Sep 2007
Product Discovery
09.24.07 Filed in: SVPG Blog
Have you seen this situation before? Your company gets all excited about a product idea, and as product manager you are asked to define it. You are told that the engineers will be finished with their current project in 4 weeks, so that means take all the time you need, as long as you are ready in 4 weeks.
No problem, you say (after all, sometimes you're only given days, so 4 weeks sounds great). You'll even use all the best practices Marty is always ranting about. You'll start with an opportunity assessment to understand the problem to be solved, then you'll spend quality time interviewing real users, and identify a preliminary set of requirements, and by the start of the second week you should be able to to work with an interaction designer on a prototype, and in the third week you'll do user testing with the prototype, and in the fourth week you'll flesh out the details of the use cases and review the prototype and spec with engineering.
These are all great practices. But what happens isn't usually so great. During your initial user discussions you find that users aren't as excited about the idea as your management was, and/or you struggle to come up with a prototype that users can figure out, and/or the users aren't excited about the ideas in the prototype when they test it. But the time is up, the engineers are ready, and the result is that during the next three to six months, engineering proceeds to build that same unusable and unexciting product that you saw in your prototype, and you ship, and then your management is of course disappointed in the results.
The problem isn't the reliability of the software, so the engineering team isn't to blame - after all, they just built what you asked them to - so everyone knows it's your fault as product manager.
You know that it doesn't help to talk to users, create prototypes, and test with users, if you don't adjust your course based on what you learn.
This notion of requirements and design as a sequential, predictable and scheduled phase in a product development process is so ingrained in our industry that it's often one of the most difficult habits for product organizations to break.
But they do need to get past this. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a creative process. It is more art than science.
I prefer to think of this phase as "product discovery" more than "requirements and design." I think this nomenclature emphasizes two all-important points:
First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there that want this product. In other words, you need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers.
Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible. In other words, you need to design your product and validate it with your customers and your engineering team.
Sometimes this product discovery is straight-forward. Other times it is extremely difficult. In my experience, it's not so hard to discover and validate the market opportunity, but often it's very challenging to discover the solution. Even with the help of great designers and great engineers, some problems are just truly hard (at least many of the ones worth pursuing).
The pharmaceutical drug industry provides an extreme example. The market discovery is usually not very hard; no shortage of good problems worth solving (like saving your life, extending your life, or improving the quality of your life). The hard part of course is discovering a product solution. Drug companies go into this "discovery" phase fully aware that there's no guarantee they'll come up with anything, or how long it may take. As an industry, they have to come to terms with this element of uncertainty (and this risk is priced into their products).
Yet with software, even though we all know it is very hard, and we know that the majority of software releases fail to meet their objectives, we still insist on scheduling the discovery phase like we're planning the construction of a house.
Management especially struggles with this notion of product discovery. I think there are two underlying reasons for this:
First, the discovery process just isn't predictable. Management fears you may spend months and end up with nothing to show for it. At least if they go ahead and build they can say that they shipped something. It's the same reason why many managers are uncomfortable with Scrum. They want to know how many 30-day sprints it will take before they're done.
Second, the perceived constrained resource in just about every software product organization is the engineers, and the thought that an engineering team might be sitting around with nothing to do but play Foosball just drives management nuts.
Ironically, it is precisely this reasoning that leads directly to wasted engineering resources.
Realize that almost every company does this discovery process I've described here, instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, they use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA'ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to two years to get something usable and useful. They are using the engineering organization to build a very, very expensive prototype, and they use their live customers as unwitting test subjects.
This is also why so many startups fail. Most startups simply don't have the funding to go two years before they gain traction. So they hire their engineers, take their best shot, and see what happens.
So with startups as well as large companies I try to get them to focus their energies on this much faster product discovery process, and once they discover the solution that works - one that is usable, useful and feasible - then it's all about the engineering. Until that point, they don't have to hire so many engineers right away, the engineers they have can and should actively participate in the product discovery process, and to a degree the engineers can prepare the infrastructure while this discovery is going on.
You can help your management to understand the nature of the product discovery process. If you consistently emphasize your obligation to ensure that what engineering builds must be useful and usable, and enlist their efforts to discover a successful solution, you'll start to move their focus to this most critical stage of the product development process.
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No problem, you say (after all, sometimes you're only given days, so 4 weeks sounds great). You'll even use all the best practices Marty is always ranting about. You'll start with an opportunity assessment to understand the problem to be solved, then you'll spend quality time interviewing real users, and identify a preliminary set of requirements, and by the start of the second week you should be able to to work with an interaction designer on a prototype, and in the third week you'll do user testing with the prototype, and in the fourth week you'll flesh out the details of the use cases and review the prototype and spec with engineering.
These are all great practices. But what happens isn't usually so great. During your initial user discussions you find that users aren't as excited about the idea as your management was, and/or you struggle to come up with a prototype that users can figure out, and/or the users aren't excited about the ideas in the prototype when they test it. But the time is up, the engineers are ready, and the result is that during the next three to six months, engineering proceeds to build that same unusable and unexciting product that you saw in your prototype, and you ship, and then your management is of course disappointed in the results.
The problem isn't the reliability of the software, so the engineering team isn't to blame - after all, they just built what you asked them to - so everyone knows it's your fault as product manager.
You know that it doesn't help to talk to users, create prototypes, and test with users, if you don't adjust your course based on what you learn.
This notion of requirements and design as a sequential, predictable and scheduled phase in a product development process is so ingrained in our industry that it's often one of the most difficult habits for product organizations to break.
