Happy Birthday to You, ProductCamp Austin!
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ProductCamp Austin is celebrating its third birthday next month! If you are in Austin on Wednesday, June 1st, you should come join us for cake, beer, and networking (not necessarily in that order). As of today, there are already over 75 people signed up!
Three years ago, I started ProductCamp Austin, inspired by ProductCamp Silicon Valley and the various BarCamps that were being held worldwide. Over the years, as the BarCamp scene has started to fade, ProductCamp has exploded in growth – there are now ProductCamps on nearly every continent and in most major cities in the U.S.
Austin has been a trend setter for other ProductCamps, and the model and positioning we’ve created have resonated and been replicated by many other planning teams in other cities. I’m proud that the planning team in Austin has provided strong logistical and moral support to these other groups in helping them think about how to structure sponsorships, recruit session leaders, manage volunteers, and maintain the spirit of ProductCamp that permeates these great events.
Over time, the planning team for ProductCamp Austin realized that ProductCamp had grown (at least locally) beyond just an event, it had become an organization. Since Austin doesn’t have a strong Product Management association like SVPMA, ProductCamp Austin has filled that void. In the last 18 months, PCA has put on events that span camps, such as ProductPotlucks (mini, one-session ProductCamps+networking) and pure networking events like ProductParties. These allow the Austin product management and marketing community a place to gather, see and be seen, recruit, and socialize.
In order to continue in this important role in the Austin community, ProductCamp has had to grow as an organization. We started that process in the Summer of 2010 at ProductCamp Austin 5 by starting the process of establishing a non-profit 501c(3) organization and by electing a Board of Directors to oversee the charter and direction of ProductCamp Austin. Today, that board meets regularly to plan new events and keep the PCA flame burning. The board members are all talented and dedicated – and are also overtaxed. They need your help, now.
Today, I put out a call to everyone who has benefitted from ProductCamp Austin: it is time for you to step up and give back to your community. The PCA Board needs planning team leads to help coordinate and run the next ProductCamp Austin event in August. At the PCA birthday party next week, the board will be recruiting team leads and volunteers to help make this event a reality. While the board members don’t all have the resources to be PCA event planning team leads, we now have a strong and deep bench of experience in what it takes to put on a PCA event. Austin’s product management and marketing community needs YOU to step up as a team lead. Show up on Wednesday June 1st and volunteer, it will be the best decision you’ve ever made for your career.
If you have questions about what putting on a ProductCamp entails, please feel free to email me. I’ve served in every role on the planning team and done everything from define the original positioning for ProductCamp to recruiting the original sponsors. I’m always available to anyone who wants to help put on a camp to understand what it takes. ProductCamp Austin 7 is scheduled for August 6, 2011 and everyone is invited! Hope to see you there!
Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing a presentation across several ProductCamps called “The Product Management X-Factor: How to be a Rock Star Product Manager.” The premise is that across your career, you have probably been exposed to several dozen people in the role of Product Management or Marketing. If you think about all of the people that you have met or worked with, why is it that some people have that “it” factor and rise to the top, whereas other people struggle – even when they have similar levels of experience?
The Product Management X-Factor: How to be a Rock Star Product Manager
I have been very fortunate in my career to work with a broad array of talented individuals, and have been exposed to even more through various ProductCamps and the many teams I’ve helped as an Instructor for Pragmatic Marketing. Based on those interactions, I’ve formed some hypothesis about what separates the good from the great in Product Management and Marketing. What are those key abilities that the rock stars posses that enables them to crack the code and get a different set of outcomes for their products and careers? The good news, is that there is a pattern to this leadership which we can all learn from, emulate, and use to change the trajectory of our careers as well.
When thinking of all the various people that I’ve seen across my career and what separated the great talents, I kept returning to two Product Management professionals over and over in my mind. I’ve changed their names, but for the purpose of this conversation we’ll call them Joe and Bill. Joe worked for me as a Product Manager on a team that I took over at a large company. He was in his mid-thirties with about 10-12 years of experience at a broad variety of companies. Over a period of months, Joe expressed to me time and time again that he was frustrated. He was frustrated and worried about his job security. In Joe’s words, he was always stuck with the “loser” projects: those products at the end of their lifecycle or moving toward end-of-life. Products that were about to go into re-architecture mode, or that the Sales team didn’t pay attention to for whatever reason. Joe felt like he was stuck in a rut in his career.
