By Peter Longini, Managing Editor 

Ariba, the California-based colossus of specialized software and services used to help companies of all sizes manage their procurement spending, is a firm believer in product management.  So were a number of the companies Ariba acquired along its way toward becoming the giant in its field.  But as in many faith-based entities, their liturgical practices varied. 

So this past spring, when Bob Shecterle was recruited to become Ariba's Vice President of Solutions Marketing, one of his first tasks was to begin to craft a common structure around managing what had become the company's rather eclectic assortment of product management practices, structures and functions. 

"Two years ago there were product managers, but they weren't organized around solutions, they were around products," he recalled.  "So Ariba said they wanted to pull this all together into a solution management framework.  At the time, we had multiple product management structures in place through these acquisitions.  When I got here, there was a lot of variability in terms of prioritization and how they approached defining requirements and communicating them to Development.  They each had their own little subset of processes they had come up with over time." 

Fleshing it out

The new framework the company envisioned included an integrated organization in which the product and service management function would mirror Ariba's distinctive interface with its market - one in which many, and sometimes all, of the company's software solutions and services needed to work in tandem, rather than separately, to address a client's business requirements. 

"There was an org chart and there were reporting relationships as well as a good theory," Shecterle said, "but there wasn't much structure around it.  So I've been taking this model - one that I've worked with in the past - and adding structure around it in terms of process, in order to make it definable and repeatable."

The resulting structure includes, in descending order from his own post as VP: four solution owners, several solution line managers, and about fifteen product managers reporting to them.  "Ariba delivers its spend management suite as solutions.  So we have a solution area for spend visibility, one for sourcing and contracts, one for procurement and network, and one for connectivity and supplier management.  In some cases, the solution owners may have as few as three products; in other cases it might be six or eight," he said.

By the numbers

Part of managing the function is tied to metrics, he noted.  For example, how effectively has the company done from a revenue perspective?  "If a product manager is doing a good job of understanding the market and the competition and prioritizing the direction their product needs to go in terms of new features, functionality and service capabilities, we trace to how that works through revenue.  There are also other metrics, like where do we stack up in analyst rankings in that particular product category?  And how effective have we been able in delivering product against our roadmap?" 

Out of phase

But there's also an artistic component.  "When we get into identifying where we need additional resources - if one of these product or service areas looks like they can't deliver on some of those metrics - is that a particular performance issue?  Or is it one we need to look at as function of breaking it out into additional products or services and additional product managers?" 

There are wrinkles as well.  For example, Ariba - like many other companies - keeps some of its operations offshore.  And some of them are very far offshore, as far away as India.  From a product management perspective, that hasn't been a problem.  But for day to day operations, it adds some unique challenges.  "When you have just a small part of engineering for a particular product offshore, and they can coordinate with local development resources, that works pretty well," he noted.  At the same time, however, the company has arrived at the point that for some products, almost the entire development team has been sent offshore.  

"Having a product manager located in the U.S. and the engineering team almost entirely in another time zone introduces challenges," Shecterle acknowledged.  "So we're actually putting product managers with those development teams in offshore sites and they report back to a solution owner at headquarters."

That's not all.  Like many companies, Ariba is a proponent of Agile Development - an approach to software development that grew up in reaction to the heavily regulated, regimented, micro-managed use of the waterfall development model during the 1990s.  Its methods involve a focus on adapting quickly to changing realities so that when the needs of a project change, an adaptive team changes as well.  But there are limitations.

"When you combine agile development with an offshore development organization, you can't afford the overhead that goes with somebody who has a question and has to wait six or nine hours to get an answer," he said.  "The cycle can't withstand this kind of time zone situation. Thus the need for local product management"

The fundamentals

Although Shecterle's job at Ariba is officially referred to as VP of Solutions Marketing, its fundamentals come down to product management, strategy and a focus on empowering his staff.  But it's not an exact science.  "A lot depends a lot on the maturity in the life cycle of a particular product or service.  For example, I have had a solution owner who is absolutely fantastic at creating new products and what it takes to do the market research, understand what's driving it, what the pain points are, and how to articulate that in terms of a product," he said.  "Once we get there and start to get successful, I'd move a different person in - someone who's very good at care and feeding - and move the other person onto the next new thing.

"At the same time, it's important for me to make sure these people spend a good balance of their time between engineering, field sales, and customers.  I want to make sure they have targets around how much time they need to spend in each of those major areas.  If someone has a natural affinity for designing and managing the engineering process, for example, they might be less comfortable in front of a customer and not spend enough time doing that.  But, in order for them to effectively deal with the opportunities and prioritization, they need to have that time," he said.  "So I have a target - it's not a hard target - but a target for how much time I'd like them to spend among those three major constituencies to make sure that they're getting the right view of the requirements for their products and how they're being used and sold through the field sales organization, the services organization, and actually bringing them to market." 

Keeping it real

Managing product managers is also about helping them grow in their professional lives.  "My job is one of overall vision," Shecterle noted, "and then coaching, mentoring, and removing roadblocks to make my people successful - insuring they have the tools, the education, the knowledge, the access to materials for them to succeed."

At the same time, he points out, there are real constraints.  "It's about making these people successful within the boundaries imposed on us by the markets and the realities of resource constraints," he noted.  "It's easy to tell a product manager to build an industry-leading killer product.  It's more of a challenge to say: build a path to get there within the constraints that we have. 

"I have some product managers that are very passionate, and it's easy for those people to get frustrated when they say we need 400 hours of work to deliver the best product we can and tell them they only have 100 hours - I'm making these numbers up - and to not have them get discouraged.  So it's not that we don't believe in the vision, it's a matter of achieving the vision within the constraints imposed by the market."

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