All about Product Management

Getting to the Top in Product Marketing and Product Management

2010-10-24T16:25:00.000+01:00

I came across this video on Youtube and found it quite inspiring so I thought it was worth sharing. The introduction on what is product management/marketing is quite succinct and bang on target.

Many of the points resonated with me especially the frequent referrals to the importance of the customer in developing your product offering. Hope you enjoy :-).

Meet the Product Manager

2010-07-29T22:41:00.001+01:00

What do you do when you’re a product manager (for web applications and tools) who has started a new job, assigned to an existing team who are just about to embark on the development of a range of new products and product features? We’ll whatever the correct answer is, this is what I have started to do. The first step I took was to access the situation and give the team the opportunity to voice their opinion.

I soon realized in my first week in my new role as product manager that there was plenty of scope to improve a number of aspects of the product development process. We are currently using a hybrid of Scrum and waterfall (the logic behind this will form the basis of a later blog post). I waited for all the team members’ to return from their holidays before holding a team meeting that I tagged “meet the product manager”.

I introduced myself as a product manager who ‘eats their own dog food’ – in other words I’m an actively user of online tools, blooging platforms, social media and networking sites.

I also took the opportunity to let them know the things (from a professional perspective) that I’m passionate about:

All things to do with Product Management/Marketing.
Working with engineering/development teams and cross functional teams.
Agile software development particularly, scrum.
Creating strategy & visions and driving them through all the stages to completion.

The things that I’m not passionate about – in fact the things that we should, as a team, avoid at all cost. See the familiar cartoon strip below.

I followed this with a case study: comparing two redesign projects that I wasthe product manager for – one using waterfall which had a shared test resource and the other using scrum with a dedicated test resource. The results were alarming. The waterfall project took +60% more man hours and went live with 100 plus small and medium bugs, whilst the redesign, that was developed using scrum, went live with 4 known minor bugs. I used this experience not only to demonstrate my active involvement in scrum but to illustrate the type of transformational product development we can achieve if we work closely together and use the scrum frame work wisely.

I highlighted that as the Scrum product owner I would initially be spending a lot of my time and energy over the next 4 to 8 weeks, developing: in conjunction with the business owners, commercial owners and other senior stakeholders, the product strategy, product roadmap and release plan - the end result being a backlog with at least 6 to 18 months worth of work in it. Naturally the backlog would need constant grooming as coarse grain items become high priority. I would also naturally be on hand on a day to day basis to support the team and remove any commercial and business impediments whilst the scrum master will be removing the technical impediments.

I then handed out post it notes and ask the team to write on each note their likes and dislikes and also to introduce themselves e.g. where they’ve previously worked, what they’re passionate about, hobbies and interests…

One of the key messages message that the scrum training drummed home to me when I was first trained on the scrum framework was that scrum does not solve problems it only identifies them. However scrum, if practiced appropriately, will make change and tracking and tracking the results of change much easier. Here are the top three likes and dislikes the developers highlighted.

Dislikes:

No dedicated test full time test analyst, no automated test tools & the team failing to carry out unit testing and code reviews.
Changing requirements /scope creep causing work to be either wasted or having to be reworked.
Opinions of the team not always being embraced when it comes to decisions on functionality

Likes:

Knowledge sharing among the team – experience and ideas are traded freely.
The fact that we use scrum/agile – the team liked all aspects of scrum especially the ability to select tasks on a daily basis.
Product Manager being part of the team as opposed to being absent (note complement was aimed at the interim contract product manager cum technical team leader).

My job as product owner aka product manager in conjunction with the scrum master aka technical team lead – is to ensure that the team is empowered to change those things that we have the power to change. Understand and communicate the reasoning behind the things that we can’t change and be patient with the things that will take time to change.

I said to at the beginning of this blog post that the first thing was to access the situation and give the team the opportunity to share their thoughts – the second thing I’ll do (and publish the results in a future blog post) is to survey the team to see how mature they are with regards to practicing scrum.

Combining Classical and Agile Product Management

2010-07-25T18:56:00.000+01:00

I was asked to present, at an interview, on how I see the role of the product manager working in an agile scrum environment. The key areas that I highlighted were:

Scope and responsibilities of the product manager in scrum
Typical product management activities in scrum
A typical day in the life of the agile product manager
The agile product management framework
A case study – the benefits
See full presentation below.

However since the interview/presentation and starting in the new role the company has decided to change direction and combine waterfall with scrum. The idea is that we start off in waterfall mode move into scrum and then finish in waterfall.

Since joining the first thing I noticed was that the current scrum team is being led (as opposed to the team self managing itself) by a contract technical team lead cum product manager who spends part of his time being the scrum master and part being a business analysis.

In order to bring clarity and set expectations from the start I went about working with the head of development and head of product management to define, at a real granular level, the scope of the product manager aka product owner and that of the scrum master who is currently the technical team lead.

The end result was a list of 90+ activities: starting off with documenting the product vision and ending in the release of a sprint. The activities combine classical product management with agile product management – a real hybrid taking the best of both worlds. The roles and responsibilities matrix was signed off by both heads – now the journey begins.

Next week I meet with the development in order to explore the journey we’ll take together in developing the products allocated to us.

How I See The Role Of Product Management

View more presentations from Derek Morrison.

Product Management interview question on strategy and tactics

2010-07-09T12:42:00.003+01:00

I was being interviewed for a Product Managers position by a Chief Operating Officer (COO) who used to do the job that I was interviewing for. The company has adopted and really embraced scrum so naturally expects the Product Manager to take on many of the Product Owners responsibilities. I ask the COO to broadly split the role down into three aspects. His reply was:
1. Vision & Strategy
2. Execution & delivery
3. Stakeholder management and collaboration

I jotted the above answer down on my note pad. He then asked me “what percentage of my time I think I would spend on each of the above three activities.” I paused for a second – gathered my thoughts and jotted figures next to each one:

1. Vision & Strategy – 20%
2. Execution & delivery – 40%
3. Stakeholder management and collaboration – 40%

Fortunately for me he agreed.

I often hear and read of Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers stressing at their yearly appraisals that they get too bogged down with the tactical and have no time for the strategic and visionary part of the job. The problem is that if you don’t use it (the visionary and strategic thinking) then your loose it. Amy C Edmondson in HBR puts it this way:

“Execution is difficult to sustain – not because people get tired of working hard, but because the managerial mindset-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employees’ ability to learn and innovate. A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to sustainable success”. Harvard Business Review July – Aug 08

Correct implementation of the Scrum process aims to solve the problem where the Product Managers/ Product Owners gets burned out due to “efficient execution” and a sharp focus of “getting things done” and “done right”. A Product Manager/Owner knows the cycles of the team and can therefore plan his/her work in advance. The key is to ensure that there is a well balanced Scrum team. I like the way Marty Cagan puts it:

“You will need product managers to represent the needs of your target users and lead the product discovery effort. You probably already have project managers (aka Scrum masters), but if not, you’ll need product managers too; just don’t make the mistake of trying to hire one person to cover project management and product management.” (italics supplied)

It’s important for each product person to deliberately carve out time for themselves to do activities that will be the catalysed for strategic and visionary thinking. Such activities would include but not limited to: visiting customers, researching the marketing and competition, discussions with the development team on the latest and greatest technologies as well as discussions on how existing technologies can be used in an innovative way, looking at how other industries (current and past) have solved problems. When I led a team of product managers – I gave them one day a month to spend out of the office in order to research what ever they wanted – all I asked in return was for a one line explaining what they had discovered. The key is not to get distracted by too many tactical things – hence the one day out of the office: Tom Grant Forrester analysts expressed it this way:

“Product Managers need to focus on the strategic inbound tasks instead of being distracted by too many tactical demands… companies need to hire or cultivate product managers who have the skills and experiences necessary to produce high-quality product management deliverables – not something that anyone can do with out training”

Tom continues by identifying the benefits of ensuring that Product Managers spend quality time on vision & strategy activities:

“Companies that make these product management reforms will be more competitive and better able to use product management deliverables to make better strategic decisions.

In short it’s a win: win situation for both you and the company. So we product people need to take the time to develop ourselves and companies need to give us the time and ensure we have the band width to do it.

Interview with a Pure Product Manager

2009-08-27T17:16:00.011+01:00

In this audio interview I speak with the author of the blog Purist Product Management: Aziz Musa. I had the opportunity to work with Aziz for a year at Reed Business Information and found him to be an inspirational and focussed product manager. During the interview I review Aziz’s:

academic and professional background before becoming a Product Manager;
his experiences at Last Minute.com;
the strategic element of the job;
how best to interact with the customers;
the optimum number of products a typical Product Manager should manage;
how to keep up with the latest trends and technologies and
the top 3 attributes needed to enter the Product Management arena.

Presentation on the Agile PM framework

2009-07-01T21:01:00.007+01:00

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.

Framework For Agile Product Management

View more documents from morrisond.

Advice for up and coming Product Managers

2009-06-30T21:33:00.015+01:00

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 the technical drivers are for the projects and/or products that you are assigned to. Be sure to ask for feedback the analysis it and immediately act on what you’ve been told.

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 section of Linkedin.–Use applications like google alerts or an RSS reader to automatically capture articles on relevant topics – then periodically send you 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. What ever 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?

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.

Agile Product Management Framework

2009-03-01T19:17:00.023Z

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 practicing 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 Share-Point 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 & 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.

Implementing an Agiles Sales Framework

Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum

What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?
What’s Product Management is like a Year after Implementing Agile

What causes Product Managers to become disorientated?

2009-02-01T22:16:00.010Z

Agile development gives the software product manager a good sense of orientation. Therefore it’s no surprise that when the agile development team steps away from using scrum (or their preferred agile method) either in part or completely

Could cause the product manager to become just a little disorientated - this has been my experience on two occasions over the past few years.

Totally moving away from scrum
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 necessary. 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.

Partially moving away from scrum
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

2008-12-10T21:31:00.010Z

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 mar¬keting 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”

2008-12-09T20:44:00.011Z

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 in 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 reaching their yearly profit margins by cutting cost or by organic growth.

It is therefore incumbent upon product managers (and technical team leaders) to help the developers and engineers who are accustom to communicating just a problem 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 or a solution thus we will help them identifying “ What Good Looks Like”.

How Product Managers can tune in

2008-09-10T19:12:00.003+01:00

Pragmatic marketing’s management team wrote a book “Tuned In” which gives 6 steps on how to create successful products and services - something that sits at the centre of every product manager’s job. In short the 6 steps are...

Step 1 Find unresolved problems – how do we know what markets, products, features to focus on.
Step 2 Understand buyers’ personas – identify who will buy your offering.
Step 3 Quantify the impact – how do we know if you have a potential killer app?
Step 4 Create breakthrough experiences – how do you build competitive advantage?
Step 5 Articulate powerful ideas – how do you establish memorable concepts that speak to the problems buyers have?
Step 6 Final step in the tuned in process is creating a resonator – viral marketing - products and features that people will want to talk about, buy and recommend.

Future post will comment on each post.

How to Create Products Customers Love

2008-09-07T17:17:00.004+01:00

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

2008-06-03T21:47:00.009+01:00

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 PM understands that significant innovations don’t come about from small incremental tweaks.
5. COLLABRATION: Product Mangers work along side many people with different disciplines and also have more than one discipline themselves.
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

2008-06-01T22:10:00.006+01:00

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 features 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 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

2008-05-13T21:32:00.016+01:00

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 ScrumBefore 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 ImplementedThe 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 Directors 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 ProblemsImplementing 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 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 3 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 .

The Need for Product Managers Continues to Grow.

2008-05-07T12:24:00.012+01:00

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 your 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.

Where will the product manager be in 3 years time?

2008-04-16T17:56:00.009+01:00

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 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.

7 things the Product Manager needs to consider when bypassing processes

2008-04-11T11:29:00.012+01:00

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 you 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, inadvance, to those who may have actually by pass the process 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 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.

If you want to get into Product Management - then ask a good Product Manager.

2008-03-31T17:04:00.010+01:00

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

How do Product Managers Keep up with Technology?

2008-03-25T19:33:00.012Z

In general Product Management and/or Technical Product Management is about orientating between business and markets trends and needs and

being able utilise technology to define product features and enhancements. Marty Cagan, in his article Are You Technical Enough? States that:

"When I interview product management candidates, I’m looking hard at these two points. The candidate must convince me that they are capable of understanding and applying new technology, and of earning the respect of the engineering team."

As such keeping up with new and emerging technologies and learning about technologies that could be new to you is not only a challenge but critical to being a good and well respected Product Manager. Marty in the same article gives a few tips on how to stay technically savvy or should I say technologically savvy.

"There are many ways to do this. Books, articles, blogs, extension courses, experiment with the technologies or write software on your own, spend more time with your engineers, ask them about the technology topics they are exploring and tag along."

'Technical Product Manager' or 'Technology Product Manager'

In my book we should be careful not to get being technical mixed up with being able to apply technology to solve a problem – semantics one might say – let me explain – I view being technical as being the role of the Developer, Engineer or the Architect the person who is able to dig deep into the code, design the solution be it hardware, software, firmware or a combination of all three – they are also the people who are able to maintain the product, figure out work arounds (e.g. when chip sets all of a sudden go obsolete and purchasing are unable to source any more or a release of a new online feature causes performance issues not experienced in UAT or system test environments). The Product Manager needs to be able to have an appreciation for these issues but is not the person to offer up a detailed solution.

Things Product Managers do to keep up with Technology

Here’s how a few Product Managers that I have interviewed keep themselves updated with new technologies:

From Marketing to Product Management: Ivan Chalif says that he
"...typically let my Engineers bring new technologies to me, but I keep my eye open for new UI features and capabilities in other products that I think might be useful for my users. I also subscribe to a number of usability- and technology-oriented RSS feeds."

Transition from Web Developer to Product Manager: Patrick Jolley said "By using sites like TechCrunch and eHub. I also really like the ‘Movers and Shakers’ section on Alexa."

Interview with a Director of Product Management: Paul Young says that he tries "... to read a lot. I make heavy use of Google Reader to keep up with RSS feeds from favorite tech sites like Engadget. I also regularly read the other Product Management blogs that I link from my site, Product Beautiful. I am always amazed and humbled by the great thoughts and posts that other Product Management bloggers are creating."

Interview with an Ex AOL Product Manager: Brunella said "By reading a lot on the Internet and getting the latest hints through friends and colleagues in the field."

Interview with Jeff Lash: Author of How to be a Good Product Manager "... I try to read as many blogs as I can manage, read general consumer and business magazines, and learn from colleagues. I try to use as many new web sites as possible -- I always sign up for the "notify me when this service is available" email notifications, since there's too many to remember. As much as I try to stay ahead of the curve, though, I can't keep track of everything. My feeling is that if something is really going to be important, I don't need to be the first to find out about it, since I'll probably hear about it soon enough if enough people are talking about it."

From Technical Support to Product Management Mark Barns states "Mostly through working closely with in house development teams on Product Requirement and Software Requirement Specs. Continuous customer engagement, Trade Shows and Standards bodies attendance also help."

Tony Bradley in his article: Keeping up with Tehnology gives this advice:
"New technologies and improved technologies are emerging all the time. It can be daunting to try to keep up with them all. Remember to focus on keeping your business needs in mind and finding the technology that helps solve them rather than keeping up with technology just for the sake of keeping up with technology."

How do you keep up with technology? – Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.

