Posts Tagged “roadmap”
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This is probably the last Product Management Reader of the year. Not for sure yet, but probably. To keep you busy through the end of the year, here is an extra wonderful list of stuff to fill your days with. Unless you’ve got something better to do, which I HIGHLY doubt!
- The Price of Leadership
[Lead on Purpose]
- The Famous ProductBeautiful Roadmapping Drinking Game
[Product Beautiful]
- An Engineer Roasts “Marketecture”
[ProductMarketing.com]
- How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise
[InfoQ]
- Stop Giving Your Customers Too Many Choices — They Don’t Want Them!
[Accidental Product Manager]
- Against a Grand Theory of PM, part 1
[Forrester Blog for Technology Product Management and Marketing]
- Organising Agile Teams With A Visual Calendar
[All About Agile]
- Product Marketing is NOT Marketing Communications
[Outside InView]
- Guest Post: Measuring Product Management (part 3)
[On Product Management]
- Attainable Requirements
[Tyner Blain]
Disclaimer: Including a link to a particular posting in the Product Management Reader is not an indication that I agree with the original author. In fact, I may post topics that are the opposite of my views or at least somewhat controversial in order to provide a contrasting viewpoint to the one I present on The Productologist.
Popularity: 2% [?]
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Tags: agile, engineer, enterprise, leadership, Marketing, marketing communications, product management, product marketing, requirement, roadmap, software
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Last week (3Dec09), Forrester Research Analyst Tom Grant led a discussion on Agile in Technology and how it pertains to Product Management. I took some copious notes on the discussion and thought I would share them here.
Be forewarned, some of this may seem a bit cryptic. I was typing in real time (on my new HP Netbook) and participating in the discussion, so I didn’t capture every single piece of the conversation. Plus, they’re notes, so by definition they are brief. I’ll try to add some clarity where I can. Items with ** denote topics that were brought up as part of a response, but not discussed in detail.
<NOTES>
Agile in tech orgs requires company-wide changes to be successful
Topics for discussion (desired @ start)
- Multiple Groups
- Agile Adoption Path
- Communicating Up
- Roadmap
- Associated Groups
- Longer-term Projects
- Cult of Agile
**Does Agile get used for things other than software (service, hardware, etc)?
What does Agile really mean?
- Fail fast
- Rapid iterative sprints (vs. releases)
- Consumer v. enterprise
- Empowering for Dev
- Customers funding development of features (demise of PM?)
- Customers/requirements mob-style
- Discover issues more quickly
**Designating sprints as design or build can provide balance for dev team and product team
What are the characteristics that make Agile truly Agile (are there minimal reqs to be Agile)?
- Daily communication
- User stories
- Coaching (external training)
- Executive sponsorship
**Challenge of balancing defect/feature in sprint/releases
How can Agile better accommodate futures (12 month plan)
- Showing a long-term roadmap that likely won’t happen that way vs. showing a 3 month roadmap that is likely, but without future planning
- Use backlog as “possible” roadmap
Challenges of Waterfall and Agile turn out to be very similar, but are labeled differently
1st age of Agile is done, moving to 2nd age where Agile is more broadly adopted and enhanced
</NOTES>
Popularity: 2% [?]
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Tags: agile, backlog, balance, challenges, Customers, Design, forrester, product management, requirement, roadmap, sprint, tom grant, waterfall
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Well folks, this is it. The FINAL PMQC. Today we are talking with Amita Paul, Founder of ObjectiveMarketer, a solution for extending Marketing, Sales and Customer Service into Social Media. This session has been in the works for a looong time. Originally, Amita was going to write some guest posts for The Productologist, but we couldn’t quite get the timing right. Then she started working on ObjectiveMarketer and as anyone who has started their own company knows, there is not much time for extracurricular activity. Ideally, this interview would have fit in with the entrepreneurial ones I did a while back, but alas, it was not meant to be. Anyway, this one promises to be a good one.
Q: How did you come into the role of Product Manager and was it planned?
