Factors to be considered before Product Release

Before you start

• Know your market
• Identify market segments
• Establish a competitive strategy
• Know the technology landscape
• Validate

Know your market

• Learn about the market by observation

- Customers
- Evaluators
- Potentials

• Quantify market problems
• Understand total solution
• Buy, build, partner to flesh out whole solution
• Communicate internally with market facts
• Product manager should be the messenger for the market

Identify market segments

• Be deliberate about which market segments you
• target
• Rather than a few features each release for
• each segment, focus a whole release around a
• segment
• Your roadmap can reflect when you will address
• different segments

Establish a competitive strategy

• Avoid competitive checklists
• This is not a competitive strategy
• Be where the competition is not
• Look for market segments where the competition is
• not
• Focus on your distinctive competence
• The roadmap should reflect your company’s unique
• ability to deliver value in the marketplace

Know the technology landscape

• Research emerging technologies
• Interview technical reviewers to understand
• technical compliance and standards they are
• adopting
• Use technology to solve problems for your
• market

Validate

• Synthesize possibilities
• Review with internal cross-functional team
• NDA review with trusted parties
• Customers
• Potentials
• Partners

Propose new features for Wikipedia and Google

Take this test quickly to know where you stand on Requirement Gathering and Feature Implementation

TEST 1: Wikipedia

There are a set of content moderators (readers) whose job is to review the content before it is published in Wikipedia. Everyday they review close to 50-100 on different topics, before they are published.

Come up with the tool which will make the life easier for the moderators.

TEST 2: Google

If and all you want to implement a value adding feature in Google. What would it be

Instructions: The Features suggested should have its respective data points

Open to ask questions.

Questions for Product Managers

Questions for Product Managers

It started with an interview on Red Canary, talking to Product Management leaders in Toronto, including Alan Armstrong, Stephen Pollack, Lee Garrison and Roy Pereira.

Interestingly enough, I know all of these people personally. I have worked with Lee & Alan, worked for Stephen, and know Roy through very close common contacts.

In the interview, they each answered the following six questions:

1. Tell us about the best product you’ve ever encountered? Why do you like it?
2. How do you know a great product manager when you meet one?
3. What’s your favorite interview question?
4. When is the best time for a start-up to hire a product manager?
5. What has been the defining moment in your career?
6. Mistakes. What was your biggest?

Steve Johnson took up the challenge and posted his answers to those questions on his blog, and most recently Scott Sehlhorst did the same.

I thought it was time to join the discussion myself. So here are my answers to those same six questions.

Tell us about the best product you’ve ever encountered? Why do you like it?

I’m a big fan of any product that “just works” or surprises/delights me in some way. I don’t have a “best” product, but here are a few that I really like and use regularly.

* The Blackberry – It does what it promises,efficiently and in a very compact form factor. It’s not perfect, but it’s really good, and it can take a beating like no other device I’ve seen. I’ve dropped my Blackberry many times and it is no worse for wear. To quote an old advertising phrase — “it takes a licking and keeps on ticking”.
* Dyson vacuum cleaner — I’ve blogged about Dyson previously, but after 3 years, the thing still sucks more than any other vacuum and leaves it’s competition in the dust. Sorry couldn’t resist. :-) What really amazes me about it is that their customer service is also really great. A small part broke on the bottom of the machine. I called the toll-free number clearly visible on the cleaner itself. The person on the phone quickly confirmed which part was broken and they shipped me a replacement free of charge a couple of days later. The cleaner was clearly designed for this kind of diagnosis and service. Awesome.
* The Honda Civic — We’re a Honda family so I don’t have experience with other brands of cars, but then why would I need to? I love the Civic because it just works. I’m terrible when it comes to maintenance and oil changes etc. but even with minimal attention it gets me where I need to go. It’s both totally reliable and easily affordable. That’s what I want in a car.

How do you know a great product manager when you meet one?

If a product manager adheres to all of these rules, then they must be great! :-) Certainly product managers need to be smart, analytic, understand technology and markets, and be great communicators and leaders.

But if there is one thing that I think really defines a great product manager, it’s the ability to “connect the dots” in seemingly unrelated or conflicting contexts. Perhaps another way to say this is product managers need a strong mixture of creativity, curiosity and intuition.

Steve Johnson answered this question with the line:

A great product manager sees patterns.

Scott wrote:

Great product managers are polymaths, with several areas of deep expertise and skill.

While written differently, these are similar answers and tie in well with the ability to connect dots.

