Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
John Peltier
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Posts by John Peltier
Startups and Product Management
Oct 11th
As I spend more time in startup-heavy Austin, I think more about the role of product managers in startup companies. In most cases, that role is implicit–there is no “product manager,” per se, but rather a CEO and/or CTO who have a vision for a product and who chair a personal quest to bring it to market. There is plenty of risk here for those who understand product management and have delivered products to market.
The fact is that as demands placed upon a startup company mount, the focus of the CEO begins to split to operational and technical issues. If someone is not dedicated to the product itself, it seems very easy — to cite but one example — to experience feature creep where people think additional functions “can’t hurt,” while they’re really not focused on the specific target market and whether or not that target market will actually use the feature being considered.
In a recent On Product Management post and the related comments, several of my peers argue for hiring experienced product management early in the life of a startup to avoid missing the target and delivering a product that isn’t a winner. I hereby add my “ditto” to those opinions.
ProductPotluck Austin
Oct 3rd
Attendees at each of the ProductCamp “unconference” events held in Austin have provided feedback reqeusting more frequent events for the product management and product marketing communities. In response, the folks behind ProductCamp have unveiled a smaller version of the unconference, calling it ProductPotluck Austin. Before you make any plans, be sure to “bring ideas — not food.”
The agenda includes networking and 2 presentations, to be voted upon by the attendees. For the first meeting on October 21, two topics have been selected: Marketing and Product Strategy. Participants are asked to submit topics, and registered attendees can vote upon the sessions offered between October 12 and October 16. On the 21st, the participants will vote from among the top 4 vote-getters to determine the two topics to be presented that evening. Much like ProductCamp, this format engenders a bit of good-natured competition and brings out better presentations.
We hope that this periodic mini-unconference between the biannual ProductCamps can help advance the product management and product marketing community in Central Texas.
Currently, 54 people are signed up out of a maximum 150. Hope to see you there!
NOTE: Please see Paul Young’s more extensive write-up of the event.
Is innovation really that simple?
Sep 16th
I’m reading an interesting book by Denis Hauptly called Something Really New, which purports to boil innovation down to 3 simple steps:
1) What is your product used for?
2) What are the steps that compose that task, and can any of them be removed?
3) What is the next thing the cusotmer will do after using your product?
Hauptly points out in the book that there are two types of innovation, essentially incremental and wholesale, and this type of three-step process is more applicable to incremental innovations. The small (incremental) innovaiton is not necessarily less valuable to a company, and it is more likely to be teachable. By honing one’s focus on the purpose of products and the specific steps of the tasks they enable, attention is being focused on workflows and on looking for opportunities to optimize.
How does one reach life-changing innovation? Is it the same as incremental, but just a better target for optimization? Or is it something existential that may only happen to people in a hightened state of mind or with higher skills? I suppose if I truly knew the answer, I’d be a more successful innovator! That said, while I think creativity and skill plays a great part in it, innovation is probably not as likely if one doesn’t focus attention on the steps required to accomplish tasks, and the tasks which come before and after a task–which is what this book helps to do. For communication of that mindset, I find it valuable.
Internal systems
Aug 30th
One of the takeaways I’m finding in Bill Jensen’s book Simplicity is a reaction to the effect that information overload has on company productivity. As there is more and more information to process to do one’s job, it becomes ever more important for a company to provide tools that not only provide access to information, but which help interpret the information in the sense of analytics. So how does this manifest for a large company aiming to produce streamlined products for the marketplace, that will address (and solve well) a specific problem?
As a product manager with a multinational corporation, I find that (at least at my company in my specific division/subsidiary) there’s a contrast between the streamlined solutions we’re being asked to produce, and the cumbersome internal systems we use to collect and analyze the information we use to design such products. The systems we’re building are “push,” but the systems we use internally are “pull.” Some of this may be due to our company’s implementation of off-the-shelf requirements management and project management tools, but the net result is that the company does not make it easier to easily understand the decisions we need to make, much less make them.
I suspect we are not nearly the only ones.
One of the products I’m developing now is a service which can run client-server or on the web, in order to maximize the base of customers to whom we can provide a solution. I’m finding that questions about–and design of–the internal management components to be used by company support representatives are getting short-changed due to the pressure to meet release targets. This is certainly not unique to this one product, and the support angle hasn’t been ignored, but at the same time the support team’s “use cases” have not been considered with nearly as much diligence and interaction design as the product itself. So in one sense, the sub-optimal experience product managers have with requirements tools is being propagated to the experience support reps will have with service management.
Something I need to reiterate within my organization.
Simplicity
Aug 23rd
I started reading a book about Simplicity titled Simplicity: The New competitive Advantage by Bill Jensen, and immediately one of the author’s assertions struck a chord. One of the book’s hypotheses (simplified) is that knowledge workers spend too much time figuring out what to do, leading primarily to diminished productivity and frustration. For large companies, much of this is laid at the feet of upper management, who may craft a concise strategy at the top but fail to disseminate that strategy appropriately within the organization.
In the case of product companies, whose effectiveness is related to how well they can develop new products and bring them to market, this is one function of product management. Product managers are responsible with becoming intimately familiar with the market’s needs in order to identify opportunities to build solutions the market will pay for, and documenting those problems and needs as requirements. (as opposed to building something we think is cool, and then struggling to find buyers)
With this role as market spokesperson, the product manager guides designers to craft a solution that will satisfy the needs so completely that buyers will be lining up to pay. In some organizations, the product manager serves as the designer as well. Either way, when that design is delivered to development, the vision, goals and solution must be clear enough that the developers can craft an accurate plan and execute without getting mired in confusion and endless analysis paralysis. Certainly the feasibility of the design must be validated before the project team is ankle-deep, but much of the programmer-as-knowledge-worker’s confusion can be alleviated by a clear vision of the solution.
Note: Modern design patterns tell us the product should also be simple and focused, but that is a topic for another post.
Jensen cites his research to assert that the 4 primary causes of confusion among knowledge workers are:
- lack of integration of change
- unclear goals and objectives
- ineffective communication
- knowledge management experience
Certainly the integration of change is a big problem during merger and acquisition activity, forcing disparate systems to be blended. Knowledge management is the problem of finding knowledge already present within the organization. But the other two–unclear goals and ineffective communication–can be addressed within a software development organization by product management.
