Lofty praise for teams and teamwork has been a mainstay of business literature, and occasionally business practice, for quite some time now. It’s not hard to understand all the fuss. At least in principle, team spirit is a truly appealing notion, particularly when the tasks are so big that no individual can consistently pull them off. As a result, both the language of team sports and application of team-like work concepts now pervade America’s business world.

But left to their own dynamics, individual business team members frequently find themselves pulled in different directions by conflicting priorities, often at the expense of the teamwork they were assembled to perform. In other cases, team-like procedures, which may have been presented as official policy, are merely cosmetic and actually at odds with the way things really get done at a firm. Worse still, some organizations, including many academic institutions, have never embraced the win-win culture that lies at the heart of the team approach.

Living by their wits

Struggling against the combination of forces that impede team effort is one of the product manager’s key roles. Indeed, it is the essence of that job, according to Cellomics CEO Dan Calvo, who came to head up the Pittsburgh-based maker of high-content screening and automated cellular analysis equipment in the summer of 2003. “Product management, by definition, is about team dynamics,” he claims. “You’re accountable for a certain product line, but nobody reports to you. That’s certainly the case at many companies, including ours. You’ve got to coordinate resources from development, operations, sales, and service. Yet you don’t own any of them. It’s the whole issue of influence management.” Influence management?

In addition to being bright and well-informed, effectively exercising influence requires the product manager to possess certain other essential skills and personal qualities, according to Calvo. “They have to be a terrific listener. They’ve really got to listen to the people they’re trying to influence – and, of course, the customers. They also have to be very tough-minded. Because they ultimately have to say ‘I’m accountable for this’ even in the face of the fact that none of the other key personnel report to them. It takes a special quality for somebody to be willing to go out there and say ‘I’ll take ownership of this’.”

Particularly for someone whose influence is not generally made clear by a glance at the company’s organization chart, other strengths can matter, too. “Communication skills – written and oral, as well as listening – are very important,” he said. “They have to have quantitative capabilities both in terms of looking at the market and understanding the opportunity, as opposed to just having a gut feel that it’s the right thing to do. And then there’s understanding the financial dynamics: will this make money or not?”

Keeping it in perspective

Calvo, whose own background includes work on both the R&D and commercial sides of various technology firms, came away with an astute appreciation for the ways customers look at buying decisions, as well as a keen understanding of the inherent tensions between a company’s technologists and its marketing staff. “When most people think about product management, they think about product development – getting new products out the door,” he said. “But what a product manager brings to that process is this: ‘What should those products actually be? What ultimate needs of the customer are they solving and what benefits are they delivering? What can we charge for those benefits? And how should we do that?’ The answers to these questions are ultimately going to determine whether or not it’s a commercial success.”

Peering over the horizon is another essential role, according to Calvo, and it is one that logically falls to the product manager. “Is somebody looking 2, 3, 4 years out, depending on your development cycle and the nature of your business? Is somebody looking far enough out to make sure you’re driving a portfolio that’s going to meet the needs of customers going forward? It’s great to have a product that meets a need. But is the business model such that they’ll actually buy it? And is somebody looking carefully at what the competition is doing over the next 2, 3, 4 years or longer? It’s the classic Wayne Gretzky advice: skate to where the puck is going to be.”

Teams in transition

Typically at Cellomics, a succession of teams drives the introduction of new products. They often begin with a project development team, frequently led by someone from the company’s engineering-technology development staff. A product management team is also formed to keep priorities, time frames, competitive intelligence, and market positioning right. Later on, a launch team is created to insure the best possible product rollout and on-going commercial success. But the handoff is never complete. “The product manager sits on every team, almost as a co-leader – although that’s not a title we use – to drive it from a market-focused perspective,” Calvo said. “It’s to drive the right value proposition, to drive the right cost position, and to drive the right positioning in the marketplace so that’s it’s an effective product for customers.

“Usually in small, technology-oriented companies, once the product has a part number and can be sold, people say: ‘well, my job is done.’ But in many ways, it’s just beginning; if it’s not a successful product, then nobody’s job is done. So to put more focus on the post-launch, we’ve put together launch teams to improve how we rolled out key products in the past and to drive more effective revenue and profitability. And the product manager leads those launch teams,” Calvo said.

Where do product managers come from, mommy?

Depending on a company’s size and maturity, those product managers can be organized by product line, by market opportunity, or by customer segment. At Cellomics today, they follow the firm’s three main product groups, although that could eventually change, Calvo acknowledged. “Right now, most of our business, and most of the immediate opportunity, is in drug discovery and basic life sciences research. Although there are differences between marketing to big pharmaceutical drug discovery accounts and marketing to academia, I don’t want to slice the business and say that I have an academic market manager, or a drug discovery market manager, or maybe a toxicology market manager,” he said. “We’re just too small to really afford that level of sophistication, nor do I believe we need it right now.”

No matter which way the company partitions its product management function, where do its product managers actually come from? “What some companies do – and in the past what Cellomics has done – is to take the best technical person and make them their product manager. But what can happen is that the technical person believes so much in the technology they’ve evolved with or developed over time, that they lose sight of the prize, which is what customers out there really want,” he said.

“A lot of companies tend to start from a technology focus, and Pittsburgh is a prime example. Technology folks are the people they have, and you take what you’ve got. They say ‘I don’t want anybody in here that can’t talk to my R&D people. You’re an R&D person that doesn’t fall down in front of customers – so now you’re my product manager.’ I’ve seen that happen in other places I’ve been. And it can really create issues in terms of developing the right approach to marketing and having the right portfolio and marketing the product appropriately,” Calvo said. “That probably happened to Cellomics in the past. But we’ve evolved over time and are continuing to evolve towards understanding customer needs and really asking those sorts of questions first.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR