Quick Tips - January 16, 2008

Tips from the practice masters...

What does it take to form a product management team that can really deliver the goods?  Jay Odell, a veteran of product management with Trilogy and later Ariba, is currently Vice President of Product Management for Blackbaud, a South Carolina-based provider of software and service solutions for nonprofit organizations.  In a recent PSN talkcast, he talked about what he had learned.

Product Management comes in flavors.  What product management organizations actually do depends on what their company executives want them to do.  Four of the most popular flavors: managing product lines of business; analyzing performance; getting the product right; evangelizing for the product. 

Right answers change.  The essential mission of Product Management can change as the organization and its environment change.  A strongly sales-oriented company trying to pay off LBO debt, for example, needs a product management team that can wring short-term performance out of its product line.  An innovation-driven company, on the other hand, requires a longer focus.

Understand the mission.  Strive to understand what the purpose of having a product management organization really is to your company.  Ask the right questions to determine whether it's a sales-oriented culture where launching new product lines means that you need something next month, or whether it has a longer planning horizon. 

Follow the power curve.  Find out exactly how decisions about investments, new markets, and so on are made in the organization.  They may come from top management.  But you may find, as Odell did, that a group of people in services and sales were really the ones who controlled the decisions about where money got invested. 

Determine the key role of a Product Management VP.  At Blackbaud, the answer morphed.  At one level, it was to manage the portfolio of investments - how much to invest in different parts of the business, how much to invest in specific product lines, how much in customer acquisition versus chronic care.  It was about putting various lenses on R&D to help make tradeoffs that were consistent with overall company goals.  Closer to ground level, the goal was to get the product right or else you wouldn't be able to sell or deliver it. 

Measure success.  For newer product lines, you can measure a lot of a product manager's performance around their financial performance, because just about everything a product manager does can influence the success of that product line.  But for more mature products, the product manager really doesn't control the sales number, which depends on the sales team and other factors.  So you can put a very specific financial metric on everybody, but it may be something that's like ‘increase penetration in the small office segment of the market,' or ‘create a new modular offering that generates X thousand or million dollars of business.'  But don't put too much end-of-the-year metrics around financial performance, otherwise your team spends too much time as glorified sales engineers.  That can incent the wrong behavior. 

Be cool.  At least once a quarter, make sure to remember how cool the things that product managers do really are.  There are very few functions in the organization that can talk about things like actually making multi-million dollar investment decisions, sitting at the table with executive team to help think through important business decisions, getting to go talk to customers on a regular basis to ask what they would like to do, and not to just to hear complaints.  If you don't remember the good parts, it's easy to get burned out. 

For additional tips from Jay Odell, read Part II and III of this series

The Team Members

How to interact with people outside of the team

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