Product Beautiful: Building Product Management by Paul Young

You Might Be a Product Manager If…

January 1, 2009

It’s time for the 2009 edition of Product Beautiful’s semi-annual “You Might Be a Product Manager If…” list. Please add your own in the comments below.

You might be a Product Manager if:

You’ve created a roadmap through 2015
You can’t remember working less than 70 hours a week
You’ve lost your hair (if you haven’t consider yourself warned!)
At your annual customer summit, you stay late to setup and test products for the next day while Sales runs up a historic bar tab
You used to be a programmer but were too extroverted
You used to be a salesperson but were too introverted
You use customer interview techniques with your spouse to discover the root cause of their problems so you can build a “solution” (”That’s interesting…tell me more!”<smack>)
You wake up at night worried about getting your product’s feature-set right or hitting your ship date
You find competitive and win-loss analysis fun (ugh, I can’t believe I just realized I find those things fun)
You walk through the store and look at products thinking “what problem does that solve?”
You do a SWOT analysis before making any major purchase
The last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up is to check your email
You’ve ever written “The System Shall…“
You never have less than five #1 priorities
You’ve sat behind the one-way mirror at a focus group
One or more of the following groups is pissed at you: Sales, Development, QA, Tech Support, Marketing, or Operations. Special bonus if you get all at once.
You enjoy writing requirements that constrain easy way out from the Programmer.
You’ve actually learned how to herd cats.
You own an iPhone.
You wonder how the iPhone product manager prioritized all the possible features.
You wonder how many engineering hours it took to create a new feature in your favorite web app.
You try to envision the next 3 design updates for any product you see.
You think in Use Cases.
You’re always looking for an alternative flow of events.
You can’t live without OmniGraffle or Visio.
You had to reset expectations with management, customers, engineering, and finance.
You had to produce a WW product forecast for sales since they are too busy to do it.
You enjoy watching “How It’s Made.“
You plan “features” for your children and have a “roadmap” for their skill growth
Your wedding included a powerpoint presentation.
Major life events require a MS Project file.
You get “phantom buzzing” in your pocket when you forget your Blackberry.
You’ve talked to more customers in the last month than all of your executives combined.
Your marketing person said “you’re technical…explain this to me like I was 10.” then, “…now like I was 3…”
You know what all of these are: MRD, PRD, BRD, Functional Spec, sprint, scrum, CAB, spiff.
Your favorite question is “why?”
Your favorite application is Excel.
You’ve built your own product P&L template in Excel to save time.
You’ve used your P&L template across multiple companies.
You know what the “analyst dance” is, and you’re definitely a PM if you’ve done it.
You know what your customer is going to say before they say it.
Your spouse knows who your 3 biggest competitors are by name.
You’ve flown on every major (and some minor) airline this year.
You’ve used Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to connect with a customer.
You’ve dreamt about competitive kill sheets.
You’ve been to ProductCamp
You’re the one your CEO comes to when he/she really wants to know how things are going.
“They” remembered your revenue commitment but not your product’s funding.
Everyone thinks they do a part of your job.
You’ve ever had to explain to a founder or executive why customers don’t want their great new idea.
You’ve been asked for the revenue impact of deleting a single feature.
You’ve been held accountable for Development’s schedule slips.
You’ve been the person that everyone brings the hard questions to at the trade show booth.
Caffeine is one of your primary food groups.
You spend more time with your development counterpart than your spouse.
You write a blog about Product Management…gulp!

Special thanks to my twitter friends: @joshua_d, @imusicmash, @chriscummings01 for contributing to this list! You can follow me on Twitter, too. Happy New Year!

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ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009

December 10, 2008

I’m proud to announce that we are bringing ProductCamp back to Austin for an encore! The first ProductCamp Austin had amazing participation from the Austin and Central Texas area, with over 130 people signing up and about 90 participate back in June. ProductCamp Austin Winter will have more people, more sessions, and be better in every way – if are are in Product Management, Marketing, or Product Development and can get to Austin on Jan 24th, this is the event you want to participate in – and it is free.

What is ProductCamp?

ProductCamp is an unconference. An unconference takes the old, stogy idea of a conference and turns it on its side. Instead of corporations paying for boring keynote speakers talking and waving their hands, you have the participants in the conference leading all discussion sessions. ProductCamp is a meritocracy, or perhaps a participatocracy – anyone can lead a session on any topic relevant to product management or marketing.

