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 Development 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.
Connect with your Sales organization. To align product management more tightly with the sales organization, especially in a sales-oriented culture, have regular sessions with the sales manager concerning the roadmap. Ask what he/she is hearing. That helps them appreciate that they are being listened to. Then ask the head of sales about sitting in on his/her staff meetings on a regular basis.
Match managers to sales teams. Try to match the right product manager with an appropriate sales team. Some companies have a mix of product-oriented sales teams and market-oriented sales teams. Provide tactical support for the product-centered sales people. But then create a set of product managers who are really market managers who can think about a whole solution.
Don't overdose on feedback. Sometimes communications regarding various company functions can become overwhelming. When you ask for feedback, people expect you to do something with it. You've got to have a conversation around which ones you can act on, and which ones will be for the longer term? Otherwise you risk becoming the ‘no' team because you may end up saying ‘no' nine times out of ten.
Demonstrate rationality. Make sure people in your organization understand your rationale. Take pains to explain why you are making the decisions you're making. At Blackbaud, people had to categorize their investment recommendations into four areas - client care; win rate; getting into new market segments; and acquiring new customers. That discipline shifted the conversation away from personal preferences and onto the essential issues: marketing, services and support, sales, and products.
Manage expectations. People in your organization won't always understand that you have product management team members who are new to their jobs and are still on the learning curve. Find the time to mentor and help your new team members learn because it's very easy for them to get thrown into the fire and fail for the wrong reasons. Also, learn to manage the influx of work that people will want your team to do; it is almost always much greater that anyone can reasonably take on.
Deal with acquisitions. At Blackbaud, the first thing they do is to hold an all-hands-on-deck meeting with people from both organizations to do a joint roadmap, which is particularly important to the acquired company's customers. Then they bring people from the acquired organization into the product management team. It opens up a line of communication against one of the real dangers in any kind of acquisition: encouraging the false idea that acquiring company knows better.
Celebrate successes. That's especially important for product managers because the fruits of their labor don't generally happen until six or twelve months after they've done all the work. And by that time, they're already onto the next thing. So celebrate success and make the product managers feel really good about what they do. Because, at the end of the day, what product managers do is genuinely cool.
Jay Odell shared additional tips in Part I and II of this series:
Part I: The practice
Part II: The team members
