Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

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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05013 Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking

Product Managers find themselves at the center of their company’s debates and decisions on product design. They understand how crucial it is for the software to be well designed, so that it not only does what the market wants it to do, but does it in the way the market wants it to.

Good product design can mean the difference between success and failure. But it’s easy to think in such black-and-white terms. More subtly, good and bad design exists along a continuum, and most Product Managers find themselves working with software that has inevitable design flaws due to rushed release dates and the pitfalls of all-too-unstructured development efforts. Product Managers, by bringing about improvements to a product’s design, have a positive impact that results in a more profitable company.

In the software industry, there are two contradictory directions for product design. The first comes out of the design traditions of more classic products, such as consumer goods. The second stems from the very cerebral, and often very un-artistic, heritage of the computer industry. Software Product Managers feel the pull from both of these directions and must decide whether to choose one, the other, or a mixture of both, and why. Given the impact of design on profits and revenue, this is a key decision.

Read on for a discussion of these two conflicting design directions, and how understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each can help Product Managers guide the team towards the right design choices.
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05012 Focal Point: Adding to Sales Discussions

Product Managers provide a unique role in a software company, something that may include skills in Sales, Marketing, and Development, but reaches well beyond the scope of any of those three functions. It’s a role nobody else fills. Yet because of their in-depth understanding of the market and the reasons people want and need their product, and because of the paramount need to make sales succeed, Product Managers can easily find themselves pulled into more sales calls than they care to be involved in, given their other priorities.

Pragmatic Marketing conducts an annual survey of Product Managers to determine salaries and other statistics about the job. In the 2003 survey, when asked: “What should the company know about product management?” a top answer was: “Product management is not sales support.” This finding underscores the fact that Product Managers find themselves pulled into the sales support role more than they feel they should be, and it is critical to manage the time they spend on sales support to provide the maximum impact in terms of improving the quality of sales discussions.

You can find the survey and much other valuable information at Pragmatic Marketing’s website at:

• http://www.productmarketing.com

As a Product Manager, you have probably experienced the positive impact you can have on a sales discussion with a prospect, and gotten encouraging feedback from the sales force and top management about how they want you to stay involved in sales to help make the team more successful at closing deals. You know sales are important, but you also know that sales calls could easily eat up all of your time, to the detriment of the many other critical aspects of your job.

When you serve in the role of Product Manager on a sales call (I say it this way because while your actual title might be anything from CEO to Founder to VP of Marketing or Development, you may be serving as Product Manager), your goal must be to bolster the sales force and train them, through example, to be more effective in future calls. You want to bring an important addition to the discussion, but you want the sales force to learn from your participation and be ready in future discussions to take on the role you have just played.

Read on below for insight on how Product Managers can add the most value to discussions with prospects, how they can increase the chance of a sale, and how they can help pass on their level of knowledge to the sales force.
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05011 Hit or Miss: Meeting Promised Development Dates

If you have worked in or with the software industry at all, you have lived through some dramatic delays in product development. For instance, Product Guernsey, originally announced last year, was due in January. It’s now the beginning of June, and it’s announced that the product, now called Providence, won’t be out until September. Or your last major release was supposed to take nine months. A year later, it won’t be out for another nine, so technically the team has worked for a year but it’s twelve months late.

In a business environment where companies are expected to run like clockwork, and planning and efficiency are prized, this doesn’t make your company look good. And people in all industries, including the software industry, are becoming less tolerant of this kind of slipshod scheduling.

If Product Management serves no other purpose, it serves to feed requests for new capabilities to Development and to structure the release of those capabilities. A Product Manager can be invaluable in helping your company be more successful at selecting, committing to, and meeting development (and consequently release) dates.

Read on below for guidance on how to commit to specific product release dates and meet them.
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05010 Well Equipped: Giving Sales a Complete Toolkit

In small and large software companies alike, Product Management is usually the critical factor in creating an effective sales toolkit. That’s because Product Management marries the strategic goals coming from the management team with the level of detail needed to support the sales team. Product Management takes its understanding of everything from the business model to the targeted customer profile to the company and product positioning, and brings it to bear on the distinct benefits and associated features of the software. It’s the ability to translate the generalities of the marketing message down to the specific and practical details of what the software does, so that sales reps have a long list of capabilities that they can relate to bigger needs and benefits.

So one key result of thorough Product Management is the existence of a complete toolkit for sales. But providing the right toolkit requires more than just providing the tools. It’s just as important to provide guidance on how to use the tools. Without guidance and training to the sales force on how to use the fine-tuned sales mechanism you have provided, you may find it used as a blunt instrument, to little effect.

Read on below for a description of the important tools to include in a sales toolkit, and a discussion on how to help sales reps use the right tool to do a precision job each time.
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05009 The Real Ideal: Strategy to Tactics and Back

Product Managers, because of the nature of their responsibilities, carry out the unique function of making strategies real and turning realities into strategy. Since they are often called upon not only to view the product from the perspective of management and competitive strategy but also to apply the software tactically, and with great mastery, Product Managers find themselves straddling the often gaping chasm between the great ideas and goals of the company, and the everyday tasks that the troops are working on in front of customers.

By gaining experience with both sides of the company coin, Product Managers have the ability to become an important catalyst that takes the strategies chosen by the management team and helps turn them into tactics through the use of the product. And their tactical abilities serve as a foundation upon which they can build more sturdy and enduring strategies because the ideals they advocate have been tested in real life situations.

Read on below for a discussion of the invaluable contribution Product Managers can make to helping the company apply its strategies tactically, and draw from tactics to make solid strategies.
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05008 At Each Other’s Throat: Handling the Competition

For any of you who have been closely involved in a sale where your product was competing directly against another product, you know that selling against a competitor is tough. Product Managers, as part of supporting the sales force, need to provide guidance and support in selling against the competition.

But there is no formal body of knowledge, nothing that you can study in a college course, on how to provide backup to the sales reps. Instead, you have probably encountered a confusing mix of vague and conflicting maxims, truisms, and opinions, scattered in various books and seminars on selling and from coworkers.

The broad range of opinions you hear may not help you narrow down just what to do to back your product in a competitive situation. Read on below for some things to consider as you determine how to keep your sales force strong and confident during the sale and make the competition break into a sweat.
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05007 Guest Article: How to Write a Case Study

I’d like to showcase an entertaining and useful article that recently appeared in the newsletter from the Boston Product Management Association (BPMA). It is written by Mike Urbonas, Contributing Editor for the BPMA newsletter and can also be found online at www.bostonproducts.org. I encourage you to take a look at the site and some of the content available there.

The article is called How to Write a Case Study (Without “Putting Your Eye Out”). Read on for a helpful article about writing a case study.
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