Bill, like Joe, was also in his mid-thirties when I met him. Bill was one of the people that gave me a break into Product Management and hired me for one of my first roles. At the time, he was of similar age and experience to Joe, but was on a completely different career track. Bill’s products consistently outperformed expectations. He was the “go-to” person for the Executive team and always seemed to have products that were on the up-swing, or 1.0 exciting products. The executive team kept asking for his opinion and he was always pulled into executive strategy sessions to talk about potential acquisitions and new directions. Eventually he was promoted several times before being poached by a recruiter. Today he is a high level Product Management executive at a technology company whose name you would immediately recognize.
Two Product Management professionals: similar backgrounds, age, and experience. Two completely different career trajectories. Why?
HR’s Point-of-View
If you look at the world the way that HR sees it, they would tell you that as product professionals get more experience, their effectiveness increases. That a Product Manager with 20 years of industry experience will be more effective than one with 5 years of experience. They will also tell you that finding the one professional who is a good fit, good PM, and has 20 years of experience is almost impossible. I am here to tell you that HR’s perspective on Product Management is wrong. It is completely possible to be very effective as a Product Manager or Marketer with less than 20 years of experience. Experience and effectiveness do correlate, but they are not necessarily casual. There is something more than experience that makes leaders in Product Management and Marketing effective.
It can be very frustrating to work with someone who is a rock star. They have seemingly cracked some secret code to being more effective. If you’ve been to one of our Pragmatic Marketing classes, you’ve heard us talk about our framework and how product managers need to think of their jobs from Strategic to Tactical and also be business-oriented and technical-oriented. These are tickets-to-entry for calling yourself a product management or marketing professional. In order to go beyond, you have to look at what the rock stars are using to get a different set of results.
Thinking of Product Management and Marketing Leadership in a New Way
If you think of the skillsets that the rock stars have learned to use, either consciously or unconsciously, some of these skills are inherited. Some skills are learned. Some of them apply more to you as a person, and some apply more to the company/organization that you are working for a the time. If you align these softer skills to categories, moving from inherited to learned, you find skills that are personality traits – inherent to who you are. Next you find skills that are more learned, or picked up along the way. Third, you find base product management skills – the skills we teach every week. As you move more towards learned skills you find communications skills and finally a category that I refer to as Executive Acuity: the ability to be effective at the executive level.
Each of these categories multiple skill sets in each. For example, under personality traits: are you confident in yourself and the data you bring to bear? Are you a servant-leader? Are you optimistic? Under learned skills: are you a multi-vert – do you have the ability to be an extrovert and gather data from the market, then become an introvert and close the door to your office and pound out a MRD for a week? Under product management skills: are you a measure of everything you do? Do you have the technical chops to speak with credibility to engineering? Under communications: are you a master listener? Can you craft a good story? And finally under Executive Acuity: do you have the ability to build consensus up and down the organization? Can you debate effectively with an executive, under pressure? Do you have empathy for how the other parts of the organization are measured and judged?
There are a lot of soft skills that the rock stars use to be more effective. I’ve identified seven of them that I call the X-factors of Product Management, highlighted in green. These will be the topic of several follow-up posts over the next few weeks to explain why these are so important and how we can use them to become more effective.
In the meantime, please explore the presentation linked embedded above, and leave a comment about the skills that you’ve seen the rock stars in product management that you’ve worked with use to be more effective.
Join me for ProdMgmtTalk Today at 4PM PDT
By · CommentsI am going to be participating in a Twitter-based chat today with the crew from #ProdMgmtTalk at 4PM PST (6PM Central). The topic is going to be the Product Management X-Factor, a presentation that I’ve shared at several ProductCamps around the soft skills that make certain leaders rise to the top where others stagnate. I’d love it if you participated with us, so join the Twitter chat room and follow along, or ask a question.
Resources and the transcript will be posted here and on the ProdMgmtTalk website afterwards for you to read if you can’t participate live and in person.
