Why Product Management Is Easy
I track the term ‘product management’ on Twitter. You can see the results of that search term by checking out a handy tool called Tweet Scan. Essentially, whenever someone mentions the words “Product” and “Management” in a tweet, I get alerted on my cell phone by way of SMS.
I’m a nerd, but I find it interesting. And, yes - this turned in to a hella long post.
Recently, and you should see this if you look at the search results, I’ve noticed a couple of folks talk about how hard a job product management is. I wanted to make some points here about this, and hopefully put to rest reservations folks may be having about exploring the possibility of getting into the job, or maybe even continuing doing the job if they are already in the thick of it.
My take is: it’s not hard.
Now, I’m not a product manager in a big, massive company. I never have been, and if I were a betting man, I’d say I never will be. That being said, I do in fact recognize that there are differences in how product management is done at say, Microsoft, and how I’ve structured it in the past. This is just due to the nature of the size of the organization where the job is sitting.
So, keep that in mind. My take on things is really related back to 20-50 (maybe 100 or less) person organizations. Anything upwards of 10,000 or 20,000 person companies really boggles my mind. So, hopefully that’s clear.
I do in fact recall when I was first put into the role. It was exciting, but at the same time, really ridiculous. Not for any other reason than, I wasn’t working for a more senior product manager to kinda guide me a long and instruct me on what to do - I was in there on my own learning as I went. It turns out, this is ideal for me, but I recognize it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea.
This leads me to admission number 1: The job is damn near impossible when you first start. Actually, scratch that — it’s damn near impossible when you get 3-4 months in. This is because, at least from my experience, it takes people about that length of time to really wrap their heads around what it is they are supposed to be doing. And I believe this is where most would sink and maybe start believing, “this job is WAY too hard for me, or anyone, to really do.”
And that’s 100% true. The way the job can be defined, it is impossible for someone to excel at. If you think about needing to be “proficient in Sales, Marketing (specifically, messaging and positioning), have a strong technical knowledge, excellent project management skills, well-versed in strategic alliances, and have a good foundation in finance.” Yeah. That’s a little tricky.
Let me take some of the surprise out of this description - there is no one that is “highly proficient” or “expert” in all of these things. They just don’t exist. You will either get a “tech” person, or a “sales” guy / gal, a “marketer” or a “project nerd.” But all of those wrapped into a single individual? Yeah. Not so much.
Now, this is where people may start to get down on things. How could you possibly do a job where all of those things are important? Some may say, “this is exactly what I think it’s HARD.” OK, well hold on - I’m getting to why it’s not.
Yes. those things are important. However, in a position like this, delegating is absolutely critical. That’s why you will usually see the line about “leading without authority” associated to many product management job descriptions. Why? Well, I’ll use myself as an example.
1. Am I a marketing genius? Hellz no.
2. Am I a great software programmer? Ummm, far from it. I may know a little LISP and SQL here and there.
3. Am I great with numbers? If you asked my grade 11 accounting teacher, she would say, “HAHA. No.”
And so on.
But here’s the key - if you understand *conceptually* how these things work, and maybe more importantly, how they work together, you are doing the right thing. No one person can build a great organization - it takes teams of people to do that. So, let’s re-visit those questions above with some modifications to them.
1. Do I understand marketing and have great marketing people to work with? Yes.
2. Can I give flexible requirements and wireframes to the outstanding developers and watch them develop wicked code? Yes.
3. Can I ask the finance people I work with to help me track project budgets to make sure I don’t go wildly out of control? Yes.
At the end of the day, so long as I understand the critical nature of cohesive positioning and building brand equity and help play air traffic controller to make sure marketing can do it’s thing, I’ve won. I can completely let go and push. IE, “I can give you feedback and my thoughts on positioning this product, but I need you to write the words and deliver something cohesive.” If they don’t, that’s another issue entirely. But I think you get the idea.
