Entries from April 2009 ↓

The product marketer or product manager? I can hear both groups making their claim for the title. To frame this, I am assuming their purview is the product and both roles belong to the same team (i.e. work as a team). Also I assume both roles are executing a strategy and therefore are important to the strategy, but in this context I am referring to the definition of the strategy.

Pragmatic Marketing have organized the product marketing responsibilites on the left of their grid, the tactical end of the spectrum. Does this make the role a tactical role? Not necessarily.

The product marketer, typically an outbound role, is listening to the market, understanding the buyers and running product launches. Armed with this information, product marketing will shape the product and define the target market. This sounds strategic to me.

The product manager, typically an inbound role, is also listening to the market, defining roadmaps, understanding users and working with development. Armed with this information, product managers will define and own the product plan.

This is where it starts to separate for me. Product managers own the plan. The plan defines the means to achieve the objectives. The plan is the strategy. Therefore, I am leaning towards the product manager as the ‘more strategic’ role.

It is worth noting that ‘more strategic’ does not equal ‘more important’ and all good product managers know to avoid defining the plan in isolation. The information from product marketing is mandatory for your plan.

This video blew my mind. Over-hyped? It is five minutes, you have nothing to lose.

Driving Competitive Advantage with Information Visibility

In short it covers the basics on improving your company performance by standardizing your processes and/or enhancing individual discretion. It talks about how companies that focus on purely being more effective continue to deploy best practices that in all likely hood are either being used by others or will be used by others. It is a cat and mouse game. I have covered this topic in a little more detail here: What is Strategy? Not Operational Effectiveness.

What I found interesting is that software is primarily designed to help companies with operational effectiveness. I realize this is not true all the time, but for the most part it is. The premise of the video is the potential driving force behind information technology is not operational effectiveness but the data that is used to define, implement and monitor your strategy.

We are shifting from a world where information is used to feed a process to a world where information is arranged as the point of use to serve the decision at hand. They term this information visibility. Michael Porter, who provides the background to this video, sees information reinforcing strategy rather than drive it out.

How does this apply to product management? Easy. Who makes the decisions for your product? You. How do you make decisions? By organizing, studying and monitoring information.

From the review of Strategy and the Fat Smoker we learned that strategy is a set of rules or guidelines that tell you how to go about making decisions. As a result, to have the best strategy you need the best data. That call report you did last year, too old. The win/loss report from 2006, too old. You need to know what customers and prospects are asking for now. It needs to be understood and validated.

There are a number of tools and systems that will enable you to capture (in closer to real-time than if you were to do this manually), organize and validate this information so that you can effectively make decisions. Remember though, the tools and systems are the operational effectiveness. The individual discretion is the key to your strategy.

First thought, “the most important ingredient in any recipe is the one you forgot to put in!” - Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy is a book written by David H. Maister.

Second thought, “#prodmgmt is such a metrics based role – counting, comparing, analyzing for trends and optimizations.” – Me!

Why these two thoughts? I was reading an article from The McKinsey Quarterly, Strategic Planning: Three Tips for 2009, and the second tip was intensify monitoring. It suggests the development of plans to monitor the performance of suppliers, customers and competitors. Early intelligence helps you plan or react to change (that will happen).

How is the first thought relevant? If you are not watching it, there is a good chance that it is the most important metric you are not watching.

I know this is not for everyone (eventually it will be), but I think revenue is the the strongest metric you can track.

What are you monitoring today and how?

As product managers we produce and consume a lot of information. Can one person do it all?

For many of us, there is only one person. Yet the product manager, in theory, is supposed to stay abreast of market conditions, technology, customer problems, prospect problems, monitor the sales process, frame marketing content, write requirements, etc.  You get the idea. You know the tremendous amount of content that must go in one ear, get processed and come out the other.

Can your product be successful if you don’t have time for it all? I vote no.

However, do you need to do it all today? Again, I vote no.

If you are in a situation, where delagation is not possible the most important task for you is to understand the most important strategy for the CEO and the timeline for their vision.

The timeline is likely the most important factor here, likely because if you are in a smaller company the CEO is only thinking about revenue and has quotas to demonstrate to the board.

Assume your CEO is focused on revenue for the next 6 months? Does it make sense to be tweaking your roadmap for features to be delivered in 18 months? One could argue that as a product manager you need to be thinking long-term and I agree. However, if your product doesn’t deliver revenue in the next 6 months you may not be around to see 18 months.

Your goal is to deliver the right product at the right time. Why should you not be working on the right activities at the right time? Work smart, not hard.