Putting Product Management on a Diet
By · CommentsIn the ProductCamp group on LinkedIn, you will find lots of interesting discussion topics. Shardul Mehta posted a presentation he made at ProductCamp DC recently about Lean Product Management. Even without the voice over, it’s an intriguing read and I suggest you take a look.
Shardul raises some interesting questions about the evolution of the idea around the Lean Startup and what it means for Product Management. If you’re not familiar, the Lean Startup is a concept popularized by Eric Ries which encourages low-burn, low-waste, fast iteration and agile startup companies that don’t take big VC investments up front. What the Lean Startup model really illuminates for larger companies is that Product Management by itself can get fat and happy tilting at windmills; all the market research they’ve done is useless if the business isn’t willing or ready to make adjustments.
Obviously the Lean Startup concept is smart; it gives you time to test an idea in the market without burning a lot of cash and make quick adjustments. It forces an up-or-out mentality and keeps you focused on delivering just the essentials without bells and whistles, and if you aren’t taking investor cash keeps you hungry and prevents you from selling too early.
What I see in the Lean Startup concept is the beginnings of realizations in entrepreneurs that a great idea isn’t enough. Great ideas have to resonate in the market and people need to be willing to pay you for it. In the bubble days, companies would build entire business models around “getting eyeballs” and figure out how to monetize them later. That only works for a very small percentage of companies – the rest of us have to build something that people are willing to enter a credit card or write a check to purchase.
To this end, I think the question in the presentation linked above is wrong: it’s not could product management benefit from Lean Startup ideas, because an effective product team would be one that is already in the market listening and bringing the data back to the business. The question is rather: how can product management and businesses use lean startup ideas to impact every other area of the business? Could it be that Product Management has been leaning into the wind for years talking about being market driven, and others are starting to come around?
For a long time, there has been a dangerous meme growing it the Valley and elsewhere that the only people of value are the engineers. They say that speed is the only thing that matters and it’s better to “be agile,” iterate quickly, fail quickly, and start over, because people figure they can create and kill 10 companies in the time it takes to get one success. I say companies may be a disposable quantity, but quality is not.
The New York Times recently had an article about a Stanford CompSci class in 2007 about writing apps for Facebook. The companies and apps that were spawned by this class were totally lean – three people per, on average. Some of the companies sold for millions of dollars to heavyweights like Zynga. But look at what these companies created; they eschewed all complexity and focused on apps that trades virtual “kisses” and “hugs.” I shudder to think that this is what our economy has come to. I recently read a great quote that I lost the source for (please send it to me if you have it): “The greatest minds of our parents generation put people on the moon. The greatest minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click ads on Google and Facebook.”
To bring this back to Product Management, what I see in Lean is the recognition that entrepreneurs need more than a good idea, they need to bake the ability to listen and adjust to the market into the culture of their company, and product management needs to take a leadership position. In a three person company, the role of product management might be played by someone who is also pounding out code, as was the case for Leaf. In a bigger company, the introduction of Lean ideas to the broader team can help them understand that they data which Product Management is bringing back to the business isn’t just academic, it’s required for the business to get more agile. Product Management can spend all day listening to the market and it won’t do any good if the business isn’t willing to accept direction from the product team and make adjustments.
The question I pose to you the reader is this: most of you don’t work in companies that are just getting off the ground and would be considered Lean – how do you get your company to be more agile and turn the information that the product team brings back into fast, cost-effective actions?
ProductCamp DFW
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ProductCamp DFW is next weekend, Saturday May 21st. If you are in the Dallas area and work in product management or marketing, or want to network with people who are, you need to be there! I will be there, and will be offering the keynote address in the morning. I also have a session on the online voting board, and could use your support. Please come introduce yourself if you are there – I’m looking forward to meeting everyone. Several Austin people are also scheduled to be there, such as Elizabeth Quintanilla, Josh Duncan, and Jose Birones (actually Jose is from Dallas but I count him as Austin since he’s been to PCA so many times).
Over at ProductMarketing.com, my colleague Steve Johnson has a great post about bonus plans for Product Managers. Based on the annual survey that Pragmatic Marketing conducts, we can say that 80% of product managers and marketers receive a bonus of some kind. Steve’s post does a great job discussing the challenges of the how most product teams are bonused, I won’t replicate that here. What I am more interested in is…why? Why are bonuses for product managers and marketers so hard to get right?
