I wrote a blog post about an agile product management frame work that I had put together in order to give guidelines to the product team and help improve the quality and accuracy of the information on the product roadmap, backlog and release plans. The blog post dealt mainly with the creation of the roadmap. The presentation below gives a high level view of the other elements of the framework.
Advice for up and coming Product Managers
I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows:
1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers?
Make sure that you deliver your tasks on time. If you have any doubts or are not sure on any task be sure to get clarification well before the deadline. Develop a thirst for understanding what drives the business and what the technical drivers are for the projects and/or products that you are assigned to. Be sure to ask for feedback, analyse it and immediately and act on your findings.
2. What's the best way to "sell" yourself and your abilities to higher-ups?
Ensure that you have a proven track record for delivering.
Read good website and blogs on topics that your line manager is interested in – participate in forum discussions – use tools like Yahoo answers and the Q&A sections of Linkedin. Use applications like google alerts or an RSS reader to automatically capture articles on relevant topics – then periodically send your line manager links to articles that they are interested in along with your analysis on the topic and how it can help the products and projects that you are both involved in. Be sure to be able to demonstrate that you can converse confidentially and in an informed way on the topics that matter to them and their career.
3. What should you look for in a mentor? Any downsides to being part of a mentor-mentee relationship?
Look for someone with good people skills and that has your interest in mind – someone who likes to help people. Be sure that they are an experienced professional and understand human nature. It’s also important that your mentor has a successful track record.
4. When is the right time to ask for new duties, more responsibility or even a promotion? How do you let them know you're ready?
Ask for new and additional duties once you have proved yourself with your current responsibilities. Be sure to let your line manager know that you are seeking for additional challenges that will stretch your abilities. Create you own personal roadmap (that clearly identifies your career aspirations) show it to your line manager at the beginning of the year and ask for their input and advice on how to progress. Most companies have periodic reviews – use this as a time to discuss where you see yourself in 2 to 3 years time and the steps you plan to take to get there. Based on this be sure to let them know where you see yourself in the next 12 months.
5. Under what circumstances is it wiser to be patient and wait for another time to seek greater opportunity?
When things are not going well – at times projects will not be going well and the reasons may be outside your sphere of influence – it’s best to get a number of wins under your belt first before seeking greater opportunities. Whatever the situation your request should not come as a surprise to your line manager.
6. If applicable to your situation, how do you handle being younger than people you're supervising or leading?
6. If applicable to your situation, how do you handle being younger than people you're supervising or leading?
I think that capabilities and experience are more relevant than age. I manage those who are just as capable as me more as a peer as opposed to a subordinate – however I always reserve the right to make the final decision as and when need be.
7. What is the best way to "speak truth to power"? In other words, how do you tell your boss he or she is wrong?
A lot depends on the relationship you have with your boss and the type of character s/he is and the situation you find yourself in. In general people do not like to be told they are wrong – so try presenting the truth by pre-fixing it with something like “another way of doing XYZ is to…” or pose it as a question – “is there any merit in us taking such and such a course instead of XYZ”. However if your line manager will be making a decision based on the incorrect information and the facts are not subjective then it will be best to present the raw facts and evidence – be sure not to do it in a conceited or pompous way – nobody likes a smart alec.
8. What is the best way to find companies with the best career paths for you?
You could use social networking sites like LinkedIn and search for companies you have in mind and then people who have or are working for the company in question and see how their career path has developed.
9. What advice would you have for someone just entering the job market and wanting to chart a career path similar to yours?
Be sure to read good books on both business and technical topics. Take extra classes either correspondence courses or evening classes. Develop interests outside of your immediate career – do some community or charity work – it’s amazing what you will learn from doing this type of work. Keep your mind sharp by learning a musical instrument or a foreign language.
10. What is the best advice you've received in the workplace that you'll someday pass down to someone else?
Never be afraid of a challenge – if possible do not stay with an organisation that does not offer you a good career path or an opportunity to grow and learn.
