose on the other. And as the need for maintenance grows as your customer base grows, your more mature product is probably facing stiffer competition as its market matures and moves towards commoditization. All the while, you can’t afford to neglect your base of existing customers.

Read on below for a discussion of what you need to consider as you continually strike a balance between development on maintenance releases and on new feature releases.

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06003 Sales Training: Revving Up the Troops

One of the duties that frequently falls to Product Managers is to train the sales force, getting it prepared to sell the product. As the person who has scrutinized and measured the market opportunity, as the person who has heard the needs of customers and prospects, as the person who has prioritized the benefits required and the associated capabilities that go into the product, the Product Manager has plenty of vital knowledge to pass along to the sales force to help it sell.

However, one of the challenges of having a Product Manager deliver training is that seldom does a Product Manager have experience selling. Most Product Managers seem to have traveled a career path that has come out of a Marketing or Development role. So it’s easy for a Product Manager to deliver a training session that doesn’t do much good.

Read on for a discussion of what to include in your training to the sales force so that they are best positioned to make your product succeed through strong sales.

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06002 Customer Loyalty: Mind and Body, Heart and Soul

Volumes have been written about the concept of customer loyalty and how essential it is to a company’s profitability and growth. There’s no denying that when a company has loyal customers who keep coming back year after year to buy its product and recommend it to others, then that company sells more products at lower cost than it otherwise would. In other words, they get more revenue at a higher profit.

A whole lot has also been written about how to build customer loyalty. These stories cover companies that advocate vastly different ways of creating loyal customers. Many of them talk about providing stellar customer service. Still others say that you need to create a product that delights customers and is such high quality that it needs no service. Others say you need a product that sells itself through word of mouth. Others swear by organizing their entire company structure around customer facing processes. Some companies rely on events like parties or sponsored sports and games.

None of these ideas is a bad one. But it strikes me that with all the companies out there with dramatically different products, some complex and some simple, some intangible and some very concrete, that there’s such a variety between organizations that not every company can win with service, or product quality, or what-have-you, as its key ingredient for customer loyalty.

Instead, each company is called upon to understand the hand it has been dealt in terms of product complexity, quality, ease of use, and type of customer. Customer loyalty through business-to-business channel sales will be very different from loyalty direct from consumers.

I believe that each company must craft its own slightly customized, perhaps even quirky, recipe for creating customer loyalty. And that recipe consists of a mix of four ingredients: mind & body, heart & soul.

Read on below for some ideas on how to connect with your customers on the level of mind, body, heart, and soul.

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06001 The Interpreter: Transforming Input Into Requirements

This is the 100th issue of Product Management Challenges. When I began writing this newsletter a little over three years ago, it was my hope to build up an unmatched source of real-world tips and guidance about software Product Management. I am pleased to say that the many back issues have covered a multitutde of topics which are important, essential even, to the successful Product Management of software.

For this milestone 100th issue, I have chosen a topic that gets right to the core of how a software Product Manager makes a difference. That would be Requirements. Requirements loom large in the life of any Product Manager, and it seems like they are always a challenge. And what I have discovered is that the best requirements seem to be derived, seem to be an indirect result of all the direct input a Product Manager receives. Read on for a closer look at this idea.

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05022 Fun Flashbacks: Old Demo War Stories

For the many Product Managers and others out there who have given software demos, you know just how badly things can go wrong. I have decided to write a lighthearted holiday issue reminiscing about some of my own and my colleagues’ most unusual demo experiences.

Read on to realize that you’re not the only one for whom demos have gone very, very wrong.
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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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05019 The Host With the Most: Hosting Software

Many companies today want to package their software product as an Application Service Provider (ASP), or hosted, offering. Hosting your software brings a number of advantages to your business.

But hosting software is not for the faint of heart.

Read on to understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software.
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05018 Giving a Good Product Presentation

You hear lots of theories - some of them pretty cockeyed - about how to give an effective sales presentation and demo of your product. Everyone will have suggestions on how to do it. Every experience you have will give you new ideas. Here are some ideas from my own recent experience presenting a software product at a conference to two packed rooms of 35 attendees, and to a somewhat smaller group of 12.
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05017 Working the Plan Using a Plan That Works

Software development organizations struggle mightily with planning their development efforts and sticking to the plan. Some Development departments fail to plan at all, other than following constantly changing, seat-of-the-pants estimates, much to the chagrin of the rest of the company that depends upon their output. Others have solid plans that they can follow and use to track their progress, and this shows in the steady stream of new capabilities and releases that result.

Still others live in the messy situation where some of the team, usually management, wants a clear plan, while some or all of the Development team resists being pinned down and made to commit.

The reason Development’s planning efforts are so important is that the rest of the company depends upon the success of such planning in order to plan their own work. Functions such as QA and Documentation (if they are separate from Development), Training, Marketing, Sales, Hosting and Production, and Customer Support all need solid assumptions upon which to build their plans. And this is where the Product Manager gets involved.

Without Development’s ability to pin down dates and expected results, Product Management can’t build reliable plans for product releases, and the entire momentum of your product is affected. So whether a Product Manager wants to or not, he or she must be involved in the planning of Development work.

Read on for ideas on how you as the Product Manager can help get your Development organization to the point where it has clear, useful, and reliable plans.
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