When senior product management veteran Jay Odell arrived at Blackbaud in 2004 after pioneering in a similar capacity at Ariba, his new South Carolina-based employer already had a product management team. Like many other software companies, Blackbaud had taken staff from its customer service area – arguably the people who knew the most about what the company’s customers were actually doing – and designated them as Product Managers. In their new capacity, they had the job of prioritizing which product features would mean the most to the non-profit clients which formed the base of the 25-year old company’s management software and services business.

“That was the right move at the time,” Odell reflected recently. However it came with a built-in downside: “The product management people were doing exactly what they were asked to do – to prioritize functionality based on what our existing customers were doing, because they knew those customers very well.” But the tradeoff was that their focus rested solely on current customers. What Odell wanted – and what he understood Blackbaud’s senior management to want as well – was a more systematic, more disciplined, more market-focused product management practice.

More discipline

“We wanted to instill a business discipline into product management – not just a ‘get the product right’ discipline,” he said. “When you’re first starting out, people just want product management to get the product right. That’s fine. But it assumes there are other people in the organization who are doing the business analysis side of things: deciding what segments you are going to hit and how you know if there’s enough of an opportunity to invest in a product.”

However at Blackbaud, there was no one accountable for those analyses. Yet making tough calls on where a market is going is precisely how professional product management can have a meaningful impact on a company’s long-term prospects as well as its near-term sales. “If you really understand what your customers are trying to do and can differentiate between something they would like to be able to do and what they really need to be able to do, then you can get the product right and the business side of things right,” Odell observed. But doing so requires a different and harder-to-find type of individual to serve as product manager.

More recruiting

“At the higher levels, no matter how much time you think you’re going to spend on recruiting, you are going to undershoot it. For the last three and a half years, I have spent 20 to 30 percent of my time recruiting, because it’s that hard and that important,” he said. “We were building a product management team into an existing business, which is more complex than if you’re a one-product company trying to establish it for the first time. So you spend a lot of time recruiting. But it’s really important to get the people right. One mistake I made early on was that in my desire to get help on the work we were doing, I brought in some of the wrong people, and it reflected badly not just on those people, but on what product management could be. It’s very difficult to wait for the right people, but it’s worth it.”

More time

However once that team has finally been assembled, implementing an effective, market-focused product management function itself will take still more time. “You have to think in years, not months, when you’re building a product management organization from scratch – especially in an organization that’s already running at full speed,” he said, reflecting back on his early days at Blackbaud. “I became the product manager myself for several product lines just to figure out how the organization makes decisions. And every organization is different. So at the beginning, I would do some of it alone, but I also tried to be very active with the people who were on my team. And that takes a lot longer than you think.”

It can eat up time even when you trim back on some of the niceties and formal procedures. “I could have spent a lot of time putting in processes on how to do market research and how many conversations to have with customers and so on,” Odell recalled. “But the main process I worked on was getting the Market Requirements Document template right so that people knew what they had to deliver. Then I worked with them individually on how to do the research and the business analysis.”

Management mandates

Building that capability was essential because accurately identifying and effectively addressing market opportunities were central elements of Odell’s mandate from the company’s top executives – a strongly sales-oriented management team who had come in through an LBO several years earlier. “You have to understand what the leadership and the other groups want product management to be,” he said. “Every software company does it differently. You could build up a team of product experts who help sell – that’s often what Sales wants you to do. You could build up people who are really deep in the industry and understand what customers are trying to do; that’s what Product Development wants. Or you could build up business capabilities so people that look at the markets and segment them and understand the size of opportunities.”

The latter was the path which Blackbaud’s senior management wanted to follow. And even though it remains a work in progress, that strategy has largely taken root. “We are now much better versed in the market side of things. We try to be better at thinking about the entire solution. We’re not as silo’d between products and services and support and data subscriptions as before – our product management team thinks about the whole solution,” Odell said.

“Everyone on my team knows what the opportunity is for their product line – how many organizations can they actually target, what’s the relevant market, what the different segments are, how many of them are in market each year, how many of them go to our competitors each year instead of to us – they understand the business side of all of our products,” he noted. “We did not do that before. We didn’t get really good at it until we had a new CEO who demanded we become good at it. Our current CEO is a software veteran who understands its importance, so we were able to respond quickly. But until he demanded it, it wasn’t expected of us.”

Make it clear

Yet in Odell’s case, that almost didn’t happen. “You should get very clear on what the executive team wants product management to be,” he cautions product management job seekers. “If there was one mistake I made it was that I understood what the person who hired me wanted product management to be, but it wasn’t necessarily what the rest of the organization wanted product management to be. The CEO wanted it to be something different. I had asked the right questions of the person who was hiring, but not necessarily of the other people. I don’t know if it would have changed anything, but the first year was much harder than I thought it would be.”

So he fell into a survival mode. “I hate to call them ‘strategic allies’, but I figured out who the people across the organization were that could help and advise and guide me on product and commercial decisions,” he said. “In my case, I worked to develop strong relationships with leaders in Professional Services, Marketing and certain Sales Managers. So I developed allies across the organization to help guide me and to get decisions made. I also leveraged outside contacts; they weren't necessarily product management experts; they were more business experts.” And it started to work.

Work in progress

That work is still underway. “If we were on a ten-step process toward a humming product management team, we would probably be on Step Four. But we were on Step One for two years. So we’re accelerating, which is good,” he said. “If you want a group that gets the business right and gets the product right, you have to bring in two types of people: one is a professional product manager; in general, I look for someone who has been a successful product manager in two different places. The second is someone who really knows the customer and the market well – a domain expert. The rest of the people on the team can be junior people who are learning to be one or the other.”

But before you can recruit effectively, you need to become a believer yourself. “You have to be able to show people how it’s a wonderful career opportunity for someone to come into a product management organization that’s growing in stature, because it’s hard work,” Odell said. “It’s much harder early on than it will be when you’re in Step Ten. You want people who really dig that kind of challenge – who love the idea of coming in, getting their product line right, and of establishing something that wasn’t there 5, 6, 7 years ago. “You want hungry people who are really passionate about their product and business, and that have high potential to be the next generation of executives at the company.”

Editor's Note: Jay Odell will be our featured guest on our live Talkcast on December 19 - "Building the Product Management Team." Listen in to learn more from Jay.