All posts in Leadership

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When To Quit Your PM Job

January 15, 2010

Blog post from 280 Group on when to quit your PM job. Wish I had found this years ago, it wasn’t written until last October, but it’s spot on for the most part.

#6 and #9 applied directly to my situation over the past couple of years. If your company isn’t committed to what you are doing, and won’t invest in your project, you are doomed from the start.

#1 on leaving when your engineering group has no desire to be part of a team. I disagree leaving in this situation is the easy way out. As the spiritual leader of a product, you need to work with engineering management to get the right people on the team. I have found on a number of occasions it may just be 1 person with a bad attitude screwing up the dynamic for the rest of the team.

#2 on passion. You could say this is a reason to not even be a product manager. There are too many product managers who just phone it in, have no passion. I have not moved into roles where I wasn’t fanatical about the product.

#5 is interesting on product management and it’s function. Product management is one of those roles where everyone thinks they are one; engineers, support, designers especially. The product managers job is to work across these functions to own the overall vision for the product. A jack of all trades person can be a perfect product manager.

#7 I would say if your companies strategy is growth through acquisition then it’s a bad place to be a product manager. You are just keeping a seat warm for a product manager from a company that is being acquired.

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Customer Delight – Give Me One Sexy Feature

May 15, 2008

I co-hosted a working session on Delight and Gen Y at a conference a few months back. Discussing customer delight, what it means, how to achieve it and what impact it has on your relationship with the customer.

A few examples from the session:

-Nintendo Wii, everyone is familiar with this example, and it is very applicable to product management. The Product Managers for the PS3 and XBox360 spent their time focusing on graphics horsepower, and to a lesser extent online community. The Wii changed the game and made it all about fun.

Most people don’t have a HDTV, and most game developers aren’t creating games that take full advantage of all graphics horsepower of the new consoles. The way customers interact with the wii, the controller and the games make everything else less important. The most commonly played game is still Wii sports, a game with basic graphics.

The lesson for PM’s here is, are you even focused on the right customer problem or need. Is your bigger opportunity to change the relationship your product has with your customers?

-Ferrari’s, yes expensive Italian car, one that is frequently broken. Everyone I know that has one, talks about how often they need to be serviced and how expensive those services are. It’s still a Ferrari, the look, the sound, the reaction, you ignore the downside of owning one because the feeling it emotes is so strong it overcomes any negatives.

-My Credit Union, I still bank with a CU because of only one feature. When I overdraft my checking they take the money from Savings and don’t charge me. Seems like a simple thing, but sometimes a check gets posted before a deposit, I forget to move money, and because my CU takes care of it, I don’t have to worry about it.

Lesson here is that your product or service may already be doing something that delights your customers, do you know what that feature is? It’s not uncommon to not know what your customers like about your product until it gets changed, or removed.

-Human nature, beautiful people. It’s human nature to put up with more grief from pretty people. Men do it all the time, pretty girl at a bar, but not much else there, well she is pretty. Looks matter, and can for a short time, help you overlook what lies beneath. A good looking product, a sexy product can distract attention from the less attractive features.

Lesson here, don’t overlook the importance of being pretty, sleek, clean, sexy.

Changing QA Roles Impact Product Management

May 8, 2008

The role of QA will vary by industry, but in the software industry QA used to be the PM’s best friend. QA’s job was to test the product, and verify not only the quality of the product but that the product met the requirements outlined by the product manager. Quality wasn’t just about bugs, it was about how well the product executed against the goals.

QA has changed over the past 10 years, moving more towards automated test suites and white box testing. QA Engineers as coders, performing unit tests, filing ‘bugs’ in the code. Testers who had a knack for identifying usability issues, or deviations from the requirements, or end to end customer experience have been driven out.

The impact on a product that isn’t terribly complex is probably negligible. On more complex products with longer histories, installed customer bases, and significant interactions, the move towards QA Engineers who don’t actually understand the complete product picture results in less usable products, and failures of usage. Products become less usable since there is not as much over site over the customer experience.

Usability, User Experience, Designers, they are the ones who’s role it is to fill this gap. Unfortunately they don’t understand the product nearly as well as QA. They also look at how usable the product is on a individual dialog or feature level, in short sessions and interviews, without a real feeling for how the product works as a whole. Since they don’t know the product as well, even when they are involved in the design process early on, they don’t have the product knowledge to be able to steer development in the right direction.

