Product Management Question Corner: Carol Dirig, NewScale
Posted by Ivan Chalif in Best Practices, Interviews, Professional DevelopmentThe ladies are going for a hat-trick with this third installment of the PMQC. Today we’ll hear from Carol Dirig, Senior Director of Product Management at NewScale, a provider of IT Service Catalog and Service Portfolio applications.
Q: How did you come into the role of Product Manager and was it planned?
A: Like most Product Managers (of my generation at least), this wasn’t an explicitly chosen career. I didn’t know what Product Managers were supposed to do, since my observation of them varied from PM to PM. But they all looked very busy, very stressed, and very popular.
I was working for a newspaper company in the early 90’s and just worked my way into Product Management roles as they developed applications to deliver news and market quotes to trader’s desktops. The Product Manager role was more fluid back then. There wasn’t much of a prescription for Product Management, so it was easy to weave your way into the job and react to what needed to get done.
I think Product Managers entering the profession today have a great advantage to kick off their careers – more college business courses that bring awareness to the explicit role of Product Management, and companies like Pragmatic Marketing that focus exclusively on the tools and functions of our craft.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you have experienced as a Product Manager and how did you overcome them?
A: Time management, time management, time management. As a Product Manager you are a magnet – a catchall – for the entire cross-functional chain. Most Product Managers have a certain character that attracts them to the profession, and that character is what makes it impossible to accept mediocrity in your work, or to say “No” when you’re already operating with an overflowing plate. When you start your day with 7:00am bug triage with India, run to an analyst briefing at 10:00, painstakingly enter demo data before 1:00, submit staff performance reviews before 3:00, do two sales calls before 5:00, squeeze in a doc review before running to a cocktail reception for your user group at 6:00…it becomes a little nutty. You have to accept that on any given day, at least one person will be very, very mad at you. That is hard, given our character.
I haven’t found a great solution to this yet – but a strategy that seems to work the best is simply keeping a firm grasp of your product’s vision in mind as you prioritize the events that come barreling at you. And being sure to put time in your day to be proactive in planning the right events/work/conversations around your product.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: I think Product Management works best as a separate function. Have a VP of Product Management on par with the VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales. Couching it under Engineering has a tendency to snuff the business thinker in favor of those who are more technically savvy. Reporting to Marketing has the opposite effect.
If Product Marketing is part of the Product Management function, there’s certainly a good reason to keep it in marketing, but I’m a fan of separating these functions. A Product Marketer needs a very separate skill set than a Product Manager, and both functions have more than enough responsibility to demand disciplined focus.
Q: How do you see the role of the Product Manager changing in the next 5-10 years?
A: I think Product Management will become a more defined profession, with clearer boundaries and objectives. It’s already come a long way since I started in this job, but it’s still not quite the same as being, say, a programmer or sales executive. There has always been ambiguity around the boundaries of our responsibilities (how we define our personal MBOs, for example) but I see that diminishing. I think titles within the trade become clearer so we have a more common playbook to set up our product organizations (e..g where do the responsibilities of Product Marketing end? What does a Technical Product Manager do? How does a Product Line Manager differ from a Director of PM?)
At the same time, our responsibilities continue to grow. I think there will be more business sense brought into the role. I’m a software Product Manager, so in my experience, we hire Product Managers that come from the technical side; gifted engineers that want to change careers, or sales engineers who want more product control and exposure to management. Over the last few years, however, I have seen a trend for finding Product Managers that (in addition to technical aptitude) have a better understanding of market dynamics, pricing theories, and roadmap strategies. I think this will evolve even further so that the Product Manager profile leans more towards the business and less towards engineering.
Q: What is your greatest Product Management achievement?
A: Releasing my first product was quite a thrill. The feeling of watching customers use it (and enhance it further) over the months that followed was indescribable. Standing in front of 3000 people as they applaud the fact that your product can solve a problem they’ve been suffering…it’s breathtaking. That’s what being a Product Manager is about, in my mind. Some Product Managers are in this job because they love being the center of everything and have CEO ambitions. Others are here because we love to solve problems and watch the solution unfold in surprising ways. I’m in the latter category.
Q: What Product Management tool(s) could you not live without and why?
A: My ears. It sounds so simple, but it took me awhile to actually figure out something so obvious. Understanding the meaning behind what you’re hearing is critical to Product Management. When a prospect or customer describes a problem to you, they do so with the only words available to them, words that are common in their company, in their industry. Their description might be covering up the real – more pervasive– problem that needs a valuable solution the market would eagerly pursue.
In terms of practical tools, I’m of fan of applications like QualityCenter, and good old Excel. Anything that let’s you trace your use cases to requirements to features to test cases to doc. There are a variety out there in varying degrees of sophistication. Go for a simple tool that everyone can use easily.
I also find collaboration tools (e.g. SharePoint) invaluable for tracking customer conversations and market research in ways that let Product Managers (and cross-functional teams) benefit from each other’s knowledge.
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And now for Carol’s question for The Productologist:
Q: Have you ever met a Product Manager over 45?
A: When I first saw the question, I was half expecting that there might be some sort of punch line if I scrolled down a bit more (something like, “A Product Manager, a Software Engineer and a QA Lead walk into a bar….”. But kidding aside, this is an interesting question on a few different levels.
Product Managers as individual contributors tend to be younger, typically mid-twenties to mid-thirties, but if they stick with it, they usually end up as a line manager or director (managing other Product Managers) or moving into something adjacent to Product Management, such as Product Marketing or Program Management, depending on where their strengths lie.
Product Management is a tough gig. I don’t mean that it’s harder than being an Engineer or in Sales or Marketing or whatever, but there is an emotional component to Product Management that is not as pervasive as in other functional areas of a business. That aspect can take it’s toll on anyone and for that reason, there is a general career flow from being an individual contributor in Product Management to positions that still have a Product Management focus, but have less of the day-to-day emotional investment.
There is also the fact that Product Managers are in a great position to observe and interact with a majority of the business functions within a company and more than a handful make the leap to either start their own companies or joining executive teams at startups where they have oversight of Product Management, if not direct responsibility.
Having said all of that with out actually addressing the original question, I DO know at least one Product Manager who is over 45. He’s actually a director, but is still very much involved in day-to-day PM work. He hasn’t always been in Product Management, so maybe that is the key to growing up in Product Management.
A little more about Carol:
Carol has over 15 years of experience in software Product Management. Her career began on Wall Street as a product analyst for financial information applications before moving to Silicon Valley where she has held various Product Management roles for solutions in the enterprise IT space.
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