11. Is there anything else you think it would be important for our readers to know?
Every set back is an opportunity for a come back – calm seas have never made a good sailor. There will be times when things will go wrong – ensure you do a personal lessons learnt (preferably at the end of each day). Be robust ensure you have a vision for yourself (a wise man once said: without a vision the people perish) and the vision will drive you on to succeed in your career.
Every set back is an opportunity for a come back – calm seas have never made a good sailor. There will be times when things will go wrong – ensure you do a personal lessons learnt (preferably at the end of each day). Be robust ensure you have a vision for yourself (a wise man once said: without a vision the people perish) and the vision will drive you on to succeed in your career.
Agile Product Management Framework
There are many good product management frameworks available - however, I thought I would create an agile product management framework that is broad enough to be applicable to any product management groups that is practising agile/scrum. Each activity has an associated document that is vital for communicating to the various stakeholders. The first activity in the frame work is:
Product Road Mapping
I recently did a presentation on roadmaps at our monthly product manager’s forum and highlighted the following regarding product road maps:
A Roadmap is not:
1) A random list of features handed down to the product manager to document.
2) A roadmap is not a static document that stays at version 1.0 all year.
3) A secret hid away on SharePoint or some other document management system.
A road map is according to Marty Cagan of SVPG (product strategy in an agile world):
“A product roadmap is what describes your current plan of how you will get from where you are today, to the vision described in your product strategy.” Marty goes on , in the same article, and states that “The product strategy analyzes the market opportunity and the technology and describes a vision of what the product can be.” Therefore “The product roadmap describes the sequence of product releases to make the product strategy a reality” (the article goes on to say). The product strategy feeds into and delivers on the company’s business strategy.
Taking the above into account means that product managers need to have a firm understanding of the over all strategy of the businesses that they work in. The involvement in the business strategy will vary depending upon the company that you work for, but overall every product manager needs to have a clear understanding of the businesses they are operating in.
How to Create a Product Roadmap
• Understand the business strategy.
• Collaborate with commercial owners, sales, marketing, engineering and business development on developing product strategies to fulfil the business strategy.
• Research and come up with ideas and present to stakeholders and arrange a brain storming sessions.
• Collate the ideas and work up a strategic roadmap.
• Show the roadmap around and get buy-in from budget holders.
Using the roadmap as a communication tool.
It is absolutely necessary that product managers constantly communicate – the roadmap can be used as a good communication tool to commnunicate to:
– Developers, Test Analyst and the wider technical team.
– Your line manager and heads of departments
– Managing Directors and Chief Executives
Communicating the product roadmap demonstrates that the product has a clear vision of where it is planning to go and therefore goes a long way to building confidence at all levels.
Product Road Mapping
I recently did a presentation on roadmaps at our monthly product manager’s forum and highlighted the following regarding product road maps:
A Roadmap is not:
1) A random list of features handed down to the product manager to document.
2) A roadmap is not a static document that stays at version 1.0 all year.
3) A secret hid away on SharePoint or some other document management system.
A road map is according to Marty Cagan of SVPG (product strategy in an agile world):
“A product roadmap is what describes your current plan of how you will get from where you are today, to the vision described in your product strategy.” Marty goes on , in the same article, and states that “The product strategy analyzes the market opportunity and the technology and describes a vision of what the product can be.” Therefore “The product roadmap describes the sequence of product releases to make the product strategy a reality” (the article goes on to say). The product strategy feeds into and delivers on the company’s business strategy.
Taking the above into account means that product managers need to have a firm understanding of the over all strategy of the businesses that they work in. The involvement in the business strategy will vary depending upon the company that you work for, but overall every product manager needs to have a clear understanding of the businesses they are operating in.
How to Create a Product Roadmap
• Understand the business strategy.
• Collaborate with commercial owners, sales, marketing, engineering and business development on developing product strategies to fulfil the business strategy.
• Research and come up with ideas and present to stakeholders and arrange a brain storming sessions.