When talking with product managers and marketers, I always make it a point to ask how their bonuses are constructed and how they are measured. I usually hear one of three answers:
- Revenue
- Profit (Gross Margin), either at a company, business unit, or product level depending on the size of the company and product
- Product KPI’s: Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, other custom measurements
The problem with all of these metrics? They all look backwards. They’re all looking at the history of where we’ve been, not where we are going and are we charting the right course. You can’t drive a car down the road by looking in the rear view mirror, so why would we want to measure our product teams that way?
The other downside is that if we measure on short-term metrics such as revenue, we incentivize short-term behavior. I met a product manager earlier this year who had just launched a new product and the Sales team wasn’t paying attention to it for whatever reason (bloated portfolio, lack of mindshare, no training). That PM was measured on revenue, quarter-on-quarter, so what do you think he was doing? Out in the field…selling. If you are a PM who is spending all of your time selling, then you’re a salesperson, not a product manager.
Steve also outlined in his post another key challenge: that most product team’s don’t have the authority to impact the metrics upon which they are measured.
Why does this happen? Product teams get measured on the wrong metrics because:
- It’s easy
- It’s the way we’ve always done it
- The Executive team hasn’t bought off on the idea of product management as strategic, and wants to measure tactics
- Executive teams want fast measurement techniques, and if you start talking about measuring “strategy” they think you’re getting fluffy and turn-off
The first two are easy to disarm if you can show a better way. The second two are more difficult. If your Exec team is having trouble seeing product management as strategic, you might see symptoms like the Executives bypassing the normal roadmap process, or working directly with the engineers. We’ve put together a free ebook to help you in this situation, called The Strategic Role of Product Management, go download it, print it, and give it to your leadership.
The last objection, speed of measurement, is more tricky. You could make a argument that, depending on company, it could take up to 24 months to accurately gauge the impact of a product manager. Think about it: you hire a new PM, and they spend 3-6 months listening to the market, compiling and testing needs. Then then spend another 3 months turning that into requirements for Engineering and positioning for Marketing. Then Engineering goes and builds something for 9 months. Then you have a 6 month sales cycle, which is just for those that buy right away – you probably want to wait 1-2 quarters to judge the success or failure of the product. Eventually, at a year end review, this might be a good time to look back at the performance of a product team member and gauge their performance, but most management teams (correctly) want to get performance indicators on important employees faster. This is why we get the same-old measurements, or worse, highly subjective measurements based on thoughts and feelings.
Thankfully, there are things that we can measure faster than 18-24 months, which a product team can control and do provide positive impact to the company. If a market-driven company and product team are bound by the quality of the market data they have – why can’t we measure the quality and efficiency of the product team in gathering that data? I can look at a product manager after just a few months on the job and know if they have the ability to get into the market and bring quality, measurable data back to the business…or if they sit behind their desk all day and make stuff up. The former I will retain and bonus, the latter I won’t.
Product teams need new ways of thinking about measurement. Ways that test the team’s ability to align what the market needs with what the company is building. I’m curious to hear from you what metrics you either have or would put in place if you were king for a day.
The Internet Fridge
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If you’ve come to Practical Product Management over the last several years, you’ve heard us tell the story of the Internet fridge. What a cool product! Who wouldn’t want one? We use this as a case study to talk about some of the challenges in the choices Samsung made when bringing the original Internet fridge to market.
As it turns out, there is a new Internet fridge on the market. Do you think that this one is an inside-out or an outside-in product? Whereas with their 1st generation product, there weren’t a lot of competitors and the idea of an Internet fridge was very new, now there are a lot of companies who are copying each other and manufacturing Internet-enabled fridges. Are they copying each other into oblivion or do you believe that the market need has materialized?
Full Disclosure: I have this exact model of Samsung, minus the touchscreen. It’s a great fridge for my family.