But they do need to get past this. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a creative process. It is more art than science.
I prefer to think of this phase as "product discovery" more than "requirements and design." I think this nomenclature emphasizes two all-important points:
First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there that want this product. In other words, you need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers.
Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible. In other words, you need to design your product and validate it with your customers and your engineering team.
Sometimes this product discovery is straight-forward. Other times it is extremely difficult. In my experience, it's not so hard to discover and validate the market opportunity, but often it's very challenging to discover the solution. Even with the help of great designers and great engineers, some problems are just truly hard (at least many of the ones worth pursuing).
The pharmaceutical drug industry provides an extreme example. The market discovery is usually not very hard; no shortage of good problems worth solving (like saving your life, extending your life, or improving the quality of your life). The hard part of course is discovering a product solution. Drug companies go into this "discovery" phase fully aware that there's no guarantee they'll come up with anything, or how long it may take. As an industry, they have to come to terms with this element of uncertainty (and this risk is priced into their products).
Yet with software, even though we all know it is very hard, and we know that the majority of software releases fail to meet their objectives, we still insist on scheduling the discovery phase like we're planning the construction of a house.
Management especially struggles with this notion of product discovery. I think there are two underlying reasons for this:
First, the discovery process just isn't predictable. Management fears you may spend months and end up with nothing to show for it. At least if they go ahead and build they can say that they shipped something. It's the same reason why many managers are uncomfortable with Scrum. They want to know how many 30-day sprints it will take before they're done.
Second, the perceived constrained resource in just about every software product organization is the engineers, and the thought that an engineering team might be sitting around with nothing to do but play Foosball just drives management nuts.
Ironically, it is precisely this reasoning that leads directly to wasted engineering resources.
Realize that almost every company does this discovery process I've described here, instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, they use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA'ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to two years to get something usable and useful. They are using the engineering organization to build a very, very expensive prototype, and they use their live customers as unwitting test subjects.
This is also why so many startups fail. Most startups simply don't have the funding to go two years before they gain traction. So they hire their engineers, take their best shot, and see what happens.
So with startups as well as large companies I try to get them to focus their energies on this much faster product discovery process, and once they discover the solution that works - one that is usable, useful and feasible - then it's all about the engineering. Until that point, they don't have to hire so many engineers right away, the engineers they have can and should actively participate in the product discovery process, and to a degree the engineers can prepare the infrastructure while this discovery is going on.
You can help your management to understand the nature of the product discovery process. If you consistently emphasize your obligation to ensure that what engineering builds must be useful and usable, and enlist their efforts to discover a successful solution, you'll start to move their focus to this most critical stage of the product development process.
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Recruiting Product Managers
09.10.07 Filed in: SVPG Blog
Probably the single most common question I get from CEO's is where to find great product managers?
I tell them that often they're already in their organization, hiding under a different title - maybe a software engineer, designer, or an SE, just waiting to be discovered. But whether you recruit product managers from inside or outside, the easiest way to spot them is to have a clear understanding of the characteristics to look for. So in this note i'll enumerate the specific traits and skills you're looking for:
Personal Traits and Attitude
Most skills can be learned, however, there are some traits that are very difficult to teach, and as such they should form the foundation of any search for a product manager.
- Product Passion
There are some people out there who just love products. Not necessarily every type of product, but also not just a single type of product. Great product managers have a love and respect for good products, no matter where they come from, and they live to create them.
This passion for product is an essential ingredient as it will often be called upon to provide the motivation to get through the many very difficult challenges, and long hours, of defining a great product. Further, the product manager will need to inspire the rest of the product team, and the passion for a product is contagious.
It is fairly easy to determine whether of not you are talking to such a person by simply asking them what some of their favorite products are and why. It is hard to feign passion; the insincerity comes through. Ask for examples from different domains. Ask what they would improve on their favorite product if they were the product manager. Ask about bad products too.
- Customer Empathy
The ideal product manager does not necessarily have to come from your target market (there are pros and cons to this), but they absolutely need to be able to empathize with your target market. This trait is often difficult to find in high-technology companies trying to produce mass-market products. We tend to want to think of our users as we think of ourselves and our friends. However, the target market very likely has quite different values, priorities, perceptions, tolerances and experiences.
Ask the candidates about the target market and how they believe they might be different from themselves. Try and detect how the candidate feels about the target market, and most importantly, does the candidate respect and empathize with that target market, or does he view his job as "enlightening" the target market.
This is doubly important for international products, or those products targeted at specific countries or cultures. There are many similarities, and many differences, between cultures. Many of the differences are incidental and not important to defining products. However, some of the differences are essential. Does the candidate you are talking to have enough understanding of the target market to know which is which?
- Intelligence
There is really no substitute for innate intelligence. The successful product manager must be able to learn very quickly. Product management is about insights and judgement, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient.
Hiring very smart people is harder than it sounds. Much depends on the strength and security of the hiring manager. Hiring smart people speaks to the company culture which is another important topic in its own right, but suffice it to say here that if your goal is a truly good product, it is simply not going to happen if you can't find a truly bright product manager.
Assuming you are anxious to find the brightest, most insightful person possible, one technique is to drill on problem solving. Microsoft is famous for their very intensive and effective interviewing for intelligence based on problem solving. The technique is to use one or more experts in some topic to drill the candidate on a problem. The interviewer is not looking so much as whether or not the candidate simply knows the right answer (knowledge rather than intelligence), but rather, how well they deal with not knowing the answer. How does the candidate work out problems? When the candidate comes up with a solution, the interviewer changes the question somewhat and asks what the candidate would do then. This is done continuously until the candidate must force herself to deal with a scenario she doesn't know the answer to, and then she is asked to verbalize how she would go about solving that problem. With practice, this can be a very effective technique in assessing a candidate's problem solving capability.
