Dare to be different, prepare to be exhausted

By Peter Longini, Managing Editor

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you believe in product management, at least in broad outline, but your company doesn't actually have anyone doing it at the moment.  And let's say, too, that by ‘product management' you mean a business function that involves defining the product or service to be offered, securing the resources needed to commercialize it, coordinating all the activities across the organization required to make that happen, promoting the product internally and externally, launching it in the marketplace, and ultimately being held accountable for its financial health.  If that's really what your company needs, how, exactly, do you pull it off?

According to Greg Coticchia, the Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer of security software maker Cloakware, whose career includes over twenty years in product strategy and management, there are a thousand different ways to organize the product management function.  And under the right set of circumstances, almost any of them can succeed. 

Is it necessary?

But before you start, it's important to understand that a company's success doesn't necessarily require a formal product management function at all.  In fact, a number of companies have never had one and they're doing just fine, thank you. "Plenty of companies have been successful building up one-product companies to $50-100 million and selling them; it's a model that can work," Coticchia acknowledged at the Product Strategy Network roundtable.  They're the classic software One Product Wonders."  But in business, as in comedy, timing is everything.

"At the very beginning of most startup organizations, there are really only two things that count: someone to build it and someone to sell it.  Nothing else really matters," he said.  "It would actually be difficult to have a product manager from Day One.  And I accept that as a marketing professional, as a person who has spent some time in product management and in sales." 

The problem comes when a company decides to broaden its offerings.  Because that's the point where the distinction between the company's business and the company's products suddenly takes on real importance - it's the point where killing a product or even a whole line of products doesn't necessarily mean killing off the parent company.  It's what Coticchia calls the ‘second product dilemma' for a previously successful single-product firm.  "The second product never makes it for a variety of reasons," he noted.  "They never actually get nurtured, owned, pushed out, or successful.  It's always all about that first product that started the company - the cherished baby, the first child." 

Until the company's founders, visionaries and senior executives accept that their products and business are two different things, no product management function can succeed.  "When the product is the company and decisions are made that way, it usually means failed product management and marketing communications," he said.  "You have to separate those functions." Sometimes that requires a bit of a jolt.

A staggering difference

"A lot of time when people look for product management, it's kind of like an alcoholic - you wait until there's a crisis, when you've bottomed out, and then you say to yourself ‘I need change,' and you go to an AA meeting," Coticchia said.  "A lot of people want to go into product management after they realize they've hit the wall.  They say: ‘We can't continue selling these one-ups to customers, we're getting bigger and bigger organizations and stovepipes and it's not working anymore; we can't get it to scale.  I used to know everything that was going on in the company and now I don't anymore.  I'm lost.'"

But even in a crisis, people prefer to look at the changes represented by the introduction of a formal product management function as applying to everyone but themselves.  "I have been in eight or nine different startups at various stages and every one of them says: I think we need product management.  They all say they need product management until it affects them and their department or in how they run the company," he said.  "They tell you ‘It's not me, it's the other guys that have to change.  They haven't defined the product right.  Those sales people are taking any deal that walks in.  Why can't you just define a market for them?' " 

Unless product management is really supported by the company's executive management structure, it will fail, Coticchia noted.  "If they don't support product management, it will get crushed by the people who build the product and the people who sell it, because that is where the muscles of the organization are, particularly in an early-stage company.  That's where the power center is, that's where the money is.  They will make the decisions.  And you'll end up having a product management organization that's doing all the things product managers are supposed to do, and yet it's still not working."

Picking people

Picking the right people for that role is also critical to the function's success, Coticchia noted.  But it doesn't always happen the right way.  "Product managers are often people that are well liked in the company who haven't succeeded in their original role as engineers or salesmen.  So even if the company doesn't have a PM function, they try to squeeze him in there.  I've seen more companies fail at this approach than anything else."

The key, according to Coticchia, is finding someone who is eager to take ownership of the product, who has the desire to have a company of their own, and who wants to make an impact on the market.  But it's hard work - work that involves taking responsibility for simultaneously juggling a number of important business, communications and technical functions, but without having the formal authority to do so.  As a result, product managers tend to burn out and typically don't last long in that position.  But there are strategies Coticchia has applied in his own career that can help.  Among them:

• Measure outcomes in every aspect of marketing and product management.  Establish benchmarks for costs and results.  Otherwise, you won't know what you're accomplishing.
• Define what you want from a product management function early on. Establish what the key deliverables are to be.
• Understand where you are in a product's life cycle.  Different strategies apply to different phases from introduction and growth through to maturity and decline.
• In creating a product or service, the product manager is responsible for defining the ‘what,' while engineering is responsible for the ‘how.'  Together, the two determine the ‘when.'
• Decide where in the organization product management should report.  Coticchia's preference is that it report to marketing.
• Maintain high internal product management visibility.  Include product management in all key meetings involving executive decision-making, customer advisory and user groups, strategic accounts, etc.
• Understand that not all money that walks in the door is good money.  You need to exercise discipline and restraint in determining which customers to serve and which products to provide.
• Product managers should take ownership of their internal and external communications channels early on; it will give them leverage to help compensate for their relative lack of authority.
• Cultivate the trust of both the development engineers and the sales force to let them know that product management is acting in their best interests.

About the Author:

Peter Longini is the Managing Editor for Inside Product Strategy™. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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