The Productologist

Product Manager’s Desk Reference by Steven Haines

There are books and there are Books, and with 700+ pages, the Product Manager’s Desk Reference (PMDR) definitely falls in the latter category of capital B books. It’s not a book you can throw in your laptop bag to read on the plane (or train). Actually, you could, but you might not have room for your laptop!

There are many books (and blogs) out there that purport to tell you how to be a Product Manager. I have discussed some of them here before and there are many reviews on sites like Amazon. The PMDR is unique among them in that it covers a very broad range of Product Management topics and it covers them in significant depth.

And fortunately, the PMDR is not just limited to the traditional Product Management functions. Haines covers all the topics that a Product Manager would even remotely have to think about or interact with–Leadership, Finance, Team Management, Research, and Career Development, just to highlight some.

In previous book reviews, I have gone through the book and summarized the main points and added some comments (observations, critiques, or questions). That’s a bit harder this time around since the PMDR is so big and I don’t think that it would add much value. What I am going to do with this one is pick out some of my favorite topics or points and provide some guidance on who it would be good for (New Product Manager (NEW), Experienced Product Manager (EPM), Big Company Product Manager (BIG), Start Up Product Manager (SUP) or everyone):

Topic	Starting Page	NEW	EPM	SUP	BIG
Stay Calm, Even When Your Hair’s on Fire	48	X	X	X	X
Documenting the Decision Process Chart	92	X	X	X	X
Basic Financial Statements	106	X			X
Competitive Positioning	150	X	X	X	X
Strategy as a Dynamic Continuum	216		X
SWOT	237	X		X
Product Strategy Review Template	345		X		X
Sorting Out Opportunities	270			X	X
So What?: The Value Proposition	277	X	X	X	X
Marketing Functional Support Plan	297	X			X
Product Performance and Monitoring	311	X	X	X	X
Eliciting Requirements	326	X
Functional Requirements	331	X
Make vs. Buy	337	X	X	X	X
Competitor Research	392		X		X
PM Role During Dev Phase	416	X
Decision Matrix for Development Changes	437	X	X	X	X
The 3 A’s of Product Launch	451	X	X	X	X
Win/Loss Audits	481				X
Recasting the Strategic Mix	502		X		X
Chapter 22 – Charting Your Career	559	X	X	X	X
Coaching Product Managers	583		X		X

There is much more to the PMDR than what I have covered above, but I think the areas I highlighted are important topics that many Product Managers struggle with. Like others who have reviewed this book (On Product Management, Cranky PM, and Product Management Zen), I think this book is a welcome edition to the library of Product Management books out there and serves to provide a broad foundation for Product Managers both within the field and beyond.

Recommendation: The PMDR is a fantastic resource for any Product Manager who wants to fill in gaps in their training/education or who wants a good reference tool for revisiting some of the areas and skills that they don’t use as much. Due to its size, it’s not portable and I wish the templates were available electronically AND free of charge for book owners, but it’s still a great book that should be in every Product Managers library.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Tags: Book Review, career, career development, competitive, Launch, leadership, new product manager, process, product launch, product management, product management books, product strategy, requirement, Requirements, skills, strategy, training

Back in December, a reader named Adam sent me an email about a book that I had just reviewed, What Customers Want by Anthony W. Ulwick. Adam asked me about my recommendation, which was

“…it’s not a good fit for Product Managers at early stage companies or where there is not a lot of product or market data for you to evaluate under-served outcomes.”

Adam’s question to me was essentially, “Well, if this book isn’t good for Product Managers at start ups, which ones are?” It’s a good question and one that until recently, I would not have had a good answer for. The problem with Product Management books is that for the most part, they are all about process and what can only be loosely defined as “traditional” Product Management.

Traditional Product Management is what we all learned about in Product Management training (Pragmatic Marketing, Sequent, ZigZag Marketing, etc) and read about in books like The Product Manager’s Handbook and Product Strategy for High Technology Companies. Traditional Product Management tends to be waterfall development with teams that have significant resources (Program/Project Manager, anyone?) and an extensive organizational and process hierarchy.

That’s not what most Product Managers at start ups experience. They’re more likely to be just one person, who probably inherited an Engineering team that was accustomed to NOT having any Product Management process. There’s no supporting team members and they also find themselves wearing many additional hats, such as Sales Engineer, QA Engineer, and Technical Writer. For those Product Managers, books that discuss traditional Product Management process are not very useful.

To be honest, the best place to find the kind of information a start up Product Manager needs is on blogs like this one (toots own horn!) and many of the others out there who post regularly about their EXPERIENCES at start ups. I won’t list them here, but check out the list of folks under BlogNation in the menu. There’s lots of great information out there.

However, I recently read (and reviewed) Rich Miranov’s The Art of Product Management and while it’s not they same type of book as the one’s I mentioned earlier, it provides a lot of insights on how Product Management works at smaller companies, especially start ups. I would recommend it for folks who know enough about Product Management to be dangerous, but want some guidance on what happens when you step outside of the traditional Product Management framework.

There are also other books and resources out there that don’t specifically address Product Management as a discipline, but are nonetheless useful for Product Managers looking for information that they can use to build and deliver better products. Examples include Tuned In, Rules for Revolutionaries, Freakonomics, Manager Tools, and The Welch Way.

One big rule for ALL of these resources, including this blog: there is no gospel on Product Management. YOU have to decide what is right for you, your product, and your organization. If something you read or hear or see strikes you as interesting, give it a try. If it works, great; if not, you still learned something.

