Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
Archive for February, 2009
Interesting post about forgetting feature requests
Feb 27th
I ran across a blog post today suggesting that the work of tracking and logging feature requests is unnecessary. As the thought goes, the ideas that keep coming up are the ones worth considering anyway, so those repeated mentions serve to remind the product manager of the market’s needs.
I find this interesting in its minimalism, but within a large software organization it seems like this might be difficult. The product manager is often several levels removed from support calls, which is where a high volume of customer contact is made. The product manager’s site visits, interviews and observations may be only a small percentage of the company’s contact with its customers. So is it wise to trust that the product manager’s selection of contacts is wide enough that those same important ideas will bubble up to the top?
The degree to which a product manager spends time listening to the market also plays a part. If the product manager carries products all the way through commercialization, time in market may be sporadic or limited; in which case, this concept would seem to be more risky of not hearing the “right” messages from the market.
Still, interesting food for thought.
Product Managment should not be overburdened with Project Management
Feb 14th
As a product manager, after delivery of requirements to the development organization, I find myself spending significant amounts of time doing the marketing related tasks I expected to do, but even more time managing the development and QA effort to get the product to market. The role of product management is well known to be responsible for be delivering overviews of the product to the technical writers, trainers and sales people. What it is NOT known to be responsible for is the daily follow-up on defects reported by quality assurance, and the job of maintaining intense focus to “get things done” by the dates promised. I’ve also written about this before. Is this a frequent problem in the industry, or the sign of an immature organization?
Signs suggest this is common:
If the product management surveys are to be believed, most product managers spend very little time doing the things we know that we should be doing, and instead spend all our time managing logistics, and doing detailed work in marketing, development, or sales.
I am responsible for three products of highly varied scope and type. Each product, in order to be great, needs the dedicated attention of a product manager who spends time out in the market discovering the problems customers would pay to solve. I find that merely managing ONE product through the development cycle has severely limited my ability to interact with the market, to the detriment of the other two products for which I function as the market spokesperson. The organization continues to come to me for detailed information about not only high-level milestones but also low-level defects and test pass rates, so while I suspect I need to become better at time management, I also suspect that the organization just doesn’t “get” product management.
Reviewing Steve Johnson’s Pragmatic Marketing e-book on The Strategic Role of Product Management, I am struck by this extract:
For technology companies, particularly those with enterprise or B2B products, the product management job is very technical. This is why we see many product managers reporting to Development or Engineering. However, we’ve seen a shift away from this in recent years, from 19% in 2001 to 12% in 2008. The problem appears to be that technical product managers spend so much time writing requirements that they don’t have time to visit the market to better understand the problems their products are designed to solve. They spend so much time building products that they’re not equipped to help deliver them to the market.
In my organization, it’s not that I spend too much time writing more and more precise requirements–in fact, we avoid use cases so that customer requirements avoid stepping into design. However, our problem is that several high priority products are under the guidance of the same product manager, who cannot manage all of them well.
Does this strike a chord in your experience?