When it comes to innovation, I have been guilty of thinking only in one dimension. I have mostly focused only on new features and functionality changes in my products that differentiate it from the competition. I know I am not the only product manager with this limitation.

However, not envisioning a new initiative as a whole new business process may result in failure. A good product may target the wrong buyer in the right segment, a marketing message could hit the wrong audience, a sales force may react negatively to your new solution.

So it is worth mentioning when a tool is available to help product managers think more systematically at an early stage of their innovation process.

Such is the case with the “Innovation Radar” presented in a complete fashion in “Grow from Within”, a book from Robert C. Wolcott and Michael J. Lippiz published in 2009. The Innovation Radar forces you to look at innovation in 12 different ways and encourages product managers to adopt a comprehensive view of their innovation initiative. The book is tackling a more general topic: investigate what makes an intrapreneur successful and the innovation radar is only a chapter of the book. Great read nonetheless.

The goal of this post is not to extensively discuss the model, as I could not do it as well as the authors.  However, in this post, I will provide a brief description of the Innovation Radar and help you imagine how you can apply the model to:

• Innovate with your existing products
• Build a comprehensive approach for developing new products
• Anticipate avenues that your competitors could take

So in order to discuss the Innovation Radar, please look at the illustration above, which is directly taken from the book. There are 4 major dimensions, Offering (What), Customers (Who), Processes (How) and Presence (Where). The other 8 dimensions are distributed between these 4 dimensions based on their type of impact. For example, the customer experience is obviously between “Customers” and “Process.” Let’s go through each dimension, with a short explanation and a few questions you can ask yourself about it:

1 Offerings: Creating unique products or services that are valued by customers. What unique architecture or feature set can we bring to our customers? That’s the dimension most of us focus on.

2 Platforms: Common components which can be developed and reused for multiple markets or customers. What are the common technologies, architectures and modules which can be shared by my customer base to reduce my costs?

3 Solutions: Customized, integrated set of products and services to solve a customer’s specific business problem. Can I package my offering differently in order to simplify, bring more flexibility, or reduce cost  in order to attract different buyers?

4 Customers: Discover new customer categories, different buyer personas, or unmet/unarticulated needs. Could there be unidentified business problems your customers may be facing?Is there an unserved up- or down-market?

5 Customer experience: Everything each actor in the sales cycle and end users see or feel about your product and your company. What collateral would resonate with my audience? Can I simplify the user interface to address a new segment? What type of support do I need for this new audience?

6 Value Capture: The mechanisms a company creates to earn its share of the market. How can we redesign the sales cycle in increase our margins? What pricing model leads to optimal profit margin?

7 Processes: The configuration of business activities to conduct operations. How can I reorganize support to reduce costs? Can I develop a single methodology which can be reused for a specific class of services?

8 Organization: How the company structures itself to respond to the needs of the customer. Will this new concept benefit from an internal, separate organization that can execute faster? Are the proper incentives in place to ensure that each team member delivers on the strategy?

9 Supply Chain: The method to deliver product and services. What could be automated, or configured by the customer to provide faster delivery, cheaper cost or improved flexibility?

10 Presence: Channels employed by the company to bring the offering to the market. Should I replace my “farmers” account managers by “hunters”? How can I integrate my offering into a partner’s larger solution and use that partner as a new channel?

11 Network: How a company or product can connect to the customer to improve the value of the product. Can different types of users in my installed base benefit from my existing products? What interfaces should I build to leverage a partner’s solution and unleash new value for my customer?

12 Brand: Symbols, words or marks used by a company to communicate a promise or an image to the customer. How can the company’s brand be leveraged to reinforce the new concept? Would my audience feel that the innovation falls naturally within the brand, or would it be considered a stretch?

The true value of the tool is that, when used correctly, it forces you to envision many of your innovative product’s implications upfront.

Gather a multidisciplinary team in one room for a brainstorming session and go through a series of questions which you will have carefully prepared in advance for each dimension listed above. Be careful not to lead your audience or you will kill creativity. Together, in a few hours and under your lead, the team can minimize the surprises your innovation will produce and define what’s needed, rather than forcing you to operate later with a set of options limited by your budget and time-to-market imperatives. That could mean the difference between success and failure. And maybe you may even find new ways to innovate in the process.

Congratulations! You now have the opportunity to lead a team of other product managers. Or maybe you want to position yourself as a contender for a leadership position and make a proposal.  What should be your first steps?