So, Adam, there’s the long answer to your question. We know you have a choice when you read Product Management blogs and we appreciate you choosing The Productologist. We look forward to serving you again in the future. The local time is….

Popularity: 25% [?]

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Tags: Anthony W. Ulwick, Customers, early stage companies, Engineering, high technology companies, Manager Tools, Marketing, pragmatic marketing, product management, product management books, product management training, Rich Miranov, start ups, waterfall, Welch Way

The Art of Product Management by Rich Mironov

I received an early copy of Rich Mironov’s The Art of Product Management, which is a collection of some of his earlier articles from his newsletter, Product Bytes.

I’ve met Rich a few times at SVPMA events and had some good conversations with him before going in to hear the featured speaker. I’m also a subscriber to his newsletter, but I hadn’t read any of the vignettes that were selected for the book.

The Art of Product Management is a lot like a book of poetry. The content is short and sweet and divided into bite-sized morsels. It’s not meant to be consumed in one session, but rather over many sittings and discussed as you go.

The chapters in The Art of Product Management are grouped together into sections along the lines of a parenting book (a metaphor that they author introduces in the preface), but truth-be-told, it’s a pretty loose organization. The original publication dates of the stories are not chronological and you can hear how Mironov was in different places professionally in the different posts. I liked this element of the book because it didn’t feel like he was this “all-knowing” Product Management expert who was casting his immense knowledge down to the masses.

The book is a how-to guide for Product Managers, but not in the traditional sense. Miranov doesn’t list the 7 things every Product Manager needs to have in their requirements documentation or provide sample schedules for executing a flawless Beta program. Most of the information presented is in form of “Hey, this happened to me and now I know better. I thought you would be interested.”

And it’s geared primarily toward folks who work at software start-ups, which is good, because most other Product Management books are squarely set on addressing the needs of formalized Product Managment teams at big companies. Anyone who has worked at a small startup company can tell you that while it’s a good foundation to have, you just don’t use most of the formal Product Management processes at small companies.

Another aspect that I liked about the book is that it is purely anecdotal. There are no longitudinal studies, surveys, or secondary analysis, just the author’s experiences. And the topics range from those specific to Product Mangement (“Null Service”, “Insider Thinking”, “What’s Your Pricing Metric”) to ones that are tangential, but still interesting (“Early Selling”, “Why Are There Serial Entrepeneurs”, “Girls Getting a Head Start(-up)”). With this type of setup, the reader gets to decide how valuable the information presented is to them.

RECOMMENDATION: I liked The Art of Product Management. It was easy to read and it was easy to recognize some of my own product and business challenges in the stories the author tells. I wouldn’t recommend this as the first book to pick up as a brand new Product Manager, but I would say that it is a good option for those who are 12-18 months into their first Product Manager role. It’s also a good option for more senior Product folks as both a refresher and an enjoyable trek down memory lane (“Oh yeah, I remember doing that, too!”).

Popularity: 30% [?]

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Tags: beta program, Book Review, Documentation, longitudinal, new product, newsletter, organization, PMA, pricing, product management, product management books, requirement, Rich Mironov, start ups, Startup, SVPMA, vignettes

What Customers Want by Anthony W. Ulwick

I’ve been looking lately for Product Management books that are less about how to be a Product Manager and more about creating products and services (and products as services). If found what looked like a great book on just such a topic in “What Customers Want” by Anthony W. Ulwick. I reviewed the table of contents and found encouraging headings like Formulating the Innovation Strategy, Devising Breakthrough Concepts, and Targeting Opportunities. I was excited to read about these topics and their focus on addressing the needs of users, customers, and the market.

Ulwick starts by describing 8 steps to “outcome-driven” innovation. Outcome-driven is the authors method for creating successful product and services. Essentially, it involves identifying what jobs and tasks users need to complete and then measuring the success of those tasks. The metrics are the customers’ desired outcomes and you use them to establish products and services that satisfy unmet or under-served customer outcomes.

The 8 steps

1. Formulate Innovation Strategy
2. Capture Customer Inputs
3. Identify Opportunities
4. Segment the Market
5. Define Targeting Strategy
6. Position Current Offerings
7. Prioritize Development Pipeline
8. Define Breakthrough Concepts

The author goes on to illustrate how the outcome-driven process is an improvement over a customer-driven approach. Many of the notes of comparison are accurate, but there are definite values to including customer-specific requirements, as long as the Product Manager includes assessment of the broader appeal of those features. The customer-driven method is also significantly more important for young companies who do not have a broad customer base.

While the ideal would be to create products and services with many data points about the market and potential customers, young companies often have to be more responsive to individual customer requirements in order to build momentum and maintain viability in the short-term. In fact, almost all of the examples in the book center around established companies which either re-evaluate products they already have in the market or products that are in adjacent markets that can be modified to serve a different market.

Ulwick’s text does a good job of providing the underlying framework of the outcome-driven process and how to utilize it, but I have to admit that there was something that kept me from fully engaging with the concepts. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it just didn’t click with me. It may be because I tend to prefer start ups to established products and companies. Or maybe it was the format (it seemed a bit too textbook-ish).

Recommendation: If you are a Product Manager in a big company, this book is a good tool to help you revitalize a mature product, but it’s not a good fit for Product Managers at early stage companies or where there is not a lot of product or market data for you to evaluate under-served outcomes.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Tags: Anthony W. Ulwick, Book Review, customer base, customer requirements, customer specific requirements, Customers, development pipeline, Innovation, innovation strategy, metrics, Outcome-driven, product management, product management books, requirement, strategy, users