You Might Be a Product Manager If…
By · CommentsSince we at Pragmatic Marketing just released our 2010 Product Management Survey, the time is right to revist one of my favorite topics: You Might Be a Product Manager If… In the spirit of the American comedian Jeff Foxworthy (“You Might Be a Redneck If…”), this year, product managers around the world contributed to the #YMBAPMI list over Twitter, LinkedIn, and this blog. And the results were excellent. So without further ado, I present the 2011 list:
You Might Be a Product Manager If…
- … you count number of iPads, iPhone4s, and/or Droids you see traveling, and consider how that compares to your hometown. @cheubaum
- …you have a #roadmap for Thanksgiving. #prodmgmt @barbaragnelson
- …the bartender in the Admiral’s Club knows you by first name.
- …you only buy clothing that has multiple use cases @austinogilvie
- …time with family at holidays is rationed in FAB order? :) @johnpeltier
- …you have “elite” status with >2 airlines and >3 hotel chains.
- …you know how to skip straight to a certain slide # in PowerPoint without leaving presentation mode (hint: type the slide # and hit enter).
- …your spouse can rattle off the kill points for each of your top competitors…
- By virtue of my surname, I would like to bend this a bit…You might be a REDNECK product manager if you’ve ever looked at a piece of blue tarp and thought to yourself, “Now THERE is some great product packaging!” – Jim Foxworthy
- …you find yourself tackling home improvement projects in terms of buy, build or partner, “Should I do that myself? Should I outsource it? Or maybe I can just use someone else’s?” – Charity Mason
- …you know how to challenge development’s first response of “that is not possible” or “that is not how users would use it” @gopalshenoy
- …you can look at something and quickly Roadmap the next two releases. – Ratul Shah
- …you’ve plotted a strategy matrix for your love life.
- …you look at common everyday products (think broom, backpack, stapler, etc.) and immediately think about what the requirements would be for the existing product and usability improvements for version 2.0, 3.0, etc. (Broom 3.0: knows when the floor needs to be swept, sweeps it, empties dustpan, puts itself back in the broom closet, plugs itself into the outlet to recharge.) – Irina Doliov
- …you refer to your kids as “release 1.0,” “release 2.0,” etc!
- …you look at your child’s stuffed Eeyore toy, saw how the tail was attached and thought “wow, some product manager must have had to fight with engineering to get that extra feature”, and then wondered what the COGs impact was. – Christina Hausman
- …you make all your personal decisions in Excel with multiple scenarios to go over with your wife. – Kirk Sadler
- …when trying to figure out how to use a new product you’re thinking, they must have missed the usability requirements. – Lynn Sigler
- …you ask your kids “what problem are you trying to solve?” when they ask for a new toy…
- …you are an expert at herding cats @gopalshenoy
- …you ask your spouse what they consider to be your distinctive competence. (credit: John Milburn)
- .. you’ve set up individual buy-in meetings with each member of your family before making a big family vacation/purchase/etc decision and have them all do what you wanted them to do without any of them knowing it! – Melanie Curtiss
- …you wish Amazon presented an ROI argument for buying Amazon Prime. :) – Jon Guild
- …you are thinking about your own “customer requirements” as your kids pick out a new pet. – David Critchley
- …you might be a Rural product manager if you stack rank your firewood. – Scott Overhill
- …when awoken in the middle of the night, you roll over and mumble “It’s on the roadmap” – Mathew Lodge
- …it’s dangerous to get between you and the white board – Mathew Lodge
- …you realize that you can’t keep everybody happy and some decisions are just tough to make. It is normal. @annua
- …u know that ever changing priorities is like the New Eng weather. If u don’t like it, just wait & it will soon change again. @gopalshenoy
- …when 11 y/o wants a tree house, you ask “What are your requirements ?” @DigitalDon
- …you discuss WHY you make each decision in your home remodeling project and use it to resolve stakeholder disagreements @sehlhorst
- …you use the word ‘feasible’ when asked a yes or no question #prodmgmt @rattay
- …you have a 100 to 1 ratio of ideas to resources and get interrupted every hour with new ideas to add to the list #prodmgmt @rattay
- …you can stack rank your children.
Apologies if I missed anyone’s contribution, we had a lot of great entries this year!
ProductCamp Rules the World!