At the first ProductCamp, we had sessions ranging from career advancement for product managers, to intellectual property discussions, to working with Agile development organizations, to working effectively with Sales and Executives, to user interface design. ProductCamp attracts a broad and diverse crowd of smart people who “get it,” so the networking is really good and the discussions are rich and rewarding.

Describe the ProductCamp Experience…

It’s Saturday January 24, 2009 and you wake up way to early for a weekend and head down to the UT campus. You park and walk up to the College of Communications and follow the signs to ProductCamp. As you ride the elevator up to the 4th floor, there are three other people with you looking confused. “Are you here for ProductCamp?” “Yeah, this should be interesting…”

You exit the elevator and see a registration table with people milling around it. As you make your way to the front, you recognize a few familiar faces from other companies. You give your name to the PCA volunteer at the table and he hands you a badge and a goodie bag with a PCA shirt in your size. You make a beeline to the coffee.

As you get your coffee, you notice that ProductCamp has attracted all types – managers, developers and engineers, academics, startup junkies, and everything in between – and these people are talking to one another. Someone is rambling about their startup, and other person is educating a small group about Twitter: “ProductCamp has its own Twitter ID, here’s how you follow it…”

After chatting for a few more minutes, a PCA volunteer calls everyone into one of the rooms. The studios at UT are huge, with 40 foot ceilings and have seen much use and abuse over the years. As you walk in, a volunteer hands you three post-it notes and you wonder “why just three?” The room has a projector showing a “Welcome to ProductCamp” slide. Someone gets up and introduces themself as a ProductCamp planner and thanks the sponsor for breakfast. Next, someone gets up and gives a short minute intro on the open grid scheduling process. You listen as you’re told to put vote with your sticky notes under the three sessions you’d most like to attend, which are listed on the back wall.

You head to the back wall and read the session names, offered by people just like you. You recognize a friend-of-a-friend’s name who is giving a session about “Connecting with Customers.” That sounds good – you use one post-it note. You see another session about “Agile Product Management.” Your engineering team is moving to Agile so that might be a good session to attend, and use your second note. As you step back to consider your third note, you see a dozen other people doing the same thing, and people feel geniuely torn about what to vote for – there are so many good sessions to choose from! Finally, you put your last sticky on a session called “Career Building in Product Management and Marketing.”

You walk back to your seat and see the PCA volunteers start to rapidly count the votes. Someone gets up and explains that they are determing which sessions are most in-demand so that they don’t overlap on the schedule. While the volunteers assemble the schedule, a ProductCamp planner gets up to talk about what ProductCamp is and why everyone is here. He says things like “ProductCamp is for starting conversations, not finishing them – it’s OK if these discussions spill out onto email, blogs, forums, twitter, or facebook.” “Learn from each other’s collective experiences, but challenge each other – speak up if you hear something that you agree or disagree with.” You think “wow, this is definitely not a normal conference.”

The planners announce that the schedule has been set, and the crowd huddles around the posted schedule to see which sessoins they are going to attend. You notice that your favorite sessions are at 10-11, 1-2, and 2-3, and you fill your schedule with other sessions you think sound interesting, including a roundtable discussion. You refill your coffee and head to the first session in Studio 4E…

As you walk in, you see 20 other people looking at each other and wondering how this is going to work. The session leader is welcoming everyone and making introductions, and you see her slide projected with the session title “Roundtable: Working with Sales.” The session leader gives a quick facilitation of 1-2 slides and kicks off the discussion by talking about a recent scenario where she introduced a new product to Sales and was immediately met with hostility from the Sales team. The questions fly quickly “was the pricing right?” “how is your relationship with them normally?” “How did you explain the value of the product?” “Does that product solve a customer problem?” “Did you just repackage one of your existing solutions?” “Is sales compensated correctly on your product?” The Q&A continues and the facilitator guides the discussion into new areas: how to be effective with your sales leadership, how to get sales buy-in for new product launches, how to end-of-life a product with sales, and so on. Through the discussion you furiously type notes out on your laptop as you try to capture some of the great ideas that the team is generating.

The hour-long session feels like it is over as soon as it begins. You wish it could continue, but you only have a few minutes to get to your next session. You quickly introduce yourself to the facilitator and a few other people you were impressed with and exchange business cards. You notice that they have their Twitter ID’s on their badges and quickly follow them on Twitter.

You go through two more sessions before lunch and meet several impressive people. You think “I need to keep these people on file because they might be good if I’m hiring or looking for a job.” You grab a plate of catered lunch and sit down with some of your new friends and talk about the sessions they attended so you can get the scoop on what you missed.