Product Manager adopting web2.0 agile software development

2008-03-13T20:22:00.016Z

In the world of web development online product managers have two choices big bang (probably using waterfall) Vs incremental redesign (and empower product development) of the websites their responsible for. The world of online moves at such a fast pace that by the time you carry out your research, then work with an analyst to document your findings in the form user requirements and then design and build your website (or online product) and then launch/re-launch it, the original research is in danger of being out of date or put another way superseded by some new online fad. This means that you’re in danger of being in decline before you’ve had the opportunity to experience growth and maturity. In my opinion a combination of adopting agile software development (such as Scrum) along with web 2.0 technologies and mindset (i.e. perpetual beta) coupled with taking a brave decision to develop a new home page whilst leaving the rest of the site as is and then asking for user feedback via your web site has got to be the way to go. The most recent site to do this is the BBC.co.uk.

Opting for incremental raises a few questions for the online product manager.

#1.Will changing and releasing just the home page of a site confuse the users?
#2.Will internal stakeholders adopt the perpetual beta approach?
#3.What do you do if the users make suggestions that go against your company culture for your online product?

I’d value your feedback on this subject.

Interview question on under performing

2008-03-10T19:56:00.003Z

What would you do if your boss called you to a meeting and informed you that your team has been complaining about your lack of leadership and management?
You would or course be surprised even shocked because you would have put things in place to ensure that you where leading and managing the team well. Once you express that you would be surprised you could then:
1. Ask if their where any particular examples.
2. List the things you would have in place to ensure that individually and collectively the team felt they where managed and led. Such as:
a. Regular team meetings – where everyone has the opportunity to give feedback and where you have the opportunity.
b. Regular one to one sessions – where you have a chance to get close to your team members.
c. Periodic review of work done – with out micromanaging your team.
d. Yearly formal appraisals where tasks are set followed through with formal quarterly reviews.
The above demonstrates to the interviewer how you would manage your team so that such a situation would not occur.
However if such a complaint surfaced and your line manage agreed with the complaint then you could suggest you work with your line manager to put an action plan together in order to get things back on track.

From Technical Support to Product Management

2008-03-09T13:42:00.003Z

Mark Barnes has extensive experience in facing customers, initially as a customer support engineer and then later in his career as a product manager. Continue reading to learn more about his transition and views about product management.

1. What’s your academic background/training?
BEng in Electronics Engineering from Sussex University.
Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing from Chartered Institute of Marketing.
2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
Field Service > Customer Support > Sales Support > Product Management
3. Where did you work prior to your current position?
Prior to current position at Tektronix I worked for Adherent Systems Ltd, (Digital Broadcast Test and Measurement) as a Product Manager. Adherent was acquired by Tektronix (General T&M) who in turn have been recently been acquired by Danaher (global portfolio of companies) - now my current employer. Prior to Adherent I worked for Radamec Broadcast Systems Ltd as a Customer Support Engineer, Sales Support Engineer and Product Manager. Prior to that I worked in the Oil and Gas exploration industry for Baker Hughes Inteq (aka Exlog) as a Field Service engineer.
4. What inspired you to become a product manager?
The desire to improve the products I was working with. In previous (support) roles I was always dealing with the results of other peoples product development decisions. I felt I could do better and had ideas about how to improve products and services so decided I should put my money where my mouth is and take on that responsibility in a product management role.
5. How did you make the move from being a Support Engineer to becoming a product manager?
During time spent in customer support role I found I gravitated towards sales activities, demo's, trade shows etc. This led me to realise that I needed to be in a position where I could more effectively influence product direction and when a Product Management opportunity in the same company came up, I took it.
6. What do you like best about your job?Getting to the bottom of customers problems and developing solutions that make those people and their companies more successful.
7. What do you least like about your job?
Overcoming the challenges of large company 'inertia' needed to execute with velocity.
8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?Mostly through working closely with in house development teams on Product Requirement and Software Requirement Specs. Continuous customer engagement, Trade Shows and Standards bodies attendance also help.
9. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.
Solving customers problems profitably.
10. What’s your dream product to manage?
Great question - something that I am passionate about, is strongly differentiated and targeted at a clearly defined niche segment.
11. How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?We don't tend to use agile in teh hardware world. My current company uses a gating process common to many hardware technology companies product introduction processes. A product is researched, defined and business case justified before the main thrust of development commences. Some amount of de-risking by the development team may take place before the project gets the green light.
12. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?#Insight into customer needs, current and future.
#Ability to communicate effectively across functions, and at all levels, of the organisation.
#Leadership qualities - necessary to motivate cross-functional teams to deliver outstanding products that deliver value to all stakeholders.
13. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Credibility in the eyes of the developers - I have seen others fail because of this.
14. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Young family occupies most time. Also motorcycles.
15. What advice would you give some one who wants to become a product manager?
Product Management can be very rewarding because you control, and are accountable for, the product or service in question. However the Product Manager must be truly passionate about the Product or Service to maximise the rewards. If you do not feel a connection to the Product or Service in question then don't take the position - find one that you care about.

Interview Question: How Do Product Managers Handle Success?

2008-03-05T20:47:00.007Z

The interviewer poses the folloing question:
"You, and your team, were involved in a successful launch of a new product that exceeded business expectations during its first phase - what would you do?"

First I would Celebrate [with the team of course] and then….

Follow Brian Lawley’s advice which is stay humble and give credit to the team.

Following that it would be critical to analyse all the activities that led to the success launch of the product. State that as the product manager I'd have the over view of all activities but the analyse will be designed to get into the detail.

Were standard processes and procedures followed? – If they where then that’s fine, if not find out what was done differently and then suggest that the particular process might be improved in the light of the current success.

How was the interaction between the various stakeholders? Did the requirements change? What methodology did the development use: Scrum, DSDM, Waterfall (probably not!). Were there code reviews, was there pair-programming for those real in-depth tricky aspects of the code base.

How was the marketing tasks carried out? – What budget was spent on promoting the product via to launch compared to other product launches? How was the sales team trained?

Round up your answer by stating that you would document the feedback – coupled with your own observations and recommendations and then work towards embedding the improvements into the 'departments and company culture' so that the next phase and next product launch will be even more successful. Finally state that you would share and discuss your finding with your colleagues via case-study on the departmental blog and/or team meeting, thus functioning around CMMI level 2 to 3.

Where do you see your product in two years time?

2008-03-04T17:26:00.007Z

Looking into the future and knowing what the competition, the market and your product will be like is probably one of the most challenging tasks that any product manager has to undertake. This can be a tricky question to answer at a job interview. “Where do you see product x in y years time”? How a product manager answers this question gives the interviewer an insight as to how much of a visionary they are and whether or not they keep a keen eye on technology as it progresses. Here are two mini case study answers to such as question.

I carried out a few interviews over the last couple of days and asked the candidates “How do they see the web in a few years time.” A few interesting thoughts came up. One person drew an analogy between the way television has evolved over the past few years: from two analog channels in black and white to 100s of digital channels via cable & satellite. Like wise the number of web pages will continue to increase therefore competition for viewer-eye-balls will increase as well. The candidate went on to say that as TV has become an integral part of everyday life the web will become even more embedded in the lives of business professionals. We will become more reliant on information to do our jobs and that information will be provided via the types of on-line products and services that we ['we' being the company they were hoping to join] produce – our [being 'us' working together] challenge is to package the information in an easy, digestible and appealing way so that users keep on coming back for more. The subtle use of we and our came over quite well.

The other candidate focused on enabling technologies like ajax and silverlight to enhance the user experience and discussed the merits of web 2.0: social networks and web services to give users a more personalised experience – he quoted the BBCs and new home page i-google as an example of being able to move widgets around a webpage and mix and match a combination of widgets to give you the all the information you want in the format you want. Thay stressed that going forward many more websites would adopt and roll out such features- untill they become almost standard. They also mentioned how mobile device will probably change and copy the UI of apples i-phone.

Whilst neither candidate came up with the next killer app or suggested something total new or innovative, however they both demonstrated that they had at least thought through the general direction of on-line products and were able to demonstrate how and why future changes might be brought about.

How others have moved into Product Management

2008-03-03T19:38:00.016Z

How do I become a product manager? There is no one right answer to this question however one thing we do know is that very few if any people enter the realms of technical product management immediately. I have interviewed a number of Product Managers who have shared their background, experiences, likes, dislikes and given tips on how to succeed.

1. From Marketing to Product Management
Ivan Chalif studied psychology and counselling at university as opposed to business studies or technology – however he is a successful technical product manager. Read how Ivan made the various transitions in his career that eventually resulted in him becoming a product manager. Read From Marketing to Product Management for more details.

2. From Web Developer to Product Manager
Patrick was a web developer who produced online products for the travel industry. Patrick took an interest in the business operated become acquainted with the key business stakeholders and eventually made the transition into product managers for the travel products the business went through a restructure. refer to Patrick's interview for more details: Transition from Web Developer to Product Manager

3. From Hardware R&D Engineer to Product Management
Francois Abbe had a strong technical background and worked for an engineer led company. As a result the engineers were used in many client facing activities. This gave Francois the opportunity to perform many of the product management roles while being an engineer. This helped make the smooth transition to product manage many of the products that he worked on as an engineer.Read From R&D Engineer to Product Manager for more information

4. From Mechanical Engineering to Software Product Management
Bikram Gupta has an academic background in Mechanical engineering – he used his engineering degree to get into IT. Bikram has a wide technical background and has read his way into Product Management Follow the link to read Bikram's interview

Moving from Technology to Product Management to increase business skills

5. The man that did all the roles before entering Product Management
Marty Cagan has worked for several hi tech Silicon Valley companies. He has a wide range of experience in many technical roles including Product Management. Marty is a founder of Silicon Valley Product Group a consultation firm that helps companies with all aspects of the product life cycle read the the interview by going to the following link From Software Engineer to Product Manager to Founder of SVPG - Interview with Marty Cagan

6. From Business Analyst to Product Management
Andy started his career as a Business Analyst - the opportunity arose for him to temporary manage a few products. He took up the challenge, impressed his employer and then got promoted. He has since moved onto a new product management role and market sector Andy's interview can be found at Moving from Business Analyst to Product Manager to "Online Product Manager"

7. From Webmaster to Product Management
Daniel worked for a publisher as a webmaster. When his company went through a restructure he applied for a job as a project manager in the IS department. This gave him exposure to Product management and it was just a matter of time before he moved through the ranks and now managers a strong portfolio of online products for the aerospace industry Danile's interview can be found at the following link: Transition from Webmaster to Product Manager via Project Management

8. From Web Applications Programmer to Product Management
Paul Young started life studying Radio-Television-Film at University but quickly moved into web applications programming which eventually led into Product management. Paul is currently a Director of Product Management. Read Interview with a Director of Product Management for more details.

9.From Account Management to Product ManagementBrunella Russo was an Account Management for a Financial Company. She moved into Product Management at AOL. Read Interview with an Ex AOL Product Manager

10. From User Experience Designer to Product Management
Jeff Lash has a strong background in User Experience Designer and has practiced information architecture. Jeff now works as the Product Director for MD Consult, a leading web site providing clinical reference information for physicians and medical professionals.Interview with Jeff Lash: Author of How to be a Good Product Manager

11. The man who read himself into Product Management.
Matt Rowe is one of those Product Managers who is self taught and self read. Matt was a Business Analyst (BA) prior to becoming a Product Manager. As a BA he ran several small projects – this coupled with his BA experience put him in good stead to become a product manager. Interview with a Product Manager

12. from Customer Support Engineer to Product Management
Mark Barnes found him self having to face customers in order to fix and install problems with equipment they had purchased - now he talks to customers with the aim of producing products that will provide them with solutions. Read From Technical Support to Product Management for more information.

Related articles:
How to improve your Product Management career and grow in your job
Interview Questions for Product Managers
How to get into Product Management

From Marketing to Product Management

2008-03-02T22:03:00.006Z

Ivan Chalif is author of th eblog The Productologist. He is also a founding member of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA). In addition to creating the original logo, and managing the website and forums, Ivan was instrumental in organizing early SVPMA events and establishing the organization’s charter.

1.What’s your academic background/training?
Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Psychology and Counseling. While getting my undergraduate degree, my focus was on working with individuals with severe psychological disorders like Multiple Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia (which by the way, is not the same as MPD, even though they are commonly used interchangeably by the media), Bi-Polar disorder, and Depression. My graduate school work centered on working with young gifted students with behavioral problems. Learning to communicate effectively with both of these populations has gone a long way in contributing to my success as a Product Manager.

2.What did you do before you where a product manager?
Before I settled into Product Management, I worked in a variety of Marketing roles, including competitive intelligence, marketing generalist, webmaster, and application prototyper.

3.Where did you work before you worked for StrongMail Systems?The past few years, I have worked at Email Service Providers like Acxiom Digital and ValueClick. Before that, I was Director of Marketing at a small online agency and before that I worked in the library automation industry.

4.What inspired you to become a product manager?To be honest, I fell into Product Management. It combines many of the business functions that I enjoy (and some I don’t) and it was only through trying out other Marketing roles that I found out what Product Management actually was and started to get more interested in moving into that type of position. I am passionate about the user experience and in many organizations that starts with Product Management.

5.How did you make the move from being in Marketing to becoming a product manager?
I moved into Product Management through a hybrid role that combined Web Producer and Product Management functions.

6. What do you like best about your job?
The part of Product Management that I like the most is solving problems. There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not working on solving a problem for a customer, prospect or internal user. It may be as simple as addressing a customer question or as complex as creating a brand new workflow for users, but it’s the challenge of overcoming the constant onslaught of problems that I find most stimulating.

7.What do you least like about your job?Meetings.

8.How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
I typically let my Engineers bring new technologies to me, but I keep my eye open for new UI features and capabilities in other products that I think might be useful for my users. I also subscribe to a number of usability- and technology-oriented RSS feeds.

9.Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.
Balancing spinning plates on a drinking straw while walking a tightrope as fast as you can with an itch on your nose.

10.What’s your dream product to manage?
In an ideal world, I would love to be the Product Manager of a motorcycle. I’ve been a fan of motorbikes since my youth and with “standard” bikes in particular. My two favorite bikes are the 1984-86 Honda CB700s and the 1986-87 Yamaha Fazer.

11.How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?
Most of the companies that I have worked at have used a traditional or modified waterfall development process. There was one company where we used an iterative development process, but that was more a function of lack of development planning versus actually following an agile method. I am not convinced that an agile development process is ideal for every type of product, so I am not driving a change to that from our current process, but I would be interested in working with a development team that uses the agile methodology to see how it works first hand.

12. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
a. The ability to make decisions quickly and effectively.
b. Being able to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders.
c. Comfort with a rapidly changing environment.

13. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?The patience to see your plan through to the end. There is a constant tug-of-war between Product Management and Engineering. Product Managers want more features in less time; Engineers want fewer features in more time. There are compromises along the way on both sides, but don’t sacrifice key elements of the product plan because they are difficult or haven’t been done before. Stand up for your ideas, your product and your users. That’s what it means to be a Product Manager.

14. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Besides spending as much time with my family as possible, I try to fit in a variety of physical and mental activities including, soccer (futbol for the rest of the world ), running, snowboarding, reading hard science fiction and political satire, and occasionally blogging.