OK, so that’s a big long “admission # 1″ type thing. Once you cross that functional expertise hump, admission number 2 is this: The answers are right in front of you. Sure your opinion will factor a lot into the initial product release / development / design - but use those around you to vet ideas and build some momentum (no “i” in “team,” etc…). Someone actually has to DO things, but gather feedback (at least internally if you don’t have users yet, and then put something out in to the World.
Guess what? You are going to get a lot of stuff wrong. But it’s not about right and wrong. It’s about common sense and building cohesive products. The answers are always there - you just have to know where to look and how to ask.
So, is product management hard? No. The trick is not being the best marketer, accountant, UI designer, developer, Sales person all rolled in to one. The trick is to make sure that features get built, marketing communicates them, support can answer questions, and Sales can sell.
All the job is is connecting dots and knowing where to look for the data you need to make decisions. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the noise.
The Importance of QA
I am in the process of hunting for a great senior QA analyst. That being said, I wanted to take some time to talk about how important QA is in the product management process; or at least, how important I view it to be.
In my experience, if you are able to find and bring in the right QA person, that’s really into QA (and not just using it as a stepping stone), they will have a strong / noticeable impact on your product as early as its next release. I’m not kidding. I was lucky enough to work with a very talented QA engineer / analyst while at MusicIP, and his work ethic and results were absolutely perfect for helping us with several key initiatives.
So, what are some of the things that I’ll rely on QA for? I’m glad you asked…
Primarily, you don’t want defects in your product. I view the role of QA to help identify and manage bugs, but also prioritize them and ensure they are getting fixed. This way, I can stay focused on planning the product and trust that when a certain set of users can’t do something they are supposed to, it will get taken care of accordingly.
So, this means setting up your QA team to succeed. And usually, that means metrics and objectives. The key metric I’ll look to that’s directly tied to QA is product quality. Essentially, this is an amalgamation of high severity defects throughout the product (1s, 2s, and 3s usually). A great QA person will derive these priority values by assigning visibility and class rankings to them. For example, how likely is it a user will encounter a specific defect? And, if they do encounter it, what is the likelihood of it completely hindering their product experience?
You need to have these checks in place in order to ensure what you are shipping (especially as it grows and becomes more and more complex) is of the highest possible quality.
Now, the other key aspect I look for in QA is sanity checking my requirements and making sure their associated test plan runs the gamut. I may state that a user “must be able to create an account” and that “the username and password fields are required,” but the QA analyst will take this one step further and actually determine all of the permutations (that either may or may not be documented in the requirements) development must cover.
In this example specifically, maybe the e-mail address the user enters is malformed. Maybe their password doesn’t match to the 6-character standard. When you are working on releasing code quickly, especially in an agile system, this type of coverage becomes crucial. I need that constant stream of discussion and feedback.
Essentially, I’m looking for trust - not only from the product team, but the QA team (regardless of wether they sit in product or engineering), the development team, the marketing team, etc… I want to develop the trust that the QA team will catch critical user flaws (hopefully) before requirements even get to development for implementation so we can work out the kinks and ensure they are as clear as possible.
Beyond this, QA can really help development too — with structuring automated test suites, tracking their results per build and really grinding out the processes to ensure maximum build effectiveness (especially when using continuous integration tools) and insist the quality is really high and stays there. They may also be able to help when running core A/B tests on a site to help determine if user’s are encountering critical flaws in one implementation and/or another and what the outcomes are of possible change.
Remember, the “Q” in the abbreviation stands for quality. That’s their job. It’s not to administer servers or to be an authority for developers. However, it’s one of the most critical jobs in an organization - especially one that is just building / starting out. If the product you are releasing is poor quality, chances are it’s going to get very far.
Bring in an experienced QA person early and really maximize their value as much as possible. You won’t regret it, and your users will thank you for it.
Ask a Product Manager Question
I finally found some time to put my thoughts down on paper from a question Jeff Lash sent my way regarding how to gather data in an organization (either B2B or B2C) that may not want or support PMs talking directly to prospects or customers.