You already know about the constraints: your product managers are very busy, so any new team-building effort will have to come at the expense of something else. You are also aware that, when left to their own devices, most product managers will tend to neglect their strategic role and slide towards the tactical, which is not sustainable in the long term.

With this in mind, how can you build a great Product Management team?

Of course you need to carefully listen to all parties, as well as tirelessly communicate your plans. However, here are 5 values which can help you progress tremendously and, if applied carefully, can help you set the tone.

1) Collaboration between product managers: Most product managers work in isolations, ignoring what the other product managers are doing. They may be competing against each other (not a bad thing when kept in check, more on this later) unnecessarily for resources, the customer’s yearly budget as well as the sales force’s attention. Some may have found creative solutions to problems which other Product managers don’t even know they have. Clearly you need to get your Product managers to talk to each other. How can this be done?

• Share what works and what does not. Have each product manager present to the group their  successes and a failures
• Improve usage of and proficiency in company tools such as CRM, SharePoint, marketing portal and internal blogs to facilitate the exchange of information
• Share important analyst/industry data to ensure the group shares a common view of your industry
• Improve product linkages: Brainstorm on how your team’s products can leverage or integrate with each other or new possibility for creative packaging.
• Encourage Product managers to review each other’s important documents, such as business cases, market positioning or even requirement specifications prior to releasing them outside the group.

No doubt this requires a big time commitment, and not everything has to be implemented on day one, but the productivity improvements will be compelling.

2) Inside/Outside Accountability: It is important that your product managers know what is expected of them and what is not. Similarly the rest of the organization must be realistic and crystal-clear about what it can expect from the product management organization. Constant sales support may be acceptable for a new product during a specified period. However when a product manager performs sales support for a mature product, it is a symptom of organizational dysfunction. Here are some actions which you can take:

• Have each PM time their activity in strategic vs. tactical buckets so they come to their own conclusions.  Identify the tasks which could be handled outside of the group and define obtainable goals to outsource them.  Pre and post-sales activity as well as product support should be good candidates for an owner outside of the team.
• Prioritization of resources and communication of the choices internally and externally.
• Define what product management does and does not do and negotiate with outside teams how to handle a transition. That’s the hard part since many organizations think of product management as the place that does whatever is not accomplished by the rest of the company. You can use this as a first step.
• Foster healthy competition between product managers by establishing fair rules and creating a climate of internal coopetition.

You should expect strong resistance from other groups who may not understand why all of a sudden you stop helping them. Your ability to focus on the strategic depends on your ability to convince them that it is not the role of your group.

3) Consistency of interfaces via process improvement: By enforcing a consistent interface between the product management team and each other department, the rest of the company will know over time what to expect when they interact with any member of your team.  Because your Product managers use the same types of documents, the same tried-and true-processes to accomplish well identified goals, the trust in your group‘s professionalism will improve. Here are some items which can benefit from better consistency:

• All documents using a similar format
• Rules about when and how to engage with sales, finance, billing, support, corporate, R&D, product marketing and customers
• Business case process
• Partnership management
• New project prioritization process
• Launch process and associated metrics
• Requirement/Prototyping process
• Obsolescence process
• Win/Loss
• P/L Tracking and Management

Basically, the concept here is that you want a consistent brand, brand message and brand delivery for product management.

4) Preparation: The crisis of the day is what makes you waste time. Anticipating crises is what will make your team get their heads above water and focus on the strategic.  By measuring what your Product managers do today, you can probably identify tasks that could benefit from preparation. Typical examples are:

• Support, customers or Pre-sales FAQs
• RFP: Database of answers to the most current questions
• Product status reporting which includes risk and mitigation
• Updated roadmaps and strategy presentations
• Relevant industry and Customer data to present against non-fact-based opinions.

5) Innovation. Your Product managers are paid to be thought leaders who push the company forward. How can they do so? Here are several initiatives which you can drive with your team to be ahead of the curve:

• Strategic Roadmap process
• Win/Loss process
• Idea management/prioritization/business case.
• Innovation Off-Site Discovery sessions (basically a way to separate yourself from the office hassles to concentrate on innovation.)

Of course, much more is needed to run a group. However, these foundational values: collaboration, accountability, consistency, preparation and innovation should guide your group toward a better future.

It is a well-known fact that new ideas come from your customers, partners, analysts, competitors and other industry influencers. Like it or not, your company looks upon the product management organization to organize these ideas.

