 For the past few months (nearly 8 since I made the western move) I have been making the rounds and meeting lots of new people. With that comes the inevitable question “What do you do?” Depending on who they are and what I think their background is, I will vary my answer. Sometimes it is “I am Senior Product Manager for software company based downtown” or “I work for a software company” or “I am in product management” and the list could go on using various descriptions to articulate the same thing. Generally, this spawns a series of “and what does that mean?” questions for which I have another series of canned answers.
One particular occurrence, when asked by the resident 12-year old “What do you do?”, I responded with “a professional thinker” and it got a curious look and a bit of chuckle. The reality is, this is pretty accurate. What we do, as product managers, is think. In my post “10 Secrets to GREAT Product Management“, the fourth item is “think”. We are paid to think. We take input and think about it. We create output and collect more input and think about it some more. (Ideally you write down your thoughts using various best-practice techniques.) Some times there is short-term thinking (today, this week, this sprint) and some times there is long-term thinking (next sprint, next year, 3 years from now). Business thinking. Technical thinking. Financial thinking. Creative thinking. The challenges are blocking out time for thinking in your schedule and not over-thinking things. I like to tell people that product management is a knowledge worker role, a linchpin role if you will. For those of you who have not yet read Linchpin by Seth Godin, a linchpin is defined as: “… people who invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.” Sound familiar? Thinking is only one of the many things that you do through the day/week/year, but it is one of the more important things. So for the time being, I am running with this “Professional Thinker” title. Combining that with “I am thinking of my equivalent to the iPhone 5″, it seems to resonate with people. They may not know how I do it, but they know what I do. |
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Entries Tagged 'Strategy' ↓
Professional Thinker
July 16th, 2010 — Product Management, Strategy
IBM 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study
July 6th, 2010 — Leadership, Strategy
Reference: IBM | 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study
Lots of good bits in this survey. It is quite long though. Here are some of my favourite thoughts.
Standout CEOs expressed little fear of re-examining their own creations or proven strategic approaches. In fact, 74 percent of them took an iterative approach to strategy, compared to 64 percent of other CEOs. Standouts rely more on continuously re-conceiving their strategy versus an approach based on formal, annual planning.
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
….. and many more ….
** Standouts are defined as: Long-term performance included four-year operating margin compound annual growth rate from 2003 to 2008. Short-term performance included one-year operating margin growth rate from 2008 to 2009. This allowed us to identify “Standout” organizations that were able to improve operating margins both long term and short term.
Reference: IBM | 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study
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10 Must-Read Articles from Harvard Business Review
May 26th, 2010 — Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
10 Must-Read Articles from HBR (PDF)
10 Must-Read Articles from HBR (Source)
Enjoy!
Anyone want to summarize one of the articles for the community?
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Harvard Business Review’s Must-Reads on Strategy
May 4th, 2010 — Strategy
This link is courtesy of Jeff Lash of How To Be A Good Product Manager fame.
Harvard Business Review’s Must-Reads on Strategy (PDF)
Enjoy!
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Using the Roadmap for Planning and Selling
March 20th, 2010 — Roadmaps, Strategy
I received another request in my “suggest a post” area (thanks!).
The use of the Product Road Map for internal planning vs in support of the selling process?
I am going to make one assumption that the author of this suggestion is referring to the external sales selling process and not an internal selling process (i.e getting roadmap buy-in).
In my opinion and I think everyone else will agree, having a roadmap for internal planning purposes is not an option. It is mandatory! The roadmap for selling is generally frowned upon.
Roadmap as a Planning Tool
Some of this is rehashed from previous posts, but your roadmap is your strategy. It is your long-term plan for success. It’ll contain the details of your value network, vision and mission statement.
I know, I know. Typically your roadmap is a power-point presentation or a spreadsheet, but it is time to mature that process. Your roadmap should contain descriptions of your partners, your buyer and user personas. It should contain describe your vision and the plan to to achieve that vision. (Unless you are a single product company you will want to provide some additional commentary on how this vision helps the company achieve their vision.) Typically, this plan is described with your release plan for the short term (less than 12 months), a feature plan for the longer term (more than 12 months) and any business development plans. Your mission statement defines your product’s purpose and primary objectives. Its prime function is internal – to define the key measure or measures of the product’s success. I have written in the past about metrics. Everything should be written using a language that shows alignment across your value network, vision and mission.
As you can see, the content is driven from the planning for your product. The nice thing about using a roadmap, is that it allows you to bucket all your strategic thinking into one document.