Another approach is to ask two or three people in your organization who are well known for their intellectual prowess, and ask them to interview this person, and help you determine the candidate's problem solving ability.
- Work Ethic
Not every role in the product team requires the same level of commitment and effort. However, the product manager role is not for someone who is afraid of hard work. It comes along with the responsibility. The product manager is the person ultimately responsible for the success of the product, and this burden weighs heavily on the successful product manager.
Even when skills such as time management and the techniques of product management are mastered, the successful product manager is still consumed with the product. Can you have a family and a non-work life and be a successful product manager? I believe you can. At least once you have some experience. But there are many people that want to be able to work 40 hours a week and most importantly, leave their work problems at the office when they leave at the end of the day. This unfortunately is not the life of a successful product manager.
I believe in being very frank with candidate product managers about the level of effort required for successful product management. But to be perfectly clear, it is not about requiring the product manager to work certain hours- if you have to actually ask or tell the product manager to come in during a critical point you have the wrong person for the job.
It should also be emphasized that the level of effort and commitment is not uniform throughout the lifecycle of the project. There are certain phases that are much more intense than others. What won't change for the successful product manager is the degree to which they care and worry about their product and the lengths they are willing to go to ensure its success.
- Integrity
This trait also relates to the company culture, but of all the members of the product team, the product manager most needs to reflect the values of the company and the product. In most organizational structures, the product manager does not directly manage the people on the project team, and as such, he can't simply direct the people to do his bidding. Rather, he must work by influencing those on his team. This persuasion is done by mutual trust and respect.
This trust and respect is built over time by the successful product manager demonstrating the traits and skills of a strong product team leader. If the product manager is not perceived to have integrity, or honesty, or fairness when dealing with his teammates, then the product manager will not have the degree of collaboration and team effectiveness that he needs to get the job done.
The product manager may not be an expert in every role of the product team, but he should have a deep understanding and respect for what each team member is responsible for, and he should be willing to trust those people to do their job.
As the main interface between the product team and both the executive team and the sales organization, the product manager is often put in difficult situations, such as being asked to deliver products earlier, or with special features for large customers. The product team will watch closely how the product manager handles these situations.
As with intelligence, assessing someone's integrity can be difficult. For candidates with previous experience as product managers, they can be asked about how they dealt with the stresses in past products. Press for details of particular situations; what made the situation hard and how was it dealt with?
- Confidence
Many people think of confidence as a result of experience. However, while experience may be a prerequisite for confidence, many very experienced product managers simply do not project confidence (you can sometimes find brand new college graduates simply bursting with confidence, although this is generally the confidence that comes from not knowing yet what they're in for).
Confidence becomes an important trait that the entire product team, executive team and sales organization is looking to the product manager to convince them that what they are investing their time and money and careers in will be successful, and why the vision is a good one. In communicating persuasively, confidence is a critical ingredient.
- Communication Skills
While communication skills can, for the most part, be learned, it can take years to become an effective speaker or writer, and these skills will be required from the start. As discussed above, the product manager influences others by persuasion rather than authority - making his case by communicating either through writing, speaking, or both.
Speaking skills can be partially assessed during the interview itself, but written skills should be assessed specifically. I like to suggest that product manager candidates bring in examples of written material such as white papers or strategic documents.
While good communication skills are absolutely essential, it is important to emphasize that speaking with an accent, or minor grammatical issues with a non-native language, do not constitute poor communication skills. The person must speak clearly enough to be easily understood, and write powerfully enough to persuade, but perfect pronunciation or grammar is not required.
- Attitude
The successful product manager sees himself as the CEO of the product. He takes full responsibility for the product, and does not make excuses. The successful product manager knows he is ultimately responsible for the success of the product. More importantly, he knows there are many very valid reasons for the product to not ship, or fail in the market when it does - the product is too difficult to build, it will take too long to get to market, it will cost too much, it will be too complicated, etc. - but he knows it is his job to see that each and every one of these obstacles is overcome.
This does not mean that he micromanages the product team, or that he tries to do it all himself, but rather that he is quick to take the blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the rest of the team when it goes well. The successful product manager knows that it is through the rest of the team that his product vision will become a reality, but that it is his product vision they are building.
Skills
In order to succeed at the job of product development, there are several skills that are important. If the person has the right personal traits, I believe all these skills can be learned.
- Applying Technology
One reason many successful product managers come from the engineering ranks is that a big part of defining a successful product is in understanding new technology and seeing how it might be applied to help solve a relevant problem.
While you don't need to be able to invent or implement the new technology yourself in order to be a strong product manager, you do need to be comfortable enough with the technology that you can understand it and see its potential applications.
There are many ways to develop this skill. Taking classes, reading books and articles, and talking with engineers and architects can help you learn. Ask the senior engineers on your product team what they would recommend as ways to learn more about the technology possibilities. Brainstorming sessions with the engineering team is another way to learn how new technologies might be applied.
- Focus
"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." There are so many distractions out there, especially for the product manager trying to create a product that customers will love. The ability to keep the focus on the key problem to be solved, and not succumb to creeping featurism, or the loud voices of a few key people or customers, requires tremendous discipline - both company discipline and personal discipline.