16. What advice would you give some one who wants to become a product manager.
Product Management is a broad practice that is, at best, loosely defined. If you are thinking about becoming a Product Manager, try some adjunct roles first. Sales, Corporate Marketing, Support, and Professional Services (or Engineering, if you are technically-inclined) will all give you a good background and the skills necessary to be a successful Product Manager. If you are a new Product Manager, it’s easy to get sucked into doing things that aren’t really product-related. Stay focused on addressing the needs of your users and understanding your market. The rest will fall into place.

How to improve your Product Management career and grow in your job

2008-02-27T22:17:00.011Z

I have recently been interviewing Product Managers about their jobs and writing interview Q&As for those who may be going for a job in Product Management. ( Refer to 'Your Career' for a list of articles). The aim is to provide individuals who want to get into Product Management with ideas, insight, inspiration and encouragement – one common thread that spreads across all the interviews is that everyone had a different role before they entered the world of Product Management.
Brian Lawley gives a webcast entitled “How to accelerate your product management career.” I have given a summary of the 20 odd points that he raises. In the hope that this will also help those who are currently working as product managers and those who want to break into product management.

1. Career goals: where you are honestly have 1/3/5/10 year goals – start with the 10 year goal and work backwards. You need to sit back and do some real thinking about this.
2. What’s the difference: why do some people advance very rapidly while others move slowly or stagnate – it about the techniques you use and how you manage up.
3. How does your boss view you: attitude and productivity: you need to be organised and get on with people – you also need to be a good leader.4. Productivity = deliverables: both strategic and tactical - day to day and important high level projects and tasks that are important to the company. Ensure you free up enough time to tackle additional responsibility – therefore the day to day work need to be under control.
5. Get a mentor: your boss, an executive, senior peer, paid coach - spend an hour a week with your mentor discuss where you’re at and how to rise above issues.6. Be the bearer of bad news quickly and propose solutions and timelines.7. Keep careful company: network with the right people. Show me your friends and I’ll tell you what type of person you are therefore avoid negative people they will drag you down.8. Be an expert: have the relevant information in your head both your discipline (product management) and your market – use google alerts, read books & blogs to stay up-to-date.9. Beef up your resume: and build your brand – put in extra time and help others, do volunteer work, get certification, take-up internal opportunities to lead.
10. Be a solution employee:– manage your boss by giving them a weekly update and get input on areas you need but have recommendations to issues that are raised.11. Always give the team the credit: – be humble and give credit to others – however when things go wrong be ready to stand up and take the blame.12. Choose right: the boss (gage this at the interview) choose the right job and company, get into a company and market that is rapidly growing.13. Be a good communicator: be concise and always have the correct tone.14. Hire only those who can over take you: You are who your team, therefore hire stars and that will reflect on you – your team will push you up, while your mentor will pull you up.
15. Truly care about people: – you will work with them again – never speak badly about anyone. It will come back on you.16. Always be professional:– don’t make issues personal get perspective before communicating –practice listening. We have two ears and one month.17. The last thing you do: you are always remembered by the last thing you do at a company its the last thing you do that people will remember you by.18. If you can’t stay positive then move on: You don’t want to be branded as the a negative person.19. Don’t sit on the fence:– be committed to your job or decide to move on.20. Build your network: - people are treated as assets – your safety net is your network.
21. Know what your good at: – hire people to complement your skills – do the things that your good at.

How Product Managers can estimate business value using agile techniques

2008-02-27T20:05:00.008Z

We recently finished a scrum sprint; during the sprint review the technical team gave a demonstration, to senior business owners, of the newly developed functionality and bug fixes they had done during the sprint. It was noted at the sprint retrospective and subsequent discussions, that followed, that the demonstration gave equal weighting in terms of the time spent demonstrating each user story. However some stories were minor bug fixes while others where major enhancements to the site's home page. The question is how does the technical team know how much time to spend demonstrating each user story?

One way would be to demonstrate the stories in priority order. However this would just give an order for the demo and not a give any indication on how much time should be spent. I believe one way would be to introduce an estimated business value to each story refer to Measuring business value with metrics for more details. The technical team are quite used to using Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 ...) to estimate the complexity of a given user story and the product owner and other business stakeholders are accustomed to watching the technical team use the poker cards to vote on the complexity of a given backlog item and then witnessing the team member who gave the highest vote discuss with the team member who gave the lowest vote the reasons why they voted in that particular way. The team then votes again based on the new information they have heard.

A way forward would be for the business stakeholders to go through a similar exercise. The business value would depend on the type of product you are developing. For community website the following could be considered: Search engine optimisation (SEO) value; improvement in usability or user engagement; third party sponsorship generating direct revenue; improvement to backend editorial systems that increase efficiency and through put; automating processes for editorial staff….

Once a business Fibonacci has been given it will be a simple exercise for those demonstrating newly developed functionality and bug fixes to give the correct weighting in terms of time to each user story – thus keeping the review fresh and relevant and ensuring that business stakeholders stay engaged through the session.

However there is a much better reason for estimating business value for each backlog item – it not only helps with setting priorities but can be used to measure the amount of value and therefore ROI for each sprint and ultimately be used to calculate business velocity in a similar way that the scrum master calculates technical velocity for a team or individual. Estiamting business velocity, (refer to Understanding your Velocity for an explanationon on velocity) will also give the product manager and product owner a high level indication on the amount of business value that a team are able to generate for each product roadmap.

Transition from Web Developer to Product Manager

2008-02-19T16:46:00.011Z

People often ask the question – How do I to get into Product Management [from being a software engineer, project manager, business analyst etc…]. Patrick Jolley is a case in point of a web developer who recognised an opportunity to move into Product Management and took it.

1. What’s your academic background/training?
I studied Business Information Technology at University. When I started I intended to do the full 4 years and come out with a degree. I soon realised that the life of a student wasn’t for me and left after two years receiving an Higher National Diploma (HND).
2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I’ve worked for Reed Business Information UK (RBI - UK) since I finished University, initially in software support, then software development and then web development.
3. What inspired you to become a product manager?As a developer I always enjoyed getting involved in the requirements gathering, design and specification stages of projects. SEO and especially usability are also areas I am particularly interested in, so it just seemed like the natural progression for my career. That and the fact that I’d had enough of being a developer!
4. How did you make the move from being a developer to becoming a product manager?
The group I was working in was merged with another area of the business. During this time there was a lot of change, I saw my opportunity and took it.
5. What do you like best about your job?
The creativity and innovation aspects of the role are especially enjoyable. It is also very satisfying to deliver something you feel proud of.
6. What do you least like about your job?Every so often things inevitably go wrong and life becomes very hectic!
7. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?By using sites like TechCrunch and eHub. I also really like the ‘Movers and Shakers’ section on Alexa.
8. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.I’ll use three words instead. Challenging, varied and rewarding.
9. What’s your dream product to manage?
Haven’t got one in particular – although I think I’d really enjoy the challenge of working for a start-up.
10. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?Communication, organisation and market knowledge.
11. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
An English to Klingon dictionary. Seriously – I think being able to trust each other is the key.
12. What are the main differences you have found between being a developer and being a product manager?
I can’t be as hands on with the products anymore which can sometimes be tough when things go wrong or aren’t happening as quickly as you’d like.
13.What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
I like to travel, play and watch football, cook, eat and sleep.

Related articles:
From R&D Engineer to Product Manager
Moving from Technology to Product Management to increase business skills
From Software Engineer to Product Manager to Founder of SVPG - Interview with Marty Cagan
Moving from Business Analyst to Product Manager to "Online Product Manager"
Transition from Webmaster to Product Manager via Project Management

How do you demonstrate that you can manage products

2008-02-14T21:44:00.012Z

Product Management interview question:

Tell me about a project you have run or a product you have managed through its life cycle?

This is an interview question that gives you the opportunity to:
a) Demonstrate that you have a practical experience in the product development process.
b) That you have considered the user by developing a product that utilises technology to solve a problem and therefore meets the customer’s needs.
c) That you are able to lead with-out-authority by matrix managing a cross functional team of multi-disciplined professionals.

When answering this question you also have the opportunity to briefly touch on a previous area/question that you may have felt you didn’t answer too well – however you have to be brief, no detract in any way shape or form from the original question and ensure you don’t give the impression that you are labouring any particular point or trying to get one up on the interviewer. For example if you where previously asked about stakeholder management and you didn’t feel that you gave a full and impressive answer - then touch on your experience on stakeholder management while speaking about a project you have worked on.

A few typical points that you need to bring out are as follows:

Be sure to outline the role you played at each stage.
Ensure you highlight that you took the initiative at each key stages.
Speak about brain storming sessions that you led out in to firm up on requirements and the products feature set and ultimately define the product.
Your ability to create and manage a product roadmap.
Be sure to explain how you communicated the vision and project to technical and business stakeholders.
Show how you led the team and got buy-in at each stage of the product life cycle.
Speak about your interaction with stakeholders from across the organisation from sales and marketing to engineering and customer support.

It is important that you take the opportunity while answering this question to speak about your domain and knowledge of the technologies you worked with – coupled with your sharp business acumen. Above all don’t be afraid to mention things that went wrong BUT be sure to speak about what you did to put things right and be prepare demonstrate what you learnt from such mistakes.

The interviewer may ask you to speak about a project that went well or not so well. If so be sure clearly demonstrate that you understand why the project went the way it did.
It's possible to spend the whole interview on this one question alone -

Bottom line is that you as the Product Manager are seen to be in fully in touch with the product at every stag ein its life cycle.

From R&D Engineer to Product Manager

2008-02-12T20:42:00.002Z

Francois Abbe has had many years experience designing world beating hi tech equipment. He has had the opportunity to travel the globe both as an engineer and product manager representing the products he has designed and (later on in his career) that he product managed.

1. What's your academic background/training?
After graduating in France, I followed a B.Eng in Electronics and
Communication Engineering.

2. What did you do before product management?I worked as a R&D engineer designing niche video signal processing products that’s used in the television broadcast and film industry. I’ve also worked designing lighting equipment and as a DJ.

3. Where did you previously work?I worked for Snell & Wilcox in the UK, as a Product Manager.

4. What inspired you to become a product manager?I recognised that there were often a gap between the high quality niche products that I designed and the needs of the customers. Designing products that did not offer a complete solution became meaningless. Product Management gave me the opportunity to influence the feature set of the products that we marketed I found this much more enjoyable!

5. How did you make the move from being a R&D engineer to becoming a product manager?Snell & Wilcox often used engineers to assist at exhibitions, customer visits, road shows and product training – this exposure gave me a good introduction and a smooth transition into product management.

6. What do you like best about your job?I enjoy interacting with a variety of people in my specific field.

7. What do you least like about your job?
When the product development cycle is too long.

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
All sorts: chatting, emails, internet...

9. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.Managing all aspects of the product line and life cycle.

10. What's your dream product to manage?Any product that is used in live broadcast applications.

11. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?Ability to listen, flexibility and vision

12. What's the key attribute you need in order to work with the development
team?Trust

13. What do you do when you're not managing products (outside interests)?Cinema and food

14. What advice would you give some one who wants to become a product manager?
Be passionate and focused!

Product Management moves into IT/IS departments?

2008-02-11T20:10:00.001Z

The function and role of product management will become crucial as businesses expand and become more dependent on technology departments to asist them in gaining the competitive advantage.

But what is 'Technical Product Management'?

When asked to describe Product Management in one sentence Marty Cagan said:

"This is the person responsible for discovering and defining a
product that is useful, usable and feasible.”

Jeff Lash concurs by saying that the product manager is the person who:

“Understand customer needs, figure out ways to meet those
needs, work to get those solutions implemented, and provide and communicate
them to the market.”

Traditionally technical Product management is a role that has operated in software and technology companies. However the role is being successfully used in Information Technology/Information services departments (IT/IS dept).

How can 'Technical Product Management' help non technical businesses?

Paul Lancour in his podcast interview IT Product Management: An Art More Than a Science?with chief technologist Manuel Barbero discusses the art of product management in the IT organisation: I’ve listed 7 key points that Manuel brings out:

Product Management is a combination of art and science to deliver products and value to a captive, internal, audience. (I’ve heard product managers described as being
half engineer and half marketing manager hence half art and half science).
Structured discipline approach to defining and delivering solutions to an audience – that has not truly embraced in IT.
It’s about selling solutions– not something traditionally done by IT management.
Be able to define the feature set and understand how it will evolve over time.
Know the price points and cost structure.
Departments who want to implement product management need to find the right people who understand and appreciate technology and the needs of the businesses end users and
commercial world.
IT/IS dept who embrace product management need a product catalogue to describe the feature set and helps the success of the introduction of product management into IT organisations.

Case in point 'Technical Product Management' in the banking industry
At Wachovia Bank, Tony Bishop and his boss, CIO Susan Certoma, implemented product Management when they began to build a much needed SOA platform for financial services. According to Susan, Wachovia Bank

“…wanted technology to become an advisor to the business,
not an order taker,”

The article states that:

deploying an enterprisewide SOA is not just about developing and deploying
components and services — it’s about changing the DNA and culture of IT to
become more produc tmanagement oriented.While most IT shops talk about meeting the needs of the business, Tony and Susan, talk about SOA as an ongoing process
of product development and evangelism — a methodology for productizing
responsiveness to changing customer needs. “We’ve taken a software vendor
product management model — the product management discipline with its associated life cycle — and instilled that discipline so I can create that horizontal
utility infrastructure,” Bishop explains.

No such thing as a non technical corporate business

As the world of business becomes more reliant on technology the need for individuals to be able to figure out what is needed, advise internal customers, manage, deliver and maintain solutions will become critical. CIOs and CTOs are bound to be heading up teams of product managers to fulfil the gap and therefore assist in driving revenue.

How to get into Product Management

2008-02-10T15:12:00.000Z

ProfSvcs has left a comment on my blog post "Moving from Technology to Product Management to increase business skills" ‘asking how someone gets into product management’. The answer became what I would consider too long for a comment so I’ve written this article that I hope will help him and others who what to move into product management. I must stress that this is my opinion based on my own experience and the experience of others I’ve worked with.
Rest assure very few people leave education (college, university…) and walk straight into 'technical product management' (as opposed to 'marketing product management' which is closly related to 'brand management')– we all have had a life before product management and that life (job) helps form the basis of our current role, consider where the following Product Managers have come from:

Bikram Gupta was a developer,
Marty Cagan a software engineer,
Andy Wicks a Business Analyst,
Daniel Leon a web-master and then a project manager,
Paul Young a web developer,
Brunella Russo worked in Account Management/Client Support role,
Jeff Lash worked as an information architecture and user-centered (IA & UCD)design, and
Matt Rowe has a background as a business/ systems analyst.

Two possible routes to landing your 1st Product Mangagement job

Go for an internal transfer from where you are into product management.

Strive to get into product management in your current company. If your company uses product management speak to the person who head up the department. See if you can obtain a job description and critically rank your self against it – also use product management job descriptions from companies that operate in similar industries as your current company. Your analysis should result in you being able to clearly identify areas that you believe (and are able to demonstrate to another person) what you could do straight away (out of the box so to speak) and what are the areas that you would need to improve on. Once you have done that set yourself an action plan (with time scales) and aim to improve your areas of weakness. This may include spending time with engineers and/or with product managers so that you become familiar, on a practical level, with various aspects of the role. Take one of the product managers or engineers out to lunch and talk over these areas with them. You could consider sacrificing a days holiday – arrange to come into work – and spend the day with a product manager or the engineering team or arrange to go on a customer visit with the product manager and attend some of the meeting that s/he chairs. (Note: I'm not saying tha it can all be done in a day - but the journey of a thousands miles must begin with a single step)...
Put the results of your analysis and action plan into a presentation – book a meeting with the Head of Product Management and make a pitch for a job. Remember you must show that you can add value.

