Not Being the CEO
Product managers are not the CEO.
However, does this also mean the reverse? The CEO is no the product manager? No. They can act like that sometimes. The responsibility of the roles heavily intersect. A large part, in my estimation, is due to both positions having visibility company-wide, and the requirement of working with everyone in a company in order to get your job done.
See, it’s a funny thing. I’ve heard stories from PM’s getting chewed out for walking into meetings thinking they run the show. In reality, a PM runs very little of a show, even if they have their own team. They greatly rely on key players to help get their job done - and they don’t have authority over those people!
Don’t get me wrong - we play a key part in a company. Truth be told, it’s probably one of the hardest jobs out there to be successful at. Trying to ensure everything stays on track (especially if you are a PM in charge of Services execution as well, which is becoming more & more common) without a) being part of senior management and/or b) having direct authority over other key folks in the company to drive things through.
First point: you have to build relationships. Strong ones. You must be able to consider all members of management your ally, since they will need to help prop & support you. This is much like the CEO. Both of you do in fact need to have (in a startup, anyway) daily interaction with all members of management, or if the company is of a smaller size, the whole company.
There’s nothing wrong with this. So long as you aren’t an arrogant ass, but know what you are doing and how you want to help the company be successful, you’ll be fine. Especially so long as you don’t pretend to know how to do each member’s of management’s job better than they do. That’s a no-no. We are jacks of all trades, but the idea is not to be better salesman than our Sales leaders, or developers than our CTOs. That’s crazy talk.
Second, get some wins. This is so key, especially for new PM’s. You want to get some wins under your belt and build up your cred internally. If you can’t do this, you’re known trust & ability will drop significantly.
Third: you are not setting vision nor strategic direction. You take your cues from management & the CEO. You help to supplement their choices, and make recommendations - and may in fact define a large portion of detail, but you are not running the company.
There may be a lot of personal conflict for PM’s there around this matter — I know there is for me. However, at the end of the day I know that I’m not the CEO and i respect that.
There’s one MAJOR lesson I’ve learned for dealing with this. Use the following words religiously:
“It’s my recommendation…”
If you feel strongly that something should be done in someway, offer up to the CEO, “I recommend (based on A, B, C) that we do this.” Why is this so important? Because this way, you aren’t being an arrogant jerk by saying, “do it this way, because I want you to, and I am the all-powerful product guy / gal!” to your CEO. That’s a recipe for trouble.
There’s a lot of relationship building that goes into being a good product manager. Nevermind also displaying cross-functional leadership, execution, vision, planning, and functional aptitude (can sell, understand marketing, basic finance, etc…), you have to get things done on a daily basis to and actually ship products.
So while PM’s are not the CEO of the company, they are the role closest to being the case - that much is true. Just respect the structure and understand that it’s there for a reason.
Happy shipping!
Welcome to the Productologist!
A big welcome to the productologist! Thanks for adding me to your blog roll, Ivan - it’s much appreciated!
Pulled Every Which Way
Product managers get pulled in a ton of different directions. Leading by indirect influence can also put you in the middle of a lot of things you don’t have the authority to prevent or solve yourself. Or, think you are guiding folks down the right path, only to have it turn out needing to be completely different at the end of the day? it’s gross.
I will say this, for all of the process and procedure Scott goes through for requirements, I’ve been working with the alternative (i.e., not doing much at all), and while beneficial from a speed perspective, it’s very easy to get people off the page you are on and/or not be on the same as them.
To all those that are trying to avoid 1,000+ page requirements documents, I will tell you this (from experience):
Walk over to people’s desks and talk. Or, if that’s not possible, get on the phone.
Get on the phone and talk through key product enhancements and projects early and often.
Get prospects on the phone to interview them about what you are doing. Get clients on the phone and treat them almost like design partners. (hint: you can do that even when writing large requirements docs).
Get Sales & Marketing on the phone. Get in front of support. Client Services.
And of course, get to your Senior Management team. Being “too busy” to talk about key product-level initiatives is not an excuse for them — or a product manager. I don’t care if you are Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. If management isn’t in the loop, when they get something that isn’t what they expected, you will get a phone call, and it won’t be to say “happy birthday.”
You don’t need forms or signatures. You need to talk. The worst case thing that can happen is development working on something that is a) not attuned to the market and/or b) not communicated well to key folks in the organization, no matter how big that company may be
To be an effective product manager, you must not fall into a trap of being “too burned out” or overloaded with other tasks to talk to customers. Conversely, if you absolutely cannot talk to customers / prospects regularly, you better make sure you have folks covering that aspect, and more importantly actually writing things down, that you trust.
