I was at a SVPMA meeting last month where the presenter, Barbara Nelson from Pragmatic Marketing, was giving a talk about the “Politics of Agile” and during the course of the discussion, she brought up examples of products that she had managed in the past. What I noticed was that when Barbara talked about the products, she always referred to them as “her” products. That’s what I like–making the product personal.
In previous posts, I have referred to products that I have worked on as “MY” products because I believe that the Product Manager should feel a sense of ownership of their product(s). Despite not being the CEO of the Product, the Product Manager is the one person within an organization that has a wholly vested interest in the success of the product.
Now you may be saying, lots of people have a vested interest a successful product. Engineering, QA, Support, and Sales want the product to be successful, but that is not their key function. Engineering builds the product, but it doesn’t have to be the current product; it could be any product. QA tests the product to make sure that it is free of defects and strives to make the product as robust as possible, but again, the QA function is for any product. Same with Sales and Support. They all contribute to the success of the product, but they are not accountable for it and their function is not evaluated on whether a particular product is a “keeper” or a “dog”.
The Product Manager, on the other hand, is accountable for whether the product succeeds or fails, regardless of whether they were directly responsible for the failure (poor feature mix, lack of understanding the market, ineffective pricing) or not (missed delivery dates, bugs, etc). The Product Manager has to answer to the company and customers when their product fails. Conversely, the Product Manager gets to sing the praises of the entire team when the product succeeds.
The main reason that I stake the ownership of my products is that I want to demonstrate to others on my team that I am invested in the product and that I am committed to making choices about the product which will make it, the company and our customers successful. I know that I am not the only one on the team who wants the product to be a “keeper”, but I’m the one who is charged with making it a keeper.
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Tags: bugs, defect, delivery dates, Engineering, feature, feature mix, Marketing, pricing, Sales, Support
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