Again you could think about raising your desire to move into product management at your annual appraisal. Ask if you could be seconded to Product Management for a period of time.

A lot depends on the culture of your company and the type of managers your dealing with.

Change your approach AND your company in order to get into Product Management.

In my experience it’s easier to change roles in your current company than to try and move into a new role in a different organisation. However you could change your approach from looking inside your company to looking at companies that operate in the same market segment or offer similar products. If you can proof that you have solid domain knowledge coupled with the understanding and skills of a product manager then they would be sure to want to speak to you. The covering letter that accompanies your resume (CV) should highlight that you have the skills that they are looking for. It will be tuff so you will have to do twice as much work as anyone else applying for the job. Study the company you’re applying to and the product ranges they offer along with competing products and companies. Be prepared to answer any question they may through at you and be able to ask them questions that demonstrate that you have done your homework and thought through the issues.

Finnally you need to be constantly reading and studying.
You need to immerse yourself with good reading material I would personally recommend the following:
How to be a good product manager
Silicon Valley Product group
Listern to the Webinas on Product maagement View

Product Managers need to reduce and handle stress

2008-02-06T21:09:00.001Z

What type of situations cause you stress?
How do you handle stress?
Stress can be a killer and every Product Manager and Project Mangers would have experienced during the course of their career. I was asked the question “How do you handle stress?” when I was being interviewed for a Product Mangers job at my current company and I have made it a point to ask the question of every Product Manager that I interview. Here are the reasons why.
It’s important that a product manager recognises the symptoms of stress learn how to cope with stress and have in place successful techniques for managing stress and be able to manage projects and/or product development in such a way as to reduce stress.
There are no real template answers to these questions – the key thing is to have strategies in place to deal with stress demonstrate that you recognise and are able to deal with it. Let’s face it, starting a new job can be stressful, the product and project managers job are ones where you lead with out authority often in a matrix management framework. Therefore you’re likely to have a lot of responsibility for delivery but very little if any direct reports or authority over the people you need to motivate to get the job done. No line manger what to hire someone and then see then burn out because the workplace and/or job was too stressful for them.

Read the following blog psots
What do Product Managers do? What is expected of them? And how not to become overwhelmed?
How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.
What Your Leader Expects of You
for tips on how to manage stakeholders and product development in such a way to reduce stress.

Remember we are all human beings - admit that you do get stressed` and trun what some may see as a negative into a postive by demonstarting ways you 've handled stress in the past and therefore showing that you can handle it if you where hired for the job in question.

Interview answers to questions regarding demands on development resource

2008-02-05T22:03:00.003Z

How would handle a senior business stakeholder that demands more than you can deliver with in a certain timeframe?

If you have had experience in managing projects and products using scrum (or some other agile management frame work) then this would be your opportunity to demonstrate that you understand the benefits of scrum to manage stakeholders at all levels (see - Part #6 How Everyone Can Get Involved in Agile). Other methodologies you’ve worked with could be used to aid in you demonstrating your ability to manage development teams and business stakeholders.
Your answer to the interviewer could include some of the following Do’s and Don’ts:

Do not be intimidated,
Do not make commitments or promises before you have had the opportunity to analyse and estimate the request.
Do not be afraid to escalate to your line manager - see Being up front during an interview .
Do ask for time to review the question.
Do include other stakeholders – perhaps in a workshop to scope and confirm the work that needs to be done.
Do give a timeframe when you will report back your findings with options.
Do ensure that the technical team are fully involved in discussions before you make a proposal.

Things to be considered when you give feedback to the business stakeholder:

Breaking what was being demanded into bite size chunks and estimating each chunk in order to give feedback on how much resource would be required to meet the deadline. refer to: How d' you eat an elephant
Explaining what could be achieved with the current resource within a required timeframe.
Referring to the technical team’s currents commitments and giving the option for less important tasks to be substituted for what is currently being asked.
Suggesting that if we hired X amount of contract resource then we could possible meet the required deadlines.
If the request seemed large – then time might be required to do research with the aim of estimating the amount of additional effort required to meet the request.
If the request seemed small – then consider offering overtime so to meet the deadline.

Remember it's your logical thought pattern that your answer will be judged on.
See other Interview Questions for Product Managers

Moving from Technology to Product Management to increase business skills

2008-02-04T17:40:00.002Z

Bikram Gupta has been been in Product Management for over 3 years he has worked in various markets and technologies such as: Telecom/Wireless, Data Networking, and Security domains. Bikram describes himself as a “knowledge worker” at heart; he’s passionate about exploring different lateral business roles outside the sales funnel. Bikram used to authors a blog entitle "Thoughts on Product Management"

#1. What’s your academic background/training?
Started working in IT with a Mechanical engineering graduation course. I obtained further knowledge in computer architecture, system programming, and Internet technologies through work experience and reading. Product Management skills were obtained through a combination job experience and reading.

#2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I worked in various roles in R&D; in development and QA, both hands on and as a project leader.

#3. What companies have you worked for?
Currently with McAfee, and prior to that worked in Lucent and IP Unity Glenayre.

#4. What inspired you to become a product manager?
I wanted to be an independent business professional. Having Technology & programming skills were not enough. I firmly believe that sound business skills can be obtained by working in various lateral product management roles – so I decided to switch to product management.

#5. How did you make the move from being a developer to becoming a product manager?
I suppose it was a combination of good luck and the interviewer being able to see the potential with in me, I would like to think that she saw that I had good systems thinking skills that could be applied and adapted to the product management role.

#6. What do you like best about your job?
Being able to take business decisions and being accountable for them.

#7. What do you least like about your job?
When I find myself questioning the fundamentals of how things are getting along and not having all the power or authority to make the necessary changes.

#8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
I am an avid reader and I have a background of working in various domains.

#9. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence?
Defining the right product(s), ensuring it is build right and position it right.

#10. What’s your dream product to manage?
An open standard based personal assistant, which can be your second brain.

#11. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
Cross-functional communication (and I would emphasis listening skills), reading the market correctly and then quantifying it coupled with good domain/technology knowledge.

#12. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Good relationship and mutual admiration.

#13. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Spend time with family, and then read, read, read....and then read some more.

#14. What advice would you give some one who wants to become a product manager?
It’s a passion. It’s your love for the product, people and company and so obviously you want to do is what’s best for all these. It should be simple so keep it simple.

Product Strategy of Microsoft, Yahoo, and FAST - BUT war declared on Google

2008-02-03T22:16:00.001Z

By the time you read this blog post the announcement that Microsoft has put in a $44b bid for yahoo will be yesterday’s news. But have you taken a minute to think what this takeover means for the Group Product managers of MSN and Microsoft, the Product Strategist at Yahoo. It goes with out saying that... this bid is either a strategic step aimed to ensure that Microsoft has a long term future in the internet world and the ability to deliver world class search technology as part of their product offering. In the first half of January Microsoft decide to purchase FAST the search technology. Bill on Business comments that:

Microsoft has laid its cards on the table early in 2008 with its $1.2 billion cash acquisition of the Norwegian enterprise search player FAST. What does this say about Microsoft's intentions, and what implications might be in store for the content community?

One can imagine that the Product Strategist have put the integration of FAST on Sharepoint’s product roadmap as part of its search knowledge management product offering. Couple that with the what Microsoft will get when they acquire Yahoo and I believe we have an outright declaration of digital-war on google. ChannelWeb Network reports that:

With out a shadow of a doubt these are exciting times for those in the digital arena – such competition can only spark aggressive innovation for dominance and market share. Given the choice which camp would you like to be product manger in: Yahoo, Microsoft or Google?

With dominance over the IT industry and Internet at
stake, top executives at Google and Microsoft have been at each other's throats over the past several years. Google has attempted to take on Microsoft's dominance in productivity software by launching Google Docs; Microsoft, in turn, is developing Office Live Workspace and its own search, mapping and online advertising businesses. The proposal to take over Yahoo is its boldest move to date against Google.

How Product Managers can push back at an interview

2008-01-30T18:08:00.000Z

Interviews are about persuading the interviewer(s) that you are the right person for the job. That you will be able to deliver the goods even when the going gets tough. A question that I like to pose to perspective Product Managers to determine if they can deliver in the face of adversity is:

OK here's the question - followed by a possible answer:

"What would you do if you were invited to a high level business meeting with the Sales Director, Head of Business Development, Director of Product Marketing, CEO and other senior stakeholders… The Head of Product Marketing gives a power point presentation on a new (on-line) product. The presentations concludes that the launch, of this new online product (that by the way is nothing like the company has done before) will be launched in three weeks time. After all, the CEO says, it's just another website."

What the interviewer(s) are looking for:

#How would you, as the product manager, manage upwards?
#Do you have the product management skills to communicate at the CEO/MD level?
#Are you able to push back in a diplomatic way?
#Are you able to manage expectations?

Suggested thoughts that need to be projected are as follows:
It’s important to be in tune with the commercial aspirations of chief executives and senior stakeholders. You need to demonstrate that you share the vision and will be an asset and not an obstacle to achieving the ultimate goal. However – and here comes the but – BUT you need to be able to positively steer the thinking towards realistic time frames and firming up on the unknowns [power point presentation are generally shallow]. Details need to be properly defined – here you have the opportunity to demonstrate [to the interviewer]:

your skills in creating a road map –

that flows into a project backlog –

that divides down into a set of user stories -

that can be estimated in terms of complexity and

time to complete.

Sets of user stories can be grouped together as themes for a programme of sprints which will eventually give a picture of the size of the project. If your more acustom to a water fall enviroment then talk in terms of product plans etc...

Once all of this has been thrashed out you then have the ability to communicate high level estimates for the project and give feedback to the senior stakeholders. This then opens up another round of discussion regarding resources for the project:

Who? (permanent or contract),

When (do you need technical resources to assist in the research if research is needed) and

How much does will it cost (different organisations have different approaches to recharges – central departments or each business unit having their own development team(s).

Ensure that you demonstrate your ability to balance your business and commercial acumen as it’s the combination of 'business sense and technical sense' that makes a good product manager. Remember organisations (and therefore processes) differ one from another - the interviewer will understand this - so it's the logical thought processes and stakeholder management skills you show when answering that determine if you give a satisfactory answer or not.

From Software Engineer to Product Manager to Founder of SVPG - Interview with Marty Cagan

2008-01-29T18:16:00.000Z

Marty Cagan has worked for several leading Hi Tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, America Online, and eBay. During his career he has performed most of the roles that are key to any technology company: product management, software development, product marketing, user interface design, usability engineering, technical writing, software testing, engineering management, and general management. Marty is a founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group a company that provides services that span the full product life cycle. He also authors a news letter that both informs and inspires. In this interview Marty shares his thoughts on Product Management.

1. What’s your academic background/training?
My education is in Computer Science, and I also did the Stanford Executive Business program. But my real education came from having the opportunity to work for and with from some of the best product minds in our industry.

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I was a software engineer at HP Labs.

3. Where did you work before you set up Silicon Valley Product Group?
I was previously SVP Product Management and Design for eBay.

4. What inspired you to become a product manager?
I learned the hard way that it doesn’t matter how great your engineering team is if the product manager doesn’t give them something useful to build.

5. How did you make the move from being a developer to becoming a Product Manager.
I found someone that I thought did this job really well, and he pointed me in the right direction.
6. What do you like best about the Product Management job?
Creating products and services that are used and loved by millions of users and customers.

7. What do you least like about the Product Management job?
So many people out there have no idea what product management really is. They think it’s marketing. Little wonder the vast majority of products and services are such dismal failures.

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
If you love technology like I do you can’t help but want to follow developments closely. Also, many of my friends and colleagues are leading engineers and architects and I constantly learn from them.

9. Describe the Product Managers job in one sentence.
This is the person responsible for discovering and defining a product that is useful, usable and feasible.

10. What’s your dream product to manage?
Been there and done that (and extremely grateful for it). Now I love to help others create their dream products.

13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do the Product Management job?

#1. Willingness and ability to engage deeply with engineers on technology – to understand what’s just now possible.

#2. Willingness and empathy to engage deeply and directly with end users and customers to understand their needs. Especially to try out your ideas on them and not let your ego get in the way of learning, adjusting and identifying the right product.

#3. Willingness to do whatever it takes to get that product shipped.

14. Product Managers come from different backgrounds: what advice would you give someone who wanted to break into Product Management who had an engineering background. How would that advice differ if they did not have a strong technical background?
(That’s a great question and one that I want to think more about and then probably write an article on for my newsletter, as many software developers talk to me about switching to product management. For the second part of that question, for people that aren’t technical, I happened to write about that in my last newsletter: http://www.svpg.com/blog/files/are-you-tech-enough.html)

15. Looking back, as a former Product Manager, what’s the one product (or product range) that has brought you the most satisfaction?
My favorite job ever was at Netscape as the Internet was just emerging. New technologies were being invented almost constantly, combined with daily interactions with developers and customers from startups and established companies all racing to learn how they could use the Internet to help solve long-standing problems. A great time to be a product manager.

Interview Questions for Product Managers

2008-01-28T17:50:00.011Z

Several months ago I spent a lot of time interviewing potential Product Manager and Lead Product Managers to head up a product team. Listed below are some common interview questions along with some that I hand crafted for the particular PM jobs being advertised at the time. There are no right or wrong answers for most of the questions. The purpose is to find out how a person will operate under different scenarios. I hope these questions will help any one who is preparing for a job interview as a product manager or going for a promotion to a Senior, Lead or Head of product Management position. Periodically I’ll post possible answers or should I say possible thought processes that your future employer could be looking for.

Where do you see yourself in three to five years time?

see

Where will the product manager be in 3 years time?

for my thoughts on how you could answer this question.

Why do you want this job?

What’s your greatest achievement to date?

How do you see the web (or the market space your in) 3 years from now?
Read Where do you see your product in two years time? for two mini case study answers.
How would handle a senior business stakeholder that demands more than you can deliver with in a certain timeframe?
# One thing not to do is to exercise your freedom of speech - but to think of all the possible options - read Interview answer to questions regarding demands on development resource for an outline answer to this interview question.
You, and your team, were involved in a successful launch of a new product that exceeded business expectations during its first phase - what would you do?
# Read Interview Question: How Do Product Managers Handle Success? for a suggested answer.

What is more important to you: being liked or being respected? Why?
How do you handle stress? Read Product Managers need to reduce and handle stress

See link above for tips on handling this type of interview question.

Do you believe in processes? Is there ever a time when you think it’s acceptable to break an agreed process?

Read:

7 things the Product Manager needs to consider when bypassing processes

How do you keep up with new and emerging technologies and how do you access and get to understand their usefulness to your product range? see: How do Product Managers Keep up with Technology? for a suggested anwer and how others have Product Managers have answered this question.
Tell me about a project you have run or a product you have managed through its life cycle? Read How do you demonstrate that you can manage products for my thoughts on this question.

What would you do if you went to a high level business meeting with directors the CEO and other senior stakeholders… viewed a power point presentation on a new (on-line) product. The presentation concluded by annoucing that we aim to launch this new product in two months time?
Read How Product Managers can push back at an interview for a suggested answer.

Moving from Business Analyst to Product Manager to "Online Product Manager"

2008-01-24T21:39:00.001Z

Andy wicks has worked as a Product Manager in two different industries. He currently managers a number of on-line products and services across a number of markets such as road transport and Human Resources. 1. What’s your academic background/training?
I went to university to study geography, but somehow came out with a Combined Honours degree in Computer Science and Business Administration. How that happened is still a bit of a blur really.