But how can a very busy product manager transform the “idea machine” into a fast, fair and simple, yet transparent process?

Remember this bright engineer who came to you last week with starry eyes and started the conversation with “wouldn’t it be great if we had a product that…”?

Chances are that if after a few weeks she does not feel you are taking her idea somewhere, she will share her future creative ideas with someone else.

This post will not provide a turnkey solution to such a process, as every company is different. It will, however, help you group and select ideas using a consistent framework that does not let your legacy products and company limitations get in the way of your thinking. In addition, the framework may help explain to that engineer why her idea needs to be further refined.

The framework consists in three principles:

1.All ideas must be aimed at solving a specific business problem. First it allows you to gather ideas around a customer-centric theme. Second it forces you to step down and look at what is truly needed, versus a your-product-should-let-me-do-this” type of input. Do not limit yourselves to your existing customers, as the new concept may also attract a different segment of customers

2.It is important to envision solutions to the problem as a “business system” that includes not only a possible new product, but also specific sales channels, support, implementation, training and services.  Granted, you most likely will never need a separate organization to serve this new idea, but at least you need to investigate what is specifically required to address the problem without the limits imposed by your company.

3.All ideas must go through the same set of questions in order to be qualified and further refined. This is what ensures consistency and transparency.

Let’s examine this last step in further detail. I usually stick to 20 questions, 10 for outside (customers, analysts, influencers) and 10 for inside the company. The reason is that you essentially want to assess the business problem, look at your company’s capabilities and see if the mixture is a good fit. It is tempting to add as many questions as possible to the list, but remember, we want this process to be fast and simple. These questions can of course be adapted to your circumstances. Finally, the order of these questions was set to evidence red flags as early as possible.

Outside:

-    Is the problem formulated correctly or is its definition too restrictive? A restrictive problem definition could make you miss an larger opportunity or waste your resources.

-    Which actor is feeling the pain? . Who do you need to sell to? (no one at this point, my buyer, someone else? ) The answer to this question may impact the duration your sales cycle as well as what sales channel is required.

-    Is the business problem pervasive in this industry? In other industries? Is this a one-customer issue or is this problem felt by a larger group?

-    What is the best possible way anyone could solve this issue in the eyes of the customer? You need to get away from the “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” philosophy and think like an entrepreneur starting with a clean slate.

-    Would that solution require an organizational or process change for the customer and would they eventually agree to make it? If a new product requires too much change in order to be accepted by the customer, it could slow the adoption of the product or the new product may be flat-out rejected.

-    Is the pain felt by the customer likely to get worse in the near to medium term? If the problem becomes more acute, then time is working for you. Nice to know.

-    Could a solution be sold up-market or down-market? In other words is this problem likely to be felt by more demanding, or less demanding segments, each with different price points?

-    Could a substitute help solve this business problem? Reaching out to outside the company is important here to identify unorthodox potential solutions to this business problem which your company may not have thought about and would negatively impact your efforts.

-    Can the problem be quantified in terms of lost revenue, productivity or customer satisfaction? While it is impossible to identify the revenue opportunity of a market which does not exist yet, it may be possible to quantify the savings that a solution may generate, to help customers justify their decision, and you to estimate a first-cut price point.

-    How much would the customer be willing to pay for a solution? Remember that this customer may not be your existing customer.

Inside:

-    Is there any certain indication at this point that the solution envisioned would be considered attractive? Think ROI, margin, volumes, but also market share, new markets, barriers to exit.

-    Would the best possible way to solve this issue involve an existing or a disruptive solution? A disruptive technology may involve a different sales cycle, lower margins, more risk, and a different launch plan. You need to acknowledge this right off the bat.

-    What is the extent of internal organizational changes required to best fill this customer need? Does your company own the appropriate skill set, would management be willing to accept a lower cost structure, what is the latitude to adapt the sales channels? How open is your organization to process changes required to accommodate a new product?

-    Can a solution be completed in-house or would a partnership be required? Granted, with enough resources, your company can go at it alone, but would a partner facilitate market entry and share the risk?

-    What is the likelihood of finding a corporate sponsor willing to fight for the solution internally? Let’s face it, only lucky product managers or geniuses get it right the first time. Anyone working on a new idea requires air cover to defend it against “resource realignments” and also to set the correct expectations with executives. No one can go at it alone.

-    Does the solution envisioned fit with my company’s strategy? Is it OK to find many small ponds for an existing product or a large pond with a new one? Can you make your idea fit with one or several existing business objectives?