The truth is that nearly every product has features that are not really all that important - if the features were never there it would not significantly impact the sales or customer satisfaction. Much more often, if the features were not there, the product would be better for it as more users could comprehend and appreciate the resulting simpler product. Focus will help you reduce the number of cluttering features, reduce the time it takes you to build the product, and therefore the time it takes you to get to market.
- Time Management
In today's e-mail, instant message, and cell-phone based world, it is so very easy to come in to work early in the morning, work frantically all day even skipping food, and then head straight home well into the night, not having actually accomplished anything important for your product. This is because you have spent the day chasing fires and working on "urgent" items.
It is absolutely essential to get very skilled at distinguishing that which is important from that which is urgent, and learn to prioritize and plan your time. If you can't manage to get the time to focus on those tasks which are truly important to your product, your product will fail.
I have known too many product managers that burn themselves out with 70-hour weeks and the worst part is when I tell them that they're not actually doing their job. The natural response is that they just don't have any more time and can't work any harder. I then go into my lecture on time management and working smarter. So much of what these people spend time doing is avoidable.
- Written Skills
Product managers spend a great deal of time writing - composing e-mails, specs, white papers, strategy papers, data sheets, competitive product reviews, and more. The successful product manager is only taking the time to write these if he believes people are going to read them, and since they are going to be read, they need to do their job well, which is typically to describe, educate, and/or persuade.
Being able to write clear and concise prose is a skill that product managers use every day. The successful product manager realizes that the readers of his writings are constantly evaluating him based on his writings. Especially with senior management, sometimes these writings are all they have to go on.
- Presentation Skills
The other major form of communication that product managers frequently need to do is a presentation. Presenting in front of a group is hard for many people. Presenting effectively is even harder. Yet this is an important skill for a product manager since many of the most important events in the life of a product require the product manager to stand up in front of company executives or major customers or the company sales force and in the short time you have, explain what your product is about and why it is important.
We have all sat through terrible presentations, with slide after endless slide; the speaker simply reading the bullets; people straining to read the too-small print; meaningless graphics; and being unclear what the key messages are and why you should care.
In contrast, the successful product manager has a minimal number of slides; he is engaging, clearly knowledgeable and passionate about his product, he speaks clearly and to the point, his slides provide relevant supporting data for what he is saying, and he has unambiguously stated his main points, and what he needs from the audience after the presentation. His presentation finishes early, he entertains questions and if he can't provide a clear, useful answer immediately he follows up diligently and promptly with the questioner, and if appropriate, the entire audience.
- Business Skills
Finally, business skills are also important for the product manager. As the main interface with the rest of the company, the product manager will need to work with company finance staff, marketing people, sales, and executive management, and the language and concepts that these people deal with.
I sometimes talk of product managers needing to be bilingual. They need to be able to converse equally well with engineers about technology as with executives and marketers about cost structures, margins, market share, positioning and brand.
This is one reason why so many product managers are recruited out of business school. The product organization knows that they need someone who can talk the language of the business side, so they hire an MBA. I have known some great product managers that have come through the MBA path, but if you've read this far, you know that the business skills are but one part of the mix required for a successful product manger, and they can certainly be learned. It is at least as common that an engineer moves into product management and acquires the business skills required by reading books, taking courses, and getting coaching and assistance from mentors in the finance and marketing organizations.
So where do you find these people?
After reading this list of traits and skills, you may be thinking that such people are extremely rare. They are rare - about as rare as good products are. But few hires you make will be as critical as your product managers, so it is worthwhile to interview for these characteristics and set the bar high.
There are a lot of different schools of thought on recruiting product managers. Many companies think that all you need is someone from the marketing organization or someone with an MBA. In the old-school definition of product manager, this may have been true, but this is a recipe for failure today.
Many companies prefer MBA's from top business schools that have a technical undergraduate degree combined with applicable industry experience. This can work well if you keep in mind that a problem with MBA programs, even from the top-tier schools, is that they almost never teach product management, so it is dangerous to assume that the recent MBA grad has any idea how to be a product manager.
My favorite source for product managers is to look for people with the characteristics described above and then use training, an informal mentoring program, and/or a formal employee development program to develop these people into strong product managers. Such people might be found virtually anywhere in the company. I've seen outstanding product managers come out of engineering, technical support, professional services, product marketing, sales, and the user community. Often these people will approach management asking how they can get more involved in the product. It can also be useful for senior management to approach top performers from across the company about the possibility of product management, as this can be essential experience for those on an executive track.
I've written earlier about running a good interview process (The Microsoft Advantage), but there have been some great posts on general hiring practices recently. My favorite is: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html.
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I tell them that often they're already in their organization, hiding under a different title - maybe a software engineer, designer, or an SE, just waiting to be discovered. But whether you recruit product managers from inside or outside, the easiest way to spot them is to have a clear understanding of the characteristics to look for. So in this note i'll enumerate the specific traits and skills you're looking for:
Personal Traits and Attitude
Most skills can be learned, however, there are some traits that are very difficult to teach, and as such they should form the foundation of any search for a product manager.
- Product Passion
There are some people out there who just love products. Not necessarily every type of product, but also not just a single type of product. Great product managers have a love and respect for good products, no matter where they come from, and they live to create them.
This passion for product is an essential ingredient as it will often be called upon to provide the motivation to get through the many very difficult challenges, and long hours, of defining a great product. Further, the product manager will need to inspire the rest of the product team, and the passion for a product is contagious.
It is fairly easy to determine whether of not you are talking to such a person by simply asking them what some of their favorite products are and why. It is hard to feign passion; the insincerity comes through. Ask for examples from different domains. Ask what they would improve on their favorite product if they were the product manager. Ask about bad products too.