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
For my sins I was a Business Analyst.
3. Where did you work before you worked for Reed Business Information UK?
I worked for 2 years at Alphameric Leisure, a small software house that provided solutions to the Betting and Gaming Industry (initially as a Business Analyst then a Product Manager). Prior to that I spent 3 years working for Ladbrokes.
4. What inspired you to become a Product Manager?
In a moment of madness I thought it would be challenge!
5. How did you make the move from being a Business Analyst to becoming a Product Manager?
I tended to enjoy interacting with people more than analysis so when the opportunity arose to temporarily manage a handful of products I took it. Luckily for me the company thought I was doing a reasonable job and made the role permanent – either that or the Functional Specifications I used to write were rubbish, one of the two!
6. What do you like best about your job?
Having the ability to work Product Management with some cutting edge technologies, and being able to help deliver these to the market.
7. What do you least like about your job?
When it all goes wrong!
8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
Google, Google and Google
9. Describe your job in one sentence.
The art of prospering between a rock and a hard place.
10. What’s your dream product to manage?
Online - it’s difficult to say as there are loads of products I would like to manage. It usually changes day to day and depends what side of the bed I get out of! Generally any of the major sports sites would be quite high up the list. Offline - it would have to be the Bugatti Veyron (as long as the job came with one as a company car and the petrol was paid for!)
11. How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?
Luckily I joined the company just as agile was being implemented into the department. However if the short transition period was anything to go by it was hard work without a huge amount of delivery.
12. How has using agile (scrum) changed your working day?
Overall it’s increased the number of meetings I go to significantly, however the spare time I do have is better spent. I am able to focus on developing the products and (hopefully) drive online growth.
13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
The ability to communicate, negotiate and be patient. Also, being able to keep an outlook calendar up-to-date helps!
14. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Trust. Not being overly technical myself is probably an advantage as I have no choice but to trust the development team to find the best solution.
15. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Answer questions about being a Product Manager and travel as much of the world as possible
16. What’s the difference between being a product manager for a small company like Alphameric and a large organization like Reed and how did you find the move from being a Business Analyst (BA) to a Product Manager?
The difference between the two is massive – Alphameric produced products that were a mixture of hardware and software for a specific industry – at Reed I’m managing on-line products and services that span a number of industries. The learning curve was steep but you just have to role up your sleeves and get in there and do the job. The challenge of moving from being a BA to a Product Manger was more a cultural change combined with self discipline – at first I found it hard not doing all the analysis myself – I seemed to periodically switch to auto-pilot and revert back to my previous BA role – the change of mind set was the challenge. Also as a Product Manger (both at Reed and Alphameric) you need to have the wider view of the business in mind at all times as opposed to being a BA where I tended to focus on defined bite size chunks of work.

Transition from Webmaster to Product Manager via Project Management

2008-01-22T16:50:00.001Z

Daniel has over ten years experience working with on-line products in various capacities. He currently works for Reed Business information as a Product Manager for the aerospace product range.

1. What’s your academic background/training?I have a degree in politics - [which has got to be the ultimate qualification for a job in Product Management].

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?I was a Webmaster and then a project manager
3. Where did you work before you worked for Reed Business Information (RBI)?
Local goverment

4. What inspired you to become a product manager?In truth – it was the next logical step in my career at RBI.

5. How did you make the move from being a project Manager to becoming a product manager?
As a project manager I managed one or more projects and then handed the results over to someone else. I preferred to take complete ownership of the lif cycle of the product– something I didn’t get as a project manager – gradually the department expanded and opportunities arose and I naturally made the transition.

6. What do you like best about your job?The challenge and creativity involved in working with new technology and using these technologies to break new grounds and therefore offer increased a better user experience and ultimately with increased business benefit.
7. What do you least like about your job?The unpredictability and risky nature of working with new technology!

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?Google reader – RSS means that I can browse an incredible amount of information remembering it and using it is now the problem!

9. Describe your PM job in one sentence.I’m an online consultant to my business, translating business requirements into technical solutions in order to deliver business growth.
10. What’s your dream product to manage?Probably a Google product or a football website.
11. How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?
Chaotic and prone to conflict – we didn’t get much done and we agued about it a lot.

12. How has using agile (scrum) changed your working day?
My day now has order & structure and as a result it has freed up the time I need to do the more important aspects of my job that was previously being neglected.

13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
Good communication skills, be a good motivator, be a diplomat and degree in politics.
14. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
See my answer above. It’s easy to stereotype developers and say they present a particular challenge. In reality, they’re just like everyone else, every individual and team is different with their own strengths and weaknesses.
15. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Sports, films and books.

Interview with a Director of Product Management

2008-01-21T17:59:00.000Z

The 4th Interview in the series is with the Director of Product Management at NetStreams – Paul Young. Paul is also the author of the product management blog: “Product Beautiful” and has a proven track record in product leadership, thought leadership and problem solving.

1. What's your academic background/training?
I have a B.S. in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Texas at Austin.

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I was a web-based applications programmer (Oracle, PHP).

3. Where did you work before you worked for NetStreams?
Before NetStreams, I was a Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager for Cisco Systems.

4. What inspired you to become a product manager?
I was one of those annoying developers who always asked "why?" "Why are we doing this?" I found myself talking to the Product Managers quite often. I also noticed that the Product Managers were the people that got to work with the Executive team most frequently and had an influence. I knew that I wanted to make a similar impact, so I strove to join that group.

5. How did you make the move from being a developer to becoming a product manager?
I was a developer for a web-based portal that Cisco's service customers used to check service requests and trouble tickets. The product manager for that product went on maternity leave and when she came back, moved to a different product. Because I was intimate with the product's features, I moved into that role. Later Cisco gave me additional services to manage (managed WAN and LAN services).

6. What do you like best about your job?
I like talking to customers! What I really enjoy is talking with customers who bought into our products because they solved a problem they couldn't solve any other way. That's cool - and profitable.

7. What do you least like about your job?
Ankle biters. That is what I call the little tactical things that you have to do to keep the lights on. Quarterbacking products for trade shows, explaining how the trade off process works to your sales team for the 82nd time, and handling hyperventilating Executives who think the sky is falling because of some new competitor.

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
I try to read a lot. I make heavy use of Google Reader to keep up with RSS feeds from favorite tech sites like Engadget. I also regularly read the other Product Management blogs that I link from my site, Product Beautiful. I am always amazed and humbled by the great thoughts and posts that other Product Management bloggers are creating.

9. Describe your PM job in one sentence.
Product Management is 50% strategy, 50% tactical, and 50% listening. Oh, that was supposed to be specific to my PM role...here goes... Directing the Product Management team at NetStreams is all about making sure that we fire the very limited development ammunition we have at the right targets in the market.

10. What's your dream product to manage?
I've mulled this over many times. In general, my dream product is something that is blazing a new trail, a product that is in a greenfield area where I can do real problem discovery and think about new problems being solved in ways that haven't been done before. I would really like to focus on a product that helps people in some way. Software as a Service (SaaS) seems like a wonderful model from a Product Management perspective, because of the ability to quickly adapt the product to new problems and experiment with low overhead. I'm always interested in how other Product Managers are reacting to agile.

11. How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?
We haven't adopted agile, mostly because it is less applicable to mixed hardware/software products. The hardware gears turn more slowly than the software gears which can move very fast, but since we sell through a channel, our users can only accept software updates to their hardware so often. So agile would be counter-productive in our case.

12. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
Curiosity , Patience and Good Listening Skills.

13. What do you do when you're not managing products (outside interests)?
I try to keep up my health, so I run and play basketball a couple of times per week. Sometimes my wife and I get down to 6th Street to see my friend Mike Hoffer play with one of his many bands, like Calling Jack Burton (a great 80's cover band if you're ever in Austin).

Paul gives some insightfall comments on how to get along with the engineering/development team - and how to make the transition to from where you current are to being a product manager. Refer to the article"How to become a product manager and How to along with developers" for details.

How to get along with the development team

2008-01-21T17:58:00.001Z

Paul Young shares his thoughts on how Product Managers can get along with the development team.

You need what I call street cred. That means a couple of things:

first, you have to speak the language of development. Developers love to needle anyone they perceive as "marketing" (note: as a marketer you are automatically one-step above a dung beetle in the eyes of most programmers) and often times, they try to bully you! I've had programmers tell me my ideas were stupid, that they were never going to do that, that that feature would get into the product over their dead body, etc. Can you tell I've done a lot of turnarounds on Development-driven companies? You have to be able to stand tall against that pushback, and the Number 1 weapon in your arsenal is customer feedback - specifically statistically valid customer feedback.

Be able to show that you talked to a significant and representative portion of the market and most arguments will crumble before you. Second, you can't tread on their turf. It helps if you've been a developer in the past because you know what their turf is; but I'll try to explain it.

You own the "what." The developer owns the "how." You're not allowed to roll your eyes when they start going on about XML and relational databases and flash key frames and Ruby-on-Rails. Your only acceptable answer is "Wow, it sounds like you've thought about how to conquer this problem a lot. I don't get into the implementation of how to solve this problem, but it I'm sure that you and the team can apply some really cutting edge technologies against it!" As part of the same token, you can't go down the next day and complain that they chose a Java implementation when you really like .NET - you have to trust the team to choose the best tool for the job and the skill sets of the people doing the implementation.

I have seen lots of ex-programmer wannabe Product Managers fall down here, don't EVER get into a heated debate on the technology choice with the developers - you'll lose (and you should!).

How to become a Product Manager

2008-01-21T16:32:00.000Z

Continuation of the interview with Paul Young
What advice would you give some one who wants to move into product management?
Product Management is unique in that there isn't a well defined career path for a product manager, unlike operations or marketing. I don't know a lot of people who have intentionally sought out Product Management as a career, most people I know have "fallen into it." My best advice is to find a smaller company that is thinking about starting a Product Management group - it may be easier to break into than a large company. I also feel that being well rounded and having good business fundamentals are key.

If you're a developer, find some way to demonstrate your business savvy - you could even do this in your current job. Surprisingly few developers are "in tune" enough to understand the business and provide good trade offs; I'm dying for programmers who can tell me "I understand you want X, but how does Y work for you, it gets you feature a, b, c (but not d), at half the cost and time, and sets us up architecturally for the future." Instead of: "That feature will take 24 months."

If you're currently in a marketing or operations position, demonstrate that you can "speak geek." Since Product Managers are required to regularly interact with and negotiate with development, you need to be able to show that you have the street cred with the developers and that they're not rolling their eyes as you walk out and muttering "marketing idiot."

Interview with an Ex AOL Product Manager

2008-01-21T12:43:00.000Z

Brunella Russo has worked as a product manager at AOL – she currently works at Reed Business Information and has gained valuable experience in launching new products into untapped on-line market spaces.
1. What’s your academic background/training?
I have a BA (H) in International Business and a Msc in Information Systems.

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I was working in Luxembourg for a Financial Company in an Account Management/Client Support role.

3. Where did you work before you worked for RBI?
AOL and prior to that I worked for Schroders Investment Management

4. What inspired you to become a product manager?
The variety of the job

5. How did you make the move from being a Account Manager to becoming a product manager?I started as an Account Manager in a Financial company while studying for my BA. Once I graduated I was moved to London by the company to an e-marketing position, holding a role which was similar to the Product Management one.

6. What do you like best about your job?
The great buzz that this role gives and its variety. Also, it is a role which combines the best out of several different roles, from project management to consulting.

7. What do you least like about your job?
The fact that rarely the roles involves completed ownership of the product, which generally lies with the Business Owner (who has ultimate P/L responsibility).

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
By reading a lot on the Internet and getting the latest hints through friends and colleagues in the field.

9. Describe your PM job in one sentence.
Rather challenging but good fun!

10. What’s your dream product to manage?
Games or Disney movies/music :-)

11. How would you describe managing product development before you/your company adopted agile?
Far more difficult and less successful as the waterfall approach was not responding to the constantly changing needs of an internet-based company.

12. How has using agile (scrum) changed your working day?
With the adoption of agile development methodology the day is far more structured and organised both for me and the development team. There is also more visibility on the accomplishments that the team achieves and potential issues that might affect the development are spotted well in advance.

13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
Great communication skills, ability to quickly move from the little detail to the overall picture and vice versa and ability to work well under stress.

14. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Geekiness!

15. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Mmm… at the moment I ride my motorbike, dance tango, go to the Theatre and Opera, play volleyball, play guitar and cook a lot!

Interview with Jeff Lash: Author of How to be a Good Product Manager

2008-01-20T10:18:00.000Z

The second interview in the series is with Jeff Lash author of the blog "How to be a good Product Manager" - Jeff has a wealth of experience managing various on-line products and has produced a number of articles and podcasts on the topic. If you want to be good at product management continue reading Jeff''s interview.
1. What's your academic background/training?
I was originally interested in advertising and studied marketing in school. However, I had always had an interest in technology and computers, so I got involved in the (at the time) burgeoning world of online business. At the time, I learned a lot of what I did on the job -- everything from graphic design to server administration, back when one person could do all of those thing.

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I spent a number of years working in information architecture and user-centered (IA & UCD)design. I worked to help clients and project teams to better understand their users, their needs, and come up with products and interfaces that were useful and easy to use.

3. Where did you work before you worked for Reed Elsevier?
I worked in the Usability Services department of MasterCard International, working on various external-facing products and consulting with many internal teams on user experience design.

4. What inspired you to become a Product Manager?
I have always enjoyed the process of understanding customer needs and translating that into a well-designed product. I realized that if my ultimate goal was to build the best products possible, one way to do that was to be a user experience designer and help teams to accomplish that -- but another way to be in a product management position where I could achieve that goal from another angle. There were also aspects of the customer experience that I could better impact from the product management side rather than from a user-centered design position.

5. How did you make the move from (IA & UCD) to becoming a product manager?
A lot of the skills, techniques and methods learned and used by user experience designers are the same as the important parts of being a product manager. I was fortunate to work on a number of projects as a user experience designer that allowed me to understand and get involved in aspects of product management. Those gave me a much better understanding of -- and some great experience in utilizing -- the traits of a good product manager.

6. What do you like best about your job?
The most important part of product management is still my favorite -- spending time with customers, watching them use my product and competitive products, understanding more about their needs, and coming up with ideas to solve their unsolved problems.

7. What do you least like about your job?
There are small frustrations with any job. Probably the part I like least is the fact that there's always much more that I want to be able to do with my product than we can accomplish at one time. Product management -- and all management -- is about prioritizing limited resources. It's just a fact of the job, but there's a huge backlog of work to do that would benefit customers and ideally I'd like to be able to get it done today!

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
It's a challenge, the scale and speed of technology changes is increasing exponentially. I try to read as many blogs as I can manage, read general consumer and business magazines, and learn from colleagues. I try to use as many new web sites as possible -- I always sign up for the "notify me when this service is available" email notifications, since there's too many to remember. As much as I try to stay ahead of the curve, though, I can't keep track of everything. My feeling is that if something is really going to be important, I don't need to be the first to find out about it, since I'll probably hear about it soon enough if enough people are talking about it.

9. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.
Understand customer needs, figure out ways to meet those needs, work to get those solutions implemented, and provide and communicate them to the market.

