Maintain Your Focus
Here’s a great little bit from Manage It, by Johanna Rothman…this book is highly enlightening and it’s great to know I’m not the only person thinking some of these things.
I once worked for a company that decided aftear a several-day offsite strategy meeting that we were going to “focus on five.”
That isn’t focus.
Focus means to center all of the attention toward something. Five strategic areas are four too many.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common for companies to spread themselves too thin in order to be all things to all possible customers. If that’s the problem where you work, move to short iterations as quickly as possible so you can say to your management, “OK, we can start that next week, because we’ll be finishing this in two days.” Even better, make sure your iterations start and end in the middle of the week, such as a Wednesday. That way if your managers have “a-ha” ideas over the weekend, they’ll probably give you a couple of days to finish what you were doing.
Your team will thank you for maintaining focus.
Stay the course, folks.
If that course includes too much stuff, either strip some of the dead weight, or move on.
Starting Out with Objectives
I’ve started implementing a set of key objectives and associated metrics with the product team. This is a fun process - especially since I have had the opportunity to take part in corporate-level planning with the management team for 2008.
This gives me the ability to do something very important - ensure everything is aligned.
Since this is happening within the company for the first time, it’s crucial that what’s setup is flexible but still effective. And the team is involved. It’s so important to remember that while you are a manager of a team, you aren’t a dictator - everyone needs to truly believe in what’s happening.
Plus, you’ll never slam dunk something like this on your own. It’s always better to gather feedback; especially if you’ve built a team the right way. Everyone will be smarter than you, so they’re going to be able to point out where you’ve mis-stepped and how something can be made better. But, I digress.
So, the question still stands: where to start with objectives?
It’s a pretty easy process really. To me, the thing that makes the most sense for a product team is to want to build market-driven products. That’s a pretty solid objective - ensure you are building market-driven products.
If it seems like this is too hard to measure, it’s not. While there are several checks and balances you could put in place, keep it simple. Remember, even if you aren’t in a start-up, you don’t want your team (or yourself, for that matter) to waste a bunch of time entering metric values for your ongoing management or Board of Director reports.
So, how can you tell if you are building market-driven products? While, first, you want to make sure the product can get customers and keep them - customer retention. If you can’t land customers it’s either a problem with Sales, product or both. Since we are talking about product management, let’s assume it’s a product-level issue.
However, it’s key to remember this isn’t all about killer features. If you are losing customers at a nasty rate, you can make sure of a couple of things:
- Has the product grown stagnant between releases?
- Is the market responding to product pricing?
- Is client support and/or implementation a concern?
- Are market needs being identified and met?
Now, market needs also include defects. If you have a slew of bugs, you may want to think about holding off on the new features for a while and do a bug release. It seems tricky, and maybe complex, but it’s not. Make sure if you find defects, especially those that are high severity, you’re fixing them. Make sure you’re gathering and paying attention to market data and implementing the right features.
The other metric you may want to consider is the cash flow of the product. You can ascertain this by looking at a basic product P & L. Is your product costing more money to develop than it’s bringing in? If it’s an intentional loss leader, than that may be OK, but if you are dumping tens of thousands (or more) of company dollars into each release and nothing is being yielded by customers in return, you can question the following:
- Is the product priced appropriately?
- Is the product positioned to take advantage of the right market opportunities?
- Are product release cycles taking too long?
- Is there a large number of high severity defects hampering product operation?
If people are buying your product, and you are bringing in positive revenue per release cycle, it’s addressing the right market needs. If this isn’t happening, and it’s not identified as a loss leader, it’s time to look at whether its positioned correctly, targeted appropriately, and being sold the right way and for the right price.
These are pretty simplistic, and I’m sure there’s a lot more than could be used. However, I’m a fan of the basics. If you want to be market-driven, make sure you can get and keep customers, and people are willing to pay for your product.
Making a Huge Company Agile
Want to know what it takes to make a company - like, say, the size of General Electric, or Wal-Mart agile? Look no further than how Jack Welch ran things when he was the CEO of GE for over 2 decades.
I just reading through one of the great books he’s put out, and here are some interesting highlights:
- Embrace Change, Don’t Fear It
- Face Reality, Then Act Decisively
- Don’t Focus on the Numbers
- Be Lean and Agile Like a Small Company
- Tear Down Boundaries
This is really interesting to me, because as a company grows, folks tend to want to start putting in more process and layers of management. While I’m not against having effective process points, I like to think of things more like a framework so people can make their own decisions. Also, creating leaders that are driving home key parts of the business is imperative.
I try to keep my philosophies grounded around similar fundamentals. Not just in product management, but in constantly trying to improve my skill set and contributing as much as possible to the company being successful.
