In the previous issue, Fits and Starts: Creating Product Management at a Startup, I explained that Product Management is a custom solution every time. While it would be great if you could pick up the established methods and launch cycles that worked so successfully for you at a prior company, and plunk them down ready-made into your new environment, it is highly unlikely that such a cookie-cutter approach will work. There’s no getting around the fact that each new company, product, or team may require customizing the way you conduct Product Management in order for it to take hold and succeed.

If you have had to serve in a consulting role at any point in your career - implementation consultant, advisor to a project, person who has been called in to clean up a messy initiative, etc. - then you have had the experience that most consultants face at the beginning of every project. You must first convince the people you are called to help that you truly understand what makes their situation unique, that you appreciate the importance of their situation, their likes, dislikes, and goals, and finally that you are going to deliver a solution that takes all that into account. Only when it’s clear that you’re not planning to just dispense advice without tailoring it to the situation at hand will the inevitable resistance to your ideas begin to diminish.

You can probably point to some notable failures where the Product Manager didn’t wind up getting anywhere, despite ideas that in the absolute were good. You may even have been that Product Manager. Chances are those ideas didn’t take into account some critical component of the organization.

It is critical that you tailor the Product Management function to suit your current company, product, market, and team. Read on for tips on going about the process of developing a Product Management approach that fits the present situation and is therefore successful.