• Collate the ideas and work up a strategic roadmap.
• Show the roadmap around and get buy-in from budget holders.
Using the roadmap as a communication tool.
It is absolutely necessary that product managers constantly communicate – the roadmap can be used as a good communication tool to commnunicate to:
– Developers, Test Analyst and the wider technical team.
– Your line manager and heads of departments
– Managing Directors and Chief Executives
Communicating the product roadmap demonstrates that the product has a clear vision of where it is planning to go and therefore goes a long way to building confidence at all levels.
Related Articles:
What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?
What’s Product Management is like a Year after Implementing Agile
What’s Product Management is like a Year after Implementing Agile
What causes Product Managers to become disorientated?
Agile development gives the software product manager a good sense of orientation. Therefore it’s no surprise that when the development team steps away from using scrum or their preferred agile techniques things get a little disorientated. I've observed this on two occasions over the past few years.Totally moving away from scrum/agile
The first time was in the summer of 2007 when we where planning a major redesign of a B2B website. It was decided to take advantage of the redesign and upgrade our technology at the same time – in fact it was deemed pretty much a 'must have'. The development team had to carry out a number of research tasks and experiments on moving from .Net 1.1 to 3.5 and also on how to best build a reclassifying engine to automatically reclassify all the legacy content (some 50,000 articles) and then every new article that the editorial team would create from that point onwards. In hindsight it was a big mistake to allow the research to go ahead with out formally sizing and scoping it in pre-sprint planning. I had no way of knowing how things where progressing and when the research would come to an end. XP identifies time boxed research as spikes .
Partially moving away from scrum/agile
The second deviation from scrum occurred this year. At the beginning of 2008 we implemented a radical restructure that effected product management, test analyst and developers. The newly formed team had inherited a newly implemented platform, moved to a new floor and adopted new tools. Initially the new floor did not have the multitude of white boards that our previous floor had. This brought about a lack of visibility. Previously I could walk past half a dozen white boards and get a really good idea on the progress of four scrum teams with in my portfolio of products by looking at the list of impediments, the location of sprint tasks on the white boards and most of all the updated burn down charts.
Lesson Learnt
Irrespective of the work being carried out ensure you stick to your scrum cycle, estimate each task and keep track of progress using burn down charts. Failure to do so could cause you to become disorientated.
A book for all Product Managers: The Art of Product Management
Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich MironovThis book compiles some of Rich's most popular columns from 2002 to 2008. It includes thoughts on building and maintaining product organizations, understanding how customers think, ideas for how to price new products, and ways to motivate people who don’t work for you. Collected into a single volume, it paints a picture of a typical interrupt-driven day.
Rich Mironov is a software product strategist and veteran of four high-tech startups. He is currently Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Enthiosys, a product strategy consultancy headquartered in Silicon Valley, where he advises technology companies ranging from F100 to pre-funded startups. Rich is considered an expert on software product management and marketing with a focus on business strategy, pricing and market analysis.
The five key section are:
1. Falling in Love
2. Organizing your Organization
3. The almost New – New thing
4. Getting into the Customers Head
5. What Should Things Cost
Rich draws analogy between being a parent (and at times a first time parent) and product management – an analogy that I used to describe the difference between product management and project management.
The book promises to be a good read for product managers who are working for start ups and for large corporate organisations – click here to purchase the book from Amazon or here to read more about Rich and his book The art of Product Management.
Product Managers Need to Show Engineers “What Good Looks Like”
Much has been written about how product managers can get along with the engineering teams – however the converse is also just as important – engineers need to get along and deliver for product managers.
Delivery should not be confined to the production of working software at the end of a sprint or project but delivery should also be expanded to day to day issues: technical, scheduling and timing, releases, scope creep and additional demand, unit testing etc… What the product manager need is solutions and options in order to aid them in making an informed quick decision. This is particularly pertinent in this time of global credit crises – quick decision making could be the difference between releasing those crucial features ahead of the competition - which could be the difference between account managers reaching or missing their monthly sales targets – which could be the difference in the business unit either making a profit or loss – which could be the difference between the organisation achieving their yearly profit margins organically or being forced to down size.
