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A book for all Product Managers: The Art of Product Management

Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov

This 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.
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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”.


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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
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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
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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
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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 .
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The Need for Product Managers Continues to Grow.

Traditionally when I think of the job of the product manager I think of someone who is half marketing and half engineer – someone who is 50% orientated towards business needs and 50% orientated towards technology. People who have this mixture hold a number of different job titles: product manager, product marketing manager, product development manager… and so on. There are many papers and blog post that explain the differences between these job roles and functions e.g. Product Management vs. Product Marketing. From my point of view your job title and function depends a lot on the type of company you are working for and the industry you’re in.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about Product Management moving into IT/IS departments. This should not come as a surprise since the Product Manager is essentially a bridge between business and market needs and technology – (be it hardware, software or a combination of the two) - and the talented individuals who dedicate their lives researching, designing and building technical products. Many SME and organisations e.g. Banks rely on information technology to gain the competitive advantage, hence the investment in product management to ensure that technology constantly delivers business value and therefore the competitive edge.

Tim O'Reilly states that: "Technology is fundamentally transforming publishing." In the same article entitled Tools for change conference he continues by saying that:
"There is so much that publishers need to know: how to effectively apply new Web 2.0 concepts like harnessing collective intelligence, loosely coupled web services, tag clouds, and mashups; content generation technologies like blogs, wikis, and crowdsourcing; content management systems; production workflows for XML publishing; real time data analysis driving publishing decisions; new presentation layer tools like Ajax (and the latest from Adobe, like Apollo); search engine optimization...."

Taking all this into consideration it’s no wonder that Product Managers have arrived at online media companies, bridging the gap between the publishing business and technology teams. Marie Griffen says in her article Product Managers Arrive that:
“The Internet is a constantly evolving technology, not simply a delivery platform for content in electronic form. It requires the creation of new jobs within media companies, and one area that is on the rise is online product management.”

The article goes on to say that: "At Penton Media, the Product Manager function is well-developed. “Product managers marry market needs with the core competencies in our technology group,” said Prescott Shibles, VP of Penton Media "s new media group.

I’ve been working as a Product Manager for Reed Business Information (the world biggest B2B publishing company) for 3 years – prior to that I had worked for in Project Management and Product Management for two different technology companies who designed and manufactured products for the broadcast industry. Comparing the two different Product Management roles I would say that the technologies, of course, differ. Also in the online world your loyalty is shared between at least 3 different types of customers: the advertiser and/or sponsor, the end user and the search engine/google(bot) as opposed to just a single customer who was generally the end user. Apart from that, the fundamental functional differences in Product Management are minimal. The key differences lie in the area of work flow and processes - however this can also vary between companies with in the same industry.

So if your looking for a challenge and a change in your product management career I would highly recommend transferring your skill set and working for an online media company.

The current transition the publishing world is experiencing is akin to the transition the broadcast industry went through when it moved from analogue to digital or to put it in consumer terms the transition from having limited TV channels with analogue to have unlimited channels with digital TV or the move from vinyl to CD – as with all changes some will embrace while other will get left behind.

Product Management is not just here to stay its growing fast and gaining ground. Where ever there are business problems and commercial needs (be it B2B/B2C online publishing or re- purposing adverts in wide screen format for television or producing films in HD for the cinema) the product managers ultimate goal is to utilize technology to produce products to solve the problems and meet the market needs in a profitable way.
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Where will the product manager be in 3 years time?

Where do you, as the Product Manager, see yourself in three years time?
I always find this question challenging: the pace of product management and technology is moving so fast that it would be quite difficult to predict where or what today’s product manager would be doing in three or five years time. However here are a few thoughts that may help you answer the question and put you on track for a prolonged and fruitful career as a Product Manager
Stress on seeing yourself as a successful Product ManagerI’ve always liked this quote from Allan R Cohen book “The portable MBA in Management”

“…the meaning of success has also changed for most people. No longer do people think of success in terms only in vertical terms (for example in terms of promotions). Increasingly, people define success in their own terms, measured against their own particular set of gaols and values in life. We call this psychological success. The good thing about success from the individuals point of view is while there is only one way to achieve vertical success (that of moving up), there are an infinite variety of ways of achieving psychological success.”

