April 21 Meeting Notes - Product Management [Robert Lasater]

The April 21 meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG of the SD Forum featured a talk on Product Management by Rich Mironov. His presentation was outstanding, one of the best I have seen at an Engineering Leadership SIG event. Here is a summary of Mironov’s talk.

Overview of Product Managment

Mironov began by stating Product Management engages in four areas:
· Product
· People and Organization
· Process
· Technical Knowledge

and an effective Product Manager must have some knowledge and background in all four areas.

Before proceeding further with his actual talk, Mironov asked the audience to take a few minutes and list some good and some bad experiences with Product Management.

Examples from the audience of good experiences with Product Management:
· Focus
· Good technical knowledge
· Made decisive product decisions
· Infectious enthusiasm
· Good financial analysis
· Voice of the customer

Examples of bad experiences:
· No business plan
· Senior management undercut product management
· Undefined product management role
· Threw specification over the fence
· Feature du jour
· Old product preconception
· Product management thinks they have good technical knowledge
· “I know what the customer wants.”
· No view of competitive product

Not all bad experiences were the result of product management.

What Does a Product Manger Do?
· Drives delivery and market acceptance
· Targets market segments, not individual customers
· Resolves competing priorities
· Drives acceptance and adaptation
· Makes money
· Even internal projects need to have willing customers

How Does Product Management Interact with the Rest of the Organization?

Product Management works with:
· Developers
· Executives
· Marketing and Sales – more broadly, markets and customers.

Product Management provides some specific inputs to developers:
· Market information
· Priorities
· Requirements
· User stories
· Roadmaps

And the developers provide Product Management a working product.

Product Management provides a different set of inputs to marketing and sales:
· Segments
· Benefits and features
· Prices
· Qualification
· Demonstrations

And Marketing and Sales provides Product Management with field input and market feedback.

It is essential for product managers to talk with actual customers. Ideally, one-third of their time they should be engaged with customers. A more realistic goal is one-fifth of their time with customers.

Product Management provides a third set of inputs to executives:
· Strategy
· Forecasts
· Competitive intelligence

And the executive team provides Product Management a Yes/No decision on a particular product or project, along with budgets, staffing and funding.

Mironov noted engineers become product managers as a path to becoming part of the senior executive team.

Planning Horizons and the Agile SW Process

From the Agile framework comes the hierarchy Daily – Sprint – Release – Product portfolio – Strategy. Product managers start in the center of this hierarchy – Release and Product Portfolio – but will find themselves from time to time engaged at all levels of the hierarchy.

The Nature of Product Management’s Role

There is no rational sequence for Product Management.
· All aspects must be worked in parallel.
· It is interrupt driven.
· Bottom-up shapes top-down and top-down shapes bottoms-up.
· Product Management must provide strategy, judgment and integration as well as execution.
· Every Product Manager should spend a significant amount of time with customers.

Good Product Managers drive decisions despite uncertainties and contradictory goals.

Since Product Management is a collection of people-related skills, it requires mentoring; difficult to get it on your own without strong role models. And one the most valuable aspects of Mironov’s presentation was his emphasis on how Product Management can fail. Knowing what can go wrong can be much more helpful than merely learning about successes.

Example Product Management Failure Modes

The first set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail when working with an Agile team:
· Product Manager only works part-time on Product Management.
· Lack of detail on stories (e.g. why the product is superior, or what are customers looking for in the product line)
· Hand waving and bluster.
· Best of intentions but pulled in too many directions
· “Build what I meant”
The second set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail in the market:
· Weak on the real world – pricing, discounts, upgrades and packaging
· Disconnected from other teams.
· Belief in rational users
· Trade off company-wide product strategy for product level features.
· Assume a few customers represent the market.

Mironov closed on a very positive theme, how you can help Product Management.

Seven Ways to Help Product Management
· Ask about Use Cases and customer problems
· Do not demand that Product Managers be as technical as engineers.
· Not every user story becomes a feature
· Expect Product Managers to translate features into customer-relevant benefits
· Ask about forecasts, shipments and revenue
· Quietly sit in on some customer meetings
· Channel your Inner Product Manager