Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

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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05006 Testing the Waters: The Product Quality Stream

It is with some apprehension that I launch myself upon a discussion of product quality and QA testing. While product quality is promoted by Marketing and management, people rarely want to see and touch the distasteful details of the QA testing that helps improve software quality.

I suppose an outstanding quality effort flows like a stream, steadily and smoothly, out to an ocean of customers. Then there’s the situation for the rest of us.

Much of the struggle with QA testing in the software industry probably stems from the mistaken belief that, in an ideal situation, testing would hardly be necessary. That by finding the right magic formula of programming, such as the double-helix cross-pollinated self-actualized awesome programming method, there would be virtually no bugs in the code and no need for testing. This belief is a distortion of the quality dictum that better work upstream results in fewer defects downstream.

I know there are software development organizations that achieve truly impressive levels of defect-free output. Hats off to them. I, on the other hand, have found it helpful to understand some of the difficulty that occurs naturally in the effort to improve product quality. Some quality events (some would call them “problems”) happen very naturally.

I compare the creation of software, and QA testing of it, to a stream or river. It’s a long stream of code that starts at the source and flows through turns, falls, and rapids to the customer base. And the QA issues we all face are like some of the situations normally encountered along a river.

Read on below for a discussion of QA testing and the river of product development where it takes place.
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05004 Fits and Starts: Creating Product Management At a Startup

A startup faces many daunting challenges as it moves along the path from an idea on paper to a full-fledged company that can stand on its own. It has to be built out piece by piece, function by function, and there is probably no function where I’ve seen companies, both brand new and established, struggle more than Product Management.

Some of the biggest barriers to successfully establishing a Product Management function at a company result from misconceptions about what the function is and what Product Managers are supposed to do for their product and company. These misunderstandings lead companies, especially startups, to waste and therefore lose lots of time on false starts and a poor fit between Product Managers and the company’s expectations.

Yet building a solid Product Management function is an important step in a startup’s development into an ongoing company. Therefore, by understanding which Product Management needs and challenges exist at startups, all individuals with a stake in the company’s success - CEOs, management team members, board members, and venture capitalists - can help move the company towards a new level of product competitiveness.

Read on below for a discussion of the pitfalls involved in creating a Product Management function at a company, along with guidance that will help you be successful in such a vital component.
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05002 Getting Your Priorities Straight: A Twisted Path

A major challenge that faces every software product is determining the priority of the oh-so-many suggestions that come to Product Management as requirements for the next release. This is one of those areas that wind up containing a heavy dose of mystery masquerading as rocket science. Requirements get prioritized using a complex formula that is far from formulaic.

The path to well prioritized requirements may be narrow, but it’s not straight by any means.

One thing that even the most consistent and systematic Product Manager faces is the need to adjust his or her method of setting priorities to each individual company. Each company has different technical and business drivers. And each product has its own Development team with its own mindset. You must customize your methods to fit the thinking and personality of the Development managers and other management team members.

Read on for some ideas to consider when blazing your own trail to prioritizing requirements.
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