A: At the risk of sounding cliché, let me tell the story that has been my inspiration all this while. It goes like this – “At a construction site, one could see three workers doing the hard work. When asked about the work, one said, he was laying bricks for the foundation, the other said, he was carving stones, but the third one said, he was building a temple.” I had heard this story at a pretty young age, when I was still in my school and had zilch experience. But, I instantly could relate myself to the story and specifically, the third construction worker.
Fast forward a few years (1999), and I am in my first job as s/w engineer (in India) for a big multinational, where for first few months, all I did was fix typos and alignments in some random reports. Soon, I realized, pretty much every engineer in the company did the same! Frustrated, I cursed myself. Leave aside the temple; I could not even see the bricks!
Fast forward 10 more years (2009). Day in and day out, I am doing nothing but thinking of the temple that I am trying to build. Sometimes, I have the bricks and mortar. But, mostly I have nothing more than a huge space! How did this happen?
So, to answer the question – the role of Product Manager was not planned, but was envisioned! I continued doing things that I loved – defining product features, integrating technologies, creating collateral – even when I had the designation of Software Engineer, much to the chagrin of my manager. However, after I did my MBA, I moved into the formal role of Product Management.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you have experienced as a Product Manager and how did you overcome them?
A: PACE and RISK PROFILE – the two differences between you (the PM) and your people!
As a PM you are churning ideas, snooping every possible place to combat competition; and geared with that momentum you draw the most powerful roadmap. The biggest challenge then is to convince the engineers “Man, this needs to get out the door like yesterday!” and to tell the management “No, this is not as risky as it looks. And yes, let us take this risk! May be this time! Please?”
These are hard nuts to crack though! And sometimes, I feel “wish, I still did code”.
Q: What have you done or what would you consider the best way(s) for Product Managers to improve themselves?
A: Considering that fundamentals of Product Management are clear (there are myriad of good advice on the net including “The Productologist”), these are some of my tips -
- Be visible, be available and be ready to speak up. It is your product and you have to protect it and promote it all the time – in meetings, in cafeteria, in restroom, in elevator, in carpool…
- Become multi-lingual as fast as you can. With engineers, with sales folks, with management, with customers, you should know to speak their lingo. Listening to what these different groups mean and presenting your concepts to them in a way that they can understand, is the key.
- Be quick in rectifying mistakes. Do not get obsessed to an idea to the extent that it becomes overkill. Accept, learn and move forward. If there are human beings in your organization, they will understand.
- Take break. No work for sometime is not a bad thing. Free up your mind from overworked issues, solutions and situations. Start afresh!
- Finally, never forget the temple that you are trying to build. Even, if it is an iterative project, there is always a temple within a temple!
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: I believe Product Management should be tied with P&L responsibility. So, in an ideal world I would like to see Product Management being managed as an independent function –tightly integrated with Marketing, Sales, Engineering and Finance – but, not under any of them. Being outside of a group has its own disadvantages – most importantly loosing the influence in decision making. That rests on the capability of the people who run this function.
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to be a Product Manager, what would you tell them?
A: Go ahead! But, wait a minute … do you see the temple???
___________
And now for Amita’s question for The Productologist:
Q: In last one 5 years if you were to pick one, which technology product or service would you call par excellent and why?
A: Even though it’s not so much a technology in and of itself, but rather a use of technology, I feel that the advent of tools for creating User-Generated Content (UGC) has had the most profound impact in the past 5 years. When the Internet was first made commercially available and followed shortly thereafter by the Web, it was primarily corporate entities that claimed the space to broadcast their ideas. Websites popped up here and there and even though almost anyone COULD create a website, almost nobody knew HOW to create websites.
Then along came tools and apps that allowed less technical folks to create content on the Web. Sites like Tripod and GeoCities let laypeople create content without having to know much about the underlying HTML code. Granted, most of it was atrocious looking (who can forget the <blink> and <marquee> tags of early HTML pages?), but it was the first steps of the public having direct access to a large-scale publishing and broadcasting medium.
Over time, more powerful tools emerged which allowed non-technical users to embrace more of the computing side of the web. Apps like Dreamweaver let designers build websites that were connected to rudimentary databases (often just excel spreadsheets) to generate pages on the fly.
