Spider-Man Vs. Megatron: A product manager in action? (Image from Wikipedia)

The Product Management blogosphere has been atwitter, and a-Twitter, with the question of the best metaphor for the role of product management. Is a PM the captain of a product as Christopher Cummings suggests? Or, going back to the old tropes, should we think of them as mini-CEOs of their products (one is always tempted to believe the Cranky Product Manager, isn’t one)? Or are they cat herders – and does that explain anything? In any case, Saeed wants to make sure we don’t undermine ourselves with unsavory metaphors like “glue” and “grease.”

Product management is a complicated and multi-faceted activity, and each of these concepts offer useful guidelines as we strive to create successful and useful products that kick ass. But there are several other characterizations I’ve found helpful over the years both to understand what I do, and to explain it to others. Since they’re not common, I would like to share them (over several posts):

The Product Manager As Transformer

One aspect of the product manager role is to do impedance matching.

From Wikipedia: The term ‘impedance’ means the resistance of a system to an energy source. For constant signals, this resistance can also be constant. For varying signals, it usually changes with frequency.

Impedance is an unfamiliar concept if you’re not an electrical engineer or a ham radio operator (I was KA6HAJ). But it basically means the resistance of a medium to information transmission, usually between components of different types. I think we can all agree that customers and developers are “different types” – and there’s naturally a communication barrier.

The product manager’s job is to bridge that barrier. In the language of electronics, the product manager is a type of transformer.

Wikipedia again: … [transformers are] used extensively in modern communications, particularly in frequency conversion mixers to make cellular phone and data transmission networks possible.

The product manager takes the signal from the market – needs, desires, complaints, misunderstandings – and transforms it into a signal that the engineering organization understands – requirements, specifications, defects, enhancement requests, and so on. Likewise, the product manager takes the signal from the engineering organization – a product with features – and transforms it into a signal for the market such as a value proposition, a set of benefits, and talking points.

Of course, like all the metaphors for product management, the transformer can only be taken so far: A transformer is a linear device, so the outputs are directly related to the inputs. A good product manager, however, will transform the inputs in non-linear ways – thinking outside the box to take the product to the next level.

Next: The Product Manager’s Purpose In Life

In my next post I’ll talk about the “highest cause” of the product manager:

As an employee, at a high level your highest cause can be yourself, the company, your fellow employees, your customers, or the product. Obviously, the highest cause of senior executives is – or should be – the company. The highest cause of the support organization and usually the services organization is the customer. Of course, by focusing on the success of the company, the executives also work to the benefit of themselves, the other employees, the customers and the product. And likewise, by focusing on the success of the customer, the service and support orgs benefit the company, their fellow employees, and the product.

The highest cause of the product manager, in contrast, is the product.

Do you agree or disagree with these characterizations of product managers? Let me know in the comments.

Q1: What are the top three Requirements/Features in your next product release?

Q2: How do the top three help address your long-term product strategy?

Q3: If you had been planning this release six months ago or six months from now, would the top three still be the same?

I have often found it easy to answer question 1, and not so easy to answer 2 and 3. If my boss asks me to answer 2 or 3 I would stall or if forced say something like “We should not do that; we are an agile company, our priorities change every day”.

But is that right? Is saying our priorities change every day almost the same as saying “Everything is a Priority”? Shouldn’t we strategize, prioritize and plan? One noted expert in the field, Karl Wiegers, states: “One characteristic of excellent requirements is that they are explicitly prioritized.”

Of course, any discussion of business priorities today has the following adages behind it:

1. In today’s world, you have to be agile, so we have to be fluid and accept change
2. In this economy, we are end-of-quarter driven, so priorities change each quarter

I observe the above but do not accept requirements change WITHOUT communicating the impact of making the change. In other words, state something like “Yes, we can consider that change and we should understand its impact on ________ and ________”

To help others make the decision, I find it is very helpful to list the pros and cons in two columns, it doesn’t hurt this method is ascribed to Benjamin Franklin:

An investment in knowledge still yields the best returns. – Benjamin Franklin

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first. – David H. Comins

(image courtesy Blackberry Studio)

Each requirement has a web of relationships with customers, stakeholders, market elements, risks, and competitors

In my last post I talked about the fact that agile methodologies are all about “doing the most important thing first.” This post is about figuring which is the “most important thing.”

As a product manager or product planner, how do you reconcile the following:

• Too many ideas
• Too many customers clamoring for their pet enhancements
• Engineering teams who have lots of “cool” things they want to implement
• The sales force screaming about the “must haves” of today’s “deal of the day”

Prioritization is a problem whether you’re doing waterfall or agile, and whether it’s a new product or an existing product. In the agile context, you have to determine your most important story, then execute on that story. Then on the next most important story, and so on.

This is easy to say, isn’t it – just do the most important thing first! But there’s a slight problem – how do you know what’s most important? If you’re a product manager or product planner, you have many constituencies, each with their own set of priorities, and each with more than you can possibly accomplish. You have to consider: customer needs and their desires (often as important as needs); company goals and strategies; your technical capability to execute on the story; tactical sales force needs; and let’s face it, personal assessment of the importance by everyone from the product manager to the engineer to the CEO herself.

And if you don’t come up with a prioritization someone else will – maybe an engineering manager, maybe the VP of Sales. And they’re not in a position to necessarily make the best decision for the company as a whole.

Now once you do make a decision, as the product professional, how do you justify it when those with axes to grind seek you out, or call you on the carpet in the executive board room?

For all these reasons, you’d better have a system – and it’s best if that system is visible, takes into account the interests of all the stakeholders, and in general helps you find the “right answer.” It’s even better if the system is not just qualitative, but quantitative, and traceable. This sounds a little like a spreadsheet, but as lots of product managers have discovered, spreadsheets have a host of problems:

• It’s hard to represent all the relationships you want to capture – to customers, market themes and other strategic elements, risks, competitors, etc.
• They aren’t very transparent
• They are terrible for acting as an enterprise knowledge base (if even stored in a sharepoint or wiki), and
• Who wants to, or has time to, create a big spreadsheet model?

So, you want something that’s a little like a spreadsheet, but is also

• Transparent
• Enterprise
• Purpose-built to handle the desired relationships to customers, market segments, competitors, risks, and marketing themes.
• Provides out of the box analysis

Well, I have one of these, and as a PM who didn’t have one in my last job, I must say it’s changed my life.

For those of you who attended the Tom Grant webinar recently, thank you, your participation made it a success.  As is usually the case, we received more questions than Tom was able to respond to during the duration of the webinar.

However, Tom has very graciously responded to your unanswered questions.

Also, a huge thank you to Tom from all us at Accept, if you ever have the chance to speak to him directly, he’s the nicest person that you will ever meet.  You can contact Tom directly at @TomGrantForr.

1. Regarding product innovation – What are the top 2 or 3 things, processes, practices, etc that are working in companies today?

Expanding the number of sources. Successful vendors are putting a lot more effort into capturing ideas from more people inside the company, as well as customers and partners.
Transparency. An increasing number of vendors see that they can’t really be sure about the reception from customers (and partners) unless they’re willing to share their current plans with them.
Mid-course corrections. The point of this transparency, along with similar measures, is to get the information needed to make mid-course corrections while innovating. (Versus the “release invention then figure out adoption” model.)

2. From the clients that you talk with at Forrester, how is the process or challenge of innovation today different from industry to industry?

A very good question! For many industries, the challenges may be the development of the underlying technology that will support an idea, or the necessary infrastructure for collaboration across different organizations. The alternative energy industry, for example, is certainly working hard to find ways to reduce the cost of manufacture for new technologies. At the same time, they’re also involved in an innovation process than spans multiple organizations. R&D departments in private companies may be working on different aspects of the same technology, in conjunction with academic researchers.

In the technology industry, the challenges go beyond just finding the next Big Idea. As we discussed today, many tech vendors are, unfortunately, discovering their users for the first time. They’ve heard user feedback about their products, but they haven’t fully understood the use cases, roles, business problems, and other human elements on the other side of the curtain.

The other noteworthy challenge for the technology industry, innovation-wise, is looking for ways to build the “minimally viable product.” (I’m not the originator of that phrase; a very smart VP of PM whom I interviewed recently is the author.) In one of the slides today, I used the word parsimony as shorthand for this challenge. An industry that has been used to piling on features and capabilities is now discovering that some of the truly successful innovations have been the less complex but more focused technologies.

3. You talked about companies using social media to capture the wisdom of the crowd, are the proof points that these are better than other methods?

Social media don’t replace traditional sources of information. Instead, they supplement the ones that vendors will continue to use. As for proof points, we have a lot of single-case examples of how vendors have cut the amount of re-engineering needed (Intuit) , improved the identification of the target market (Collabnet), and accelerated the time to market (Clickability). Future research will give us aggregate statistics on these and other measures.

4. How can you filter through all the social media information to glean innovation information?

Again, it’s all about the question you want to ask. For example, if you’re really interested in ideation, you’ll focus on the channels where people might directly suggest ideas to you. Some of these involve direct conversations with customers (your blogs, forums, innovation sites etc.). Others are independent sources that nonetheless are very suggestive or inspirational. For example, when I was working on a collaboration product, I regularly rotated through different forums or communities for particular professions, to better understand their collaboration challenges. Hearing how health care professionals distrusted web-based collaboration tools, and why, led to a whole discussion in our group about the need for building more what amounted to product marketing about security collaboration, designed for audiences like these, into the product. With limited time and resources, we had to prioritize this project over other ideas we had-and customers would never see, if they felt nervous about using the tool in the first place.

I’m talking about an ongoing feed of information. If you have a particular question that you need to ask right away, the challenge isn’t avoiding information overload. Instead, it’s knowing where to look, so that you don’t have to spend too much time and effort blundering around different types of social media, trying to figure out which one will provide the answer. Once you find some reliable sources (or you build them yourself), return trips for information become increasingly easier.

Calvin Borel and Mine That Bird win Kentucky derby (image courtesy SFGate.com)

Last week we hosted a webinar with Tom Grant of Forrester who spoke about how the merging of the right ingredients can produce winning results.  One of my favorite Tom quotes from the webinar was:

Innovation is both an art and a science. Social media help with both.

There is so much chatter in the blogisphere about the benefits, or not, of how companies, in particular B2B’s can use social media to take advantage of this wave for product innovation.  Real innovation, not just the “nice to have” features but the “game changers” which will make the difference between the survivors next year, or even five years from now.

I recommend that you check out the replay of Tom’s webinar, and if you’re not already following him in the blogisphere or on Twitter @TomGrantForr, you should, he’s got some very interesting thoughts and perspectives for product managers on how to navigate these ebbs and flows.

I’ll post some additional questions next post, that we recieved during the webinar, that Tom responded to after the event.  Stay tuned.