After lunch, you hit 4 more sessions. By the end of the day, you are spent, physically and mentally. As everyone filters out, people are already talking about the next ProductCamp and what sessions they plan to offer, and you think that maybe this isn’t so hard, and you’ll offer a session next time, too! A group breaks off to do an official ProductCamp happy hour, and you join in few a few drinks. The week after ProductCamp, you email some of your new connections to grab lunch – it’s great to keep the network fresh.

I hope that this gives you a taste of what to expect at ProductCamp. After running one, I was very excited to lead another, and have high hopes for ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009. I look forward to meeting you at ProductCamp!

Go Register for ProductCamp!

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The Spin Cycle

November 17, 2008

Anyone with children has heard of the telephone game: line up 30 people, the first person whispers something to the next, and so on down the line until the last person says what they were told aloud. It’s funny because the message changes as it moves down the line. In business, this effect isn’t funny; it’s dangerous, wasteful, and frustrating.

Most companies do an employee satisfaction survey at least once per year. I have seen at least 10 of these surveys and in every single one, the top employee concern was “communications.” The telephone game is bad, but when you observe that effect in two directions (executive level down, individual contributor level up) you get what I am calling the spin cycle – because you can spin for weeks on end just to get everyone agreeing before work on a project even begins.

“Go do’s” and Executive Fiat

Ideally, a Product Manager has the time to do research, write requirements, and bring products to market that meets the needs of customers. Conditions on the ground rarely allow this process to happen cleanly. In larger companies, there is the concept of the “go do.” “Go do” means that for whatever reason, the executive team needs you to execute a tactical task. A go do could be implementing a certain feature, choosing a certain partner, or attacking a certain market segment. Usually go do’s are influenced by big picture concerns such as existing lines of business, strategic partners, or even keeping the board happy by interacting with another part of their investment portfolio.

A CEO I used to work with called mandates from management “ruling by Executive fiat.” That is a great phrase, and reflected his desire to avoid Executive fiat unless completely necessary. Sometimes you need to get in and break a tie on the team, but in most cases the right answer should be obvious.

Go do’s and ruling by fiat are dangerous because they remove decision making from lower levels of an organization. Most go do’s come without explanation – it’s just “go do this.” In the absence of reasoning behind a “go do” decision, teams project reasoning through their own world view. The development team thinks management’s directive to choose a specific partner is a mandate to use .NET over Java. The marketing team believes that implementation of a certain feature represents a new strategic direction for the company or product and aligns marcomm efforts accordingly. The downstream effects of a fiat decision can be disastrous.

Sources of frustration

Management resorts to “go do” orders for several reasons:

Trust – they don’t believe in their team to do the analysis and come to the right decision, so they co-opt the thinking
Sensitive Information – they have access to sensitive information, such as M&A, that for business reasons can’t be made available to the team
Scope – they have line-of-sight to other lines of business that their segment is not concerned with addressing
Speed – they perceive the team and their decision making process as too slow, and want to short circuit process and jump straight to the “right” result

Employees get frustrated with mandates because they don’t understand the thought process behind the decision making process. As a Product Manager it is possible that a mandate will be in direct conflict with the goals and roadmap of your product! Reconciling this gap is a key communications hurdle that Product Management must step up and own.

The worst consequence of the spin cycle happens when employees take a go do and immediately start to execute based on their understanding of management’s ask. They go off for weeks or months, working on a solution, bring the result back to management who says “wait…THAT’s not what I wanted!” The communications cycle has broken down completely in both directions, fostering more mistrust between management and employee. Since the employees didn’t “get it right,” management’s perception of employees as do-ers and not thinkers is reinforced, resulting in more and more mandates. Employees become jaded, stop asking “why,” and mumble about how management doesn’t know what they want.

Breaking the Spin Cycle

Product Management and Marketing sit in the unique position between the executive and employee layers, and are positioned to facilitate better communications across the entire business. High performing teams are built on trust,

To truly break the spin cycle, first control the conversation. When you are asked by management to “go do” a feature or partnership – ask “why?” Some executives are insecure and take this as an affront to their power or management style, but good management will provide you with the reasoning behind the decision. If they balk, explain that you will need to communicate this decision across the organization, including the deprioritization of other work in order to get this project done, and that being able to effectively explain the decision will help speed up the work.

Next, illustrate the impacts of a mandate. Executive teams are notorious for “forgetting” about all the work in-progress, expecting new work to get tossed on the pile and not change the scope or dates on ongoing work. Show how stopping current project, and starting something new will change release dates for everything.