It is therefore incumbent upon product managers (and technical team leaders) to help the developers and engineers, who are accustom to communicating just a problems, to change their behaviour and stop – think for a while and offer a solution to the problem(s) they encounter. Each solution put forward (as opposed to a problem) helps the company get a step closer to reaching its revenue targets.
Changing habits can be hard so it could be useful for the product manager and/or team leader to identify someone in another team who posses the good attributes I’ve identified above – an engineer who when communicates a problem offers a number of options to solve the problem. This way we will help them identify “ What Good Looks Like”.
Delivery should not be confined to the production of working software at the end of a sprint or project but delivery should also be expanded to day to day issues: technical, scheduling and timing, releases, scope creep and additional demand, unit testing etc… What the product manager need is solutions and options in order to aid them in making an informed quick decision. This is particularly pertinent in this time of global credit crises – quick decision making could be the difference between releasing those crucial features ahead of the competition - which could be the difference between account managers reaching or missing their monthly sales targets – which could be the difference in the business unit either making a profit or loss – which could be the difference between the organisation achieving their yearly profit margins organically or being forced to down size.
It is therefore incumbent upon product managers (and technical team leaders) to help the developers and engineers, who are accustom to communicating just a problems, to change their behaviour and stop – think for a while and offer a solution to the problem(s) they encounter. Each solution put forward (as opposed to a problem) helps the company get a step closer to reaching its revenue targets.
Changing habits can be hard so it could be useful for the product manager and/or team leader to identify someone in another team who posses the good attributes I’ve identified above – an engineer who when communicates a problem offers a number of options to solve the problem. This way we will help them identify “ What Good Looks Like”.
How to Create Products Customers Love
Product Management View Webinar Series – Marty Cagan, of SVPG, presents “How to Create Products Customers Love. A webinar that is well worth half an hour of your time - where Marty highlights 10 Techniques for discovering products that are: valuable, usable and feasible - taken from his book inspired.1# Make sure you know what problem you’re trying to solve and that it’s worth solving.
2# Create a product strategy so that you know what you are trying to solve – even if you’re using agile!
3# Create a prioritized set of product principles so you know the nature of the product you’re trying to build.
4# You simply won’t get great products by asking customers what they want – customers don’t know what’s possible – customers won’t know what they will like until they see it and use it. However this does not negate your responsibility to be close to your customers.
5# Don’t try you define /design by committee – empower the key three stakeholders: product manager (function/value) – user experience lead (form/usability) – engineering lead (technology/feasibility).
6# Realize that function (requirements) and form (design) are completely intertwined – forget the old waterfall model of “requirements followed by “design”.
7#If mostly what you do is race to add features, you’re probably: not actually improving the product - no really making a difference.
8# As important as the engineering is, the user experience design is even more important, and usually more difficult – make sure you have skilled user experience designers, especially interaction designers.
9# High-Fidelity Prototypes: gives you something realistic to test on users – force you to think through the product – illuminates the true product requirements – helps you narrow down to minimal product – communicates product to the team.
10# It’s all about trying out your ideas on real users – before you build anything – test with real target users and customers – test early and often, throughout discovery.
The book: www.svpg.com/inspired
Click here for the webinar
Innovative Product Managers
In his article, Innovating in Large Companies, Marty Cagan highlights the fact that many successful companies allow their engineers to spend 20% of the time on innovative projects of their choice. Marty encourages companies to allow Product Managers as well as engineers to spend 20% of their time innovating. Why is this a good idea?– Because many successful products come from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Tim Brown, in his Harvard Business Review article, stresses that innovation comes through observations, observing how people use current products - what products could help them do their jobs better.
Marty in the same article reminds us “that innovation is rarely about solving an entirely new problem. More often it is solving an existing problem in a new way. So watching people struggle with their existing solutions is a great way to highlight innovation opportunities.”