Crazy idea, I know. Believe me, it happens quite a bit.
So, here it is: Can a product manager get feedback without talking to customers?
Listening Labs
Not sure how many of you out there have been a part of usability studies or testing. My personal opinion is that “studies” put people in contrived situations and expect them to yield real-world data about how they are interacting with products.
This research is inherently faulty. Why? Namely because when asked, the natural response is for people to tell a researcher (or “expert”) what they think they want to hear.
Funny enough, Harry Beckwith covers this very, very well in his book The Invisible Touch.
I just watched one of Robert Scoble’s early interviews at his new FastCompany.tv gig with Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis. It’s not secret I’m a big Jason fan, and I think the Mahalo product is outstanding; in fact, it has replaced Google as my homepage.
The whole interview (parts 1 and 2) are really worth watching. However, about 13 minutes in to the first segment, they interview Mahalo’s Director of User Experience. He talks specifically about what i started this post discussing. His insights about what Mahalo does are fascinating - check it out:
To follow this up, Eric has created a Mahalo page with his insights and information about user testing. This is fascinating stuff, and I hope it can bring some additional depth to your product development process in the future.
Agile Risks
It’s easy to get taken with the simplicity of agile. Less requirements to write, less documentation, less time planning - but it all pans out in the end. I find that once you are in the thick of it, there are intricacies that can really bite you in the ass if they don’t have the proper attention paid to them.
Let me provide an example that has to do with requirements - writing them, providing them to development, and just their overall management.
If you write a one-line requirement, develop your workflows, and then your wireframes and send it on over to development, is there a risk they won’t get it? Um, yes. For sure.
Now, on the flip side, could you spend a lot more time writing those requirements, break out each permutation and case, and then send it on to development and still have them make incorrect assumptions? Yep - probably much less of chance, seeing as the requirement would box the developer into exactly what needs to be executed, but there is still a chance.
But, will it take you much longer to write that requirement? Yes. Will there be more documentation produced as a result? Yes. Will people talk more, or read more? Read more. Is that bad? In my book, yes it is folks.
See, you want people talking as much as possible. Communication. Remember that thing people did before e-mail and telephone? They actually talked to one another - face-to-face. Why people don’t do this as much now is left up to a myriad of reasons. However, the “agile” style of simple requirements (i.e., capture the damn idea and what it is supposed to do, design it so you don’t have developers opening up Photoshop and churning out graphics, and write all the necessary associated copy, etc.) will intentionally drive more and more communication.
The product manager should be ahead of the release curve. We do one release per month and I’m already planning May. This is highly ideal (while not always possible in every scenario) because I have a ton more bandwidth to provide the necessary attention to, and answer the questions about, how certain requirements are to work.
Now, developers of course need to know when to ask the questions. Because this style of requirements leave a lot more flexibility (by design), they need to know it’s OK to say, “alright, product flunky, I don’t get it. Why is it supposed to work this way?” To which I would reply, “for reasons X, Y, Z” or, “um, I dunno. Good call - you got me. Let’s make a change.”
Now, how does this relate to risk? Well, of course, this method leaves you open to having development mis-intepret the requirements, not ask about them because they believe to understand them and they are seemingly clear, and they get implemented wrong.
This is bad, but hey - agile is all about iterations. Sure, expect to get possibly lambasted for not getting something out the door because the requirements weren’t understood (PMs, I’m talking to you - a release is your responsibility), but at the end of the day, it’s one of the key agile risks.
You could toil away in your office, spend three weeks writing requirements for a single feature (been there, done that) and then always be “catching up” or “not getting stuff done on time due to having a lack of time to do it.” Or, just document what it’s supposed to do and trust your developers (because they are really super smart people) to interpret and understand, and know when to ask questions.
Then, expect you’ll have some good conversations, and possibly some healthy conflicts, over what something is supposed to do. And that, my dear friends, means the product is going to be a lot better at the end of the day.