Finally, be able to show strategic impacts of the decision. If the executives want to mandate the usage of a specific partner, you need to understand that partner’s capabilities and how that decision will change your roadmap.

How do you address this issue? Please reply in comments!

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Product Beautiful on Alltop

October 17, 2008

April Dunford of Rocket Watcher somehow has a direct line to Mr. Marketing himself, Guy Kawasaki, and got a Product Management page established on Alltop. Alltop is a Yahoo-style blog directory, the idea being that it hosts the “top” sites for each topic, picked by hand. It’s an honor to be included, but I also have to echo the CrankyPM who said:

“Please, someone, tell the Cranky Product Manager what truly is the big deal about Alltop? It kind of reminds the Cranky Product Manager of Yahoo! back in 1997 – a quaint little human-generated listing of websites, classified by categories. The Cranky Product Manager could export her bookmarks and create a similar site in an afternoon.”

D’oh! Although you wonder where Alltop would be today if you took the exact same code and replaced Guy Kawasaki’s name with mine. Name recognition still counts for a lot.

One thing Kawasaki is really, really good at is knowing what makes people tick. Alltop is a perfect site for the narcissistic, ego-driven blog world. Even skeptical people like myself will chortle, all while making a post like this to crow about getting behind the velvet rope. Meanwhile, Guy is paying cash for another pair of Lucchese boots and someone like me is muttering “I could export my bookmarks and make that site!” Yeah, but you didn’t. And neither did I. And if we did no one would come. So we criticise with one paragraph while accepting our award in the next. All while sending more clicks over to Alltop.

The same thing goes for Truemors, which is basically the worst of Twitter, Digg, and TMZ put together. I wish I had thought of that first…

Now that CrankyPM and I have guaranteed our delistings, I look forward to starting AllBottom with her.

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The Big Company Survival Kit for Startup PM’s

October 16, 2008

There is so much territory to cover on this topic that this is probably the beginning of another series. This post focuses on differences and expectation setting between small and big companies, and lessons learned making the leap between the two.

I’ve always considered myself a startup kind of guy, and for the past two years I ran Product Management at a small company called NetStreams. However, two months ago an opportunity came up that I had to consider, and ultimately took, to help Dell build out their SaaS business. Over these two months I’ve formed some new opinions about how Product Management is different at a small company vs. a large company. Now that I’ve bounced between small and large (NetSolve to Cisco to NetStreams to Dell), the contrasts are stark and important – especially if you are considering changing jobs.

Scope

Scope is very different between small and large companies – but not how you might think. My assumption was that coming into a large company, that roles would be very well defined and delineated, and that the scope of your role would be set. The reality is far from that – I’ve found that there are plenty of opportunity to define what Product Management means. This may differ depending on the part of the business you are in (legacy/sustaining vs. new/conquest).

In the startup world, very few people know what Product Management is or does. So there is a lot more education that you need to take on. Explaining to the Development team for the N^th time about what Product Management does can wear you down. Butting heads with Executives who believe that their experiences trump the data you’re bringing back from the Market can wear you down. The excitement from seeing the decisions you make and the products you bring to Market gives you a boost. The energy/excitement level is much more boom/bust in a startup. Big companies want a steady hand on the wheel.

Business Opportunity

Who do we want to be (when we grow up)? In a small company you are constantly asking and answering this question. Often times, the answer changes and evolves over time. In a good Market you’re faced with the question of “It’s not what do we need to do to succeed, it’s which of these excellent opportunities are the best?”

In the large company, you are already grown up. Now your job is to sustain, and not screw up the business. Even minor risks look much bigger. Do we want to push the envelope on a product? Maybe not if it means we’ll end up on the front page of the NY Times for something bad. “The unknown” takes a much bigger place in planning and you devote a lot of effort to reducing the unknown variables. The good news is that you have a big team and lots of people to help. The bad news is that decision making can be infuriatingly slow and involve dozens of people with competing priorities.

Politics

When you’re at a startup, you’re all in the same “rowboat in the ocean.” Everyone must contribute for survival, and it is pretty easy to see who is dead weight. This fosters tight teams and passionate arguments over everything, but there is always a family feel (or at least there was for me), meaning that everyone is doing what they genuinely believe is best to make the company succeed. There’s just no room for ulterior motives.

Lots of people talk about the politics inside big companies, and some of that is true. However, at least in my experiences it isn’t as bad as most people portray. So much of this has to do with how you carry yourself: are you “above the fray,” and not interesting in having political conversations? If yes, you can avoid much of the mess. If you enjoy that kind of thing (why?), those conversations and people will seek you out.