-    Can the problem be solved by offering a new solution recombining existing products or services? If you fail, it is better to do it early and cheaply. A first try with existing technology can help you achieve that.

-    Is a solution for this problem included in my existing product’s roadmap? If yes, do you need to reconsider the timing? If no, what should be taken off to accommodate a potential new effort?

-    What is the likelihood that my company will execute in a quality and in a timely fashion? Execution is key. What is the impact of the idea which you are considering coming to the market late or with a smaller set of benefits?

-    What would be the competition’s response to a move? Could this idea already be on any of your competitor’s radar screen? Is there another company out there who could have its eyes on the same opportunity?

This set of questions can and should be modified to your environment. Also, most of the answers are not black and white; you may need a sliding scale to account for the various shades of gray. Finally please remember Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”.

One of the challenges facing product managers is the difficulty balancing daily crisis and strategic work, which often results in the strategic taking a back seat. However, product managers have a unique opportunity to add value when a crisis is presented to them by ensuring that the problem is properly defined. All you need is proper timing, the appropriate methodology and some persuasion. Let’s focus on the methodology part.

Here comes the crisis of the day. Question to self: are we barking up the wrong tree? When handed a crisis to help resolve, there is a good chance that you’re given a problem formulation as well as a solution in the same breath. In the race to find a solution, you may be lead in the wrong direction without noticing it. Somewhere an executive or a key customer is upset, so time is of the essence and all you have to do is execute! Wrong. In fact, this is a perfect time for a problem restatement.

Please consider the difference between two descriptions of the same problem:

• “The system is too slow and we need to buy more hardware” and
• “The use case for this particular customer requires too many operations, negatively impacting network traffic and reducing system performance”

Which problem would you rather help solve?

Let me share an anecdote which I heard as a kid growing up in the 70’s in France. At that time the Paris architecture was changing and not for the better. Many companies relocated to the La Défense District, west of Paris. Towers were a new thing then for that part of the world and for the first time most companies were distributed across many floors. With no email, chat or cell phones, face-to-face meetings were more common, so employees were moving around a lot. As a result, employees started to complain about having to wait too long for the elevators. One company hired a statistician to work with the elevator installer to reduce the average wait by a whopping 20%. Despite this great achievement, the complaints kept on coming. Everyone was at a loss until the HR manager with a psychology background observed the employees waiting for elevators. The observation triggered the idea to place mirrors on the walls between the elevators. Complaints stopped immediately.

The problem was not that the wait was long; it was simply that during the wait employees were bored!

Since people (or Parisians at least) generally enjoy looking at themselves in a mirror, the issue solved itself. The problem was indeed stated incorrectly from the beginning and this error lead to the wrong course of action.

Nobody can be upset with you for trying to better understand the issue in order to solve it diligently and efficiently and perhaps recast it as an opportunity!

Based on personal experience, what is presented as a product problem may actually be a symptom and additional digging is required to uncover the true problem, as in the case of the elevators above. There are multiple ways of finding out if you are dealing with the problem itself or one of its symptoms and my favorite methods are the 5-whys, the fishbone diagram, as well as the “broaden-the-focus” method. I will not discuss each method in detail, since it has been done before quite well already. Instead, I will present why and in which context these methods can be used successfully.

-          The 5-whys method makes you ask “why” until you find a root cause which you can act upon. I like it because it is very simple, it can be done on the fly while discussing the crisis with the panic-stricken stakeholder. As part of the conversation, you can find the root causes of the problem together and mutually agree on a more accurate definition of the problem.

-          The Fishbone Diagram works better with a team of experts and in a company culture that is used to this type of exercise. It provides a more complete analysis of the root causes, and will typically convey more authority because, after all, it is the result of an expert team, not just the imagination of the product manager. A fishbone diagram can also be performed after the crisis is resolved.

-          The broadening-the focus technique tries to redefine the problems in terms that are more in tune with improving your product, by rephrasing this problem in a larger context. For example, if the crisis is caused by the customer dropping your product because there are “too many clicks”, your problem redefinition will be “how do we improve the user’s experience?”  This method works best if you want to demonstrate a pattern of similar issues. Capitalizing on repetition of the same crisis will give your problem definition more credence.

No matter what method you chose, one thing is almost certain: you will need to solve the problem as you redefined it AND the immediate crisis. However, documenting the issues and presenting an improved view of the problem will be beneficial to your team and your product in the long-term.