Bring in people that are just really damn good. Provide the tools and skills to help others become really damn good. It’s not beyond a successful leader to do so.
Ensuring that people don’t feel tethered to do whatever “senior management” wants is crucial. Great ideas really can come from anywhere in the business; making sure they are being heard is necessary in order for a company to become truly great.
Being so closely tied to product, it’s easy for me (and others) to become really wrapped up in “roadmaps” and “features” and “action items” and “metrics.” However, while these things can be sexy to talk about, they aren’t the fundamentals of a successful organization.
What’s the most critical part of defining a new product? Identifying the problem that product is going to solve. The same goes for a business.
Identifying the vision for that organization and the objectives that need to be met is 100% critical. Everything else will come after that, including some amazing / lightning bolt ideas. But, everyone has to be dialed-in to that vision. It can sound like rhetoric, but it’s really not.
Behind Closed Doors
I just finished reading perhaps the most honest and streamlined book on management I’ve ever read. Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management is amazing.
It works through the story of a Director of Software starting his new position at a new company and all of the challenges he faces with while starting to work with his team.
Some great principles are covered, and the book provides examples and tools for communication and working through the day-to-day challenges that management presents.
While it’s focused on a high-tech, the fundamentals provided can be applied to any industry. While reading, I kept going back to what I’ve learned from Manager Tools for reference, and reflecting what the authors of the book were saying to what Mike and Mark discuss on their outstanding podcasts.
While a lot of the content was familiar ground, the book offers a little bit more of a relaxed feel to giving feedback and executing one-on-ones that I preferred. The Manager Tools is very, very good - but I’ve always found it to be a little bit more formal and targeted towards large-scale organizations; not start-ups, which is the world I’m from.
In any event, I encourage everyone to buy the book and subscribe to the Manager Tools podcasts. After (even 2 weeks) you’ll have a better foundation for management.
Communication with Multiple Products
There’s a major trick to having a product portfolio that spans both business and consumer and includes, not only several major products, but also a lot of little utilities that go into those products being successful.
One of the hardest parts about this that I’ve found thus far? Communication.
How much is enough? How much is too little? When you’re working within a smaller environment, what’s overkill?
All these questions are tough ones to answer, especially when you are just building out the portfolio. There are so many tools out there that can be leveraged for effective communication, but what’s going to ensure that the important messages get through?
A lot of it lies with the sender / communicator (you).
Garbage in, garbage out, right? If you find yourself sending several product updates in a day, chances are, they aren’t really that meaningful. I’ve tried out several tools over the years, and am finally starting to think I’ve hit on good combination. Chances are, that will change again in another few months.
I tried Pownce out during the testing cycles for a v1.0 to get it out the door. It worked OK, but then some folks on PC’s at the office had the desktop client just crap out on them. Gross.
I’ve been using Twitter to announce releases and link to release notes. That’s going pretty well so far - especially since there’s not a ton of volume when it comes to releases.
I communicate with management internally using e-mail. However, that’s going to have to change soon, I think. Having a weekly product meeting is probably more effectively, however, more meetings is definitely not the answer. Trying to make sure everyone has the information they need at any given time is more conducive to an effective environment than meetings; that is, if I’ve learned anything by reading Peter Drucker.
I’ve been demo’ing Version One in recent weeks, and am very close to buying out a license. It’s probably the best PM software I’ve used thus far, and I have tried several products. We’ll see how things go. For a tool like this to be successful (and like any internal management tool) people need to use it regularly.
Would this circumvent weekly meetings? Chances are, probably not. But, maybe. Shouldn’t everyone be able to login, or get an e-mail they can read as their schedule permits, with key data regarding product releases / activities going on for that week? Maybe a cross-functional product meeting stems from having a weekly staff meeting with your folks.
I think that might work more effectively. And, I’m realizing now that I’m doing this stream-of-conciouness. Sorry.
So, to sum up, here’s how I’ll be managing product communications more effectively over the next couple of months, and we’ll see how it goes:
- Twitter for release notifications
- VersionOne for requirements / planning management
- Weekly status emails with a report exported from VersionOne
- Weekly staff meeting that doubles as a “product meeting”
- Irregular training sessions as the need arises
As I bring some more product manager’s in to the mix at the company, we’ll see how this progresses. I definitely don’t want to do things “just because” other people have done them other places. With this stuff, you really need to find what works for your team at this specific company. It might be the same, but chances are, it’s not.
Use what you know / have done in the past as a baseline, but not the rule. I’ll be sure to post back to record details on how this goes and where it sucks and where it works.