- Customer Empathy
The ideal product manager does not necessarily have to come from your target market (there are pros and cons to this), but they absolutely need to be able to empathize with your target market. This trait is often difficult to find in high-technology companies trying to produce mass-market products. We tend to want to think of our users as we think of ourselves and our friends. However, the target market very likely has quite different values, priorities, perceptions, tolerances and experiences.
Ask the candidates about the target market and how they believe they might be different from themselves. Try and detect how the candidate feels about the target market, and most importantly, does the candidate respect and empathize with that target market, or does he view his job as "enlightening" the target market.
This is doubly important for international products, or those products targeted at specific countries or cultures. There are many similarities, and many differences, between cultures. Many of the differences are incidental and not important to defining products. However, some of the differences are essential. Does the candidate you are talking to have enough understanding of the target market to know which is which?
- Intelligence
There is really no substitute for innate intelligence. The successful product manager must be able to learn very quickly. Product management is about insights and judgement, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient.
Hiring very smart people is harder than it sounds. Much depends on the strength and security of the hiring manager. Hiring smart people speaks to the company culture which is another important topic in its own right, but suffice it to say here that if your goal is a truly good product, it is simply not going to happen if you can't find a truly bright product manager.
Assuming you are anxious to find the brightest, most insightful person possible, one technique is to drill on problem solving. Microsoft is famous for their very intensive and effective interviewing for intelligence based on problem solving. The technique is to use one or more experts in some topic to drill the candidate on a problem. The interviewer is not looking so much as whether or not the candidate simply knows the right answer (knowledge rather than intelligence), but rather, how well they deal with not knowing the answer. How does the candidate work out problems? When the candidate comes up with a solution, the interviewer changes the question somewhat and asks what the candidate would do then. This is done continuously until the candidate must force herself to deal with a scenario she doesn't know the answer to, and then she is asked to verbalize how she would go about solving that problem. With practice, this can be a very effective technique in assessing a candidate's problem solving capability.
Another approach is to ask two or three people in your organization who are well known for their intellectual prowess, and ask them to interview this person, and help you determine the candidate's problem solving ability.
- Work Ethic
Not every role in the product team requires the same level of commitment and effort. However, the product manager role is not for someone who is afraid of hard work. It comes along with the responsibility. The product manager is the person ultimately responsible for the success of the product, and this burden weighs heavily on the successful product manager.
Even when skills such as time management and the techniques of product management are mastered, the successful product manager is still consumed with the product. Can you have a family and a non-work life and be a successful product manager? I believe you can. At least once you have some experience. But there are many people that want to be able to work 40 hours a week and most importantly, leave their work problems at the office when they leave at the end of the day. This unfortunately is not the life of a successful product manager.
I believe in being very frank with candidate product managers about the level of effort required for successful product management. But to be perfectly clear, it is not about requiring the product manager to work certain hours- if you have to actually ask or tell the product manager to come in during a critical point you have the wrong person for the job.
It should also be emphasized that the level of effort and commitment is not uniform throughout the lifecycle of the project. There are certain phases that are much more intense than others. What won't change for the successful product manager is the degree to which they care and worry about their product and the lengths they are willing to go to ensure its success.
- Integrity
This trait also relates to the company culture, but of all the members of the product team, the product manager most needs to reflect the values of the company and the product. In most organizational structures, the product manager does not directly manage the people on the project team, and as such, he can't simply direct the people to do his bidding. Rather, he must work by influencing those on his team. This persuasion is done by mutual trust and respect.
This trust and respect is built over time by the successful product manager demonstrating the traits and skills of a strong product team leader. If the product manager is not perceived to have integrity, or honesty, or fairness when dealing with his teammates, then the product manager will not have the degree of collaboration and team effectiveness that he needs to get the job done.
The product manager may not be an expert in every role of the product team, but he should have a deep understanding and respect for what each team member is responsible for, and he should be willing to trust those people to do their job.
As the main interface between the product team and both the executive team and the sales organization, the product manager is often put in difficult situations, such as being asked to deliver products earlier, or with special features for large customers. The product team will watch closely how the product manager handles these situations.
As with intelligence, assessing someone's integrity can be difficult. For candidates with previous experience as product managers, they can be asked about how they dealt with the stresses in past products. Press for details of particular situations; what made the situation hard and how was it dealt with?
- Confidence
Many people think of confidence as a result of experience. However, while experience may be a prerequisite for confidence, many very experienced product managers simply do not project confidence (you can sometimes find brand new college graduates simply bursting with confidence, although this is generally the confidence that comes from not knowing yet what they're in for).
Confidence becomes an important trait that the entire product team, executive team and sales organization is looking to the product manager to convince them that what they are investing their time and money and careers in will be successful, and why the vision is a good one. In communicating persuasively, confidence is a critical ingredient.
- Communication Skills
While communication skills can, for the most part, be learned, it can take years to become an effective speaker or writer, and these skills will be required from the start. As discussed above, the product manager influences others by persuasion rather than authority - making his case by communicating either through writing, speaking, or both.
Speaking skills can be partially assessed during the interview itself, but written skills should be assessed specifically. I like to suggest that product manager candidates bring in examples of written material such as white papers or strategic documents.
While good communication skills are absolutely essential, it is important to emphasize that speaking with an accent, or minor grammatical issues with a non-native language, do not constitute poor communication skills. The person must speak clearly enough to be easily understood, and write powerfully enough to persuade, but perfect pronunciation or grammar is not required.
