Happy New Year 2010
Thanks to the 862 unique visitors who read our pages 3,800 times since we started a little more than 3 months ago. Happy new year for 2010 wherever you are.
Are You Barking Up the Wrong Tree?
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. Continue reading this post »
Product Manager Wanted: HR’s Mission Impossible?
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:
Leadership in Product Management (3) – Functional Organization
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. Continue reading this post »
Build Your Personal Credibility by Leveraging Your Company’s Existing Assets
Few moments bring more credibility to product managers than when they are able to provide rock-solid market facts to defend their strategy against opinions or third-hand customer single data points raised earlier at the water cooler.
Yet finding truly relevant, uncontested and trusted customer data is a daunting challenge. It is also time-consuming.
Of course there are always industry data or analyst reports available, and these should always be fine-combed and appropriately leveraged. I always maintain a “market facts” database which I can pull out on short notice.
But this outside data does not reflect the intimacy you have developed with your customers: how do they use your product, when can you up-sell or cross-sell and with which products? These questions can only be addressed using internal resources. A process called Data Governance can help a company make sense of this customer data. Let’s investigate data issues before we delve further on Data Governance. Continue reading this post »
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