August 24th, 2006
Product Management: Part 1
Time to switch gears from marriage back to business… Sorry to disapoint, but this IS a blog about our adventures in marriage AND business.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Web 2.0 product management lately – it’s what I’ve been doing with Nuvvo and it’s also what I enjoy most. There is a lot to think about so I hope to make this a multi post affair. Please let me know your thoughts – things I missed, things I got wrong, things I got right. I left some stuff out intentionally in fear of rambling on too much.l
I decided to start with the big picture: what drives product management decisions and execution? I came up with the super fancy diagram below. Thank you OmniGraffle! The arrow directions represent the flow of information. The length of the line represents how close I feel the relationship should be (frequency of contact, for example). The size of the circles represent their importance to the decision making process for a product manager.
Customer:
This is the biggie. Try to get to know your customers. Figure out who they are, or who you think they will be, and talk to them. Get them onside, offer them incentives (material or not), and build a relationship. Sometimes you’ll need to filter out the noise, and find the real insights. Try to stay accessible. Lastly, try to become a customer yourself. Use your own product, early and often.
Marketing:
If you build it, they probably won’t come…unless you’ve got great marketing execution. Also, a lot of product decisions should be made with marketing in mind. If you’ve got a freemium pricing structure, which features are free and which are premium? As the product manager, you’re also your product’s evangelist, so you should get out there and blog, participate in (un)conferences, do podcasts.
Industry Trends:
I start my day reading industry blogs and publications. I skim them to see what’s new. I try out products that sound interesting or relevant. I look for inspiration, direct or indirect. I see what’s working and what’s not working. Offline, I try to connect with others in my space to understand what they’re doing, their thoughts on ideas, their passions. Focus on products focusing on your target market – it’s more relevant and there is possibility that great partnerships may ensue.
Development:
Your development team makes your vision a reality, so you should be really close. Understand who they are, their background, their skillset. Don’t expect old-school developers to become Agile developers overnight. Make sure you speak a common language and check in with them very often so you don’t end up with something unexpected in 3 months’ time.
Competition:
Everyone has some sort of competition, even if you’re selling into whitespace like many Web 2.0 companies. It’s a good idea to know who they are, and where they came from (some background can sometime shed light onto seemingly bizarre behaviour). If possible, it’s a good idea to try their products out, see what their customers are saying about them, and try to learn from their mistakes and failures. If possible, talk to them.
For a one-product business, the role of product manager can mean the role of CEO to a large degree - your product strategy, at least for the short run, IS your company strategy. There is a lot to think about, and a lot to coordinate. The actual execution of all this is an entire new post alltogether.
Hi Malgosia!
Dontcha just love diagrams! :^)
I made one for you, however I cannot post it here (boo hoo)
So - I made a page on my web with both our super fancy diagrams and the following discussion. - please feel free to copy and add the diagram here if you want.
http://www.slaterocks.ca/IMAGES/prodmanblogreply.html
Your diagram (at top) contains all the important core elements of product management and starts to correctly illustrate the relationships between each using relative sizes and distance.
My diagram shown below builds on this same “How the heck DO you manage emergent technology products anyways???” question. I have been noodling on this for quite some time and it is, strangly enough, a slave to it’s own design and constantly changes. Today’s changes being inspired by your model - I changed the font size of the core components to carry forward the same ‘importance’ relationships your ‘bubble’ sizes express. The only big difference between our core ideas is that I have grouped industry trends and competition together as I feel they are quite intertwined - thinking that competition is perhaps best looked at in the context of trends?? Perhaps….
I have taken those core elements you describe and relate them in the context of “Effort and Community”. Effort - in all its forms, sweat, material, cash, debt. Community / Connectedness - probably the single most important factor in your success is your innate understanding and application of continuous energy in this dimension. Blogs, PODs, Meshing, Wikies and all!
I am also a real fan of sustainable business and environmental practices and find there is little or no difference between ‘business’ and ‘environment’ as systems and so I use an Ecological Energy System model as the base.
The iterative product development strategy that you have adopted is further expressed in my model by the use of the infinity symbol as both a conceptual and practical flow model. Once a full cycle is initially completed from that point onwards the product exists simultaneously at ALL points along the loop. Constantly being re-born, constantly growing, constantly in use, constantly declining…. I think this suggests that successful product managers must also be nonlinear and deal with emergent changes at any point in the loop, at any time - as well as seek change out purposefully at all points of the loop as a means of constantly adding energy to the product life cycle.
:^) Have FUN! Brian Slater