10. What's your dream product to manage?
There isn't one specific one. My products -- MD Consult and First Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/) -- are used by physicians around the world every day to answer their medical questions and improve patient care. It's very gratifying to work on a product and for a company that has such an impact on the lives of so many people all over the globe. My "dream" product would probably be something in that same realm -- something that can have a real impact on the most basic aspects of people's lives around the world. The computer developed out of the One Laptop Per Child project ( http://laptop.org/) is the first thing that came to mind.

11. How would you describe managing product development before you /your company adopted agile?
In a few words -- less efficient and productive. There was more of some things -- more unnecessary documentation, more process for process sake, more overhead -- and less of others -- less communication, less trust, less effective working relationships. We got projects completed and created good products, though it took longer and was more painful than it needed to be.

12. How has using agile (scrum) changed your working day?
I'm much more involved with our engineering team on a day-to-day basis. I know much more about what's going on with the product and with projects in development at any point in time. I don't think it's any more or less time consuming than any other process, though I feel like my time is much better spent.

13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
Integrity, communication, and curiosity. Without integrity, you can't galvanize support from the various different departments and groups who need to work together to create and keep developing your product. Communication goes along with that: keeping people on the product development team informed, keeping your stakeholders engaged, promoting the benefits of your product internally and externally -- these are all essential and often-overlooked aspects of the job. Curiosity is crucial to help you understand the real roots of the issues your customers are going through, why they like/dislike your or any other product, or why a technology is being used in a certain way. With the iceberg metaphor, curiosity is what helps you discover the 90% of an issue that's below the surface.

14. What's the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Respect. If you don't respect their skills, experience, and knowledge -- if you're constantly trying to overrule their technical decisions or arguing with them about issues that are really their responsibilities -- then you'll never get any credibility. At the same time, if they don't respect you -- if you don't spend time with customers, if you don't have a vision for your product, if you keep changing your strategy -- then you'll never get anything accomplished.

15. What do you do when you're not managing products (outside interests)?
I try to keep my blog How to Be a Good Product Manager updated on a regular basis. I've been biking a lot more lately, and when I get a chance, I like to play Wii -- it's an amazing product and so well designed. I love Nintendo's strategy of letting Microsoft and Sony fight it out for the hard-core gamers while they went after the much bigger market of non-gamers (like me). I never was big gamer, but the more I play Wii the more I am impressed by it.

Interview with a Product Manager

2008-01-17T18:03:00.000Z

*What’s it like being a Product Manager?

*How do you become one?

*What attributes do you need?

*And what do you need to be able to get on with your development team?

This is the first in a series of interviews with people who have successfully moved into the Product Management arena. Matt Rowe is a Product Manager currently working in online publishing with in the chemical market.

1. What’s your academic background/training?
Australian equivalent of the British A levels which is basically a high school certificate/diploma, external courses and lots of reading!

2. What did you do before you where a product manager?
I was a business/ systems analyst (BA) responsible for specifying and implementing SQL core development and bespoke applications.

3. Where did you work before you worked for RBI?
Monster / TMP Worldwide

4. What inspired you to become a Product Manager?
I had spent seven years in the same company and had little chance of furthering my career any further. I applied for a job as a BA at the Guardian – was interviewed by a Product Manager. His explanation of what he did left such an impression on me that I decided that Product Management had to be my next job.

5. How did you make the move from being a business/ systems analyst to becoming a product manager?
Studied a few methodologies combined with a lucky break.

6. What do you like best about your job?
Seeing ideas become a reality – I get a sense of real of achievement and job satisfaction.

7. What do you least like about your job?
Not always having enough resource.

8. How do you keep up with the latest technologies?
Google (RSS) reader and pub talk.

9. Describe your Product Management job in one sentence.
Continual challenges, ever changing and always rewarding

10. What’s your dream Product to Manage?
Guardian Unlimited it’s an award winning web site. They take a common sense approach to software development – they also know how to keep things simple and effective.

11. How would you describe managing product development before you where introduced to agile?
I’ve always taken a common sense approach, so agile just reinforced this giving more structure to the SDLC.

12. How has using agile (scrum) changed your working day?
More focus on the planning.

13. What would be the top three attributes you need to do your job?
To be confident, but not cocky, focused but flexible.

14. What’s the key attribute you need in order to work with the development team?
Clarity (and a sense of humour :-) )

15. What do you do when you’re not managing products (outside interests)?
Sleeping !

Keeping Product Management Simple and Efficient

2008-01-13T18:33:00.001Z

Product Proliferation and complex ordering systems
I know I want one but I’m not quite sure which one - was the constant thought of customers who wanted to buy our cutting edge, world beating system products.
Each product had a number of options designed to solve every conceivable problem– however along with every conceivable option came a complex (and long) order code, that if mistyped would result in you receiving a product that would not quite be fit for purpose.

How not to make it easy for your customers to do business with you The customer was then faced with the challenge of working out the complex order code (an order code designed by engineers for engineers). The order codes where not problematic in the early days when we produced a handful of system products but we soon became the victims of our own success as the product range rapidly grew , become more and more popular but consumed a lot of man hours to manage. Sales order processing often made mistakes copying the complex order codes from a fax into a spread sheet before they emailed it to the manufacturing plant (70+ mile away) to be build. The order code on the spread sheet would be re-keyed into a database prior to the hardware being built tested and shipped to the customer.
The results of a complex system
Often a system integrator was responsible for building and configuring the system at the customers site and would find out half way through the project that there would be subtle feature(s) missing from the products – usually as a result of either the incorrect order code being quoted in the fixed order or the complex order code being mis-typed somewhere along the line. This would result in an angry customer contacting the company and demanding that the products be either swapped out or that a customer support engineer come and reconfigure the firmware and/or hardware on site (which could be anywhere in the world). The net result to the company:

Loss of reputation,
Possible loss of repeat orders,
Decrease in ROI,
Frustrated sales team,
De-motivated workforce and an
Over stressed product manager.

Consulting the user(s) when implementing no-brainers
Some of the answers to the above problems are no-brainers to define but very difficult to implement. One of our main competitors had similar problems with order codes and decided to simplify them for the customer (with out any consultation)- this ended up alienating those system integrators, who often would be responsible for defining a solution and placing orders, that had taken the time and energy to learn how to navigate around the complex order code system. This caused some of them to look else where for a solution provider.
What the expert says
No wonder Ron Ashkenas writes, in his article Simplicity-Minded Management in Harvard Business Review’s December 2007, that Product Proliferation is one of the causes of unnecessary complexity in organisations. He states that:

“Each innovation has a ripple effect throughout the enterprise, requiring changes in manufacturing and the supply chain, pricing, marketing materials, sales and service training, and so forth. What’s more, most large organizations are better at adding new products and services than they are at pruning, so the SKUs mount. The resulting complexity is difficult to manage – and can be troublesome for customers, too.”

Lessons I learnt was to keep everything that surround the product as simple as possible and therefore make it easy for your customers to do business with you.

See also: How to keep Product Management Simple and Effective

How to keep Product Management Simple and Effective

2008-01-09T17:31:00.000Z

Product Managers who work in organisations where needless complexity tend to be less efficient than those who work in companies who have simplified processes, procedures and best practice.

I worked for a company sometime ago that was able to produce ground-breaking cutting edge products, but found it difficult to put in place the most basic processes and workflows, needless to say I spent a lot of my time fighting to do the simple things in life.

I’ll be publishing a few blog post over the coming weeks on organisational complexity and simplicity and what product managers can do to assist in turning the complexity (processes and workflows etc) into simplicity and therefore boost productivity and be able to focus and give more time to the important matters in your product management work-life i.e. deliverables (strategic planning, high value projects, meeting deadline…).

E-mail Causes Complexity with in Organisations
But for today I want to have a rant on by pet subject: “email” or should I say the abuse of email! (Tackling the constant flood of e-mails that consumes much of my working day is one of the things I aim to do better in 2008).

Ron Ashkenas in his article Simplicity – Minded Management list email etiquette or lack of it as one of the causes of a company being unnecessarily complex. He writes:

“When you send a large number of people a message that discusses issues many of them don’t need to know about, you’re just burdening your colleagues with low value information that distracts them from important matters.”

I’m sure we’ve all experienced being CC(ed) in on pointless emails and have spent much of our valuable working-day ploughing through emails ensuring that someone has not buried an illusive request or piece of information that could be critical if not attended to.

Likewise I’m sure we’ve all been in meetings where critical issues are being discussed, with colleagues that work in the same office, and you hear those irritating words – “I sent you an e-mail” usually it’s the extra-long email that was sent to half the company – the bit pertaining to the product manager was buried somewhere in it. The email sender never thought to pick up the phone or come and see you in person about the issue. I often wonder if such people would handle their personal business (moving house, transferring large of money between bank accounts) with out following through with a 1 to 1 or a phone call illicit feedback.

Tips on handling E-mail
Brian Lawley in his podcast “How to Get Twice as Much Done in Half the Time” gives a number of good tips on how to be more efficient with your time – ironically managing e-mail is the first topic he deals with. Brian gives several email pointers:
1. Check email 3 times a day – not throughout the day.
2. Separate work and personal email
3. Turn off email notifications – when the alert pops up on your screen it a) interrupts your chain of though and b) tempts you be drawn away from the task at hand to read/answer the e-mail.
4. Process e-mail rapidly & empty your inbox
5. Keyboard short cuts – helps speed up using outlook.
6. Read large emails that need thought and a long response at a set time.
7. Turn emails into tasks by dragging the email into the task bar.
8. Avoid jumping into long and controversial threads – 50% of long threads burn themselves out.
9. Clear your inbox out – leave it empty – by close of business every Friday – it’s sure to leave your head clear for the weekend – knowing that you are returning to work on Monday morning to an empty inbox.

What I’ve experienced so far.
So far this year I’ve adopted number 4 and 7 and it has helped to keep things simple and boost (albeit by a small percentage) my over all productivity. I’m not convinced that all of the nine pointers that Brian mentions are appropriate to all product managers – however it’s always worth reviewing and challenging your own working practices to see if they can be simplified before attempting to simplify your teams, departments or companies working practice.

What Product Managers could do differently in 2008.

2008-01-06T18:16:00.000Z

What you would do differently in 2008

Harvard Business Review went out on the streets of Boston and interviewed a number of individual and asked what they would do differently next year. Listed below are the key points that managers in the Boston area said.

Stop procrastinating and be more efficient with their timelines.

Work harder

Work less

Be more assertive

Find a seconded career

Make use of their resources and go out and better understand the market and really relate to their clients

Balance work and home life – be more efficient at work

Work harder – work smarter and be more considerate with their clients

For me – my immediate aim for 2008 is to efficiently manage the constant flood of e-mails that consumes much of my working day. What’s yours?

The full video interview can be seen at 2008 workplace resolutions.

What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?

2007-12-04T23:08:00.001Z

What’s the job of the Product Manager in a cutting edge web development environment? What does the typical diary of today’s web and/or software Product Manager look like?

Product Management business as usual (BAU) activities in scrum.9.30am attend the daily scrum meeting (stand up) with Engineers, Test Analysis. Depending on which functions are being discussed a representative from Sales, Product Marketing, e-Marketing and Usability may be in attendance - after all good Product Managers get everyone involved in the agile process . Identify progress, update the burn down chart and begin to remove those impediments – the usual activities of a typical scrum master. The above should take around X hours.

Product Management and product planning activities.Spend X hours in meetings and ad hoc discussions with business owners in order to get the backlog in order for the next sprint. This will include reviewing backlog items (enhancements, features and bugs) that have been reported by business and technical stakeholders from across the organisation. It’s essential that the backlog items that will be selected for the coming pre-sprint planning meeting are reviewed and that business stakeholders ensure that they are not so fuzzy that the Engineering team are unable to make sense of the individual requirement. In some cases the stakeholder who raised the backlog item will be invited to the meeting to answer questions – however the Product Manager needs to ensure that the stakeholder has a clear view in their mind of what they are requesting - comment like it doesn't work helps nobody!

Product Management Strategic direction
Spend X hours working with senior stakeholders reviewing the product roadmap, reviewing what the competition are doing, discussing any new ideas that may have been put on the backlog and brain storming on any new innovative ideas (making sure they avoid the innovation trap) that have emerged since your last meeting. The result is an adjusted roadmap that feeds directly into the sprint calendar.

Product Management team building and re-charging activities.Meet with fellow Product Managers and discuss what’s happening in their world: what issues they’re facing – can you help them in any way shape or form and vice verse. What items do they have on their backlog and road-maps – is there any synergy in pooling resources to build features that are common to both product teams if so get buy-in from the appropriate holders: team leaders, development manager or business owners (if they are re-charged for the technical resource).

Feedback on performance of the product.One of the key applications for the online Product Managers is a web analytics tool such as Hitbox, Adtech or Google Analytics. So it is essential for the Product Management team be fluent with the use of these tools to be able to measure the success (or otherwise) of online products and the effect of releasing new features and enhancements onto the site. Product Managers need to Listening to the Voice of Customer with Web Analytics.

Routine tasks of the Product Manager.The tasks above don’t include dealing with the dreaded email inbox, fire-fighting issues as and when they are reported, chairing the sprint pre-planning meeting, sprint planning meeting, retrospective and review. That’s not to mention driving the release of the new features through the various processes in order to ensure that the release goes out on time. If your having problems getting through those routine tasks then you'll do good to invest 30 minutes listening to Brian Lawley podcast "How to Get Twice as Much Done in Half the Time".

Product Managers need to get the right balance by measuring and monitoring X hours.

It’s essential for Product Managers to get the right balance between the above activities in order to avoid perpetual fire fighting. Dividing your time across key activities is a fine balancing act at the best of time. However knowing how much time and energy to spend on each activity is dependent upon each Product Managers individual circumstances. One thing I would say is that quality time and energy has to be spent in creating and maintaining product roadmaps – feeding the vision of the roadmaps through to product planning and eventually into sprints that end up being new features and enhancement released onto the web site.

The sooner this type of cycle is established then sooner the Product Manager can break out of the perpetual fire fighting and help desk mode.

The pragmatic marketing group have produced a marketing framework to aid Product Managers get the correct balance between tactical and strategic activities.

Great Product Managers are on route to becoming tomorrows CEOs.

2007-11-25T17:08:00.000Z

Mark Dance in his podcast for featureplan (Are Great Product Managers Born or Made) states that the first rule for hiring great product managers is to hire product managers that can grow to be CEOs because they are: the CEOs of tomorrow and are the CEOs for their products. Adam Bullied, in his blog post Not Being CEO, reviews the common aspects of the CEO and Product Manager role, he states that:

“The responsibility of the roles heavily intersect. A large part, in my estimation, is due to both positions having visibility company-wide, and the requirement of working with everyone in a company in order to get your job done.”

Mark Dance also compares the role of CEO and Product Manager: stating that both are strategic and operational in that they:
#1. Create value for customers
#2. Capture that value and
#3. Protect that value

The steps taken from moving from Product Management to becoming a Chief Executive

Barbara Tallent who progressed from Product Management to being a CEO via being a VP of a few departments’ notes in her blog post Product Manager to CEO in 10 short years says:

"In some ways, being a CEO is no different at all then being a product manager. You are responsible for everything and yet there are outside influences that are out of your control. Yet in some ways it is very different. As a product manager, you have all the responsibility, but none of the authority and you need to coax, cajole, or con people into what is best for the company. As CEO you have a level of authority that is easily misunderstood and even more easily misused. But you still have to build consensus and make people feel like they are part of the decision process so, from that perspective, product marketing prepares you well for the CEO role."