This all ties together. It may seem crazy, but it’s true.
Don’t stop talking. And don’t avoid getting in front of prospects and customers. Your shareholders and VC’s will thank you later, even if you do take a bit of heat for it up front.
XBox Breakage
So, last week while I was working towards getting some hardcore achievements, my xbox 360 crapped out on me. It’s been a pretty frustrating week, considering it happened while my wife has been out on business.
All my pizza eating, xbox playing plans went right out the window.
But, it was an interesting experience to go through all of the points of support before deciding, yes it needs to go in for repairs. I pretty much tried everything.
My first step was to head over to xbox.com. It was really simple to find their knowledbase, and the articles I worked with were well laid out and written. Very simple to diagnose / find what was wrong with my console and get their tips.
Once I had played out as much as I could, I actually managed to get the DVD-ROM drive working to the point of getting back in game and getting some stuff done. But, it didn’t last too long before my entire console was frozen again.
So, on to email support. They wrote back quite a friendly message and told me to call support. They had all the helpful info: phone number, reference number based on my email, and the name of the support rep that replied, which I really like. I actually have our support reps do the same thing.
Now, the one beef I had with support was, the rep was CLEARLY reading right off of a script. Now, I realize that she probably didn’t even work for Microsoft or the XBox team, but it would have been nice if she did. I always got this feeling that the XBox team was this cool little start-up like thing inside of the bigger borg that is MSFT.
I lost that when I talked to support. Now, don’t get me wrong, she did a good job and gave me everything I needed, but it seemed like returning the console was the very first thing she jumped to. She didn’t even sound like she owned an XBox, let alone understand what a DVD-ROM drive was and what I was saying to her.
I think had she actually been more passionate about the console, and had something like, “yeah, my friends went through that, what date was your console issued? Yeah, we’ve had reports of those failing” — or something more than just going down her paper script, it would have continued me buying into the small, start-up like XBox team brand.
Maybe I’m crazy, though. I could very well be the only person on Earth that gets that feeling about the XBox team. But, that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that Support is a key part of Product Management. You get it built into their thinking that there is something more they could do to enhance the customer’s experience. A rep that was saying, “hey, we noticed that 3,000 of the 10,000 XBox’s manufactured during date X to date Y had DVD-ROM problems” would allow MSFT to put the right literature on their site.
I’m not saying that they don’t do that, but based on who I spoke with, I have a hard time buying into that type of ambition going on from their front lines.
Locating Market Data
I have been spending a bunch of time heads-down, analyzing market data. This is a key part in any PM’s life, and this magical data can really come from anywhere. Here are a few of my favorite sources:
- Sales pipeline
- Support
- Win / Loss
I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on each of these different areas that can lead a PM to helping create a better product. But first, I want to get something out of the way: gathering market data is NOT (I repeat) NOT, a one-time process, or something that happens once every six months. You should be devoting at least some fixed percentage of your time each week to doing market research.
Remember, a PM serves as the proxy between the company and its customers / market. No questions asked.
OK, with that out of the way, on to the post.
Sales Pipeline
The sales pipeline is filled with wonderful little tidbits you can pull out. Generally, dividing a pipeline into broad strokes (beginning, middle, end type stuff) is the easiest way to go. This should give a good picture of where many of the deals are - whe combined with win / loss, this should present some strong collective feedback.
Support
Within our organization, support and QA both work within product management. I did this very deliberately: 1) support gets ingrained into them how to turn support inquiries / client deployments into helpful defect reports and feature enhancements without really having to get services involved. The second (the QA part) - it’s easier to keep a tighter lock on release cycles.
Each week, support produces a quick report giving key metrics about what clients are looking for. However, a PM does not have to turn these into requirements - as mentioned already, support is trained to do that themselves.
Win / Loss
Another key element to getting PM involved in the sales cycle — gathering win / loss data. I usually do this by setting up a custom form on the opportunity / lead list within the CRM system in use. This type of thing should be kept short and sweet. You don’t want to get crap from Sales directors / VPs that you are wasting their reps time filling out forms.
There are other channels where market data is gathered that I’ll pick up in another post. These are the core areas I’m using now, along with your typical prospect interviews. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the job; especially when it starts being a tangible effort that has a positive effect on the product development lifecycle.
