The Productologist

Today, we are hearing from Luis Rojas, Director of Product Management at StrongMail Systems. Luis is a Product Manager who has his feet firmly planted in the realm of Technical Product Management, which is a slight departure from the more Marketing-focused Product Managers that we have spoken with in the past on the Product Management Question Corner.

Q: What was your worst Product Management mistake and how did you recover?

A: Early on, I assumed that a sales channel that had been successful in selling one type of product would be successful selling a higher end solution to the same customer base. The company that I worked for was selling a very successful mid-tier product line through an indirect sales channel. This allowed us to put a lot of feet on the street while keeping the overall cost of sales down. The company was obscenely profitable and was selling circles around the competition. Then we had our IPO and started on an acquisition “binge.” We started buying up companies that had complementary products and proceeded to integrate these into our product family and sell them through our existing channel.

The problem arose when we started making too many demands of the same channel and diluting the message with too many products or choices. It became harder to capture the mind share of distributors because they no longer had laser focus on one solution. They became distracted by selling “suites” or “platforms” instead of trying to solve real, everyday problems.

We recovered  by analyzing which distributors were being successful and why, and which ones were struggling. It became apparent that the solution was to segment distribution into a tiered channel consisting of master distributors, value-added resellers, and system integrators. This allowed each organization to focus on its own strengths and collaborate with each other.

Q: What have you done or what would you consider the best way(s) for Product Managers to improve themselves?

A: I think that the answer to this is to “be the customer” and to “eat your own dog food.” It’s impossible for a Product Manager to be successful without living through the same pains as their customers. No amount of customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, or analysts’ white papers are going to make it real for you as much as trying to solve the same problems faced by your customers. This will give you deep domain expertise. When you speak with customers, you will have a deep understanding of their issues. You will will be able to identify the complete value chain for your products and services and you will be able to turn this knowledge into effective product plans and specifications. You will be able to equip your sales people with the necessary tools to identify, qualify, overcome objections, and close opportunities. Using your own product every day will make you into an expert and will be an eye opener when you get to see all “warts” but also see all the features and value propositions that can be exploited in innovative ways.

Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?

A: I think that Product Managers have to have one foot in marketing, one foot in sales, one foot in engineering, and one foot in support. That means you’ll either have to start growing some extra feet or you’ll need to develop relationships across multiple departmental boundaries to help you gather information, come up with pragmatic solutions to problems, and drive product vision through planning into execution. The devil is in the details and if you ask ten persons in your company for product ideas, priorities, or solutions to existing product-related issues, I’m sure that you will end up with ten or more different responses. Position yourself where you can most effectively communicate the product strategy and priorities and develop internal champions that will become your allies in making your plans happen.

Q: If someone told you that they wanted to be a Product Manager what would you tell them?

A: I would first ask them why they want to be a Product Manager and then I would tell them to find senior Product Management professionals that will mentor them and help them achieve their career goals. I think that oftentimes, people have the impression that Product Managers sit around thinking up neat features to stick in the product. Later when they get into the thick of it, they realize that it’s a lot of hard work and that it’s hard to please everybody all the time. You have to balance a lot of different goals such as customer acquisition, customer retention, market leadership, profitability, increased revenues, and many others.

Q: What Product Management tool could you not live without and why?

A: I don’t think that I can narrow this down to a single tool. The tools that I seem to use most often are:

1. A good word processor with the ability to create and maintain specification templates to make sure that all necessary requirements are included in each release.
2. A spreadsheet to create matrices of various kinds such as feature lists, competitive advantages, product gaps, compatibility matrices, etc.
3. A good source control or version control repository that will help all important documents to be centralized, versioned and backed up.
4. A good defect tracking system that will help you prioritize and analyze bugs or enhancements and group them together into release vehicles.
5. I also use HTML and image editors to create high-fidelity mock-ups of user interface screens or components. This helps me to not only think through requirements, but also to present various options to customers and other stake holders before writing specifications that will need to be changed later because not enough time was spent on requirements in the front end of the development life cycle.

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And now for Luis’ question for The Productologist:

Q: What is a good ratio of Product Managers to engineers assuming a top tier enterprise software product company with a third (or later) generation product?

A: The number of Product Managers per product or products per Product Manager is often a topic of discussion in Product Management literature, but the ratio between Developers and Product Managers is less straight forward in my mind. The average is 5.5 developers per Product Manager, but in reality, I think this number varies widely. In fact, I don’t see why the number of Developers and Product Managers should be considered together at all.

For both Developers and Product Managers, the number is primarily driven by product complexity. In early stage products, the number for both Developers and Product Managers is lower because product complexity is lower (Note: this is a generalization; the first release of a product can be very complex, but as a general rule, products start off lower in complexity and become more complex over time).

As the product matures, complexity increases, which usually requires both more Developers working on it, as well as diversification in the areas of expertise for the Dev team. Over time, the product may remain complex, but the Dev effort to maintain that complexity decreases. The effort looks much like a bell curve, though the shape of the curve varies from product to product.

For Product Managers, the number required is driven by different factors, such as domain expertise, number of products and product modularity, and the scope of the position (what the PM is tasked with), and product modularity. Let me explain each of these in greater detail:

Domain expertise comes into play in a similar way for Product Managers as it does for Developers, but for Product Managers, domain expertise revolves around the markets that the product serves vs. the technologies used in the product. Product Managers whose product serve diverse markets need to be able to understand those markets in great detail and that’s not always possible for a single Product Manager. When a single PM can no longer effectively manage a diverse pool of markets, it’s time to hire more.

The number of products that a single Product Manager can effectively handle varies based on the experience of the Product Manager, the sophistication of the the product, and how inter-related the products are. Three products per Product Manager tends to be the average, at least in recent surveys of Product Managers. On the flip side, if the product is very modular (and very large), it makes sense to have Product Managers be assigned to modules within the product. The same rules apply, but for modules instead of products. This can address the domain expertise issue, too, since Product Managers can be specialized for their module(s).

As most Product Managers know, the definition of what a PM is responsible for varies greatly from organization to organization. This is why scope is an important consideration in how many Product Managers should be staffed. A PM that is tasked with many ancillary (but critical) tasks, will have less time to focus on core Product Management functions, than one that is heads down on pure Product Management tasks. This could lead to needing more Product Managers or to bringing in staff that can handle the ancillary tasks.

So, after all that, what do we have? Development and Product Management both need to evaluate staffing based on a variety of factors, but considering the ratio between the two should not be one of those factors.

Luis had a 2nd question about structuring the Product Management organization, but I feel that deserves it’s own post, so look for that in the future.

A bit more about Luis:

Luis started his career in sales, working for manufacturing automation companies. After managing sales teams and being on the road for years, he decided to get “off the road” and stay closer to home to help raise his child. He moved into mergers and acquisitions and was tasked with managing an acquisition that required merging the product lines and channels to bring an integrated solution to market. That opportunity gave him his first taste at Product Management and, twelve years later, he’s never looked back. As a Product Manager, Luis has provided vision and leadership that resulted in long term contracts with global companies including: General Motors, Boeing, 3M, Intel, Nestle, Bausch & Laumb, Philip-Morris, and others.

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Related posts

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• Where Does All the Time Go? (1)
• Less is More (2)
• Why the UI is Important (4)
• Hiring for Success (3)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 5:04 am PT and is filed under Interviews, Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.