Note that not proactively involving yourself in politics does not mean being politically unaware. You always need to know your manager’s motivation and your manager’s manager’s motivation, and what drives the team around you, so you can pull those levers at the right time.

Context is very important in a larger company. For example, big company have lots of semi-overlapping products and projects that are competing for scarce resources. Is the person you’re talking to someone who owns a competing initiative? That may not be a bad thing, maybe you can find common ground between your projects and collaborate on requirements – but always keep your market justification for your product at the ready so you can pull it up when called upon.

Someone recently described large companies to me as “tribal.” If you’re in a company of 50,000 people, all searching for justification for their own jobs and their own products, thought patterns can change to “What’s best for me, What’s best for my group, What’s best for the company.” In that order; it’s survival.

Communications

Small companies meet face to face and in the hallways. Decisions are made informally and sometimes with little deliberation. If you’re not careful that can cause lots of flapping in the wind downstream, as individual contributors catch up with the “strategy of the week.” That problem is compounded because many executives in startups are in their first executive position and were great individual contributors or team leads but possibly poor department heads. Communication filters down through the organization as fast as Word of Mouth can take it.

Another aspect of startups is that most communication is verbal – there aren’t memos, Project Managers doing daily status updates, etc. If you miss a meeting, you need to seek out someone from that meeting and get a face to face update.

In the large company world, PowerPoint rules. I recently had to give a presentation to an Executive and I was shocked at the amount of time that my manager and I spent wordsmithing. The reason is that at a larger company, there are so many people vyying for your time that you get overbooked for meetings, and can’t make all of them. So you ask people to send you the deck, and PowerPoint becomes a defacto memo. If you’re used to all of your slides coming with your voiceover, forget it. Your slides must stand on their own, and deliver your message clearly, concisely, and quickly. The good news is that it’s good practice to hone your message down to the key points, a skill I obviously need help with as evidenced by the length of my posts.

Another big difference in the big company is that you’re on a campus. There are multiple buildings and you’re working with people in different areas, cities, timezones and countries. Meeting face to face just isn’t practical every time. The result is conference calls. Lots and lots of conference calls. It’s a culture shock at first and you need to amp up your active listening skills to make them work.

Execution and Overlap

Small companies don’t have overlap because they can’t afford to. On the other hand, execution lags because you don’t have the resources to properly develop, QA, document, market, or sell. That problem is compounded because most startups (not all) don’t wish to set a target market, believing that they really can be all things to all people and are deathly afraid of turning down any business.

Big companies are execution oriented. They have formal measurement processes and you are judged every six months or every year on your performance. Measurement is a good thing, but it also fosters a culture of justification – you need to show why you exist and what you’re doing to advance the business.

Normally it is a good thing to have lots of execution minded people running around picking up dropped balls. The problem is that in a company with 50K employees, sometimes the right hand doesn’t know that the left hand exists, let alone what it is doing. There have been multiple times at both Cisco and Dell that I’ve been in meetings doing introductions and have given the standard “this is who I am this is what I’m doing” and had people approach me after the meeting saying “wait a minute…I’m working on the exact same thing! What’s your name again?” Just finding the right people can be half the battle.

Resources

Big companies have lots of resources, but you have to fight to get access to them. Big companies spend a lot of money on research, customer interviews, focus groups, product testing, etc. Unlike a small company, there aren’t a lot of long shot bets in a large company. You need to be able to illustrate ROI and time to payoff, or you’re dead in the water. If you can, you’ll get access to what you need to make your product successful, and if it’s not…it’s on you.

You also have leverage resources when you’re at a larger company. You can negotiate better deals, you have multiple companies that want to tap into your sales force and installed base, and you can use these to put together partner solutions that may be superior to other offerings in the Market.

Benefits

My wife and I recently had a baby girl. I started at Dell on a Monday, and Addison (at right) came on Wednesday. One lesson learned is not to start a new job and have a baby in the same week. However, it enabled us to take advantage of the better benefits that a big company brings to the table. To cover the family at the startup would be have been just short of $1000/month. Now I pay less than a fifth of that. For better coverage. And 401k matching.

At the startup you get lots and lots of equity. Will it ever be worth anything? Part of that has to do with you and the work you put in, there is also luck and timing involved. I’d advise anyone going to a startup to understand the time frame to a liquidity event very clearly before making the leap. Are you willing to accept that standard of living for five+ years? What if your family situation changes? Something to consider…

Making it Work

Can someone with a small company, entreprenural heart be happy at a big company? Ask me again in a year.

