You can feel the energy in the room earlier this week as we huddled around a projector at a two-day company offsite. Our company is doubling in size every year, we’re hiring new people all the time and growing interest in more globally competitive innovation and frugal innovation is feeding us an opportunity to become a very large company. The mood is naturally upbeat as we launch the offsite with a review of company performance.

Throughout those two days I must have heard a dozen stories about different customer prospects and what their pains were in the innovation cycle. Though different prospects were interested in specific features, there was a theme that strung across nearly every story.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between product managers and their boss that’s caused from the way the two groups communicate.

• Product managers are most concerned with building products faster, because that’s what’s communicated from the top-down and what they live and breathe every day; requests for more product features than there are resources to develop and tight deadlines.
• Despite the communication from the product manager’s boss about deadlines and features, what keeps your boss up at night is making products that customers want – products that will sell. When 50 percent of product launches are a failure, the risk and pressure are high to deliver.

Neither group is incorrect and both are important issues, but everyone can work a little better if we better understand each other.

Executives can’t have all the features they want – they have to choose based on resources and priorities. Find a way to communicate the tradeoffs and where they might have to give up a feature. Your boss shouldn’t be the only one sweating whether the product will sell. Get in the game, join the discussion, get customer feedback and contribute to getting the RIGHT features into the product.

Even if all you hear from up the chain is pressure to meet deadlines and develop products faster, you can bet if we ask your boss what their biggest concerns are, they’re worried about products that sell.

We’ve just announced our new Transparency webinar series – featuring industry experts including Tom Grant and Roy Wildeman of Forrester Research Inc.; Brian Lawley, the author of Expert Product Management; and renowned blogger Scott Selhorst!

Absolutely a fantastic line up – brought together in this series to help product managers increase organizational agility and enable faster, confident decision making through transparency, real time analytics, collaboration and communication across the entire product innovation lifecycle.

For more information, visit our webinar page. We hope you can join us for these exciting events.

A product management consulting group called Brainmates did an interesting survey on social media and product management.

The survey was a series of questions that all start with “Do you use social media to…?” The answers were yes, yes and yes. We use social media for everything… except to get feedback about our products.

A survey like this has a lot of bias, because answering “yes” equates to “I’m doing my job” and answering “no” could mean “I may be missing something”. The natural inclination is to respond with yes, which makes the anomaly statistic even more compelling.

We all know (I hope) that we should be using social, collaborative tools to gather feedback from our customers that impact product development, so why aren’t we?
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On Monday, May 17, 2010, from 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Eastern time (18:00-19:00 UK time),  Tom Grant, Ph.D. from Forrester Research will host a teleconference on Requirements Tools.

“…the adage “the right tool for the right job” definitely applies to requirements tools. We have segmented the requirements tool market by the business problems that they address.”

Teleconference Agenda:

• The ROI of requirements tools
• Different business problems, different tools
• How the needs of IT and TI differ
• Recommendations and next steps

You can find more information about this event at http://www.forrester.com/rb/teleconference/requirements_tools_address_different_business_problems/q/id/6281/t/1. A teleconference registration fee may be required.

Devolution of Whole Product Launch

One of the best practices I communicate in my client work is Whole Product Launch (WPL). I help companies define success by brainstorming on what it looks like, appears to be, customer satisfaction, etc. i.e. What needs to happen before customers get value not what needs to happen before we release the software.

However, I’ve noticed as companies embrace Agile this concept is difficult. The cross-functional team best practice in Waterfall is evolving to a product team that does delay stand-ups showing progress. However, many of the deliverables for WPL do not lend themselves to a daily stand-up. And many of the people in the cross-functional team are not really part of the new “product team”. Also, since some of these deliverables have long lead times they either devolve into lesser outcomes or are done “after” the release.

The result is poor or late sales enablement, customer training materials, press release, etc.

So how should one bring Whole Product through an Agile process? More on that next week…