How others see Product Managers

So, first off I (Ethan) have started a new job. And I have to admit it: I am no longer a Product Manager. I have taken a job as a Technical Account Manager at a certain large search engine company located in Mountain View (California). So I’m going to be on the front lines for a change, working with large partners to get our products implemented. SVPMA members feel free to drop a line so I can look out for you at the next SVPMA meeting.

But to my real point: I was eating lunch with some of my new co-workers today who are a mixture of pre-sales (SEs) and post-sales (TAMs). One person was complaining about some of our Product Managers. To almost-quote: “he wanted all the glory without having to do any of the hard work.” Another person commented that the PMs often went ahead of started selling features to partners that were somewhere between difficult and impossible to implement. It was the exact opposite of the stereotypical sales situation: here were the sales people telling the PM to shut up and stop overselling.

I protested vehemently, of course, but for the most part I had to agree with them. Worrying about ease of implementation or supportability is often low on the PM’s list of priorities. People want to import data from SAP - well let’s build it! And who cares that it will take fifty people to implement it? That’s Services’ problem. My bonus depends on putting out new features.

So, if you want to be a Good Product Manager, build great new features that customers will use and love. But if you want to be a Great Product Manager, build great new features that your coworkers in services and support can actually deal with. In the fast-paced markets most of us work in the strategy of “Ready, Fire, Aim” builds buzz and can get a lot of press, but does it build a sustainable business? Rarely.

RACI

Paul over at Product Beautiful had a great post about RACI- a way to breakdown deliverables by the people who are:

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Consulted
• Informed

for each deliverable. It’s very similar to Saeed’s concept of the Information Supply Chain except that it just focuses on the people and not when or how the activities take place. But as a simple planning tool it’s a great, clear approach.

Partnering for Strategic Breakthroughs

I thought I’d give this one a dry title - it’s really about the iPhone again. But I thought people would be pretty tired of iPhone posts by now.

So, for those of you who don’t follow the iPhone (both of you perhaps), Apple released the iPhone SDK. But they did something else that will end up driving many more iPhone sales than allowing you to download games - they added ENTERPRISE support. Yes, ENTERPRISE. It’s just that important. (I’m sure you know by now that your products are nothing if they’re not ready for the ENTERPRISE.)

You can now connect your iPhone directly to Exchange and get all your corporate email in one sleek, beautiful Apple-branded package. All the cool of Apple and all the IT-approvability of the Blackberry. And how did Apple do it? Did they hire dozens of developers to copy RIM’s BES gateway technology? Nope. They licensed ActiveSync. The trouble is that, as anyone who has ever owned a Windows Mobile device can attest, ActiveSync stinks. It just doesn’t work reliably. But you know what - no one cares. In one fell swoop Apple just did more damage to RIM then a dozen NTP lawsuits.

When you’re looking to take your product to the next level and add in the “killer” functionality that every single prospect asks for during demos you need to look long and hard at how you can buy or license that technology instead of building it yourself. RIM had nothing to license when the Blackberry first came out - ActiveSync was even worse back then anyway - so they had to do it themselves. But Apple went to the source and did in just a few months what RIM has spent millions of dollars building. So Apple knows what to do. What technology have you licensed for your product lately?

The Benefits of Focus

Most products do a lot. It’s tempting to try to sell all that functionality at once. But a lot of products benefit from having less as opposed to more. Yesterday I ran into a problem: I bought a new car. OK, that wasn’t the problem. My new car has a roof mounted antenna, one that goes back at 45 degrees. Driving into my garage is no problem but backing out again results in the antenna snagging against the bottom of the garage door. My fix was to unscrew the antenna. The unfortunate side effect was the we lost radio reception a lot sooner than normal as we drove out of town.

I figured there must be someone out there that has a solution to this problem. I mean, a shorter antenna isn’t exactly rocket science. I eventually found a site that had a solution so compelling I bought is right away - something very unusual for me, who normally spends an hour of research per dollar (yes, it takes me 2.99 hours to buy a loaf of bread). The miracle site? http://www.stubbyantenna.com/

Never have I found a more focused site. I mean, if you want a stubby antenna, this is the place. There’s selection and nothing to distract me from my task of finding a short - sorry, stubby - antenna.

I know that your product is a lot more amazing than a stubby antenna, but I doubt you could close a sale in five minutes. What could you remove - from your marketing material, if not your product - that would at least cut your sales cycle in half?