Good product managers, according to Jeff Lash, do not just gather requirements — they understand unmet needs, existing problems, and opportunities for improvement, and they then use that information to determine the requirements for the product.
So what are the characteristics of innovative Product Management? Tim Brown identifies five attributes that can be applied to a Product Manager:
1. The Product Manage has EMPATHY: that’s to say they have the ability to image the world from multiple perspectives, they put people first, they notice things that others miss and use their insight to inspire others.
2. The innovative Product Manager is an INTEGRATIVE THINKER they use analytical processes along with their ability see all the key points and the things that seem to contradict aspects of a problem. They use novel solutions to solve existing and/or emerging problems.
3. Product Managers must be OPTIMISTIC they have an inbuilt believeth that there will be a solution to any given problem.
4. EXPERIMENTALISM: The Product Manager understands that significant innovations don’t come about from small incremental tweaks.
5. COLLABRATION: Product Mangers work along side many people with different disciplines. They also have more than one discipline themselve.
The innovative Product Manager adds value through observation, insight and understanding.
Related articles:
Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1
How Product Managers can avoid the innovation trap #part2
The innovation Value Chain and Product Management
How to be a better Product Manager
Graham Jones co-founder of Lane4 an international performance development consultancy gives several tips, in his recent article “How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better”, published in this months addition of Harvard Business Review, on improving your management performance – many of the tips are applicable to Product Managers. The article draws several parallels between successful sports and athletics personal. The tips are very applicable to Product Managers.The first point that Jones puts forward is that the real key to excellence in both the sports and business world is mental toughness and the ability to thrive on pressure.
Loving Pressure
Product Management by its very nature is a job that is highly pressurised. You may be at a trade show and all of sudden the (beta) product your demonstrating gives up the ghost. How do you cope? It’s not always possible to ship spare equipment to annual exhibitions – such a situation will call for the product manager to quickly think on their feet. Or suppose your release gets unexpectedly delayed, a senior stakeholder has promised a major client that new feature in order to secure a purchase order or sponsorship deal– the lucrative deal is under threat and your mail box and voice mail gets flooded by a host of complaints and questions. To add to the pressure your company is desperate for revenue, times are hard – competition is tough.
Jones states that “You can’t stay on top if you aren’t comfortable in high-stress situations. Indeed, the ability to remain cool under fire is the one trait of elite performers that is most often thought of as inborn. But in fact you can learn to love the pressure…” The two tip that Jones gives is to:
a) learn to compartmentalization – the sports person who loses a match on Monday must be able to put the defeat behind them walk onto the pitch the next day and play with the will to win.
b) Have a secondary passion that you can switch to – a hobby or charity you support. The ability to switch will help you avoid burn-out and therefore succesfully ride the storms of a commercail life.
Reinvent Yourself
I read a number of years ago that feedback was the breakfast of champions. Jones gives an example of Trampolinist Sue Shotton who reinvented her performance and as a result became world champion. One of the things that enabled her to achieve her ambition was her “insatiable appetite for feedback – according to Jones a quality he has seen in all top business performers his worked with. Product Managers who work in an organisation that values ‘lesson learnt’ or ‘scrum retrospectives’ can solicit or create an atmosphere for honest constructive feedback.
Celebrate the Victories
It’s important to celebrate victories but according to Jones it’s vital to be able to identify how and why you were victorious, he says that “The very best performers do not move on before they have scrutinized and understood thoroughly the factors underpinning their success.” It’s important that Product Managers know how and why they’ve achieved success. This gives them a better chance of repeating success at a later date.
Related articles: Ten Steps to Better Product Management
What’s Product Management is like a Year after Implementing Agile
It’s been over a year since the product management team went on a series of agile/scrum training courses. The transformation and associated challenges over the past 14 months have been quite interesting. Here’s a report on the journey, progress, issues encountered and experiences to date.Product Management Prior to Scrum
Before agile working practices where adopted the Product Managers role consisted of a lot of short term tactical wins coupled with continual fire fighting. All this resulted in Product Managers being more reactive to situation as opposed to being proactive in delivering new products to market and improving on developing the feature set of their current product portfolio.
