Surviving Product Management

Date: Mar 3, 2006

In his years as product manager for a wide variety of tech products, Louis Columbus has learned several useful lessons regarding what strategies work best to support the products and, ultimately, the company's bottom line. Share his knowledge in this article.

Let’s face it, product management is hard work. I’m not saying in this article that I have this area wired, but I want to share some of the lessons I learned along the way. With a healthy dose of humility from experience gained as a product manager for products as diverse as hosted applications and printers, here are my recommendations for surviving and excelling at product management.

Essentials of Product Management

Certain tasks form the foundation of any product management role. They’re the cornerstones of the job, and from my experience, some of the more critical tasks.

Passion for your products and their success matters more than organizational power. The role of a product manager is full of opportunities to find passion for the product today, its future roadmap, sales strategies, finding and growing a sales champion, and working with and supporting service. In short, the best product managers I’ve worked with have a passion for their products and their success. They rarely coerce cooperation through formal power by invoking a VP or C-level executive’s name or position. Their passion and intensity earn them respect. Passion is the fuel of the best product managers; it propels them past doing "just enough" to get by—to delivering exceptional work, projects, and results.
Manage expectations aggressively. In some companies, product managers are considered the final authority on future product enhancements, current and future pricing, launch dates, PR and lead-generation efforts—even which analyst firms to use. With this much authority, sales, channel management, operations, production—in short, every affected group in a company—looks to product management to make commitments on products to respond to competitive pressure or capitalize on market opportunities. If your company has an intranet, post the product roadmap and product management plans, in detail by product, for everyone to view. Deviating from the product roadmap for special orders needs to be communicated aggressively, as do pricing moves and product direction.
Know your competitors better than industry analysts do. Become an expert in every aspect of your competitor’s business. If you haven’t already, get 10Qs and other filings from the SEC for publicly available companies, and for all competitors run a D&B report every three months to see how their business is going. Take the hardest-hitting competitive points and publish them to your direct sales force, including inside sales. Publish the trending data for your indirect partners and keep the best competitive analysis for your direct sales force. Publish "how to sell against" papers on each competitor every six months to capture your current knowledge for both direct and indirect channels.
Pricing competitive analysis deserves its own effort. When managing high-volume products such as PCs, laptops, or accessories, having a constant view of how your pricing measures up relative to competitors is easily accomplished by checking your competitors’ Web sites and their channel partners’ Web sites. Tracking your competitor’s price relative to your own on a daily basis delivers the data necessary to fight for price moves and lower per-unit costs from purchasing, procurement, or operations. Consider hiring a couple of interns from a local university to do the daily analysis and establishing trending graphs and presentations. A good strategy is hiring interns for 20 hours a week, working the first half of each day of the week. Pricing from competitors is typically revamped nightly with Web site refreshes, so having interns capture this data during the first hours of the day gives you visibility into pricing moves immediately.
The first 90 days in a product management role is critical. This is the time when the best product managers I’ve seen establish their reputations, start delivering on projects, show their strengths and weaknesses, develop alliances, and set expectations for the next year or two. It’s crucial during this time to avoid being isolated and getting buried quickly in email and distractions. The best product managers get out to the departments with which they’ll be working, building alliances, starting to earn trust, and getting to know where product management is positioned in the company and what its true role is. During interview cycles you get the org chart view; it’s time to get the real view now. Reach out to departments you’ll work with: sales, marketing, service, engineering, production, operations—and the customer base. Get out and see at least three to five customers if you can, coordinating this effort with the sales department, and spend time with the internal "customers" you’ll have, going as far as to publish your project list for everyone who’s relying on you. Work to deliver projects before deadline and ask frequently for feedback. The goal during this first 90 days is to become part of the fabric of the company and spend time learning the organization and where its most pressing needs are, before going after huge projects.
Grow sales champions, even if you have to do pre-sales support. Sales and product management often have a cordial yet distant relationship in companies. Product management needs sales to run up the most critical metrics, and sales needs product management for product information and support. Pre-sales support is avoided by many product management staffs because it can become all-consuming. Structure pre-sales support in terms of escalation of the best opportunities coming to product management for face-time with product experts. This approach is crucial to building links with sales and eventually grow a sales champion. Just manage your time well to make sure that this doesn’t become an all-consuming job.

Making Cross-Functional Teams Work

The toughest area of product management for many people is convincing others to do what needs to be done on behalf of your products. The ability to gain cooperation when there is nothing inherently in it for other people and departments is an art form. The best product managers don’t rely on coercive power; they make cross-functional teams a positive experience.