Human Resource professionals know that a well-oiled product management organization improves the chances of success for new products while increasing the long-term profitability of existing products.  But let’s face it: HR is handed a tall order when asked to recruit for product management positions.

For one thing, while account managers close deals and engineers design products, the definition of what product managers do for a living varies immensely across companies and industries. This makes it difficult for the HR and hiring managers to simply rely on a job title to bring in appropriate candidates. Second, evaluating candidates can be challenging – if a new product bombs or was successful in a prior experience, what was the real contribution of the product manager?  Third, there are typically fewer product management positions relative to other areas of the company. This results in fewer openings, thus the hiring process for product managers may not be as refined as it is for other positions in the company.

So how can Human Resources professionals and Product Management leaders work together to consistently attract and retain top product management talent? Here are a few questions HR professionals may want to answer before hiring a product manager:

1) What business problem is the product manager hired to solve and what functions must be executed to address this business problem? This may sound obvious. Yet, while product management position descriptions are usually well-crafted, experienced product managers are often puzzled by the contradictory presentations of the position given by each interviewer during the hiring process. Product managers are typically interviewed by many departments, such as Sales, Marketing and R&D, in addition to the department they hope to join. As a result, they witness the differences in expectations and lack of alignment across the company front and center. For example the VP of Product Management wants to launch new products while her R&D counterpart wants help prioritizing defects, Sales begs for better collateral and Finance wants someone who will positively impact profitability.  In this situation, and in a good economy, the best candidates see a red flag and stop the process. In a bad economy, they try to please everyone to get the job and expose themselves to a potential backlash once they are hired, because they encouraged the wrong expectations and they can’t deliver for everyone.  In this case everyone loses. A solution? Leaders in product management development methodologies, such as Pragmatic Marketing and others have codified each of the functions of a product manager (pricing, requirements, innovation, win/loss…), so take this as a guide to list the responsibilities that are expected of them and ensure that every department agrees with each function included or excluded from the position description.

2) Will the organization embrace the product manager’s role as you’ve defined it? or in other words, is your organization capable of handling someone who meets the requirements for the position? Product Managers want to be leaders, evangelists, marketers, strategists, change agents, financial analysts, accountants and project managers. Oh I forgot about sales support… and that’s what they like to do. However, what product managers see as a part of their job may create too much change and may be construed as a nuisance for an unprepared organization, reflecting badly on the product manager and their organization. Is the hiring organization ready to acknowledge a product manager insisting at every turn that the sales organization must be redesigned for their new products to be successful?  Is the organization ready to consider the product manager’s recommendation to partner instead of building in-house?  Product managers chose the profession because they like to lead and they do get frustrated when they cannot complete tasks they think they were hired for. Ensuring that all parties outside product management agree on the exact definition of the role and what it means to them will go a long way toward addressing these concerns.

3) Are all the position requirements really “must haves?” Since product managers dabble in so many different domains of knowledge, it is extremely easy to create a long list of skills that are required for the position. Loading up a job posting with too many “must have” requirements may result in too few applicants, effectively shutting out those that are qualified for the job. Spelling out specific priorities can help you prune the laundry list and improve the quality of applicants. Is industry experience an absolute requirement or merely a nice to have? Do you really need someone that can code Java, PHP and web services, or do you just need a product manager that isn’t going to get snowed by product development? Also, do not ask for a talent or skill as a “must have” that will not be used within 12 month of the hiring date. This will limit your pool of candidates and disappoint your new product manager if they aren’t provided with an opportunity to exercise these skills.

4) How will your interviewers respond to questions about the product management organization? Experienced product managers know that the most important factor to help them do their job is the respect the company has for the product management organization. As mentioned above, they can see firsthand through the interview process if the PM organization is respected or not. Among the red flags are: How many VPs of product management over the past 5 years? If more than 3 or 4, the CEO and the C-suite may have differing views on how new products should be developed and released. Does the PM organization have unfettered access to customers and prospects for win/loss analysis; do they have full right to use CRM tools such as Salesforce.com? Can they access and query the financial system to determine if their products are profitable? If not, the leeway of the product manager will be severely limited. In this situation top candidates may exit the hiring process because they know they won’t be able to positively impact the organization. The solution may no longer be in the hiring process but as part of an internal change management effort, to bring a specialized product management consulting organization who can teach execs state-of-the-art Product Management processes and techniques which, once in place, will attract A-level candidates. In addition, even the best candidates will have a difficult time interviewing successfully, if they’re walking into the hiring manager’s office blind. Only so much background information can be gleaned from the corporate website, so recruiters can improve the quality of the interview interaction by briefing candidates on the dynamics, expectations and landmines important to those on the interview panel. This is especially important when members (especially senior executives) are prone to stick by their first impressions.

