Quick Tips - February 13, 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 Manaegment for Blackbaud, a South Carolina-based provide of software and service solutions for nonprofit organizations.  In a recent PSN talkcast, he talked about what he had learned.

Understand product line management team essentials.  The keys to an effective product line management team are having people on board who can: 1. perform a credible business analyze of a market, 2.  truly understand what the customer is trying to do, 3.  make hard decisions about priorities, and 4.  work effectively across the various functions within the organization.

Assess your team members.  At the outset, ask the people on your team to present an overview of their product line to determine if they're business-oriented or feature-oriented.  Then ask the company's functional heads for their perspectives on what the team did well, didn't do well, and where they needed to improve.  Among other things, the results will help you understand the organization's expectations of product management.

Know where to look for new members.  Decide what skills your product management team needs to have.  For Odell, if the need were for business-oriented skills such as market analysis, he would look outside.  If it were domain knowledge-oriented, he looked for someone in the company who had the domain knowledge and could learn the business side later.

Identify the two types of product managers.  When you look at a resume, how does the prospect describe the success of their business?  If they use numbers, that tells you if they're a business-oriented product manager.  If they talk about themselves as facilitators, that tells you that they work in an organization that's very collaborative and does team-based decisions, versus doing classic product management. 

Recruit experienced product managers.  It's hard to find people who have both the required business and domain skills.  And if your company is in a remote area, there won't be many qualified people already there; you will have to relocate them.  Odell brings in a few highly experienced people and then builds a team of more junior people around them who can learn from their experience. 

Learn to read a resume.  Odell looks for two types of product managers.  One is business-oriented, the other is a domain expert.  For a business-oriented product manager, he looks for someone who has been a product manager for two different organizations, but not a job-hopper; two places can translate into being a great product manager in a different industry.  But for domain knowledge, he finds that sales engineers and consultants work best. 

Keep product managers around.  You won't have a sustainable product management function until you have people who have largely grown up in the organization.  When someone in a senior product management role leaves or moves to another part of the company, you may not have anyone you can slide in unless you go and recruit.  So bring in people with less experience who can learn because in a couple of years, they will become your senior people. 

Jay Odell shared his tips in Part I and III of this series:

Part I: The practice 

Part III: How to interact with people outside the team

---

Comments on this Quick Tips article can be submitted to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

To read our latest articles in Inside Product Strategy™ click here.