How Scrum was Implemented
The philosophy of agile was presented, by the IS Director and Head of Web Solutions Group - Kelly Waters (author of the blog 'all about agile software development'), over a 3 month period to various committees, steering groups and forums in order to get the by-in from Managing and Publishing Directors.
External trainers where also brought in and presented, to the MDs and the heads of Business Development and e-Marketing, the issues that companies face with software development and how agile/scrum could address the challenges we were currently experiencing.
Agile/Scrum Training
On-line Product Managers, Web Editors and Business Owners spent a few days on a scrum master and product owner’s training course. All Product Managers had a strong idea of the rudiments of scrum and a few where practicing elements of it. The training helped consolidate the principles of scrum within the Product Management team and helped gel a common high level theoretical understanding of the principles and vocabulary of scrum.
Problems and Issues
The real battle started after the training. Whilst some business owners embraced scrum others where less than reluctant to adopt or get involved. A number of open meetings were set up, with the product management team, where business stakeholders were free to ask questions and engage in an open debate regarding the pros and cons of adopting the new way of working. Product Managers also worked on a 1-to-1 basis to evangelize the benefits and to secure and maintain buy-in. Fortunately the Managing Directors fully supported the principles of agile – so inevitably business stakeholders eventually freed up time in their daily schedules to attend the 10 to 15 minutes stand ups each morning and a few afternoons every 15 days to participate in pre-planning, planning, reviews and retrospective meetings.
Identifying and Solving Problems
Implementing scrum did not solve all the company’s problems but went a long way to identifying many of them.
Problems with releases:
Increase in the frequency of releases identified bottlenecks in the resources used/alocated to carry out releases.
Managing the release problem
The Lead Product Manager’s implemented a ‘scrum of scrum’ where releases are put on a white board and at 4.30 every afternoon a Lead Product Manager or the Development Manger meets with the Product Managers who want to release the following day in order to set the release priorities based on business value.
Problems with Agile Testing
Test Analysts found it a challenge adapting to agile – I ran a few sessions with the Web Solutions Group Management team and all the Test Analyst from across the department. Many issues where down to a change in test working practices. No longer did the Testers have a fully documented technical and functional spec to work with. Read Part # 7 Points to watch out for when converting from waterfall to agile testing for more details
Solving the Agile Test Problem
The Test Analyst were sent on Scrum Master training courses, the analyst aspect of the test function was highlighted and the Test Analyst are now given the formal responsibility for gathering and documenting the test cases during pre-planning. The test cases are presented to the customer(s) during the planning meeting in order to get their formal feedback and sign-off. This has formed part of us adopting agile engineering practices and therefore a 'kind of' manual' test driven development.
Return on Investment (ROI) and improvement in quality using Scrum
Just prior to implement scrum I had finished managing a project (re-design of a B2B website). Six months afterwards I worked on another redesign of a B2B website that was more feature rich and technically challenging. However this time I used scrum to manage the project the number of man hours was reduced by 35% and went live with 4 known minor/low bugs – with in 2 hours of launching we discovered 2 bugs that did no show up in our test or UAT environments – both bugs where fixed within a matter or hours.
Product Management Post Scrum
Implementing scrum has resulted in Product Managers being able to be more proactive and think and act longer term. Sure there are still issues with fire fighting and predicting the exact date and time of a release - however the overall negative situation has diminished considerably since the organisation has embraced agile working practices. The profile and trust of the Product Management team has also increased – many act as proxy product owners and are involved in defining features and working along side business owners in making decisions, identifying opportunities to improve the product feature set and advising business stakeholders on a host of different tactical and strategic issues. See:
Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum
and
What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?
Ironically the few business stakeholders who where sceptical about embracing agile are now some of its greatest exponents .