In short, you can reduce the time that it takes to locate and hire high-performing product managers by emphasizing prep-work upfront. Coach and manage the candidates and the organization prior to the interview process, keep a laser focus on the essential roles and responsibilities of the position, and keep an open mind!

In the first post I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].  The second post addressed the importance of effecting leadership within the context of the two aspects of people and organizational culture [Leadership in Product Management (2) – People & Organizational Culture].  This final post in the series will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of functional organization.

Let’s consider two notional functional organizations.  While all departments play important roles within a company, arguably those most relevant to product management are Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  Aligning the objectives, much less the activities, across these disparate departments is a challenging proposition.  More often than not they have discrete objectives, agendas and measures of success that compete rather than complement each other.

In Figure 1, I have depicted an organization that is largely sequential in its information flow – the departments are discrete with hand-off points clearly delineated.  Sales controls distribution, Marketing owns positioning and marketing, and R&D retains development.  Overall coordination is provided by Products.

Given this functional organization, the leadership style most congruent would most likely be one of command and control.  Products would assume positional authority over Sales, Marketing and R&D, directing their activities towards common objectives.  While some product managers may aspire to this model, I have no personal experience with it.  I do however have experience with discrete departments, but with less-than-clear hand-off points and no productive level of overall coordination.

In Figure 2 on the other hand, I have depicted an organization towards the opposite end of the spectrum from that above and is more representational of the matrixed departments with which most of us are likely to be acquainted.

Within this functional organization, Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products are discrete departments but have areas in which there are distinct responsibilities as well as those that overlap.  While each department retains primary responsibility for their function, ideally they are complementary and supportive.  An example in this figure is positioning and marketing developed by Marketing, some of which goes directly towards targeted markets, while other is developed specifically for use by Sales in support of their efforts in distribution (direct and indirect).

R&D is more engaged with the market facing activities of the company, and while still receiving direct market input, also benefits from additional feedback from people who are market facing informed by the perspective of Sales and Marketing.

Products would provide overall coordination but in an overlay manner.  In this model Products would also have a direct market-facing role and provide input to R&D.  The most congruent leadership style for this functional organization is one of collaboration.  Collaborative leadership is a much more complex affair and is defined by Wikipedia as, “an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership).  As most PMs find themselves in organizations similar to this model, the need to effect leadership to bring about alignment extends beyond people to include separate departments as well.  Organizational collaboration has become a necessary fact of professional life.

The above are overly simplified representations but in so doing, I have attempted to depict two points on a continuum of functional organizations – each company will be unique in both its layout as well as resulting inter-organizational dynamics.

Returning to the subject topic of leadership, a successful product manager will need to assess the lay of the land – particularly with respect to people, culture and functional organization – and develop an appropriate leadership approach that will serve to attain the overall objective of organizational alignment towards common goals.  There is simply no formulaic answer or definitive methodology such as pitch, business case, executive fiat, etc. that will meet continuously evolving needs.

Nor is this a fixed proposition once a line has been determined.  Each change in the market, stakeholders and/or organizational alignment or composition will often require an adjustment.  Think of it as a finely balanced Rube Goldberg device in which the various components are always in motion and therefore the center of balance always shifting.

Leadership is not without pitfalls and failures.  The issues and challenges are far too complex.  Rather it is marked through being able to align the organization more often than not so that objectives such as successful entry into a new market and sustainable attainment of market share are achieved.

Successfully developing and launching a solution or product requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational alignment.  Only in delivering upon the internal challenge of organizational leadership can there be any expectation of product or market leadership.

Examples of people within business who embodied successful leadership have become icons of American business – names such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Thomas J. Watson, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove and Steve Jobs.  And the latter is also quite arguably the best product manager in living memory.

REFERENCES

Leadership – has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership

Collaborative leadership – describes an emerging body of theory and management practice which is focused on the leadership skills and attributes need to deliver results across organizational boundaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_leadership

8 years later, HP does it Fiorina’s way

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5777808.html

HP developed its strategy under the guidance of former CEO Carly Fiorina. But it wasn’t until Mark Hurd took the helm that the company’s plans were made a reality.

http://www.cbfeature.com/special_coverage/news/still_hp_after_all_these_years/hps_critical_battlefield_in_china/

HP Way

http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm

Shackleton – The true story of Shackleton’s 1914 Endurance expedition to the the South Pole and his epic struggle to lead his 28 man crew to safety after his ship was crushed in the pack ice.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/

The best depiction by Hollywood of the dynamism involved with leadership was Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Sir Earnest Henry Shackleton, the British Antarctic explorer.  Shackleton (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/) is a film testament to this unorthodox leader who was adept at continuously adjusting his leadership approach as required in the face of unimaginable challenges – environmental, organizational and crew.  His success was ultimately measured by leading his 28-man crew out of Antarctica following the crushing of the expedition’s ship without a single loss of life.

In the first post on leadership in Product Management I laid out the case for leadership in product management and outlined three primary aspects of a company [Leadership in Product Management – Effecting Organizational Alignment].   This post will address the importance of effecting leadership within the context of two of those aspects: people and organizational culture.

In most organizations, alignment of people around a common initiative in the context of product management immediately involves multiple stakeholders in terms of decision makers and influencers.  With respect to people and personalities, the immediate task is to identify the stakeholders relevant to product management.

As with prospective customers, these will include both decision makers and influencers.  Also material with respect to people is the need to approach people differently.  Some stakeholders will require no more than being asked for support, while others will need more formal persuasion in terms of market assessments, pitches and business cases.  It should be recognized on occasion there will be those stakeholders you will not be able to inspire or persuade and for them you should identify a means to mitigate their impact.

Similar to development of a good go-to-market plan, development of a stakeholder engagement plan (whether formal or informal) will increase the chances of obtaining your objective of advancing the product / solution plan Products proposes.  In short, the engagement plan should identify the decision makers and influencers within the organization whose agreement (or at least neutrality) is critical to advance your objectives.

Engage your stakeholders one-on-one.  Doing so provides you with the opportunity to engage each stakeholder using an approach most appropriate to them.  It allows you to demonstrate your knowledge of the market and why they should buy into what Products proposes, and therefore align themselves in terms of objectives and metrics organic to their departments.

Engaging stakeholders individually also allows them to privately air disagreements or concerns which you must address as part of your product, solution and/or go-to-market plan.  Note the “must” in the previous sentence.  Failure to address the concerns shared with you one-on-one will most likely prevent their support of Products in the current initiative.  It could also result in limited to no access to these stakeholders for future projects.

This also provides a firebreak in the event a particular engagement does not go well.  Company-wide presentations are best utilized as forums for publicly demonstrating broad consensus across the organization – not for persuasion of undecided stakeholders.  If you have done your job properly, the true benefit of public presentations are to demonstrate that all (or the majority) are agreed with the go-to-market plan and aligned accordingly.

Organizational culture is important as your approach in leadership should be informed by the predominate culture.  The primary dimensions in which this comes into play are “what” and “how”.  Let’s explore some examples to illustrate the point.

Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1999 largely on the basis of her strong performance in rising through the ranks at AT&T and Lucent.  Prior to her departure from Lucent Fiorina led Marketing and Sales for the largest customer segment.  She brought with her to HP this focus upon sales and marketing which was initially lauded as a much needed shake up of the staid engineering oriented company.  However, Fiorina’s personality and approach ran counter to the well established “HP Way” (http://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm) and proved to be a catalyst to her eventual dismissal.

Fiorina’s successor, Mark Hurd, was appointed CEO in 2005.  Though Hurd continued the head count and cost reductions, his approach was much lower profile than that of his high-flying predecessor.  His focus upon productivity and efficiency seems to be more in line with the inherent engineering culture of HP.  Assuming leadership of HP, Hurd took on expectations that he would return HP to “boring profitability” – a challenge that he has delivered upon in spades. 

Interestingly however, a closer examination of the strategies upon which Hurd has successfully executed trace many of their lineages to Fiorina.  No where is this more apparent than in the acquisition of EDS which delivers upon a strategic proposal made early in Fiorina’s tenure – and which precipitated the now infamous proxy fight with Walter Hewlett (son of co-founder William Hewlett).

There is a growing level of recognition that strategy developed by and under Fiorina has proven to be both sound and profitable for HP.  What is equally apparent was that the “how” of her approach was out of synch with the much vaunted HP culture and as a result it is Hurd that has received recognition and reward for the successes of HP.