- Attitude
The successful product manager sees himself as the CEO of the product. He takes full responsibility for the product, and does not make excuses. The successful product manager knows he is ultimately responsible for the success of the product. More importantly, he knows there are many very valid reasons for the product to not ship, or fail in the market when it does - the product is too difficult to build, it will take too long to get to market, it will cost too much, it will be too complicated, etc. - but he knows it is his job to see that each and every one of these obstacles is overcome.
This does not mean that he micromanages the product team, or that he tries to do it all himself, but rather that he is quick to take the blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the rest of the team when it goes well. The successful product manager knows that it is through the rest of the team that his product vision will become a reality, but that it is his product vision they are building.
Skills
In order to succeed at the job of product development, there are several skills that are important. If the person has the right personal traits, I believe all these skills can be learned.
- Applying Technology
One reason many successful product managers come from the engineering ranks is that a big part of defining a successful product is in understanding new technology and seeing how it might be applied to help solve a relevant problem.
While you don't need to be able to invent or implement the new technology yourself in order to be a strong product manager, you do need to be comfortable enough with the technology that you can understand it and see its potential applications.
There are many ways to develop this skill. Taking classes, reading books and articles, and talking with engineers and architects can help you learn. Ask the senior engineers on your product team what they would recommend as ways to learn more about the technology possibilities. Brainstorming sessions with the engineering team is another way to learn how new technologies might be applied.
- Focus
"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." There are so many distractions out there, especially for the product manager trying to create a product that customers will love. The ability to keep the focus on the key problem to be solved, and not succumb to creeping featurism, or the loud voices of a few key people or customers, requires tremendous discipline - both company discipline and personal discipline.
The truth is that nearly every product has features that are not really all that important - if the features were never there it would not significantly impact the sales or customer satisfaction. Much more often, if the features were not there, the product would be better for it as more users could comprehend and appreciate the resulting simpler product. Focus will help you reduce the number of cluttering features, reduce the time it takes you to build the product, and therefore the time it takes you to get to market.
- Time Management
In today's e-mail, instant message, and cell-phone based world, it is so very easy to come in to work early in the morning, work frantically all day even skipping food, and then head straight home well into the night, not having actually accomplished anything important for your product. This is because you have spent the day chasing fires and working on "urgent" items.
It is absolutely essential to get very skilled at distinguishing that which is important from that which is urgent, and learn to prioritize and plan your time. If you can't manage to get the time to focus on those tasks which are truly important to your product, your product will fail.
I have known too many product managers that burn themselves out with 70-hour weeks and the worst part is when I tell them that they're not actually doing their job. The natural response is that they just don't have any more time and can't work any harder. I then go into my lecture on time management and working smarter. So much of what these people spend time doing is avoidable.
- Written Skills
Product managers spend a great deal of time writing - composing e-mails, specs, white papers, strategy papers, data sheets, competitive product reviews, and more. The successful product manager is only taking the time to write these if he believes people are going to read them, and since they are going to be read, they need to do their job well, which is typically to describe, educate, and/or persuade.
Being able to write clear and concise prose is a skill that product managers use every day. The successful product manager realizes that the readers of his writings are constantly evaluating him based on his writings. Especially with senior management, sometimes these writings are all they have to go on.
- Presentation Skills
The other major form of communication that product managers frequently need to do is a presentation. Presenting in front of a group is hard for many people. Presenting effectively is even harder. Yet this is an important skill for a product manager since many of the most important events in the life of a product require the product manager to stand up in front of company executives or major customers or the company sales force and in the short time you have, explain what your product is about and why it is important.
We have all sat through terrible presentations, with slide after endless slide; the speaker simply reading the bullets; people straining to read the too-small print; meaningless graphics; and being unclear what the key messages are and why you should care.
In contrast, the successful product manager has a minimal number of slides; he is engaging, clearly knowledgeable and passionate about his product, he speaks clearly and to the point, his slides provide relevant supporting data for what he is saying, and he has unambiguously stated his main points, and what he needs from the audience after the presentation. His presentation finishes early, he entertains questions and if he can't provide a clear, useful answer immediately he follows up diligently and promptly with the questioner, and if appropriate, the entire audience.
- Business Skills
Finally, business skills are also important for the product manager. As the main interface with the rest of the company, the product manager will need to work with company finance staff, marketing people, sales, and executive management, and the language and concepts that these people deal with.
I sometimes talk of product managers needing to be bilingual. They need to be able to converse equally well with engineers about technology as with executives and marketers about cost structures, margins, market share, positioning and brand.
This is one reason why so many product managers are recruited out of business school. The product organization knows that they need someone who can talk the language of the business side, so they hire an MBA. I have known some great product managers that have come through the MBA path, but if you've read this far, you know that the business skills are but one part of the mix required for a successful product manger, and they can certainly be learned. It is at least as common that an engineer moves into product management and acquires the business skills required by reading books, taking courses, and getting coaching and assistance from mentors in the finance and marketing organizations.
So where do you find these people?
After reading this list of traits and skills, you may be thinking that such people are extremely rare. They are rare - about as rare as good products are. But few hires you make will be as critical as your product managers, so it is worthwhile to interview for these characteristics and set the bar high.
There are a lot of different schools of thought on recruiting product managers. Many companies think that all you need is someone from the marketing organization or someone with an MBA. In the old-school definition of product manager, this may have been true, but this is a recipe for failure today.
Many companies prefer MBA's from top business schools that have a technical undergraduate degree combined with applicable industry experience. This can work well if you keep in mind that a problem with MBA programs, even from the top-tier schools, is that they almost never teach product management, so it is dangerous to assume that the recent MBA grad has any idea how to be a product manager.