A lot of times product managers need to find solutions to problems that are highly constrained — usually WRT budgets, resources or time. Finding solutions that satisfy business, technical and market requirements, and being able to sell those solutions to executives or other doubting Thomases are hallmarks of a great product manager.

What’s your favorite interview question?

The one I like to ask potential product managers is:

What one word best describes Product Management?

I’ve asked that question on the blog. Here are the results.

It’s always interesting to observe interviewees struggle with the question as it usually catches them off guard. And of course, once they come with an answer, the obvious follow up question is “Why?”

When is the best time for a start-up to hire a product manager?

This is a great question and core to how our industry understands and values Product Management. I’m clearly biased here, but I have to agree with Stephen Pollack’s response:

Thirty days before you start the company.

This answer also lines up perfectly with what Bill Campbell of Intuit said about Product Management.

Too many people don’t actually realize the full scope of the Product Management role. It’s not just about product requirements, even at the very earliest stages of a company. I’ve seen too many founders of companies create offerings (I won’t call them products), that didn’t completely address market problems, that weren’t differentiated from competitors, or that didn’t target specific market segments and problem domains.

And what happened then? They brought in “a product manager” to help address the issues. Sorry, way too late. Why spend another year and potentially millions of dollars to fix problems that you could have addressed right at the start?

What has been the defining moment in your career?

I’d say it was leading the Product Management efforts of the flagship product of a public company in Silicon Valley. The release was described by the CTO as “the biggest, most ambitious release in company history.”

That effort consumed my focus for almost 2 years, and I learned so much during that period. I’ve shared some of it publicly.

I ran a large beta program during that release and used that experience to write this article on betas.

I gained a greater understanding of how to optimize cross-team communication.

I also gained some insights into leadership, particularly when dealing with people across departments, geographies and areas of focus.

Mistakes. What was your biggest?

I’ve certainly made my share. My biggest was probably not understanding (for far too long) the impact personal motivations and politics played in Product Management. I’ve written that for product managers, “Every activity is part of a sale.”

Virtually everything we do in Product Management relates to influencing others to support our goals. In most companies, Engineering won’t simply do what the PM asks. Darn. :-) And certainly in larger organizations, with significant constraints, misaligned objectives and even compensation conflicts, people will focus on what is of benefit to them. They will optimize locally (i.e. what’s best for them or their team).

A lot of what Product Management is about to get teams to optimize globally (i.e. what’s best for the product or the business), sometimes at the cost of local optimization. This is where selling becomes important. The sale is in getting other teams to agree to do what you need, and to get that, you have to understand their motivations, drivers, goals and objectives. Once I understood that, life became much easier for me as a product manager.

Product Management and Thought Leadership

Let us start with a question

What is a thought leader?

Before going further, let me try to put a box around the phrase “thought leader”. I say “try”, because I think the phrase will mean different things to different people and there is no single definition that can cover all viewpoints. Here’s one view:

A thought leader is someone who consistently communicates credible and unbiased information and insight in a particular domain AND whose insights are used by others to take action or make decisions about issues in that domain.

OK, so that won’t fit into a single tweet, and it probably could use improvement (your thoughts are welcome), but it does contain several important points.

1. Thought leaders are people.

Yes, sometimes an organization can be viewed as a thought leader, but it’s the people who make up the organization, and in particular those who speak for it, and represent it that can be viewed as thought leaders.

2. Thought leadership is an active task.

People must communicate in an ongoing manner. A brilliant person who cannot communicate his/her insights to a wide audience cannot be a leader. Communication is one of the 4 Cs of Leadership.

3. Credibility and trust are a must

Virtually anyone can speak on any topic, and with web technologies, they have a virtual megaphone to get their message across. But that fact alone doesn’t make someone a leader. Thought leadership, like any type of leadership requires the trust of those who follow. The leader must be believable and not be seen as a self-promoter or a shill for some organization.

4. Other people/parties must find the leaders insight relevant and actionable

Leadership must be tied into action or progress for those who follow, and not simply the number of those who will listen.

For example, Kanye West joined Twitter on July 28/2010. He had about 200,000 followers the next day and currently has almost 500,000 (roughly 1 week later). Does that make him a thought leader? Not in my opinion, at least not on Twitter. Between musings on life, or Twitpics of things he wants to buy, it’s hard to see how any of this minutae about his life can be considered useful insight. In fact, Kanye seems like a perfect example of the Devil’s Dictionary definition I gave at the beginning of this post.