Credibility is the capital you trade with. Start with humility. Passion and credibility go hand in hand. Building credibility has to start with a focus on earning respect from engineering, product marketing, sales, and other departments with which you regularly interact. Building credibility starts by building trust. Trust comes from being transparent. Building credibility takes time; product managers often feel that they must be the "instant expert" for their products, when building credibility is much better accomplished by admitting what you don’t know and asking for help. Humility and honesty gain respect, as does asking for help and sharing thanks for getting it. Be sure to serve up plenty of recognition to those who help you, copying their managers on "thank you" email when members of other departments go out of their way to help you get to your goals. Start laying the foundation for positive relationships in which you earn a reputation for sharing credit and thanking others early and often.
Replace frequent cross-functional meetings with an intranet site. Respect the time of cross-functional team members by distributing marketing, sales, and business plans, specifications, and documents via an intranet site. Distribute links and ask for feedback, and hold cross-functional meetings only when there’s enough to discuss and it warrants everyone’s time. You can also use an intranet site for managing the approval cycles for documents. If your organization comprises team members across a wide geographic region, use meetings and conference calls for exceptions and have the workflows on the intranet site handle the routine tasks.
Create a buzz around new product introductions by creating Champion Awards. In one PC company that had to rely on engineering resources from another project to get its product line built, tested, and ready for launch, product management created Champion Awards signed by the directors of engineering and marketing, the general manager for the division, and the CEO. These were personalized by product managers and framed, and then presented the same week in which a member of engineering completed a task above and beyond his or her primary job in support of the product launch. Presentations were made at cross-functional meetings by the directors of engineering and marketing.
Under-commit and over-deliver on launch dates. With their product introductions, companies signal to the outside world how coordinated they are internally (or not). Major pressure to move launch dates up may come from sales, channel management, marketing, and at times even operations and production. Despite pressure to move up a launch date, keep schedules full of at least 20% extra time, because delays are inevitable.

Lessons Learned from Working with Engineering

This relationship is the most important of all, and the one that potentially has the most conflict. I’m no Dr. Phil of product management, but I can say that what has worked for me is making engineering an ally in interpreting and responding to the market with product direction.

Share product ownership with your products’ engineers. Partner and team with engineering; specifically, spend time understanding engineering’s perspective on your products. Share ownership for the product and its future, and work to create a cooperative environment with engineering.
Pursue product expertise relentlessly. Becoming a product expert starts by realizing that there’s no such thing as an "instant expert." Work with engineering to appreciate which decisions they’ve made on your product and why—that effort goes a long way toward giving you a solid foundation to manage your products as effectively as possible.
Be a de facto leader of development via customer and competitive intelligence. This strategy takes effort, and it’s worthwhile for any product manager to establish his or her role as delivering in-depth customer and competitive intelligence. Often, when the next generation of a product is being developed, engineering needs input on what customers want. By committing to be the leader in terms of customer and competitive intelligence, you can guide product development more effectively.

Lessons Learned from Working with Product Marketing

Product marketing can make or break any product’s future. In many high-tech companies, however, product marketing is the translator of product features into process-centric benefits for prospects and customers alike. Generating demand, managing leads, creating awareness, and in short delivering the messaging platform for your product, product marketing is a critical ally.

Get on top of lead-generation performance for your products. Marketing may not have this data, but go after it for all product managers. The idea is to start building out what the sales funnel looks like for your products and how many leads are needed at the wide end of the funnel to result in closed sales.
Work with marketing to understand the sales funnel for your products. See whether you can create the sales funnel for your products using marketing data, and learn why some leads drop out of the pipeline.
Develop a Google AdWords strategy for your products. AdWords is very economical as a lead-generation strategy. Define the specific keywords to include competitors and their products as well. The cost per click can be well under $1 and the leads are finely tuned.
Send a constant stream of white papers and information to prospects. This is especially important in emerging markets, where prospects are looking for guidance and insight into what new technologies are working reliably. Prospects want to understand what new technologies mean to them; they don’t want messages slammed at them. Educate and be the trusted advisor in new markets, and you’ll sell more.
Use industry analysts often. In certain software segments, IT buyers rely on industry analysts for guidance, and as a result such analysts have insights into what’s being purchased and why. Get industry analysts to visit your company and present competitive updates once every three to six months. Also get their insights into your product roadmap and direction, making sure that a nondisclosure agreement is in place as part of your company’s overall relationship with the analyst.

Wrapping Up

Product management is more like an avocation than a vocation. The best product managers have an inherent curiosity and passion not just for the technologies in their products, but most importantly, how they align with users’ needs today and in the future. Staying relevant to customers is more important than being technologically elegant.

The bottom line is that product managers have great potential to make a lasting impact on companies and entire industries through their efforts. Exceptional product managers are marked by a passion to make their products, engineering staffs, and salespersons the stars of their companies, with the product manager content to be the enabler of accomplishment, the "backstop" of products, so to speak. A great product manager is like a great coach, orchestrating people, resources, and strategies to make the teams successful first and always.