My favorite source for product managers is to look for people with the characteristics described above and then use training, an informal mentoring program, and/or a formal employee development program to develop these people into strong product managers. Such people might be found virtually anywhere in the company. I've seen outstanding product managers come out of engineering, technical support, professional services, product marketing, sales, and the user community. Often these people will approach management asking how they can get more involved in the product. It can also be useful for senior management to approach top performers from across the company about the possibility of product management, as this can be essential experience for those on an executive track.
I've written earlier about running a good interview process (The Microsoft Advantage), but there have been some great posts on general hiring practices recently. My favorite is: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html.
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Managing Product Managers
09.04.07 Filed in: SVPG Blog
In my last article (Product Management vs. Product Marketing) I discussed why product management is very different from product marketing, and how critical it is to have capable product managers. The note seemed to strike a chord in that a record number of you wrote to express your agreement and the need to educate companies about this issue. However, quite a few managers of product management mailed me to say that while they agreed, they had inherited an organization where many of the people with "product manager" titles were really product marketing people with all the problems I described, and they were struggling to correct the situation.
So I thought now would be a good time to discuss the role and responsibilities of those that manage product managers.
Typically this is a Director of Product Management, but in larger companies you'll also find Group Product Managers and/or increasingly, a VP of Product Management. In any case, this job is among the most important positions in any high-tech company. Few positions will have more impact to the future success of the company than the head of product management. A successful product can literally redefine the course of the business. Yet a few failed products can sink a company. As a result, this job is characterized by massive success, massive failure, and little in between.
These people have two essential responsibilities. First, they must build a strong team of product managers. Second, they are responsible for the company's overall product strategy, and the various products in the company's portfolio. I'll discuss each of these responsibilities in turn.
- Building The Product Management Team
It is the primary job of every manager to build and develop the capabilities of his team, but this is especially crucial for this role because of the high impact nature of the product management position. An inadequate product manager is nearly certain to result in wasted product cycles, frustrated users, and lost customers. For many positions in the company, the truth is that you can often get away with sub-par employees because there are others to pick up the slack. Given that most products just have a single product manager, there is rarely the situation where another product manager can cover. Your only real hope is that someone else on the product team, like a lead engineer, steps up to do what's necessary.
So if you find yourself managing a team of product managers where some are not up to the task, then you have to correct the situation. There are certainly some people that will never be successful product managers. They are in so far over their heads that no amount of training or coaching is going to change that. However, I've found that for many of our product managers, you can in fact significantly improve their performance. I don't want this to sound self-serving since it is no secret that I spend a good deal of my time helping companies develop the skills of their product managers, but one way or another the manager does need to get his team up to speed.
I argue that every new product manager needs roughly three months of hard learning before they should be entrusted with the responsibility of guiding a product. During this time, the new product manager needs to immerse himself with target users and customers, educate himself on the relevant technologies, and study the market and competitive landscape. The manager should be facilitating and overseeing this time. Note that this already assumes the product manager understands the actual skills and responsibilities of a product manager. These three months apply even with experienced product managers. They still need to learn about your customers and your domain.
When you hire a new product manager to the team, establish a program so that the new product manager can get the exposure to users and technologies that he needs. For those product managers that you already have and are already in the midst of managing their products, if they're not up to the task, then you will want to make sure that they start a program like this in parallel with their other responsibilities. But make sure they understand their need to get up to speed.
And of course if you determine that the product manager is unable or unwilling to do what is necessary, it is your job as manger to find someone that is. To anyone that has ever had to do this, you know this is no fun. But this is the reason for your higher pay, and you owe it to the rest of your team and your company to correct the situation. Do everything you can to help the person find a job they can succeed at, but in any case you must get people in place that can do the job that is necessary.
Once you are convinced that the members of your team are capable of success and properly equipped to succeed, then you will need to let these people do their job. If you micro-manage your product managers they will not step up and take ownership the way you need them to. If you can't trust your product managers, you need to find product managers you can trust. This doesn't mean you shouldn't ask questions and be constantly available to help; you absolutely should. But if you empower strong people I promise you that you'll be amazed at what they can do.
Note that we first made sure we had strong people before we empowered them.
If you empower people that aren't capable, you are essentially abdicating your responsibility as manager. If you micro-manage people that are not capable, you are essentially doing their job.
I have written elsewhere (How's Your Manager Rate?) about what makes a good manager so I won't repeat that here, other that to say that every good manager knows that the best way to look good is for the members of his team to look good. As such, always hire people that you believe are smarter than yourself, and then do everything you can to help them succeed.
- Defining The Company's Product Strategy
Nobody is more responsible of more accountable for the suite of products a company offers than the head of the product management organization. This person needs to decide what products are are pursued, and review closely the strategy and execution for each product.
The head of product management must have a deep and current understanding of the company's business strategy, so that he can ensure that the product strategy directly supports the business strategy. He also takes the leadership role in defining the product vision and working with the product managers on his team to deliver on this vision. The product principles (see The Product Manifesto) are typically established by the full product management team, but the head of product management leads this effort and ensures that the products adhere to these principles as much as possible.
Even with the best team of product managers all doing an outstanding job you will still have cross product conflicts as each product manager works to optimize his product, and the head of product management must work to identify and resolve these cross-product issues.
Similarly, the head of product management is responsible for the portfolio roadmap - looking overall at the many product releases that are planned and considering the business needs and the customer impact.