Product Managers are thought leaders

Looking at the 4 points above, they can clearly be applied to the role of Product Management. Product Managers must lead through influence, must convince others of their perspectives and views, must have credibility and trust, and must communicate information in ways that others find useful and relevant. This applies to both internal teams and with external audiences.

Product managers may not see themselves explicitly as thought leaders, but they often are viewed that way by others. Keep this in mind as you work through your next research project or product release.

How would you define thought leadership?

Do you see yourself as a thought leader in your company?

Nadeem

Innovation requires a lot more than just talking to customers

I recently participated in a discussion on a Yahoo! developer group list on the question of who owns innovation. There was consensus that creative ideas can come from anywhere and everyone is responsible for contributing to innovative outcomes. There also needs to be an owner, and for me, that owner should be the product manager. But, innovation does not happen just by telling the product team to be innovative. It is a discipline with its own techniques and skills that can and need to be learned.

This discussion got me thinking because although I stated that product management should own the innovation process including the idea pipeline and innovation portfolio, I wondered how many companies take the time to teach their product managers how to be innovation leaders, equipping them with the skills necessary to facilitate the creative process in their teams and deliver innovative products and services. In practice, the majority of product management work focuses around existing products and incremental improvement. This makes it hard to get into the mindset of nurturing a breakthrough product that delivers substantially more value than the alternatives. Further, there is little discussion within product management about the mechanics of innovation. In fact, almost all my knowledge of innovation has come from adjacent fields to product management such as market research, strategy, psychology, product development, and design.

One practice that has been widely accepted in our product management discipline is to get out of the building and talk to customers. This is a great technique and one in which we often need to be reminded. But this method to identify new opportunities, which was a ground breaking idea in the early ‘90’s when many product managers spent all their time in the office, is widely adopted and practiced. If you want to gain an edge on your competition, you need to go further, to gain more insight and tap the creative potential of your team.

I’ll be sharing more about innovation in future posts, but if your team is struggling to develop innovative solutions that are superior to the competition, give us a call.

Source: http://www.280group.com/blog/?p=1081&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ProductManagement20+%28Product+Management+2.0%29

Product Management Tips

So you're in a new role as product manager. Where do you begin?  A smart Product Manager would always start with the following:

1. Start with the positioning statement. If you don't have one then get the Pragmatic Marketing positioning template and write a draft. Once you're finished, circulate it among your management. I bet you will find not everyone agrees. If you can get an agreed upon positioning statement it will help everyone understand who the target customer is and why.

2. Take control of the requirements. Somewhere in your company someone (Sales, Development, Support, etc.) is explicitly or implicitly writing requirements. You will want to stem the tide as soon as possible. Hopefully, the positioning will help everyone get a better idea of what's being built. Additionally, you should define some process/document for capturing requirements. Create a form for enhancement ideas and get sales, support, and customers using it. Let all the stakeholders know that they will have a say but you're going to be the owner. Hopefully, you will have the support of your management in this process.

3. Take inventory of your sales collateral and internal sales info. Do you have a good FAQ? Is the outbound collateral all marketing fluff? Sometimes one or two well-written targeted pieces of collateral can help answer most of the questions and reduce time spent in pre-sales support, particularly on the phone. See also Creating Effective Competitive Sales Tools For Your Sales Reps.

4. Try to offload as many of the outbound responsibilities as possible. In my experience, Product Managers are always going to be called on for some pre-sales support, the goal is to minimize it and use it as a process to collect more market problems. 

Personally, I found spending additional training time with Sales Engineers or Field Consultants is the best way to start this process. The goal is to get them to know as much about the product as you. Once you have done this you can/should become less available to your Sales reps. The result should be that the sales reps will find the SE's know their stuff and are much easier to get hold of than you.

Product Management vs Product Marketing

This is one among the frequently asked questions in a company “who owns what in an organization with Product Management and  Product Marketing:”

Typically the title “product manager” is used to signify people who listen to the market and articulate the market problems in the form of requirements. And the title “product marketing manager” is usually assigned to those who take the resulting product to the market by defining a product marketing strategy.

 “A product manager is a member of either the marketing organization or the development organization who is responsible for ensuring that a product gets created, tested, and shipped on schedule and meets specifications. It is a highly internally focused job, bridging the marketing and development organizations, and requiring a high degree of technical competence and project management experience.”

 “A product marketing manager is always a member of the marketing organization, never of the development group, and is responsible for bringing the product to the market place and to the distribution organization… it is a highly externally focused job.”

The survey results show product managers are more inclined to research the market and write requirements while product marketers typically plan go-to-market strategy and write collateral.