Roadmap as a Sales Tool
Now despite the comment above that using your roadmap as a sales tool, you will sometimes not have a choice. Prospects may want to see your vision. You’ll need to make everyone aware the risks with showing prospects the roadmap. It could delay the sales cycle if they wait for future features or set poor expectations if they believe the roadmap will not change (and it will change). There is nothing wrong with sharing your vision, but the appropriate expectations need to be set for the Sales team and the prospect.
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Budget and your Strategy
February 9th, 2010 — Product Management, Roadmaps, Strategy
I suspect that one of the major impacts to your roadmap is a budget change. And by change, I mean a reduction in available funds for product development. I suspect a lot of you dealt with this last year as you suffered through many rounds in workforce reduction. I am curious how you handled that.
Picture this scenario, late last fall you reviewed all your feature requests, dusted off the roadmap, the business case is shiny again and it is all aligned with your vision and the corporate vision. With your budget approved, you are ready for 2010. Enter January 2010 and due to slightly missing the Q4 numbers you are now forced to chop $75,000 from your budget. Basically the equivalent of one developer. What do you do?
- Band together with the other product lines and pray for Management to realize that chopping 75k is guaranteed to affect more than 75k in revenue this year?
- Offer to combine forces with another product to share revenue (knowing that you will likely never be able to undo this) in hopes that your new increased revenue will offset your requirement to reduce cost?
- Suck it up, chop the developer and leave the roadmap unchanged and modify the business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost but leaving the revenue numbers unchanged? The more with less scenario or in this case same with less.
- Suck it up, chop the developer and scale back the roadmap and business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost and revenue numbers?
I am less inclined to do anything that will affect revenue for future years. Depending on how many rounds of workforce reduction you have survived, I am less comfortable selling the same with less scenario. If you are in your first or second round, go with that. Teams generally perform better after the first and second cuts. I am not hopeful they will “see the light” and let you keep a full team in hopes of achieving your revenue targets. Although, this is probably the scenario I start with. Sell the vision, sell the facts and get buy-in on the business case. Failing that, cut, reduce and move forward.
I am hopeful someone will share a situation where a budget cut has affected their roadmap and how they responded.
I meant no offense to any development types by suggesting we cut you, it was a just a random example. We really hate cutting our roadmap in any scenario.
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Strategic Thinker
November 26th, 2009 — Product Management, Strategy
I sometimes wonder what makes a person a ’strategic thinker’. What attributes does someone need to be considered a strategic thinker? I like to fashion myself as a strategic thinker. I know that in most situations, whether personal or professional, I will start to envision what the future will look like. I am not sure this is a distinguishing feature from anyone else. I suspect everyone, in some way, does mental scenario execution to gauge what the future might look like.
This page (link) provides some interesting attributes that assist in strategic thinking. These include using facts, working with boundaries, consequence and risk analysis and decision making.
There is no doubt that product management is a strategic role (or should be), but how do you put the right person in place when everyone will claim to be a strategic thinker. I am not sure there is magic recipe here, but having someone who has successful products in the past is a possible indicator they can repeat it. Not a guarantee though.
A lot of the work that product management should be doing helps one become a strategic thinker. All of those enhancements, win/loss reports, call reports are your facts. The boundaries are framed through your persona development and then consequence, risk analysis and decision making come out during roadmapping sessions and release planning.
Having all of these things doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a winning strategy, but it will give you some evidence to put in place a plan and allow you to think strategically.
November… already? And Random Bits
November 1st, 2009 — Leadership, Personas, Pricing, Strategy
Next thing you know it has been 23 days since your last post. Oddly my subscribers have risen. Thanks for reading! There is lots going on in my life and reading and writing has sadly slipped below my capacity to process. I am hopeful that will change in November, but my travel schedule for the month is already pretty full. We shall see. Generally when I am lost for blog ideas I have a book review to do, but the current book (How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer) is a bit heavy and proving to be a slow read. The upside, I am learning lots about brain activity.
Random Bits:
1. I want to acknowledge a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago about authority vs. influence. His premise was that authority doesn’t exist. Authority alone is not enough to lead and that even in a position of leadership influence will still rule the day. I agree.
2. Regarding personas, I continue to see them not being used. You will lose the battle without them. Also try your best to ignore this post, except for the comments.
3. Regarding vision, I continue to see either no vision or poorly defined visions. You will lose the battle without a vision, largely because it is the key component to strategy. No vision, no strategy. Here is a good blog on product visions.
4. The price of your product is determined by the value it provides, not the cost.
5. Please visit my list of product management events. It is the most comprehensive list of events targeted towards product managers anywhere.
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