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Sign Fail…

October 3, 2008

I spotted this the other day at work and had to snap a photo with my iPhone.� How do you know you’ve given up?

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Using Social Networking in Product Management

October 2, 2008

There are three categories of customers you should be talking to as a Product Manager: Current Customers, Evaluators, and Prospects. If you have an established business, finding Current Customers to talk to should be easy. Evaluators are slightly more problematic, but you can also access them via win/loss analysis. Finding Prospects is always a challenge, but now finding them is easy if you know where to look.

Before you spend hours burning up Google, write down what you are looking for in a Prospect. Are you looking for people who have the same characteristics as your current customer base? People with certain demographics? People with certain responsibilities in their organization (purchase authority, specific roles)? If you don’t yet have a persona for your customers, this is a good place to start. For example, in one of my current projects, I am looking for people that:

Are thinking about their organization’s IT security
Have purchase or recommend authority
Data is critical to their business or loss of data would be adverse, embarrassing, or force disclosure

That means I am targeting CIO’s, IT managers, and Security managers. Great – how do you find them? Traditionally, you meet them at trade shows, or you know them from past lives and keep a deep Rolodex, you have friends of friends, or you pay a market research firm to dig them up for you. Some of those are OK, but in general they are either too slow, too expensive, too ineffective, or just suck. There are better ways to connect with these people.

Everyone is online today, everyone who matters anyway. If you’re a Product Manager working on products to sell into Africa, this might not apply to you – go hook up with the OLPC folks and get them online. There are Billions of people online, and you must find a few needles in a very large haystack. Thankfully, the tools you need are just a few clicks away.

LinkedIn

I’ve written about LinkedIn before, in my changing jobs series. In my opinion, there is no better tool for finding and connecting with people for business purposes. Important to this conversation, you can search by title, company, and keyword. To actually contact people you either have to have an direct or indirect connection and be introduced by a friend. If you don’t have any connection through your network, you can use the “InMail” feature to send an email (more on this below). The InMail feature costs money, and you can buy as needed or a monthly or annual subscription. I recommend the subscription, and if you make your profile OpenLink enabled, it allows people to find you easily. I often get contacts this way (aside: if you are a reader, please feel free to connect with me, just click the link to my profile on the right and mention this blog in your connection note so I know who you are!).

Blogs

Blogs are a wonderful way to find Prospects. Your Prospects read blogs that interest them, and since you grok your Prospects you have a pretty good idea about what they are reading. If you don’t, ask your Current Customers what they read. Go to these blogs yourself and read them, it will serve you in two ways. First, you will increase your understanding of the pain points that your Prospects are having. Second, the blogs you are reading are probably written by a Prospect, but more importantly Prospects are commenting on the blog posts. The comments section is a goldmine for Prospects to talk to – and often times they link back to their own blog or email address. Reach out to them over email (see below).

Facebook

The business world has long dissed Facebook as a grafitti wall for college frat boys. It is – but it’s also expanded into other audiences that you want to reach into. Facebook has groups that you can join and access members, a great feature for Product Mangers. Take my Prospect example above – I searched Facebook for “Information Security” and it returned more than five highly relevant groups with over 1500 members. Think I can find a couple of good conversations out of that pool? I do!

Twitter

Twitter is the latest narcissistic social networking tool. The signal to noise ratio is very high, but you can find gems on twitter. Use twitter’s search tool to search on keywords that you think your Prospects will be talking about, e.g. “security.” Once you find someone making an interesting comment, follow them for awhile and then decide if they’re worth contacting.

A Honeypot Blog

Honeypot blogs are blogs that you write for the purpose of attracting people that you want to meet. Don’t start a blog, update it twice, and expect people to flock to you. You need to “get it,” and stick with it. If you start a blog, you need to provide valuable content to the people you want to reach. Your blog must be a pitch free zone. If you don’t know what to do here, first read about it, then consider hiring someone who knows their way around the blogging world. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that your mistakes get plastered all over the Internet, so you can’t make any.

Once you’ve used these tools to locate a pre-qualified Prospect, you need to make contact and convince them to talk with you. In general, people don’t mind talking to Product Managers, but everyone is busy, and everyone is jaded since they get a million emails per day and most of them are spam. You need to word your first contact very carefully or you will be immediately discarded as a salesperson.

This is the template that I use:

<Prospect Name>,

I found you online via <where you found them>. My name is <your name>, and I am a Product Manager at <your company>, responsible for our <your product> products. After reading your posts, I’d like to spend a few minutes with you listening to some of your challenges in <your product’s area, e.g. “security”> and your take on some ideas we have.

This isn’t a sales call; I am in Product Management and am only interested in building products that are interesting to people like you.

Could I give you a call? When would be a good time for you?

Thanks,
<your name>

I’ve had good success with this and get a 30-50% hit rate of people writing back to me. At that point you need to use your skills as a PM to qualify the Prospect further and decide if this is someone that you need to empathize with and listen to. Be sure to follow up your meeting with a thank you email and send them a hat or t-shirt if you have the budget.

This approach won’t work for everyone. Are all CEO’s and CIO’s on Facebook? No. There are only a couple of thousand of them in the World and every Marketing and Sales team everywhere has it in their goals to target them. The good new for you is that your competition for their time is largely using interruption marketing techniques: banner ads, dead tree mailers, cold calls, etc. If you can find them in their “native habitat,” or better, have them come to you, your chances for success go way up.

One last thing: never, ever, under any circumstances give your contact list to Sales. I hope this is obvious. If you do, and Sales starts pitching someone who thought that they were talking to you in confidence, they will immediately assume that all of the gritty details that they shared with you are now in the Salesperson’s hands. They will resent you and your company. Remember that you found these people online, so where will they go to vent? Exactly…

Good luck and good hunting! I’m also interested in other ways you use to connect with Prospects, either online or off – reply in comments.

UPDATE: CrankyPM has a good post about how to build and use Customer Advisory Groups. More relevant to your existing customers, but if you can get Potentials to them, you are my hero.

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Apple’s App Store: The Rise of Transitionware?

September 22, 2008

The iPhone 3G product launch has had the kind of hype (and reality) that businesses dream about. � To date, there are well over 1M phones sold and over 10M downloads from the iTunes app store.� Apple’s newest creation opens the door to new revenue streams, but also strikes a new balance of power between the application developer, the channel, and the user.� Some of Apple’s curious design choices may also be carving out a new pricing strategy: apps that start free, then later move to a paid model – “Transitionware.”

If you have iTunes and an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can access the app store.� There are thousands of applications across many different categories like productivity, games, and finance.� Apple segments the offers into “Paid,” and “Free.”� Paid apps can range from $0.99 to $999, set by the developer, and Apple takes a cut of the revenue.� Every app has a 1-5 star rating, voted on by the users, and an open commenting system.� Anyone can review or rate any application, even if they haven’t purchased the app they are reviewing.

During the first month of the app store, there was a proliferation of simple free apps: flashlight (turns your iPhone screen white for use in the dark), to do lists, lightsaber, etc.� The reviewers tended to cut (some) slack to the free applications. For example, some reviews of the free game iGolf:

Good Game
(5/5 stars) by: Rubayath

Great game, it reminds me of my gf’s Wii, and hte best thing is, it’s FREE.

It’s Decent
(4/5 stars) by: The ace of hats

Amusing game for free.� Increainly [sic] unrealistic.� My high score is 520 yards.� Hold on tight to the phone.

Paid apps got no such treatment.� Some samples from the game iFish:

This is worse than just bad
(1/5 stars) by S.S.S. Truck Driver

This is worse than just bad.� It seems to be unplayable.� Dose [sic] nothing at all that I can see.� And no instructions at all…Dont [sic] get it even if it were free.

This should be free
(1/5 stars) by chr1s60

Extremely boring and pointless.� The game is too difficult and the graphics and display are plain and boring.� The sound is ok, but aside form that there is nothing even slightly positive about this game.

If you review more of the comments, you’ll find many from people posting opinions about the applications who haven’t even tried them!� It’s no surprise that people like free better than they like to pay.� The average rating for the across the top 25 free apps is 3.96, for paid it is 3.70.� If you are a business, how can you take advantage of the goodwill of reviewers who like free, and still turn a profit?

Avatron has a different strategy for their Air Sharing application.� For the first two weeks, they are offering their app for free, before the price transitions to the normal $6.99.� The result has been amazing – highly rated reviews, and they are the #1 listed app under their category in the app store.

Lots of companies have used try-before-you-buy strategies in the past, usually in the form of demoware or low-cost student licensing.� Jott recently transitioned out of beta (”free”) and into production (”paid”).� The difference is that Air Sharing is a fully functional app, and users who got in during the free period will retain their functionality.

In the app store, buyers are making impulse purchases based largely on the advice of other iTunes users.� Because of Apple’s walled garden, the first place that most users see an app is in iTunes.� If the app is rated low, it’s done before it begins, so the ratings of the first few reviewers count more than ratings of later reviewers.� The average rating on the Internet is 4 out of 5, so anything less than 4 is a death sentence.

