Quick Tips

Business practices for the effective product manager

What business savvy does a new product manager need to acquire?  At a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, Tina Wyland, Associate Product Manager at Philips, Gina Dickson, Product Manager, TrueCommerce, and Jason Baim, Director of Product Management, TeleTracking Technologies, shared their thoughts and on-the-job experiences about succeeding in a position that carries both great responsibility and little authority.

• Learn the tools.  There are a huge number of tools, techniques and artifacts involved in product management: market requirements documents, product roadmaps, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, pricing analysis, positioning statements, demos, etc.  As owner of a product line, you have to learn how to use each of those tools.
• Get in line.  Product management could report anywhere in the organization, but it should be driven by the company’s overriding business goals, no matter what type of organization it is.  The key is whether the expectations of the product management team are being reinforced by the Engineering or Marketing managers.
• Link sales to development.  An interlock process to align sales compensation with product management’s expectations around revenue targets and forecasts can be a useful tool.  It’s particularly important because you can’t plan for sales reps to be compensated for the sale of an item that won’t be available.
• Align your processes.  The functions of product management, product marketing and program management – the process, content and positioning of a product line – should be aligned.  If you’re building something one way, and communicating its value a different way, and managing its life cycle a third way, unless there’s an overarching strategy to hold them together, you’re in trouble.
• Ask good questions.  If someone comes to you with a problem or issue, you may not have the answers, but you should have the questions which would help to analyze the situation and help you to make the decisions.
• See if it makes sense.  If Sales wants a feature very, very badly, ask what percentage of your customers could really take advantage of that change or feature: 10%?, 30%? 75%?  What is the revenue opportunity?  Survey customers about what they’d like.  Ask yourself if it makes business sense to do this.  Will you lose market share without it?  Does it fit into the Big Picture?  What would be gained?  Would it turn off current customers?  Put the numbers together and see if it makes sense.  Try to understand the revenue and profit impact.
• Rank risks.  For new projects, look at the business risks, the technical risks, at how well it will be accepted, and if it could be a big money generator.  Rate both risks and rewards from 1 to 5 on.  It will help you in the project selection and budgeting processes.
• Stop parroting.  If you are being bombarded with requests from different parts of the organization, develop a form for them to complete that requires showing the value and why it’s a priority.  That can help the Product Manager to get out of the ‘Polly Wants a Cracker’ fetching mode; you need to implement discipline and priorities.
• Share responsibility.  Having different regional product managers and allowing different parts of the organization with different skill sets to drive company and product strategy is one way to reduce the pressure for making immediate responses to individual customer and sales department requests.
• Stop and smell the roses.  As a product manager, you have to force yourself to take the time to pause and think strategically because there will always be immediate issues to respond to and unless you deliberately make the time, you’ll never find it.
• Separate tactical and strategic tasks.  Some companies split responsibilities so that a marketing manager does more of the tactical, day-to-day things and the product manager focuses more on the strategic aspects.  That allows the product manager to focus on the Big Picture over the next 5 years or more.
• Learn what’s missing.  Strategy to a sales person is not the same as strategy to a CFO.  Figure out what’s really missing that you feel you need; define what’s not getting done.  Then block out the time to do it.  Bring the people who made that request into the process, just as you would bring in a customer on feature design.
• Discover what drives success.  The most important thing you can do as a Product Manager is to understand the main drivers of success for your product line: what’s the business model for the product line, the major drivers of revenue, profitability, market share – whatever your company holds near and dear.  Then focus on them. 

Becoming an Effective Product Manager Quick Tips Series:

• Part I of III: What does it take to succeed as a newer product manager?
• Part II of III: Working with customers and engineers
• Part III of III: Business practices for the effective product manager

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