A good QA tester knows the product, its interactions, use cases, customers, and can steer a team in the right direction and away from pitfalls. With fewer QA people in these roles, in favor of automation engineers, the burden of filling the gaps falls to engineers and product managers.

Product Managers jobs are now even more difficult. In addition to uncovering customer requirements and needs, writing requirements, they now must verify the product meets the spirit of those requirements on their own, because QA cannot be counted on to do so. A PM can’t really put ‘and don’t suck’ at the end of each requirement, even though you would think it’s implied. The PM owns the end to end customer experience, and that means testing that experience, and doing it early enough in the process to where failures can be identified and resolved.

A good QA tester used to be a PM’s best friend. As QA gets squeezed, with PM’s being the single throat to choke the burden rests on the PM’s shoulder to make sure the product is delivered and not just free of critical customer facing bugs, but that it actually is a product worth using.

Powerpoint Tyrany and The Hockey Stick Graph

May 7, 2008

A skill that comes late to many Product Managers, as it did for me, is the ability to promote your project to internal stakeholders. Your project is in competition with other projects within your organization and company. The members of your project team rely on you to make sure they have the resources to make the project a success. The project and even the jobs of the team members can be on the line.

No pressure.

A few key things to keep in mind:

-Marketing needs to be involved so they can help you with the financial upside of your project, what is the benefit to the company

-Support and operations need to be involved, what’s it going to cost?

-You are competing with other projects for resources

-Be clear on what you need to succeed, people, contracting dollars etc.

-Don’t be afraid to kill your project if it isn’t going to be funded to the point where you can be successful.

-Strategic or technical alignment, the hail Mary pass of project resourcing

Marketing Involvement

Marketing is your best friend, they are going to help you promise the world. In the current business environment, you aren’t going to get funding unless there is a lot of upside. Work with your marketing folks on what the upside is. Then once you get an idea of what the incremental revenue will be, take that and double it, that is what all the other product managers are doing

Support and Operations

I have seen projects move forward that were direct to consumer offerings, and based on the cost of development, the revenue and the ongoing costs, it was a money loser, or no one knew what the revenue would be. Reminds me of that old SNL skit on the bank that only makes change. “How do you make money by only making change?” Volume. Another way this can happen is if you are changing a product or service and lowering costs, great for the consumer and adoption but your margins can disappear.

You are competing with other projects for resources

This is the hardest one to deal with. No matter how logical you think you are being, how reasonable your numbers are, and how confident you are in your chances for success, someone is in front of management with a hockey stick graph, promising the world. These people are all over the place, are shameless and are never held accountable. I call it the tyranny of the really good powerpoint deck. He who has the best deck wins.

Be clear on what you need to succeed

Don’t throw extra junk into your proposal, focus on what you really need to succeed. If management approved everything you asked for, could you deliver the results? Often we are so beat down before we even get into asking for resources that we ask for what we think we will get rather than what we actually need to succeed.

Kill the project if you don’t get what you need

Nothing is worse that asking for 20 headcount to deliver XX$’s and getting 5 headcount and still being held accountable for the same revenue. It isn’t reasonable and business leaders need some tough love. It is doing them a service, since leaders don’t want to kill projects, so they take a peanut butter approach to resource allocation, spread a little over a large space, and get nothing.

If it is suggested that people can contribute in their ‘white space’ or ‘free’ time, run don’t walk away. It’s the equivalent of a pretty girl telling you she wants to be ‘just friends.’ More projects should get killed, they don’t because everyone invested in a project wants to fight for it, to preserve their dream, their work, their ideas, even in the face of impossible odds. Better plan, if you have a great idea, can’t get it supported internally, leave and do it in your own.

Strategic or technical alignment

You can get a project resourced if it is strategic, so ignore the revenue side of things, or if it is using some new technology. When pitching your project look for opportunities to align along new skills, technologies, or opportunities. This could help you bypass all of the logical P+L reasoning that would normally apply to project resourcing. You can try these magical words/phrases; iPhone, Facebook, Mobile, Social Networking, Crowdsourcing, User Contribution

If all else fails, find the most self promoting pitch artist and get on their project, it’s going to get funded. Just keep in mind when things go South, they are going to bail before the project completely craters and leave you holding the bag