Some years later, blogs started to emerge and once that happened, it was as if the floodgates had been cast open. The number of pages on the Web grew astronomically. The same problem of signal-to-noise remained, but new voices were heard and new viewpoints were put forth and discussed.
Social Media is an interesting extension to that. I am not sure where it will go, since it is such a broad category and it includes many diverse areas, but to be sure, sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others have made a significant impact on the role of communication in the 21st century.
A bit more about Amita:
As a founder and CEO of a new startup, ObjectiveMarketer, Amita is fulfilling the most challenging Product Management function of her career so far. ObjeciveMarketer is a comprehensive marketing platform for social media, offering campaign management and analytics solution for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. She is focused on growing the business and building functionality that will increase adoption of social media as a viable business channel. All in all, it is fun and I am enjoying every moment of it. To connect with her, you can follow @amitapaul or @objMarketer on Twitter or through LinkedIn and Facebook.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Tags: Design, Engineering, Marketing, roadmap, Startup
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I’ve used Twitter off and on for the past year or so, engaging with other Product Managers and Product Marketers about PM topics and also with community members within my industry.
I like the brevity of the tweet. Share a link to a page or article without the pontification of a blog post (irony?). Solicit for informal feedback. Stay on top of current events.
There are other uses, too, like following celebrities (I won’t judge), getting discounts for products and services, monitoring air and road traffic. All in 140 character, bite-sized chunks.
The problem I have is the volume and time committment. Reading and/or responding to any one tweet takes only a little bit of time, but if you have a significant number of follows (or your follows are verbose), you can easily burn an hour or more at a time.
I use TweetDeck on my computer and Tiny Twitter on my mobile to help me stay on top of threads, but even with TweetDeck’s filtering and organizing, it still is a lot of information overload. And I am not sure how much value I get from Twitter (or how much value others are getting from my tweets).
A month or so, I was asked a question about how to keep up with Twitter. My response was, “Don’t.”
Twitter, like many other tools, is useful, but can be a time-suck (NOTE: I’m not pickimg on Twitter here. There are plenty of other time-sucks, such as roadmaps, prospect/client presentations, balancing the feature backlog, meetings, just to name a few; all are useful in small doses, but so easy to waste time on).
Over the past few weeks, I have been curtailing the time I spend on Twitter. It has become more like my Google Alerts folder. I skim the folder, looking for nuggets of information about my product, competitive products and companies, and notable topics for my industry, but I don’t read every alert or link within every alert, and if they get old, I just delete them.
No hard feelings. No guilt about missing out on something.
Technology has given us the feeling that we can have everything accessible to us at any time and that we have to always be “on,” but that creates an environment where we are using more and more energy to sift through the noise than to actually do anything with the signal, if and when we find it.
Don’t abandon Twitter. It’s a good tool and one that has its place in the Product Manager’s toolbox. Just take stock of how you use it and how much. What else could you do with that time?
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Tags: beta, client presentations, community, competitive, competitive products, informal feedback, information overload, meetings, mobile, product manager, product marketers, roadmap, run a meeting, social media, social networks, tools, Tweets, twitter
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People, people…please calm down. I know that it’s been more than a month since the last Product Management Question Corner, but these things take time. Fortunately, this one is worth the wait! This edition of the Question Corner brings us Rene Larro, VP of Products and Solutions Marketing at Model N, a provider of revenue and compliance management software. Rene brings us the perspective of a Product Manager who started out as a traditional consultant and rose through the ranks of Product Management all the way to the VP level.
Q: How did you come into the role of Product Manager and was it planned?
A: Moving into Product Management wasn’t specifically planned, but throughout my career I’ve always been drawn to roles where I could be involved with both business and technology. In 1999, I made the jump from consulting to the startup world and joined Digital Impact as an Account Manager. At the time, DI was building out it’s second generation campaign management tools and I had the opportunity to work with the Product Management team as an internal beta user for one of our products. I was constantly talking with the Product Manager about things that “I thought the software could do better”. The more we worked together throughout the release cycle, the more I became interested in the role. When an opportunity came up to move into Product Management I jumped at it and have been in Product Management and Product Marketing ever since.
Q: What are the biggest challenges that Product Managers face?
