Product Management, in-bound and out-bound activities

@mathurabhay

The New Product Manager

A good start is half the success. and how do you ensure this at you new job? It's a serious challenge for product managers who are moving into a new job. The challenge becomes more stiff if you are moving into a newer domain, and are going to work with whole new set of professionals you never worked with.

From my experience I have coined down first few steps that a product manger should take as soon as he gets onto a new job. My fair assumption is that you would have learned and read enough about the domain in which you are going to operate, however knowing things from outside may not be as clear and absolute as you get to see when you get into the system.

Learning Steps

Product Manager, heading for crash?

Product Manager Distractions 

Just like a car would crash when the driver shifts focus away from the driving, the product or / and product manager are sure for a crash  when product manager  shifts focus away  from the core deliverable.

Crash could be due to two reasons, one, you tend to do something you are not suppose to do and  two, you do-not do something which you are expected to do.

In example of a smoothly running car, the driver may get distracted by a beautiful girl walking on the street, or the driver ignores traffic lights. In both the scenarios, driver shifts his focus away from core responsibilities and ends up meeting with undesired consequence. When the driver sees a beautiful girl walking on street, he gets carried away by the beauty and gets lost admiring the beauty so much that he would realize this shift of focus only after car crashes. Ignoring a traffic light or taking it lightly could do the same to the car and to the driver. 

What Product Managers are Expected to do!!

"A picture is worth a thousand words". So irrespective what role you do within product management, be it 'Technical Product Manager', 'Software Product Manager', 'Product Owner', 'LOB Owner' etc. the picture below describes organizations expectation form the person who is supposed to be the captain of their (product) ship.

Read Collecting Requirements for better understanding on 'Designing your Radar' 

Related blog posts on expectations from Product Manager: 

1. Product Mantra: When did I last meet my customer
2. 5iees: Requirement gathering to Feature implementation

@mathurabhay

Who is best fit for product manager’s position – IT DEPENDS

I have been part of discussions on this topic for enough and more times. Few suggest a strong back ground in technology while some emphasis on business acumen and marketing background a must for PMs job. I remember my discussion with a senior executive of a reputed Indian telecom giant who says, “It depends on product type, market and key deliverables that are expected from PM”. And why should not I agree to him, he has been pioneer in setting up successful PM team on more than one occasion. And then I sit back and say, ok now here I am talking about technology products for enterprise customers and expect my product manager to conceptualize product, drive engineering, do market research, talk to potential customers, evaluate competition, define go-to-market strategy, train my staff, help sales and accounts team in closing the deal, talk to analyst etc…. Wow too many things to do, and do I expect my product manager to do all these? Strange but that’s what I see PMs doing when I go through CVs of stalwarts in the domain.

I then go back to one of my mentors and ask him the key deliverables I should be expecting from my PM who is working on an enterprise software product. And I get a prompt reply, “well it depends on the organization structure and functional departments that you have, marketing, strategies, sales, engineering etc and where does your Product team come into the picture. Is it part of marketing, engineering, strategies or an autonomous department?” Now from my experience I have seen Product team as part of these functional departments at some or other time. Personally, I have worked as PM as sibling of marketing, strategies and engineering departments. Also, I have worked in Product group as an autonomous body having a VP reporting directly into top executive team. I started scratching my head thinking of an ideal organization structure, and I soon realized that it’s waste doing so as I as PM would definitely like to be part of an autonomous team which has a strong and long stick.

So then I go back to my mentor and say, “Well I prefer Product group to be autonomous and not as part of any other core group like marketing, engineering etc. Anyways this my thought but could you tell me the best fit position for a Product group?” Reply this time was equally prompt as it was last time, "Well, it depends. It depends on the life cycle of your product(s), and/or your business. Are you at a stage wherein you have identified the pain point that you wish to resolve, or you are still doing it. May be you have done that but you now wish to conceptualize a product and then work on architectural aspect first, may be block diagrams first. Or you have done that too and a engineered product is ready for launch, and now if you say that you already have a product which is in transformation from early days to maturity days than the answer would be different. So where do you stand?"

Now this started giving me feeling that I am banging my head on a wall. But does answer to this really matter before I decide roles and responsibilities of PM or identify who is best fit for that job. And yes it does, from what I learned and experienced, Product group's proximity to engineering should be high during startup phase, and its proximity to marketing department is critical during initial research and growth stages of Product. How about the maturity stage of a Product, this is the time when you really don’t want to mess-up too much, steady releases, paying customers, and conquered market are hard earned. So let’s get back to brainstorming session. Where does my Product team best fit for an matured product line. And you know the answer, "Well, it depends on complexity of the product, revenue and organization size." Yes, so what’s the conclusion other than it depends, oh well it depends on what it depends to decide the Product team positioning.

Ok well, so if I need to summarize, this ‘it depends’ discussion in manner that this is well understood on best fit Product Manager candidate and Product team positioning, I would say ‘well, IT DEPENDS’.