Finally, the head of product management will need to manage the executive relationships. It is essential that all of the key players in the company, including and especially the CEO, have a good and trusting relationship with the head of product management. The whole company depends on this person, and he must be open and transparent with his decisions and reasoning, accessible and approachable by all. He must be receptive to new ideas from any source, but also respected enough that he can push back when appropriate on conflicting or vacillating priorities.
As you can see, this is an extremely demanding job, but great product companies have great people in this role, and it is not a coincidence.
Note that important contributions to this topic came from Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware, recently acquired by HP, and one of the best VP's of Product Management i've ever known. And now hopefully Ben can return HP to its former glory.
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So I thought now would be a good time to discuss the role and responsibilities of those that manage product managers.
Typically this is a Director of Product Management, but in larger companies you'll also find Group Product Managers and/or increasingly, a VP of Product Management. In any case, this job is among the most important positions in any high-tech company. Few positions will have more impact to the future success of the company than the head of product management. A successful product can literally redefine the course of the business. Yet a few failed products can sink a company. As a result, this job is characterized by massive success, massive failure, and little in between.
These people have two essential responsibilities. First, they must build a strong team of product managers. Second, they are responsible for the company's overall product strategy, and the various products in the company's portfolio. I'll discuss each of these responsibilities in turn.
- Building The Product Management Team
It is the primary job of every manager to build and develop the capabilities of his team, but this is especially crucial for this role because of the high impact nature of the product management position. An inadequate product manager is nearly certain to result in wasted product cycles, frustrated users, and lost customers. For many positions in the company, the truth is that you can often get away with sub-par employees because there are others to pick up the slack. Given that most products just have a single product manager, there is rarely the situation where another product manager can cover. Your only real hope is that someone else on the product team, like a lead engineer, steps up to do what's necessary.
So if you find yourself managing a team of product managers where some are not up to the task, then you have to correct the situation. There are certainly some people that will never be successful product managers. They are in so far over their heads that no amount of training or coaching is going to change that. However, I've found that for many of our product managers, you can in fact significantly improve their performance. I don't want this to sound self-serving since it is no secret that I spend a good deal of my time helping companies develop the skills of their product managers, but one way or another the manager does need to get his team up to speed.
I argue that every new product manager needs roughly three months of hard learning before they should be entrusted with the responsibility of guiding a product. During this time, the new product manager needs to immerse himself with target users and customers, educate himself on the relevant technologies, and study the market and competitive landscape. The manager should be facilitating and overseeing this time. Note that this already assumes the product manager understands the actual skills and responsibilities of a product manager. These three months apply even with experienced product managers. They still need to learn about your customers and your domain.
When you hire a new product manager to the team, establish a program so that the new product manager can get the exposure to users and technologies that he needs. For those product managers that you already have and are already in the midst of managing their products, if they're not up to the task, then you will want to make sure that they start a program like this in parallel with their other responsibilities. But make sure they understand their need to get up to speed.
And of course if you determine that the product manager is unable or unwilling to do what is necessary, it is your job as manger to find someone that is. To anyone that has ever had to do this, you know this is no fun. But this is the reason for your higher pay, and you owe it to the rest of your team and your company to correct the situation. Do everything you can to help the person find a job they can succeed at, but in any case you must get people in place that can do the job that is necessary.
Once you are convinced that the members of your team are capable of success and properly equipped to succeed, then you will need to let these people do their job. If you micro-manage your product managers they will not step up and take ownership the way you need them to. If you can't trust your product managers, you need to find product managers you can trust. This doesn't mean you shouldn't ask questions and be constantly available to help; you absolutely should. But if you empower strong people I promise you that you'll be amazed at what they can do.
Note that we first made sure we had strong people before we empowered them.
If you empower people that aren't capable, you are essentially abdicating your responsibility as manager. If you micro-manage people that are not capable, you are essentially doing their job.
I have written elsewhere (How's Your Manager Rate?) about what makes a good manager so I won't repeat that here, other that to say that every good manager knows that the best way to look good is for the members of his team to look good. As such, always hire people that you believe are smarter than yourself, and then do everything you can to help them succeed.
- Defining The Company's Product Strategy
Nobody is more responsible of more accountable for the suite of products a company offers than the head of the product management organization. This person needs to decide what products are are pursued, and review closely the strategy and execution for each product.
The head of product management must have a deep and current understanding of the company's business strategy, so that he can ensure that the product strategy directly supports the business strategy. He also takes the leadership role in defining the product vision and working with the product managers on his team to deliver on this vision. The product principles (see The Product Manifesto) are typically established by the full product management team, but the head of product management leads this effort and ensures that the products adhere to these principles as much as possible.
Even with the best team of product managers all doing an outstanding job you will still have cross product conflicts as each product manager works to optimize his product, and the head of product management must work to identify and resolve these cross-product issues.
Similarly, the head of product management is responsible for the portfolio roadmap - looking overall at the many product releases that are planned and considering the business needs and the customer impact.
Finally, the head of product management will need to manage the executive relationships. It is essential that all of the key players in the company, including and especially the CEO, have a good and trusting relationship with the head of product management. The whole company depends on this person, and he must be open and transparent with his decisions and reasoning, accessible and approachable by all. He must be receptive to new ideas from any source, but also respected enough that he can push back when appropriate on conflicting or vacillating priorities.
As you can see, this is an extremely demanding job, but great product companies have great people in this role, and it is not a coincidence.
Note that important contributions to this topic came from Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware, recently acquired by HP, and one of the best VP's of Product Management i've ever known. And now hopefully Ben can return HP to its former glory.
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