From 1986 to 1997 Apple, Inc was then known as Apple Computer and struggling to define its path in the highly dynamic personal computer business.  This period in the company’s history is best known for the notable failure of Newton and plummeting share prices.  Yet Newton was only one of many endeavors undertaken by the executive team, all of which contributed to the declining market capitalization.

Under the respective leadership of John Sculley, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio Apple moved away from its predominate culture in two ways.  Under the auspices of Sculley, and continued by both Spindler and Amelio, the organization of Apple was changed from that of being product focused to various forms of nominal corporate functional alignment.  Secondly, the company embarked on a spectrum of technology initiatives that were far removed from the core competence recognized today. These initiatives ranged from central processors (Aquarius) to high-end workstations (Tesseract) to high volume / low margin go-to-market strategy (wading into the prevailing PC price wars of the time) to licensed manufacturing (Mac clones built by Radius, Motorola and Power Computing).

It was not until the return of Steve Jobs and his assumption of the CEO role that Apple again found its footing.  Jobs appears to be the very embodiment of the Apple culture and he reasserted the focus upon products and the user experience.  The results have been stunning.  The CEOs before Jobs had each in turn attempted to lead Apple into various forms of “what” that was not congruent with the predominate culture – none of which were successful.

The point is to be aware of the company culture and align your leadership efforts accordingly.  The degree to which your approach with respect to either “how” or “what” is divergent from the culture will increase the level of difficulty in attaining your objective of aligning critical stakeholders and therefore the company behind your initiative.

Leadership as a topic has a great deal of breadth and depth.  With respect to product management the term “leadership” usually evokes the context of product or market leadership.  While these are worthy goals to which many of us product managers aspire, there is much work to be done in laying the groundwork for the desired level of success.  This is particularly true if the objective is to achieve product or market leadership on a sustained basis – think Exchange over Lotus Notes.

Attainment of product or market leadership requires tight organizational alignment around company initiatives and its go-to-market plans.  You as PM will be called upon to drive alignment around how your company goes to market.  Success in this effort will require organizational leadership.

Over the course of three posts we will explore the topic of organizational leadership in the context of product management.  Many of you will reflexively think that this is ground more suited to CEOs and the like, and that Product Managers should stay primarily focused upon identification of market opportunities, development of products / solutions and their successful launch into the market.  However, product management best practices make implicit, or in many cases explicit, the need to run a product or solution as a business unto itself.  Therefore, unless you have direct control of all the means of production, marketing and distribution, you will need to effect leadership to ensure the organization and its disparate departments do what is necessary to win in the market.  I liken product management to being the CEO for the given product or solution.

Leadership is one of those concepts ready to grasp but difficult to define, so let’s take a moment to reflect upon definitions to ensure we are all working within the same context.  Referencing Wikipedia, one definition of leadership is the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership).  Note the focus upon persons.  The formative years of my professional career were spent as a naval officer, therefore to me there is a clear distinction between leadership and management.  Leadership involves alignment of people around a common initiative or objective.  Management is the control of assets and/or processes.

Having assumed a role as Product Manager you have learned or will learn quickly that there are many beyond you with opinions as to what the Products department should be doing.  As Joshua wrote in his recent post, A GPS for Product Roadmaps, a successful product strategy requires more than simply the PM’s imprint.  To be successful, a company needs to align itself around one or more clearly defined product or solution strategies so that all departmental teams can pull in the same direction.  Critical to the achievement of organizational alignment is ensuring the core objectives and effort across Sales, Marketing, R&D and Products.  This is best accomplished through the exercise of organizational leadership.

In approaching the challenge of alignment through leadership, the purview of product management expands beyond identifying a market opportunity, defining a product or offering and its successful launch.  In addition to the above, the foremost task of product management becomes the alignment of stakeholders and organizations such that there is consensus with respect to the go-to-market plan, and all know their role in its execution.  To accomplish the requisite level of alignment requires a multi-disciplinary approach spanning all the elements readily recognized as “good product management practices” to also encompass inspiration and persuasion.  In a positive sense, these are at the core of leadership.

The objective of this post was to posit and outline the need for product managers to effect organizational leadership.  It is axiomatic to state that every company is unique.  Yet relative to product management, there are three aspects of organizational composition that are consistently material:

• people (and personalities) that comprise the relevant stakeholders
• organizational culture
• functional organization

In the next two posts we will explore these three material aspects as they relate to organizational leadership by product management – what they mean and how they can be leveraged to achieve the outcome you desire.