Avatron’s strategy is brilliant because it captures lots of positive feedback from users who are happy to get a “deal” on a free app and reward them with a 4 or 5 star rating (currently 4.5 stars).� It builds hype because those users feel like they are part of the in-crowd who got in on a special deal early, and the ticking clock drives media coverage (”get in now before it’s too late!”) that you need for a launch.

The coolest part about this method is that it taps into OPT – Other People’s Time.� One of the key takeaways from David Meerman Scott’s writing is that you are what you publish.� Good advice, but I’ll take it a step further and say “You are what others publish about you.”� You can never have as much street cred online as reviewers of your product have.� Reviews have become so ubiquitous, it’s startling to go buy a product and not see reviews – you get suspicious.� BazaarVoice has built a company around it.

I predict that many more companies will adopt the “transitionware” approach to launching software in iTunes.� The power of the crowd demands our respect!

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How Technical Should a Product Manager Be?

September 18, 2008

Recently, the CrankyPM was in top form with her post about the 6 Types of Software Engineers.� That kicked up an interesting response from a developer, who attempted to classify the 4 Types of Product Managers.� The response post re-raised the age old Product Management qualification question: “How Technical Should a Product Manager Be?”

There are two big philosophical battles for Product Manager qualifications: level of technical competence, and level of domain expertise.� Arguments for more technical include:

Less likely to be B.S.’d by development
More easily builds rapport with development
Understands what is possible

Arguments for less technical include:

Won’t be tempted to get “in the weeds.“
More outside-in than inside-out focused
Doesn’t filter requests to development based on own biases of what is possible

I actually started my career as a developer.� To the point of the article linked above, I wasn’t a “guru,” but I sought to get out of development because I didn’t want to always be implementing someone else’s vision.� I am thankful for that experience today because I do feel like it enables me to speak with developers more on their terms and relate to the challenges that they face.� I’m not just a PHB saying “here’s the date – make it happen!”� It helps, and as a PM having a good relationship with your team is important.� However, it also leads to one of the biggest myths of Product Management…

“Being Technical Enables me to Know When Development is B.S.ing the Schedule.”� It doesn’t matter how good your relationship with development is, you don’t know if they are padding the schedule (or rather, how much).� Most development teams have no idea of how long a feature will take to build.� Even if they did know exactly, unless you are in the code and are familiar with everyone’s workload and skills you’re not going to know.

There are at least two ways around this problem: Evidence based scheduling, which looks at past performance against projected schedules as an indicator of how much to trust a developer’s estimate, and Agile, where you can lock in dates and flex scope instead (which just shifts your problem from dates to scope).

The other knock against being too technical is that you will filter requirements into development based on your own biases of what is possible.� A Product Manager should not know or care about how a solution is implemented, only the time and cost to fulfill the requirement.� If the requirement is “The lawn shall be cut to 2.5 inches above ground level every 2 weeks” do we care if the solution is a lawn mower vs. a billy goat vs. 75 developers with scissors?� No!

It is the job of development to tell us how much something costs, and our job to go into the equation assuming anything is possible.� “Man on Mars?”� Sure – 100 Trillion dollars and 35 years!� “100 MPG car?” 15 Billion dollars and 7 years.� “Invisibility cloak?”� OK, some things aren’t currently possible (yet).� But put in the requirement, because developers get off on a challenge!

Another way to get accurate info from Development is trust.� If you have a good relationship with the Alpha Dog developer, they will tell you how confident they are in an estimate or how much they are padding.� But beware – I’ve seen junior PM’s turn around a give this info to management thinking that it will get them recognition.� Worst.� Decision.� Ever.� The VP hears that the schedule is padded 3 weeks, trims the timeline by the same, and your bridge with Development gets burned down.� Poke and prod for details, but keep it “in the family.”

A final note on the “technical” product manager: every minute you spend talking to a developer is a minute you are not spending listening to a customer or potential.

How technical do you think a PM needs to be?

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For the Record

September 3, 2008

In case you’re just tuning in, I’ve recently changed jobs.� I now am running Product Management for several SaaS products for Dell.� Thankfully, Dell is more progressive on blogging than many other large companies.� They actually have a blog policy that makes sense, and as such I’m making this post to let you know that the views expressed on this blog are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Dell, Inc. Now that we’re clear on who is speaking for whom, back to the Product Management discussions!

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Building Product Management from the Ground Up by Paul Young

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Using Social Networking in Product Management

How Technical Should a Product Manager Be?

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