A: One of the biggest challenges you face as a Product Manager is balancing the needs of your company as a business and the demands of your customers when making decisions about the roadmap and tradeoffs for a given release. New license sales are the lifeblood of an enterprise software company, and to successfully grow the business you need to continuously add new products to your portfolio to give you new things to sell. But, the more successful you are and the larger your customer base grows, there are increasing demands to add additional features and functionality to your existing products to keep your installed base happy. Your existing customers don’t always care about the great new product you’re bringing to market next year, they want you to focus on their issues, and to add their key features to the roadmap. There is never enough time or resources to do everything you want to do. It’s a delicate balance and there are always hard tradeoffs to make.
Q: What have you done or what would you consider the best way(s) for Product Managers to improve themselves?
A: There are a few things that come to mind.
Get to really know your customers and the problems they are facing. You can’t be a successful product manager by sitting in your office. Get on the road, visit your customers, talk to them and sit with them while they use your products. I’m always amazed at the insights I get by sitting with users and watching them do their jobs. Customers love the attention, and truly appreciate it when Product Managers visit and listen to them. And sometimes, the simplest change in the app can turn a frustrated user into a champion.
Get to know your product and your technology inside out. The most successful product managers I’ve worked with become experts in their products, what they do, and how they are built. Great product managers develop a “feel” for what it takes to build their apps, and how their apps fit in with all the other pieces of their technology. Don’t be afraid to get into the details. You’ll get more respect from your engineers, you’ll be able to make better tradeoffs on effort vs. benefit, and ultimately make better decisions about your products.
Finally, get into the field and sell. Designing and delivering the best product in the world doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t sell. At the end of the day, sales drives the business. If you want to be a real asset to your company, get out with the sales team and learn what works and doesn’t in the sales process.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: For an enterprise application company, I’ve always believed that Product Management needs to report into the business, not to engineering. It’s easy for Product Mangers to get wrapped up in the day-to-day aspects of the internal side of the role. Reporting into the business helps ensure balance between the demands of building the product, with the necessity of ensuring the product is marketable and can be sold.
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to be a Product Manager, what would you tell them?
A: If you like working on challenging problems, want to be doing something different every day, thrive on being thrown into challenging situations, want to do both strategy and tactics, love getting into the details, and want to make a real difference in your organization, Product Management is a great role to be in.
I think it’s the most demanding job in a software company, but it’s also extremely rewarding. There is nothing better than slaving away on a product for a long period of time, seeing it go out the door, and then sitting down with users and watching them run their business with what you built.
Q: What is your greatest Product Management achievement?
A: Building a $50M enterprise software company from the ground up and having a product that has continued to sell even in an impossibly tough economy. Starting with just a technology platform in 2001, my team was responsible for defining and building an integrated application suite that now contains 12 applications, and is used by over 30 major Life Sciences companies across the pharmaceutical, bio-tech, and medical device segments to manage more than $80B in revenues.
_________________
And now for Rene’s question for The Productologist:
Q: What’s your opinion on the age old question of Product Marketing vs. Product Management. Should Product Managers own both sides, or is it two different roles?
A: What a poignant question given that I recently took a new position as Director of Product MARKETING. There has always been a blurry line between Product Management and Product Marketing. Depending on the company you are working for, these could be the same job, overlapping jobs, or completely different jobs. The complexity around this issue has been discussed at length on many Product Management blogs and in Product Management training classes.
The factors that determine if one person can do both Product Management and Product Marketing are numerous:
- size of the company
- maturity of the company
- sophistication of the product(s)
- number of products
- other available marketing resources
- comfort with talking to the field (Sales, Customers, Prospects)
- comfort talking with outsiders (analytst, media, board members)
- ability to balance more on your plate than you have room for
In my eyes, Product Management and Product Marketing are not the same, though they share some commmon goals and tasks. The skills necessary to be a great Product Manager and a great Product Marketer are not often found in the same person. Product Managers benefit from technical skills, relationships with/respect from Engineering, project management, and the ability to communicate effectively with internal and external constitents. They have to know the ins and outs of their products and be able to help the field identify how to tackle customer and prospect challenges.
Product Marketers are much more externally focused. They get out and evangelize the products. They work with customers, prospects, the field and oustiders to understand the market and set strategy for how to serve the market.
It’s hard to envision a single person who can do all of that and do it well. in most cases, they don’t. We all have strengths and weaknesses. We find way to compensate for our weaknesses. We get our favorite SE to do the really hard technical demos. We ask for help from someone in finance to help with our excel spreadsheet models. We get help from the PR specialist when we need to write up snazzy content for a presentation. We ask Technical documentation to explain (one last time) whether the API can do what we told the customer it could do.
Even if there are people out there who have the skills necessary to do both jobs, if you combine those two roles, that’s a lot of work to accomplish and you have to ask yourself if it is realistic for them to do all of those things. Can one person do all of that? Maybe, for a short period of time.
Many of us have been there before. Sixteen-hour days, seven days a week (well, maybe only 10 hours a day on weekends). It’s exciting at first, but after a while, it begins to grate. You start choosing your battles. You pick the ones that feel most comfortable. The ones that don’t find themselves at the bottom of a growing to-do list.
Can one person be both Product Manager and Product Marketer? Yes. They can even be successful if the requirements of the position and volume of work match their capabilities and capacity. But the reality is that in a mature organization with a complex product (or suite of products), the combined role is more than one person can reasonably handle.
A bit more about Rene:
Rene is the Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing at Model N. Model N is an enterprise software company that provides Revenue Management solutions to Life Sciences and Hi-Tech manufacturers. He’s been with Model N for eight years and through that time has played numerous roles in various aspects of Product Management, Product Marketing & Pre-Sales. Rene was the original Product Manager in Model N’s Life Sciences Business Unit and was instrumental in driving the direction of Model N’s product suite and building the Product Management organization. Prior to Model N he was a Product Manager at Digital Impact, a Manager at Andersen Business Consulting, and he started his career as an Actuarial Analyst in the insurance industry. Rene has an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a BS in Managerial Economics from UC Davis.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Tags: beta, career, Customers, Documentation, enterprise software, Marketing, MBA, product management training, Prospects, release cycle, requirement, roadmap, Sales, strategy
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Write text here…
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Why you need a launch owner
[Launch Clinic]
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Startups and The Vision Thing
[Rocket Watcher]
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Success is not a zero-sum game
[Lead on Purpose]
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Roadmap: Product Vision Statement
[Strategic Product Manager]
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Who’s in charge of price? (Hint: It’s the person who speaks with the buyer.)
[On Product Management]
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Your Mother Was Right: How Product Managers Dress For Success
[Accidental Product Manager]
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Saying No to Customer, Sales, and Exec Feature Requests (with Justification)
[The Experience is the Product]
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Claim Your Productivity Day!
[Product Management Zen]
Disclaimer: Just because I include a link to a particular posting, that is not an indication that I agree with the original author. In fact, I may post topics that are the opposite of my views or at least somewhat controversial in order to provide a contrasting viewpoint to the one I present on The Productologist.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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Tags: dress for success, product management, product vision, roadmap, Startup, zen
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I’m not one to toot my own horn (blog, check; twitter, check; facebook, check; Linkedin URL, check; professional head shot, check; press release, check), but I was recently on the other side of the interview table with Michael Hopkin @ ProductManagementPulse and I said some right-smart stuff.
We talked about about variety of Product Management and Product Marketing topics:
- Usability and design
- How to talk with executive staff
- Listening to ALL of the market, not just the noisy parts
- Being proactive instead of reactive with your roadmap
- How to come up with titles for professional blogs
Give a listen here: http://www.productmanagementpulse.com/predictive-vs-reactive-product-strategy
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Tags: Alterian, Facebook, interview, Ivan Chalif, Marketing, Michael Hopkin, product management, product marketing, product strategy, roadmap, strategy, twitter, usability and design
1 Comment »
Tired of hearing the U.S.-centric view of the world? Me, too. So today, we’re talking to Donal Kane, a Product Manager from the United Kingdom, who works at Mediaplex, the technology division of ValueClick, an online marketing company focused on ad serving, customer acquisition, and affiliate, email, and search marketing. Donal takes us on a journey that starts in Medieval times and ends up 24 months in the future.
Q: How did you get involved in Product Management?
A: I guess I’ve a somewhat unconventional academic background for Product Management having studied Medieval History and Economics in University. I’m sure there’s a good joke somewhere about studying the religious warfare in the Middle Ages and the position of product management in an organisation but I haven’t come up with it yet! Seriously though I would say that an analytical mindset and the ability to clearly communicate requirements and requests are something that’s more important to successful product management than anything else.
Following university I wandered into Software Engineering and then equally accidentally ended up in online advertising at Doubleclick’s European HQ in Dublin back in late 1999. I started out in Technical Support and after moving up through the ranks with Doubleclick for over 5 years I moved across to ValueClick in 2005 as European Product Manager, initially in the Mediaplex business and more recently in Commission Junction as well.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: My product management experience has been focused on working in remote offices at quite a long distance from the engineering teams and the core product managers; this probably gives me a slightly different perspective on this than some of your interviewees so I would give a geographical answer here and say the best place for the Product Management function to be located is in the same location as the main engineering/development, in my experience anything else doesn’t really work.
However I think there can be a danger of Product Management being “captured” by the engineering function so some organisational distance is useful in maintaining a degree of independence and avoiding Product Management becoming too close to Engineering/Development. It may be useful for Product Management to sit with Engineering, but if they have lunch with them every day too that’s probably too much!
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to be a Product Manager, what would you tell them?
A: I think it’s far more important to be interested in the product than to want to manage it. If you’re interested in the product and you understand well what it does and how it’s used then that’s the most important part of being a Product Manager. I’d always encourage people to work in a business they’re interested in rather than concentrate on a job title in a business they may be less interested in or have less aptitude for.
Q: What have you done or what would you consider the best way(s) for Product Managers to improve themselves?
A: Always be conscious that your users and customers (internal or external) probably aren’t using your product in the way you intended them to use it, or the way you think they want to use it. It’s always a useful exercise to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”; spend some time on client calls, support tickets or RFPs to get an understanding of what’s really going on out there with your product.
I think it’s critically important to avoid the “ivory tower” mentality with Product Management, just because you think you know the best way to do something with your product doesn’t mean that that you’re correct and even if you are it doesn’t mean it’s immediately obvious to everyone else.
If you talk to your customers and users you’d often be very surprised at how their usage of your product diverges from the ideal that you have.. sometimes (in fact quite often) your users may have come up with a better way to use your product than you would have thought of yourself.
Unless you understand in detail what your users are doing with your product, and why they’re using it in that way you can’t be an effective Product Manager.
Q: What was your worst Product Management mistake and how did you recover?
A: Spreading myself too thinly across the business so I can’t properly practice what I preach with everything I work on and really learn in detail how a product is interacted with by the users and customers.
Recovery is a slow process and I don’t think I’m there yet!
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: Microsoft Windows, and the first thing I’d do is roll back to XP and keep the only genuinely good feature on Vista – the “Snipping Tool.”
_________________
And now for Donal’s question for The Productologist:
Q: When it comes to roadmaps and strategic product planning what’s the optimum level of forward planning you should do ? … It always seems to me that while a little planning is undoubtedly a good thing, too much planning is bad as you lose flexibility and can become hostage to your own plans. Finding that balance must be hard .. any tips?
A: Plan for change. The problem that a lot of Product Managers get into is that once they put something into a product plan (or roadmap or whatever you want to call it), it’s set in stone. Sales saw you present it at the last quarterly meeting. The CEO mentioned it at the board meeting a week ago. That customer you showed it to wants to know when the feature that is 3 quarters away will be done.
In general, I like to think of the roadmap more like a compass. It helps you understand and communicate the general direction you want to go. If you commit to it like an unbreakable contract, you may end up doing something that is out of line with your business by the time you get it done.
For folks who are trying to figure out a roadmap, I usually give this advice:
6 month roadmap should be cast in clay. It’s pretty stable, but it’s not cheap. It takes a lot of work to build it. You can be modify it slightly if necessary, but it’s gonna cost you.
12 month roadmap should be cast in marshamallow creme. It’s big, fluffy, and tasty. You can shape it any which way you like and if it doesn’t look right, you can throw another dollop here and there to easily adjust it. Plus it doesn’t look real, so no one will expect you to actually deliver it.
24 month roadmap should be cast in pixels. Nothing there, but pictures that can easily be modified to suit whatever business whim you need. It’s low-cost (except the labor), infinitely tweakable, and can be as big and fantastic as you can dream up.
A lot matters about your company and product(s), too. Big companies usually require lots more formal planning. Young, small companies are flying by the seat of their pants and planning more than 3 months out might seem ridiculous.
As the Product Manager, you have to drive the planning process. Figure out what works best for you, your team, your company, and your product(s). But don’t get stuck just because you think you found the right cadence and detail. Hopefully, you company is growing and changing, so you’ll need to keep evaluating whether your product planning process is still effective.
A bit more about Donal:
Donal has been working in Online Advertising in Europe for almost 10 years and is currently Director of Product Management for Mediaplex in Europe, working out of the ValueClick offices in London.
Popularity: 13% [?]
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Tags: balance, customer, Customers, Engineering, experience, mistake, product, product management, product planning, roadmap, Success
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Sorry that I missed you last week. I was busy losing fake money at a fake casino. At least the food and drinks (which were real) were free! You know what’s not free? Good Product Management. Check out some of the best below (The folks @ On Product Management had a hat-trick). You can pay me back later.
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Visiontyping and the Hands-On Executive
[Silicon Valley Product Group]
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The Importance of Writing Well
[Particletree]
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The Importance of Storytelling in Marketing
[Rocket Watcher]
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Important Lessons in Pairing – From a Designer’s Perspective
[Enthiosys]
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How can product management weather the recession?
[Ask a Good Product Manager]
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Rules of the Product Management Jedi
[On Product Management]
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Adam Bullied vs. Enthiosys: Don’t Fight!
[On Product Management]
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Failure To Launch (Your Product)
[Tyner Blain]
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Survey reveals reasons buyers say no
[Buyer Persona Blog]
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Roadmap, meet Mr. Strategy
[Strategic Product Manager]
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Reorg time: Put PMs and PMMs in the same department!
[On Product Management]
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Product Plagiarism: Answers are There if You Know How to Spin It
[Spatially Relevant]
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Don’t Hire a Marketer for Your Early Stage Startup
[Startup Marketing Blog]
-
Are Executive MBAs Valuable To Product Managers?
[Accidental Product Manager]
Disclaimer: Just because I include a link to a particular posting, that is not an indication that I agree with the original author. In fact, I may post topics that are the opposite of my views or at least somewhat controversial in order to provide a contrasting viewpoint to the one I present on The Productologist.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Related posts
Tags: agile, buyer personas, buyers, designer, executive MBA, hands-on, Marketing, MBA, pairing, Personas, plagiarism, product launch, product management, product marketing, recession, reorg, roadmap, Startup, storytelling, Visiontyping, writing
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This is a very special edition of the Product Management Reader. Not only does it contain 8 (which is my favorite number, right after 2 and 4) great Product Management blog posts, but each comes from a blog where the word “Product” in the name of the blog. Amazing, I know. And what are the chances that they would be included in a list on another blog called “The Productologist”? Astronomical, I am sure. Please read each of them with the appropriate level of reverence.
- Product Manager – Translator Extraordinaire
[Product Marketing.com]
- Scenario Planning in your Roadmap
[Strategic Product Management]
- How much customer “capital” have you earned?
[Product Management Tips]
- Why doesn’t Engineering report to Product Management?
[On Product Management]
- Searching: Product Management Architect
[Product Management View]
- How NOT to do Win/Loss Analysis part 1: CRM Reporting
[On Product Management]
- Product Managers Can Learn From The Past: The Story Of The Vasa
[Accidental Product Manager]
Disclaimer: Just because I include a link to a particular posting, that is not an indication that I agree with the original author. In fact, I may post topics that are the opposite of my views or at least somewhat controversial in order to provide a contrasting viewpoint to the one I present on The Productologist.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Related posts
Tags: Analysis, architect, CRM, customer, customer capital, Engineering, Marketing, product management, product marketing, Reporting, roadmap, Strategic, translator
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