Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

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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05016 Pushed and Pulled: Development vs. Production

Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to move customers up to the newest software, where the priority has to be doing it at the right time, and doing it right.

When you provide hosted software, you add yet another dimension to the mix. Unlike installed software, where you can send out CDs and let the customers drive their own upgrades, you have to deal with both conflicting priorities, namely Development and Production, because your company has taken on a role that software companies didn’t traditionally have to deal with. That is the role of implementation and production manager, which entails very different priorities from a software developer.

Read on below for a discussion of how these two priorities push and pull you in two different directions and how to handle them.
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05015 Degrees of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management

Product Management is not a job that people can go out and get a degree in. You can get a degree in Computer Science that covers the knowledge you need in order to start out as a programmer. You can get a degree in Marketing that gives you the basic foundation to get started in Marketing or Advertising. But there’s no college level degree that I know of out there in Product Management.

This makes it a real challenge to find, evaluate and hire good Product Managers. With so few objective external indicators, you have to define the Product Manager position very clearly and scrutinize candidates to see if they are a good match.

So what do you look for when you want to hire an ace Product Manager to champion your product and move forward relative to the competition? After some years doing Product Management and many more before that doing things that all tie in to Product Management, I see the ideal candidate as having a combination of four critical elements.

Read on for a discussion of what to look for to find a good Product Manager, and questions to ask to better judge whether they’re Product Manager material.
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05014 Striking Gold: Polishing Your Marketing Message

The effort to first define and develop the marketing message for your product usually takes place with a limited amount of research and input from customers, especially for new capabilities. For the many organizations that don’t have the luxury, either in terms of time or money, to spend all they want on market research to determine just which benefits resonate the most with which type of prospects, the marketing materials must be developed and printed nonetheless. This means that your product’s marketing message goes out to the world before you have really had enough time to discover some of its most compelling advantages. You mine what gold you can get your hands on, and sell it for all it’s worth.

But once your product is launched and customers begin to adopt and use it, certain benefits begin to clearly rise to the surface as the most important ones. And new positives appear that had simply never occurred to anyone on the team when the product was under development. These new benefits are like gold nuggets, and are incredibly valuable for solidifying, targeting, and extending the marketing message for your product. You need to mine this material as it appears.

Product Managers generally find themselves in discussions with a wide range of prospects and customers, and get knee-deep into the product and its benefits. This makes them an invaluable source of material for improving the marketing message.

Read on for ideas of where and how to mine these gold nuggets to create a more powerful message to the market about your product.
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