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 Nth 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.

{ 3 comments }

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?

{ 0 comments }

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.

{ 2 comments }

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!

{ 1 comment }

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?

{ 3 comments }

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!

{ 1 comment }

SaaS Foundations

August 14, 2008

Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain has a really great post up on SaaS fundamentals.  If you’re evaluating SaaS as a sales/delivery model, you owe it to yourself to read and understand these issues first.  I especially like how he positions everything from the Point of View of the customer (which is how we should all think).

In addition to his article, there are some psychological aspects at play with SaaS that you need to evaluate for your market, I’ll list a few and let you (the reader) expand on them in comments:

  • People generally dislike pay-as-you-go pricing, and will actually pay more in a flat fee
  • Customers are worried about data lock-in and what happens to their data when they stop paying (you can disarm this by providing industry standard data export tools [CSV, Excel, etc])
  • The customer gets more leverage in a deal in SaaS than in a “standard” licensing sale, especially as an existing customer.  As Scott pointed out, the economics of SaaS mean that keeping your existing customers is important since they are annuity revenue streams, and much less expensive to attain than new deals.  Customers know this and use it to leverage better terms at renewal time; and since they are getting all of the upgraded functionality as it comes in the SaaS model, it is to their advantage to stretch out the negotiation process as long as possible.  If you are a smaller company using SaaS selling into a large company, they will be able to figure out what rough % of your revenue stream they represent, and even if your contracts have good uplifts on the fees once a contract goes month-to-month, they may make the calculation and refuse to pay the uplift knowing that it is unthinkable that you’re going to cut them off, which is your best leverage.  If you’re a startup – are you preparred to cut of access to the SaaS you are selling Ford?  Morgan Stanley?  Bank of America?  Good luck with that!

{ 4 comments }

Tuning Into Your Market

August 5, 2008

Last Month at ProductCamp, I had the privilege to work with some of the great team from Pragmatic Marketing, like Graham Joyce and John Milburn.  They were kind enough to give me an advance copy of the new book from Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott entitled Tuned In.  After reading it cover-to-cover, I can recommend it as a great resource and vehicle for the message that Pragmatic Marketing has carried for years.

The whole point of Tuned In is that there is a better way of developing products and services, and better products and services to be developed if only we listen to and understand our customers.  This message will sound very familiar to anyone who has been to a Pragmatic Marketing training, or who has read their blogs.  It is deceptively simple, and it sounds so easy – why wouldn’t you talk to your customers?  Yet, most companies don’t.

Tuned In puts a wrapper around everything that Pragmatic Marketing teaches in their trainings, and David Meerman Scott’s message about how to talk with customers dovetails well with developing products that make sense.

My biggest beef with Pragmatic Marketing has always been that they are too theoretical, and that “the matrix” is academic.  That theory means that you leave the training with a head full of good ideas about what you should be doing, but few ideas on how you should be doing it (e.g. connecting with customers, getting buy in from Executives, etc).  My favorite part about Tuned In is that they start to break down these walls with some really great examples of putting the process to work “on the ground.”

Tuned In is not a how-to manual, but a good reference for you to refer to when you want to refresh what you learned.  I’d also recommend handing it off to a skeptical Executive – my copy was just over 200 pages and I nearly finished it on a round-trip flight from Austin to Vegas, so you may be able to fit it within their attention span.

Some of the greatest ideas are great because they are obvious – or rather, they feel obvious after you’re exposed to them.  The ideas presented in Tuned In are obvious and presented in such a “smack your forehead” way that makes you wonder why you didn’t tie them all together yourself.  The mantra of know thy customer is real, is powerful, and is true.  Reading Tuned In will get you re-energized, and it could be the spark that you need to get more budget, headcount, or political support – or more importantly, what helps you turn your product or company into a market winner.

On a side note, I’m going to try hard to keep Product Beautiful active over the next few months.  I just started a new job and we have our first child coming any day now, so time for posting may be reduced.  If any of you would like to guest blog on Product Beautiful, please drop me an email at pt.young@gmail.com to let me know – I’d love your help!

{ 2 comments }

Changing Jobs in Product Management: Leaving, Starting, and Building Bridges (Part III of III)

July 20, 2008

This post is part of a three-part series about changing jobs in Product Management.  Part one was about doing a self-evaluation and farming your network.  Part two was about interviewing and evaluating offers.  In this final part, we will discuss how to leave the right way, start on the right foot, and build bridges for the future.

A rock bridgeAfter you have gone through the entire process of self-evaluation, farming, interviewing, offer evaluation, and acceptance, you will probably be mentally exhausted.  There are still important steps to take before you can close the chapter on your current company, which must be done with grace.

No matter what kind of relationship you have with your current company, boss, or peers, leaving the “right way” is critical.  It is a small World, and people have long memories – you want to be the person that they remember for all of your good traits, not for storming out the door or telling your boss to “take this job and…”  …No matter how good it might feel.  Remember, these people are your future references, and there is a fair chance you’ll run into them again in another role, or on the street, and you want that to be a pleasant meeting.

[click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

Changing Jobs in Product Management: Interviewing and Offer Evaluation (Part II of III)

July 16, 2008

This post is part of a three-part series about changing jobs in Product Management.  Part one was about doing a self-evaluation and farming your network.

Feeling naked in the negotiation process?After you’ve done your evaluation and reached far and deep into your network (which you are doing anyway – right?), at some point someone will find you.

The point of any your search is for you to find, but also for you to be found, because hiring managers and companies will make a much more lucrative offer to someone they feel like they’ve vetted.  I highly encourage raising your online profile through creative PR.  It’s not about putting yourself out there to find a job, it’s about being recognized as a “go-to” Product Management expert in your field/geography/niche.  Face-to-face events like ProductCamp are great for showing your depth of expertise, which you can leverage into fun online conversations down the road (aside: every city should have a ProductCamp.  Email me if you want help setting it up).

No one gets a formal request to interview right off the bat anymore.  You’ll get an email, probably from the HR or recruiter, saying that they saw your profile on LinkedIn and you’re a match for some talent that they are looking for.  This is where you critically need to have done your self assessment so that you already know if this company is one of your targets, and why.  If you’re interested, ask to have an informal meeting with the hiring manager, which may be face-to-face or a phone screen.

[click to continue…]

{ 4 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →