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.

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Today’s episode of the PMQC includes responses from Emily Kubec. Emily is a product manager at eBay (UK) Ltd.

Q: How did you come into the role of Product Manager and was it planned?

A: A team I managed at Digital Impact were heavy users of an in-house application that had started to accumulate largely any function in the company that required a UI. We needed to rationalise what was in the original product and break off inappropriate tasks into a new one. My manager at the time had the foresight to move me from being the most vocal advocate for user needs to being the product manager for that tool. From there, my role grew to cover more, and more externally-facing, products.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you have experienced as a Product Manager and how did you overcome them?

A: An ongoing challenge is managing the balance between global input and rapid progress. The fastest way for us to get something to market may be for a small American team to propose a single, simple design, but that approach fails as soon as the solution must be adapted for international markets. A large part of my role, then, is less leading development directly and more influencing teams to build a global solution that’s flexible in the right places. Often this means partnering with colleagues in other international offices to make our case stronger. Even more effective is sitting with the US team while the solution is defined, but given the relative scale of our local office, we need to choose carefully which projects warrant that much attention.

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

A: The most dangerous habit I had early on was designing in isolation without developers’ input, largely in an attempt to save time. While I still trust my instincts, it’s proven crucial to have early feedback from an expert who might identify a faster or more elegant way to solve the problem. Keeping that dialogue open is not only better for the product; it’s better for job satisfaction since it’s a rare developer who pictures himself purely as a code monkey and not as a problem solver. Perhaps most importantly, when time pressure is a factor, early engagement builds a level of investment that is indispensable while deadlines loom and resources are stretched.

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

A: I’d ask them what they really mean by Product Management. There are so many dimensions to what we do, so many continuums on which to define our role. Product Management can differ by company, by office, by product line, by project. I’m happiest when I’m more owner than influencer, and more technical than marketing, but many of my colleagues would disagree. A successful Product Manager must be prepared to wear many hats—and hope that most of those hats fit most of the time.

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: Social networking is clearly hot right now, and many companies are taking a stab, mostly unsuccessfully, at monetising it. SocialMedia Networks founder Seth Goldstein was quoted in MIT’s alumni magazine (Technology Review, July/August [NOTE: requires free registration], “Social Networking Is Not a Business”) as saying that the space to monetise is not alongside content on social sites; it’s “between users”. I believe that, and I would love to work on whatever product really solves that problem seamlessly. On perhaps a more practical note, the DVR interfaces here in the UK are not great, and it’s not clear to me why they can’t be as good as the ones in America. I’d love to work on Sky Plus at least long enough to get it to parity with the TiVo I left behind.

—————-

And now for Emily’s question for The Productologist:

Q: As companies grow and careers advance, Product Managers often begin managing other Product Managers. Is it possible to sustain a balance between being a good people manager and staying involved with a product, or must one of them become dominant over time?

A: Career growth is not commonly considered a problem, but in Product Management and other fields, there is a point where the individual has to choose whether they want to remain an individual contributor, with their hands deep in the day-to-day tasks or a manager, where they can assume a role of greater responsibility, but sacrifice the being involved in the details of the product.

To be sure, there are draws to being a manager:

• Perceived as having greater experience, both inside and outside of the company
• Higher visibility within the company
• Usually has a higher pay grade
• Comes with direct reports
• Appears to be more strategic

But there are also some drawbacks:

• Requires delegation rather than execution
• Requires navigating corporate politics
• More administrative than most people realize

But just because you are a star Product Management individual contributor, there is no guarantee that you will be a star Product Management people manager. The skills necessary to be successful in each role are different and people management is not for everyone. It is possible to transition from individual contributor to people manager, but part of making that transition is letting go of the deep involvement in the product that star Product Managers love.

It is possible to balance the between pure Product Management and Product Management management, but it’s not likely to serve you well in making the transition to management. You’ll be happier (and more successful) if you think of being a Product Manager and managing Product Managers as completely separate jobs.

A little more about Emily:

Emily is a Product Manager at eBay (UK) Ltd, which she joined following her move to London from eBay headquarters in 2005. Now in her fifth year with the company, she is currently a part of the Finding team (search engine logic and results set navigation) but in the past has looked after other areas from mobile applications to fraud detection. Prior to eBay, she spent five years at Digital Impact (now Acxiom Digital) in San Mateo, Calif., in Product Management and Quality Assurance.

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Tags: balance, career growth, challenges, feedback, international markets, Management, mistake, product management, skills

In 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.

—————-
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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Tags: challenges, multi-disciplinary, product management, requirement, skills, software development, tools