By · CommentsWhat started as an interesting idea, then grew into a wave, has now become a tsunami: ProductCamp is changing product management and marketing everywhere. In just the first few months of 2011, there are ProductCamps scheduled in Austin, Vancouver, Atlanta, Boston, Silicon Valley, London, Dallas, and more. ProductCamp has now spread to four continents (S. America, Africa, and Antarctica, we’re waiting on you). If you live near a major metropolitan area, chances are there will be a ProductCamp near you. Anyone in a product management role is officially out of excuses for missing one of these events.
ProductCamp is winning because it solves a real problem for product managers: we have traditionally poor access to “our people:” people that do jobs like ours, think like us, and run into similar issues. Most product managers know their peer product managers at their current company, and the dozen or so people they’ve met throughout their career. If you’re lucky, your city has a local organizing group for product management and marketing, but these groups have spotty coverage and are of various quality. If you don’t have access to this group, you’re forced to look elsewhere to network and learn.
On the other hand, if you are highly experienced, or have recently done something unique and want to share that experience with the world, your options are also limited. You can start a blog – but writing isn’t everyone’s forte. You might get invited to speak at a local marketing meeting…only to find that the audience is made up of more traditional brand management or marketing communications people who aren’t interested in what you are doing in product management.
ProductCamp solves both the consumer and the producer problem by bringing both parties together under the same roof. Mixed in with solid networking and you get a volatile concoction of interesting people and insightful sessions that bubbles with energy for a day. The kicker: it’s 100% free to the participants (for most camps). ProductCamps around the world are now riding this formula to success. We’re on the precipice of a golden age for product management, where our luminaries will be uplifted by our peers and companies will have a chance to recruit from the clear cream of the crop.
The best product management and marketing talent tend to show up at ProductCamps, for a few simple reasons. First, the best people are interested in networking and learning from their peers. Second, great product managers are often great presenters, and rarely get a chance to show their stuff to people who “get it,” and care. You will find some amazing presentations from product managers and marketers at ProductCamp. Third, people who suck at their jobs or just want to skate by generally aren’t interested in burning up a Saturday (when most camps are held) talking with other people about their jobs. No one comes to ProductCamp because their boss made them do it.
Recently I had a chance to participate in both the inaugural Rocky Mountain ProductCamp and ProductCamp Austin 6. Both were great experiences and I made dozens of new contacts and learned a lot. Each camp brought new ideas to the table and showed how the ProductCamp template is evolving and changing. For example: ProductCamp Austin is now on it’s sixth edition. Rocky Mountain ProductCamp (RMPC) was on its first. The organizing committee for RMPC had traveled to Austin for PCA5 and borrowed heavily from the Austin template: in-person voting, best session award, sponsorship levels. RMPC also had new ideas, such as online streaming of certain sessions, which Austin duplicated. Each event had its own local flavor, and received rave reviews from their participants.
At both RMPC and PCA6 I was selected by the voters to present in a session I titled “The Product Management X-Factor: How to be a Rock Star Product Manager.“ The idea behind this topic is that there is a set of personality traits and skills that are inherited and learned, which some product managers have figured out how to use in order to become more effective in their careers. I was fortunate enough to win “Best Session” in Denver and “Best Session Runner Up” in Austin. I will do some more in-depth posts on this topic later; what was interesting for this post was the level of engagement and involvement the crowds in both Austin and Denver. I have received dozens of requests for follow-up and additional information based on two presentations. If you are doing something interesting and want to interact with people on it, there is literally no where else you can go to hit such a targeted group of people.
The bottom line is: if you want to be a thought leader in product management today, you need to present in front of your peers at a ProductCamp. It will be one of the most intense, but rewarding experiences of your career. Hit me up in the comments or by email if you want some tips on how to make an effective ProductCamp presentation.
After you’ve taken a few minutes to fill out the 11th annual Product Management and Marketing Survey, you might be feeling a little feisty. Well, you’re in luck! I am officially moving the annual “You Might Be a Product Manager If…” list to be in conjunction with the survey so you can get everything off your chest at once! I’ll release the full list on this blog in January, and need your participation! If you’d like inspiration, you can read the past lists. Some of my personal favorites include:
You might be a product manager if…
- You do a SWOT analysis before making any major purchase
- Your wedding included a powerpoint presentation.
- You spend more time with your development counterpart than your spouse.
Submit your best ideas in the comments below, or @ reply me on Twitter! Best submission might even get something cool…