Barbara Tallent reviews her career and gives four attributes that all Product Managers need to embrace to prepare themselves for more senior positions in their organization:

#1. Start thinking like a CEO – think beyond the product, the next sprint, enhancements and bug lists. Think about the position of the product and the company in the market place. Bring people together to talk about the product road map.
#2. People skills: motivation, communication – telling people why products, features etc are or are not important. Be able to lead people.
#3. Live in the sales world for a while – understand the sales process – improve your sales skills because the CEO is always selling, either to customers, investors, or employees.
#4. Learn as much as possible about fund raising and its process. CEOs particularly of start-ups will need to raise funds. Also learn what venture capitalists look for when investing in a company.

Growing CEOs from with in the company

Joseph L. Bower in November’s issue of Harvard Business Review gives a number of pointers for those wishing to progress to the level of CEO. The article points out that:

#1.The most successful CEO’s, on balance are developed inside the company – but manage to retain an outside perspective: there is a need to maintain enough detachment from the local traditions and ideology to maintain the objectivity of an outsider.

#2. Build a track record of delivering in the short term while building for the long term.

#3. Take the opportunity, should it arise, to run a business unit, department or even a risky project that gives you the opportunity to be responsible for profit and loss (P/L).

Attributes needed for driving a company forward

Bower also lists four key skills that a new CEO needs to drive a company forward and produce the results that the board and shareholders are looking for:

#1. Anticipate where the world and the companies markets are heading and create a vision to position the company accordingly.

#2. Identify and recruit, if need be, the talent that can transform the vision into reality.

#3. Gain a real understanding for the problems and issues that the company faces.

#4. Understand how the company really works – who are the key players that make things happen.

Irrespective of whether you’re a Product Manager who wants to improve their Product Management skills and standing within their company or whether you are looking to climb the corporate ladder – the advice and tips, I’ve summarised, from the authors quoted in this blog post are applicable.

Final word from Tallent was that “There is a whole lot of good ‘fortune’ and timing that goes into anyone's career” including her own she adds.

I believe the key is to be striving to reach your full potential, at each step in your career, so should the doors of opportunity open (running a risky project, taking on P/L responsibility for a business unit or becoming a CEO) you are prepared to rise to the challenge and walk through the open door.

Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development

2007-11-14T22:29:00.000Z

One of the key attributes that a Product Manager has to have in order to be successful is the ability to work in a collaborative way across teams and departments in order to bring new products to market or maintain and increase the profitability of existing products by adding innovative features and enhancements. Collaboration is one of those key requirements listed in the majority of job adverts for Product Managers. Collaboration is a key issue for CEOs because they know that bringing a group of people together from diverse backgrounds, skill-sets and professions to work as a team or virtual team is a challenging job.

According to Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson:

“The most productive, innovative teams were led by people who were both task and relationship-oriented.”

As such it’s the responsibility of Product Management to be able to work with and co-ordinate stakeholders with different skill sets and from a variety of backgrounds and at different levels.

Three factors that help Product Managers successfully collaborate are:

#1. Work closely with your teams on a daily basis – sit among the engineers and if possible have a hot desk in departments and/or the officers of other stakeholders – spread yourself around.

#2. The Product Manager has to be a universal translator: understanding the commercial and business world and yet have the appropriate technical understanding of the technologies that underpin the products so that they can understand and explain both sides of the equation. This will ensure that business and technical sense is maintianed.

#3. Be clear on your role (what is expected of you) and ensure that other stakeholders know the boundaries of your role. This will aid in dispelling ambiguity and ensure that tasks aren’t inadvertently left undone.

In short the successful Product Managers will understand the issues, technical and business pains of their stakeholders and be able to communicate and help resolve these pains for the common good of the success of the product.

Profit-Driven Innovation with Hugh Richards

2007-11-11T17:03:00.000Z

Product Management View blog and webinar series has a webinar by Hugh Richards entitled " Profit-Driven Innovation". This webinar covers key issues companies face when innovating:

#1. Why we innovate.
#2. Key drivers of successful innovation.
#3. Understaning company operations.
#4. Innovation impact across the company.
#5. Necessity for strong leadershp.

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

2007-11-04T19:03:00.001Z

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps Part#1 touched on two innovative traps that ProductManagers may encounter:

#1. Strategy: the misconception that every innovative idea has to be a blockbuster – where as a number of small incremental innovations could lead to over all product success. And
#2. Process: subjecting innovative efforts and projects to the same rigor, reviews and filters as standard business as usual (BAU) will stifle innovative growth.

Part #2 will now deal with the innovative traps of Structure and Skills.

Structure
The wrong company structure could easily hinder innovation. However a key part of the Product Management function is to collaborate with stakeholders from across the company in order to collate possible ideas for future product development and product enhancement as well as to smooth the way for the implementation of such ideas.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter gives example of companies that setup innovative projects that included individuals from across various functions [sales, marketing, production…] with in an organization. These individuals worked apart from the traditional company structure in order to avoid a company culture that would hinder innovation. The ideas that were most innovative and promising from the various areas [sales, customer support, marketing…] would be introduced back into the main company. However Kanter reports that the projects failed to integrate the new ideas back into the mainstream part of the firms. The key reason, for failure, was put down to a poor connection between the experimenting innovative team and the mainstream company. Product Management by its very nature seeks buy-in from across various cross functional areas and acts as the oil to smooth the way for such changes in order to ensure products experience constant improvement at each point their life cycle.

The Product Management function also needs to be able to review activity from various divisions across an organization – divisions that will probably be working with various technologies and/or operating in different markets. Kanter gives examples of CBS and Gillette who failed to bring various technologies together from its various divisions in order to come up with cutting edge products.

CBS was once the world’s largest broadcaster and owned the world’s largest record company, yet it failed to invent music video, losing this opportunity to MTV. In the late 1990s, Gillette had a toothbrush unit (Oral B), an appliance unit (Braun), and a battery unit (Duracell), but lagged in introducing a battery-powered toothbrush. The likelihood that companies will miss or stifle innovations increases when the potential innovations involve expertise from different industries or knowledge of different technologies. Managers at established organizations may both fail to understand the nature of a new idea and feel threatened by it.

Possible lessons learnt for CBS and Gillette would be enable Product Management to operate horizontally across the enterprises various divisions in order come up with innovative ideas. This means that the Product Manager would need to have at least an appreciation of the various markets and technology from across the enterprise.

The 4^th and final innovation traps that Kanter list is Communication and leadership Skills:

Being able to innovate is one thing but having the ability to convince others of your innovative idea is another. Failure to be able to sell your idea to internal stakeholders will probably result your innovative ideas not making itto market - and by chance they do they are in danger of being a commercial failure. I worked for a company where the engineers came up with a fabulous idea – it was designed – manufactured – was displayed at exhibitions but was not a commercial success, simply because the Sales Director did not understand or believe in it. I’ve also worked for a different company where a particular engineering team continuously produced competitive products that earned the company substantial revenue. However the team failed (for one reason or another) to gel with the rest of the company. The result was that the team was dismantled by senior management. Strong management including Product Management is required to complement innovation.

Relationships need to be built and maintained,
People need to buy-in to the ideas,
Colleagues need to speak up for your innovative ideas at meeting that you don’t attend,
Unhealthy competition between R&D teams needs to be put to rest.

Micheal in his blog High tech Product Management who owns innovation in your company writes:

"In most high-tech companies, the Product Management/Marketing team has the best view of the cross-functional processes of the organization - across Development, Marketing, Distribution, Operations, Sales and Support."

In short Product Management needs to drive innovation through various stages by using their soft ‘people skills’. Chief being the ability to communicate at all levels through out the organization.

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1

2007-11-04T13:47:00.000Z

Product Managers often need to collaborate, co-ordinate, drive, release and launch innovative ideas into the market place. However there are pitfalls that product management need to avoid if success is be to secured. This is a two part series based on Rosabeth Moss Kanter article in Harvard Business Review entitled Innovation: The Classic Traps. The article focuses on four areas: Strategy, Process, Structure and Skills.

Strategy Mistakes
It is not possible for every innovative idea to be a huge success such as the new iPod - therefore Product Managers, Business and Product Owners should be careful not to reject opportunities that at first appear too small because they do not have the inherent promise of being the next killer app. A number of small incremental wins to a product feature set could ultimately result in overall product success - especially with online products.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter states that:
Not every offering [feature, enhancement or new product] will be a blockbuster, but 'Time Incorporated' had learned what successful innovators know. To get more success you have to be willing to risk more failures, Rosabeth quotes the following example from the traditional media business as a case in point:

"Time Incorporated, the magazine wing of Time Warner, for a long time was slow to develop new publications because managers wanted any start-up to have the potential to grow into another People or Sports Illustrated, two of the company’s legendary successes. During the period before Don Logan took the helm in 1992, almost no new magazines were launched. After Logan brought a different innovation strategy to the magazine group, Time developed (or bought) about 100 magazines, which dramatically increased the company’s revenues, cash flow, and profits."

The same would naturally be true for on-line media companies aiming to increase revenue by innovation– whether it’s adding new enhancements, functionality or widgets to an existing website or launching a new on-line product in a new or related market area. The balance will be the risk and reward of innovative ventures versus the risk of the traditional and status quo which could result in the risk of loosing market share to a number of younger meaner online publishing machines.

Process Mistakes
There is a risk of stifling innovation by subjecting it to tight controls and procedures of existing businesses. Again Rosabeth Moss Kanter gives us a practical example:

"AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) in 2000 sought new Internet-based products and services using established strategic-planning and budgeting processes through existing business units. The CEO asked the divisions to bring their best ideas for Internet-related innovations to the quarterly budget reviews. Although designated as a priority, these innovation projects were subjected to the same financial metrics the established businesses were. Budgets contained no additional funds for investment; managers working on innovations had to find their own sources of funding through savings or internal transfers. What emerged were often retrofitted versions of ideas that had been in the pipeline anyway."

Product Managers would do well to justify time for engineering teams to carry out research and therefore help secure budget for both pure and applied research. It would also be advantageous to map the areas of applied research to future product functionality in order to demonstrate transparency..
See also
Innovation the classic trap
The Innovation Value Chain and Product Management
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

The Innovation Value Chain and Product Management

2007-10-28T15:51:00.000Z

Morten T Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw published an interesting article in HBR about what they call the Innovation Value Chain.
The article highlights the three main phases of innovation:
*Idea Generation
*Idea Conversion
*Idea Diffusion

Idea Generation:
The aim is to generate ideas from various sources: from with in your own business unit of team; from other business units or teams; from across the company; from customers; end users; competitors; universities; related industries and the list goes on…

Idea Conversion:
The list of new ideas need to be appropriately screened and categorised to determine the degree of technical difficulty to develop in terms of engineering time and resources verses the commercial return on developing such a product or new feature. It could be that the new idea will not bring the company or business unit direct commercial success but will help the company enter uncharted territory or, if a new feature, help maintain the products competitiveness due new developments in a rival product.

Idea Diffusion
Hansen and Birkinshaw state that “Concepts that have been sourced, vetted, funded and developed still need to receive buy in” from various internal and external stakeholders.

The key to the article is that a company's ‘innovation value chain’: idea generation – conversion and diffusion is as strong as the chain's weakest link. Hansen and Birkinshaw suggest that companies need to identify where the weak links are and either create new roles for employees to help strengthen the link – and/or when hiring new candidates seek those who will be able to address weakness in their ‘innovation chain’.

I would say that a company with weakness in it’s 'innovation value chain' needs to either review it’s product management team and come up with a plan to strengthen the product management role or consider adopting product management as a new function with in their company.

Also read:
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.

2007-10-03T17:10:00.000+01:00

Technology companies often go through good and bad times and even through the good times there will be situations which seek to hinder the personnel performance of Product Managers and Technologists. On occasions there will be situations and decisions that run against the grain of your feelings and the path you’ve laid out for yourself. Company issues: recruitment- either you can not hire the right staff, sudden change in direction that takes you unaware, technical environments not functioning and therefore hindering progress. Loss of an expected sale or even a sale man landing an unexpected deal that pushes a lot of last minute work your way with tight deadlines. And list goes on.

Here are seven tips to help product managers ride the companies storms: Have a roadmap for your self as well as your product and make sure your road map is flexible enough to incorporate changes and therefore capitalise opportunities should they arise.
#1. Develop the ability to hold two opposing views in your mind at one time and yet be able to come up with a third and even better view.

#2. Ensure you have a mentor and know when to ask for help.

#3. Be your own worst critic.

#4. Make sure you are constantly learning from your past experiences and the experiences of others.

#5. Keep your feet on the ground

#6. Be constantly learning and reading – this will help you act and re-act when unfamiliar situations occur.
#7. Make sure you have some fun activities outside of your commercial life.

Part #10 Justifying Time to Research with Agile

2007-09-04T21:53:00.001+01:00

Agile Research

I worked for a company that designed and manufactured niche signal processing equipment for the broadcast industry. Part of the secret to the company’s success was that it was not shy in investing significant amounts of revenue in a research department as well as allowing its engineers to carry out their own research projects.

In my opinion all technology companies need invest in research, but think about adopting some agile principles in funding research to ensure that time can be traced and that the business gets a good return on investment (ROI) for research that has been untaken. Here's my list of five potential things that you can adopt when thinking about trying to find time during your busy day to justify time to carry out research.

#1. Identify areas that require research and build it into the sprints backlog.
#2. Ensure that product managers have time to research so that they are up-to-date on the latest widgets, gadgets and technologies. Product management research will not be part of the backlog but nonetheless the research needs to be done in a time-boxed way. It may be an idea to set your self a research goal for each sprint (using the start and finish of the sprint as time markers).
#3. Give time for the engineering team and product managers to formally report back on what they have researched.
#4. Take note of any newly introduced functionality or enhancements that comes about as a result of the research that has been carried out.
#5. Track the benefits (in terms of increased traffic to your website - equipment sold because of the additional feature etc…) and therefore prove business benefit and therefore ROI.

For more on this topic read: Innovating in Large Companies which encourages us to spend 20% of our time in research and innovation.

10 Tips For New Product Managers

2007-09-03T17:47:00.000+01:00

If you’re new to Product Management then you really should invest 30 minutes of your time to watch Jeff Lash’s podcast “Ten Tips For New Product Managers…” The podcast will also serve as a good refresher for those of you who are experienced Product Managers. Jeff's ten points are listed below.

#1. Spend time with customers
#2. Ask “dumb” questions
#3. Let go of your past
#4. Surround yourself with experts
#5. Gather data
#6. Focus
#7. Concentrate on what, not how
#8. Communicate, communicate, communicate
#9. Sell your product internally
#10. Do whatever it takes

Click here to go to the podcast.

Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum

2007-08-24T12:44:00.000+01:00

Scrum has three key roles:
#1 The team – who owns the sprint backlog and are responsible for estimating. functionality and fulfilling the commitment made at sprint planning meetings.

#2 The Product owner – who owns the product backlog and decides on product functionality.
#3 The scrum-master who owns the impediment log and is responsible for removing any blockages that hinder the team from performing and fulfilling their commitments.

So what's the role of the Product Manager in scrum?

Alyssa S. Dver writes in her book: Software product management essentials that: “The job title of Product Manager is vague…. Sometimes the Product Manager is the business owner. Some companies view Product Managers as the liaison between Sales and Engineering, helping to define and refine product requirements and specifications.” Other companies use Product Managers as the scrum-master in addition to being a liaison between the business stakeholders and technical stakeholders.

