Product Management Question Corner: Glenn Mar, Mediaplex
Posted by Ivan Chalif in Best Practices, Interviews, Professional DevelopmentIn this first edition of the PMQC, I’m interviewing Glenn Mar. Glenn is the Sr. Director of Product Management at Mediaplex, an online ad serving and publishing system.
Q: How did you come into the role of Product Manager and was it planned?
A: I find that doing “soup-to-nuts” software development has been an indispensable background for Product Management, as the latter has been essentially the same work (up to the coding). I frankly don’t know how people without that background get the sensibility for writing requirements that are engineering-facing. It wasn’t particularly planned, so much as I got drafted into a role that obviously needed doing and that I was capable of.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you have experienced as a Product Manager and how did you overcome them?
A: At the front end, Product Management has more client relationship-building and defining your own requirements based on my guess about the market. The former comes naturally to me, but the latter is still a challenge. I don’t find it realistic to make meaningful revenue predictions about new features, so instead I talk to enough people to be convinced that the direction is sensible. It should make sense competitively, be compatible with our current products, and pass the “sniff test” of impact.
Q: If you could be the Product Manager for any product, what would it be and what would be the first thing you would do?
A: I’d be Product Manager for major league baseball, and the first thing I’d do is ditch the DH. It’s an abomination.
Q: What is your greatest Product Management achievement?
A: Well I can’t mention the client by name, but it’s our largest client, and I was able to turn the requirements in a direction that favored us (and in my honest opinion, the client’s greater good) and then successfully install and migrate the largest integration project I have been in charge of anywhere. I think it’s kind of funny that this was by far the single biggest financial achievement ever done at Mediaplex and yet I was not voted “Employee of the Quarter.” It just goes to show you that peer voting has a lot more to do with exposure and lack of complexity of the accomplishments as anything else.
Q: What Product Management tool could you not live without and why?
A: We’re not big into the tool set, but I’d have to say Bugzilla (Bug/enhancement tracking system) because the hardest thing it is to get people to do is to leave a usable paper trail.
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And now for Glenn’s question for The Productologist…
Q: I believe there’s a big overlap in what Mediaplex calls “Product Management” and tasks that other companies might put under Engineering, Sales Support, and Product Marketing, not to mention Training, Customer Support, and Tech Writing. How do you think a Product Manager should best position his/her skills in multiple areas so that others understand the finer details?
A: No matter what size organization you are in, Product Management is a multi-disciplinary role. At larger companies, the Product Manager role may be highly specialized, focusing on a single product and only being responsible for gathering and prioritizing requirements. At a startup, the Product Manager can be responsible for those things, plus writing user documentation, running demos for Sales, answering RFPs, being a QA tester, and many other tasks related to the product, but not traditionally owned by Product Management.
To be prepared for either end of the spectrum (or somewhere in between), Product Managers should not focus on developing those specific skills, but rather the more general skills that can be applied to the specific areas. Those general skills (and let me be clear, these are not general in the sense that they are low-level and easy; they are general in the sense that they are broad) are writing, listening, speaking, and presenting (and there is a difference between the last two). These are the core skills of a Product Manager. If you can master those skills, you can apply them to any tasks that you may be assigned, regardless of whether those tasks are traditional Product Management tasks or more tangential ones.
A little more about Glenn:
Glenn had a 13-year career at Pacific Bell that started in computer operations, but developed into a software engineer and sometimes team lead role. After that, he spent a couple of years contracting as a software engineer doing Y2K-related work. When the dot-com explosion happened, Glenn ran into a former colleague who worked for Mediaplex and brought him in on the Customer Support team. In his own words, “The Peter Principle applied and I quickly rose to the level of my own incompetence, the boundaries of which I stretch to this day.”
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