Applying horizontal success to Product Management
The Product Manager could apply philosophy of horizontal success by talking about:
  • Becoming or continuing to master a range of technologies that are applicable to his/her market and product.
  • To be known as the Product Manager that successfully launched a number of innovative products into the market place.
  • Broadening your product portfolio and entering new markets.
  • Taking on more responsibilities and mentoring junior product managers
Achieving the above and being formally recognised for it is also known as lateral promotion acording to Promoting to a new employer
"The lateral promotion is where, because of your increased knowledge, skills or experience, you earn more pay but do not get a managerial position. Many companies have realised over the past decade that one way to keep their personnel happy is not to make them supervisor, manager, partner or vice president, but to pay them better for being good at what they do. It's a simple way of rewarding - and keeping - valuable employees without putting extra strain or a new life on them."
It’s important not to give the impression (or have the idea) that you’re using the company only as a stepping stone to becoming the “Head of Product Management” or promoted to being the “Group Product Manager.”
Be sure to persuade the interviewer that you are able and ready to add value to the company and the product range(s) you will be managing before you give any impression on having a desire to climb the corporate ladder.
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7 things the Product Manager needs to consider when bypassing processes

Wikipedia, states that: Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. Therefore it is important that the product manager believes and supports the processes that the company has implemented. However are there ever situations when it is acceptable to break an agreed process?

The answer depends a lot on the industry and products you’re managing. Very early on in my career I worked as an Avionics Engineer – the company would periodically be audited (with little or no warning) by the CAA, FAA and internal QA department. For obvious reasons failure to adhere to and being seen to follow the laid down processes would be totally unacceptable. Other industries are bound by SOX or ISO 9001 etc…. So if asked, at an interview – it would be wise to demonstrate that you understand and embrace the appropriate processes and procedures. However it would also be good to demonstrate that you can think outside the box. Some industries are not heavily regulated and there will be times when bypassing a process may result in commercial gain. If you feel it is appropriate to bypass processes then by sure to indicate that you would consider the following 7 points:

1. Inform your line manager. The last thing you want is for you boss to approach you if something goes wrong – ensure you keep her/him in the loop.
2. Weigh up the risk and rewards to the company and product. Are you sacrificing quality and therefore the company’s reputation for the sort term commercial gain? E.g. by shipping a product to a customer before it has been fully beta tested. On the other hand if you don’t ship first will your competitor ship before you and gain valuable market share?
3. Weigh up the risk and rewards to your career – in other words would you feel confident defending your actions to corporate management? How would you explain a lost commercial opportunity to the CEO or MD?
4. Keep a record of what was not done or who was not consulted.
5. Send an email, in advance, to those you are asking to actually by pass the process (e.g. support staff) and be sure that you clearly indicate that you as the ‘Product Manager’ are prepared to take full responsibility for any unfavourable outcome.
6. After the event (e.g. a release of a new online feature) be sure to backtrack – tidy up any loose ends and make sure that the records correctly reflect what actually happened and why. Or continue beta testing and offer the first customers a free upgrade etc…
7. Review the process that was bypassed and see if it could be improved to cater for any future emergencies.

My final thought on the topic is never by pass a process if it involves compromising on health and safety, breaking the law or deceiving the customers/end user no matter what the commercial gains.
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If you want to get into Product Management – then ask a good Product Manager.

Many ask the question “How do I get into Product Management” well here are a few links to Q&As, on the topic, on Jeff Lash’s new website ‘Ask a Good Product Manager’


How can a software engineer become a product manager?
View my answer to this question - hopefully it will help not just the asker but many more software engineers who want to make the transition from software engineering to product management.

How can I become a product management consultant?
After being a product manager for a number of years you may want to change career and become a product management consultant. Read how Adrienne Tan of brainmates answers this question.

How can I become a product manager without any experience?
Saeed Khan of On Product Management shares his views on how to get into product management.

You can also read more of my thoughts on how to get into product management at:
How to get into Product Management

And read how other got into Product Management at:
How others have moved into Product Management