The software and publishing companies have different stakeholders who are responsible for profit and loss (P/L), user experience etc… If this is the case then the product owner (who sits on the business side of the fence and is responsible for the P/L and/or the user experience) should be the person in charge of defining the product and the Product Manager can facilitate the discussions and decision between the team (technical stakeholders) and the product owners (business stakeholders).

I tend to view the different roles in scrum as an allegory to help me consolidate the lines of demarcation:

#1 The team is the Rock band – people pay to attend concerts to see and listen to the rock band.
#2 The product owner(s) are the fans – who pay to attend concerts, pay for the music and therefore ultimately determine what music is popular and what music the band plays.
#3 The scrum-master is the bouncer cum manager – they protect the band from over enthusiastic fans, make sure that no harm comes to them – book the gigs and makes sure that the band turns up on time.

So if your a Product Manager in a company who is about to implement scrum you need to ask yourself if what you do ultimately determines what music gets played or do you make sure the musicians play the right music. The answer to this question will determine if your the product owner or scrum-master or even perhaps proxy product owner.

Part #8 Tips on being an Agile Manager

2007-08-19T17:52:00.000+01:00

The agile manager must be able to constantly inspect and adapt in order to keep pace with a changing environment and capitalise on the changes as they occur. Here are 6 tips on ways in which you can inspect and adapt in order to improve the agility of your management and/or Product Management.

Inspecting:
#1 Agile managers tend to have an understanding of what is coming up – this occurs either by information that is cascaded to them from the board or Chief Executives or by anticipating future directions of the company and/or the market place.

#2 Agile managers seek to know the 'strengths' and 'areas that need improving, (weakness) of their team and the teams they work with - whether it's a virtual team (if they are matrix managers - as in the typical agile Product Management role) or those who directly report to them.

#3 Agile mangers strive to be better thinkers: they have the capacity to hold two opposing ideas in their head at once and then be able, creatively, to resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that has elements of the others but are superior to both.

Adapting:
#4 Agile managers are adaptive managers, they put people before ideas – they value people and ensure that they are placed in the best position for them to succeed.

#5 Agile managers adapt themselves and their programme to ensure that they remove the obstacles that are either slowing down their team’s performance or preventing them from achieving company goals.

#6 Agile managers find out what their teams expect of them and they ensure that their teams know what is expected of them – they then seek to remove any areas of potential conflict between the two in order to ensure that there are no areas of ambiguity.

The world, the markets we operate in, the companies we work for are constantly changing – the agile manager must constantly adapt themselves and their teams to ensure that they continue to function successfully in the constant changing and turbulent environment.

Part # 7 Points to watch out for when converting from waterfall to agile testing

2007-08-15T13:21:00.000+01:00

Agile can be a challenge for the Test Analyst who has been trained and is accustomed to working in the traditional waterfall, Prince 2 environments or using the V model. A tester who finds themselves as part of “the team” using the agile scrum frame work can find that they are out of their comfort zone and may feel a little exposed. We recently held a meeting with a group of Test Analysts and asked them to identify what areas of our scrum implementation the needed to be improved and what areas they thought were going well. The key points identified are listed below.
Possible areas to Improve
50% said there were:

No proper test management processes.
Not enough sharing of information across the different groups (group = testers, product managers and developers).
No re-use of test scripts across the different on-line products using the same backend systems.
25% said that:
Being left out of emails containing relevant information to the sprint.
Changing requirements half way through a sprint and not being clear on the actual change.
Test work not being prioritised enabling the tester to know what order to test tasks in.
Tester work is 1 to 2 sprints behind the development. (....Need to read the what done really means)
100% stated that:
There was a lack of written requirements to test against, not enough detail in the requirements resulting in no real understanding on how a feature should work. Also a lack of forethought on features causes problems later on in th sprint.
No formal tracking of defects: only the tester is using the defect log and changing the status.

Areas that are going well:

100% agreed that:
Definition of sprint cycle.
Sprint planning and pre-planning meetings.
Communicating daily with developers.
Good visibility as to what is coming up .
Agile process being well implemented- everyone understanding the business benefits of agile.
75% agreed that:
Close working with developers and business owners
Good use of the impediment log
Agile process being well implemented: everyone understanding the pros and cons of agile.

Tips for those new to the test agile role

If your thinking about joining a company, as a tester from a waterfall/Prince 2 background, that works in an agile way or your current company is planning to implement agile then I would recommend that you think about the following:

Make sure that you attend the sprint planning meetings and wear your 'Business Analyst' hat – make sure you gather requirements that will enable you to write short test scripts and therefore test each backlog item and task. If need be arrange (with the Scrum Master and Product Owner) a follow-up meeting to clarify the requirements.

Don’t be shy in raising impediments – it’s the Scrum Masters job to ensure that all impediments are removed so that “the team” can successful carry out their work. Impediments can include "I need more details on how this function should work."

Review, on a regular basis, the product backlog and create and maintain a query log that maps each backlog item – this will help you when your in the sprint planning meeting to ask the right questions at the right time.

Keep a defect log during each sprint - add those defects that are not cleared at the end of each sprint to the product backlog.

Part #6 How Everyone Can Get Involved in Agile

2007-08-14T21:42:00.000+01:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was adopting scrum (an agile development frame work). At first implementing scrum identified quite a few issues (mainly bottlenecks) with in the organisation. However the past few weeks have witnessed a turn around – all of a sudden it seems that everyone wants to get involved and be part of the scrum process.
So how do you (as a ScrumMaster/Product manager) broaden the influence of scrum so that all the product stakeholders have the opportunity get involved at the appropriate points in time?

Make it easy for anyone (Sales, Product Marketing, Information Architect etc..) to contribute to the product backlog. This can be done by placing the backlog on a shared drive or document management system. I’m currently using SharePoint 2007 as an interim solution before we implement Team Systems.

Communicated the dates for sprint pre-planning, sprint planning and reviews along with the start and end dates for the sprints.

Invite those stakeholders whose backlog item(s) have been selected (during the sprint pre-planning meeting) to the next sprint and the daily scrum meeting.

Invite the same stakeholders to the sprint review where the selected feature(s) will be demonstrated along with the other features.

Some may ague that all the business stakeholders should communicate their ideas to the product owner and he/she alone should attend the various sprint and scrum meetings. However it has been my experience (to date) that the product owners are often too busy (not to say that Product Managers/ScrumMaster are not). Therefore assisting the Product Owner by implementing the 4 steps above will go a long way to ensuring that your implementation of scrum will be successful. The one key point is to ensure that the product owner takes full responsibility for selecting and prioritising the product backlog items.

Part #5 How to adopt Agile Product Marketing

2007-07-22T19:33:00.000+01:00

The Agile Product Manager works closely with the engineering and technical teams working with in an agile framework such as scrum. The adoption of an agile methodology means that new features will get delivered incrementally every 30, 20 or even 10 days. This is great news for the product owner who sees the product developed and released incrementally (with in a matter of weeks as opposed to months) and gives them the ability to change priority and the features depending on the demands of the market-place. However this can prove a bit of a challenge for the Product Marketing Manager who works closly with the Product Manager and is tasked with communicating product features to the outside world. How do you best communicate product information to outside audiences in an agile way ? Ensuring that you are getting the best kudos for the efforts you put in. Here are seven tips for the Product Marketing Manager who find themselves responsible for marketing products that are developed incrementally in an agile frame work.

Review the product backlog and create high-level marketing material based on each product backlog items.
Contribute to the product backlog.
Meet with the product owner and discuss the priorities for the next sprint.
Attend the daily 10 minute stand-up sprints meeting (especially the ones toward the end of a sprint) so that you get periodic updates on what is going on.
Attend sprint review meetings so that you get a demo of the newly developed features.
Review product roadmap with product owners and scrum master and discuss which sprints (and dates of the sprints) will cover which high-level features that have been sketch out on the road map.
When publishing hard-copy material ensure product features are explained at a 'high level' and publish the 'detail' on-line.

The Product Marketing Manager like the Product Manager is duty bound to adopt an agile approach to work in-order to secure the competitive edge for both the product they are marketing and for their own career aspirations.

How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.

2007-07-16T17:53:00.000+01:00

Technology companies often go through good and bad times and even through the good times there will be situations which seek to hinder the personnel performance of Product Managers and Technologists. On occasions there will be situations and decisions that run against the grain of your feelings and the path you’ve laid out for yourself. Company issues: recruitment- either you can not hire the right staff, sudden change in direction that takes you unaware, technical environments not functioning and therefore hindering progress. Loss of an expected sale or even a sale man landing an unexpected deal that pushes a lot of last minute work your way with tight deadlines. And list goes on.

Here are seven tips to help product managers ride the companies storms: Have a roadmap for your self as well as your product and make sure your roadmap is flexible enough to incorporate changes and therefore capitalise opportunities should they arise.

#1. Develop the ability to hold two opposing views in your mind at one time and yet be able to come up with a third and even better view.

#2. Ensure you have a mentor and know when to ask for help.

#3. Be your own worst critic.

#4. Make sure you are constantly learning from your past experiences and the experiences of others.

#5. Keep your feet on the ground

#6. Be constantly learning and reading – this will help you act and re-act in unfamiliar situations occur.
#7. Make sure you have some fun activities outside of your commercial life.

Part #4 Agile Customer Support

2007-07-15T19:33:00.000+01:00

I worked for a company where in the morning I was booked on a flight to troubleshot issues at a customers site in Switzerland at Midday it had changed to Germany and by the time I went home I was booked on a flight (for the next day) to Florida. That’s agile customer care for you. The ethos of the company was to adapt your schedules to meet the customers' need. Indeed the competitive edge that we had was the fact the we responded to the customers needs and had a well trained customer support department which was backed up by a test dept, R&D, project managers, product managers, technical sales and even the technical manager and technical director who all had the ability to visit customer sites with the view of fixing problems. The agility of all technical staff meant that the company had a great reputation for customer service and therefore won repeat business and experienced greater ROI year on year, that's got to make good business sense!

I believe that our success was down to two very simple attributes that each member of staff had adopted:
1. We worked hard to be better than the competition.
2. Everybody was customer focussed.
This meant there was very little time for internal company politics and the petty little immature things that causes a company to loose its way.

Success depends on how agile your customer support is – is it down to a few individuals with the job title of 'customer support engineer' or is it the whole company.

See also: Part#1 Implementing an Agile Frame Work

Part #3 How to run an agile training course

2007-07-01T16:49:00.000+01:00

We’ve all attended training session which were death by power point. There was little interaction from the attendees and the trainer seemed determined to get through everyone of his/her dozen or so bullet points that appeared on the numerous amount of slides that they had.

I attended a six day 1st line management training course sometime ago – and was dreading the thought of having to sit through a zillion power point slides and hearing the droning of some poor trainers voice for a the rest of the week. However I was presently surprised. The agility of the trainer was quite refreshing and the participation from the attendees was second to none. Here’s how he approached the session.

The introductions: who you are what you hope to gain from the course – all jotted down on a flip chart.
Quick survey of participants to see if there were any “challenging issues” they were currently facing that they need to resolve.
Merge the participants’ expectation with the course content (the two were pretty close). This could be considered the backlog items
Short problem solving exercise to get us to think out of the box and wet our appetites.
Run a series of exercises and tasks.
Open discussion / feedback on the tasks
Periodically visit the “challenging issues” previously raised and discuss in conjunction with the feedback from exercises and tasks that were set.
At the end of the day review the backlog items and tick off the backlog items that had been covered.
Ask attendees if they need any more input on a given backlog task.
Review the course at the end of the six days referring to the backlog items that have been covered.

No power point slides, very little use of projector or plasma screen. Lots of writing on flipcharts, constant inspecting and adapting through out the day to ensure participants needs were met. A real agile approach to a training course.
Benefits:

Managers and leaders are better trained based on emerging needs as opposed to a rigid inflexible curriculum.

Teams stand a better chance of improving their performance because real life issues are being addressed.

Next time you attend a training course that is "death by power point" and you get a feedback form asking... "how it was for you" - point the training to this article and suggest they adopt training the agile way.

Part #2: Agile meetings run by an agile chairperson

2007-06-24T12:18:00.000+01:00

All of us have attended many meetings during our careers, some good and some not so good. The idea of the sprint meeting: where hands on stakeholders (product owner(s) and technical team) meet for 10 to 15 minutes each day, stand up around a white board and answer 3 basic questions:

#1 What did you do yesterday (reporting back on the commitment you made the day before),
#2 What are you planning to do today (today’s commitment) and
#3 Is there anything stopping you fulfilling your commitment.
Ranks high in my book as a good way to run a meeting to get an understanding of the status of a project, it's: concise, precise and efficient. These meetings are co-ordinated and arranged by the scrummaster (Product or Project Manager).

Sprint meetings which are an essential part of the agile scrum framework.

Sprint meetings are not too different from many typical management meetings that we attend – ironically, these meetings are not conducted in an agile way or form part of an agile framework. These meetings have very firm agendas where each item is time-boxed. It's the job of the chairperson to firmly keep the meeting on track – the final agenda item is traditionally 'any-other-business' (AOB ) which is usually time-boxed at round 5% to 10% of the total meeting time. Some chairpersons will do a 'round robin' in place of AOB – giving each person time to raise any issues they may have (this too is usually time-boxed to 5% to 10%) not enough time to tackle any real issues of concern.

It goes with out saying that the way you chair and organise a meeting depends a lot on the type of meeting, the aim and circumstances surrounding the meeting and the people who will be attending.

For regular team meetings I prefer the more flexible agile approach where the chairperson sets the agenda, gives plenty of opportunity for those attending to add agenda items, publishes the agenda before the meeting and then raises each agenda item in turn but allows the team to divert onto other topics (irrespective of whether the item is or is not on the agenda). The chairperson tactfully pulls it back on track if the discussion does not seem to be adding value to the team or department. Running a meeting in this fashion does take a bit longer (probably up to 25 - 35% longer) however the benefits outweigh the cost.

Another way to run an agile team meeting is to do away with a formal agenda. The chairperson (departmental or team leader) opens up and tells the team what their issues, concerns and achievements are. Then they open up the floor so that others can contributes and share their plans, concerns, achievements etc... I’ve been in teams where this method has been used and over time it has produced good results.

Team morale is kept high as people value agile meetings as a place where concerns can be raised, discussed and possible solutions and support given. This also has the added benefit in that the chairperson (departmental or team leader) gets to know what individual members of their team really think (people talk more freely when they are relaxed and not time boxed) and an understanding of the true concerns and issues that the department/team may be facing – as opposed to a polished presented one-liner that makes them look good.

I worked with one MD several years ago who calculated the cost (based on everybody's, hourly rate) of our weekly team meetings. OK it had the effect that we become more concise with our comments and therefore kept the meeting as short as possible. However the MD didn’t really know what was going on in the various departments in the company.

To get a better return on investment (ROI) out of meetings takes the initial investment of time, that will give you the scope to chair in an agile way. Agile meetings gives the team members time to talk freely – this gives you the ability to really get to the bottom of what is happening. To get concise to the point status of a project adopt a daily sprint meeting (10 to 15 minutes max) the combination of the two (sprint meetings every day and agile meeting every week or two) will help you run any team and or project in an effective way – insuring that you get the best of both worlds: timely reports and a grasp of the real concerns the department/team are facing - the ultimate result being a better ROI from your team.