Seth’s Advice for Product Managers: Quit Now

Seth Godin gives some advice to real estate agents. Allow me to paraphrase his advice for Product Managers:

Here’s my best advice (everyone knows a product manager or two, so feel free to forward this along).

Plan A: You should quit being a Product Manager. I’m serious.

Quit being a PM. Get a job doing something else.

Some of you have been waiting to hear that. My pleasure.

…

The ones that are left, that’s you, can consider Plan B:

If you’re not going to be able to make a living by helping sales, by checking to see which bugs have been fixed, by using the never-ending ream of support calls to answer, then what are you going to do? Whining is not an option.

In fact, I think this is an extraordinary opportunity for you.

As [Seth] wrote in The Dip, you’re either the best in the world (where ‘world’ can be a tiny slice of the environment) or you’re invisible.

So become the best in the world at understanding your customers. This means being Draconian in your choices. No, you can’t also do a little of this or a little of that. Best in your world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.

You become the source of information, the watercooler, the person to turn to.

“I have no time!”

Of course you have that time available. Remember nine months ago when you were three times as busy with sales calls as you are now? Invest that time in building up your expertise and becoming the person people who don’t even like you turn to for insight.

The opportunity is to reinvent the way you interact with current users, with prospects, with the mildly interested and with your past clients. The opportunity, in other words, is to stop waiting around for the phone to ring and instead figure out how to do what you do best… connect users and developers in a way that makes them both confident.

Some of you will stick with the standard business card with the standard photo, the standard office and the standard feature request strategy and the standard approach to making the phone ring. It’s going to be a long haul if that’s your route.

I’m betting, though, that the best of you will end up with a product that will survive, thrive and prosper. Best time to start is right now.

Marginal Utility

Marginal utility is a basic staple of undergrad economics courses. Typically the value of a good goes down as you consume more of it. As I discovered this afternoon, I get less enjoyment from my third cinnamon roll than I did from my first (note to self: try some self-control). But sometimes when goods get infinitely cheap the consumption curve goes completely awry. In his blog deal architect, Vinnie Mirchandani writes about what happens when people start getting unlimited cell phone minutes for a fixed price:

In the UK when they had a similar unlimited mobile minutes promotion a few years ago, a man told me he used his and his wife’s cell phones as a baby monitor - all night and every time the baby had a nap.

Awesome. A million dollar solution to a $50 dollar problem.

The inspiration for the post was that most of the major US mobile phone carriers have just introduced plans that give you unlimited calling for $99 monthly. Have you thought about uncapping usage of your product?

Product Management versus Marketing and Development

Some good comments on product management from former colleague Cadman Chui over at Red Canary. From some followup comments by Cadman:

I believe Product Management should reside neither in Marketing, or Development. If a product manager falls under marketing, they end up being biased into doing a lot of communications style work. If a product manager falls under development, many times they end up project managing release schedules at too much of a tactical level.

I think most readers of this blog would agree.

Further Proof that Product Management is not Marketing

Via Valleywag: PCampSiliconValley. A BarCamp-style unconference for Product Managers. March 15th in Sunnyvale. I wish I could be there, but Valleywag is right: it’s tough to say “I’m going to PCamp” with a straight face.

It Pays To Stay Cool

From Wired, on the iPhone development process:

A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.

I guess this means I should be happy that I don’t even have a door.

Why Choose This Feature?

Recently I finsihed reading Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, by Read Montague, a fascinating book about how the brain makes decisions. It brings neuroscience, biology and computer science together to explore some of the latest ideas in how the brains actually makes decisions.

Montague spends a lot of time going over the notion of value and how measuring value is implicit and essential to every decision the brain makes. For example, when you train a dog using rewards the dog eventually obeys because it transfers the value measurement from the act of getting food to the command itself - the dog’s brain actually reprograms itself to see the command as being as good as getting food. (The cynical among you can go and check out What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage and how to apply these techniques more broadly.)

The book got me thinking - bringing in a value measurement is exactly what Product Managers do in product-oriented decision making. Why choose feature X over feature Y? Because we have some way of measuring the value of each feature. Too often we use an implicit value (”We added for support for AIX at my previous job and it never got us any sales”) but we often manage to do better (”35% of prospects said they would use the product on AIX”). But either way, Product Management is about making decisions by measuring value.