Nov 26 Selling Rocket Engines? Houses? Twinkies? Do better as a Product Manager!

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Why Product Management

At a recent technology Meetup in San Francisco (which I attended with a friend exclusively for the free doughnuts, but of course), I learned that many aspiring product designers (people in software, in fashion, in real estate, and everyone in-between) would love to explore careers in Product Management but don’t know where to start. This is a natural trend of thought among progressive thinkers in many disciplines, including the IT specifically: those who have mastered a singe technical domain often want to broaden their career horizons by applying their talents and experience in a strategic context, which is in fact how many good product managers are born. In this discussion, I offer my personal insight into the science of Product Management, as well as an extensive list of resources for those who aspire to become product managers.

Background

As a business analyst at heart, but also as someone with experience in managing a wide range of physical and intellectual assets (including SaaS/PaaS products, investment portfolios, inventories, and retail product lines, among others), I have been actively engaged with product managers throughout my career. My personal experience is that the best of the product management folk are people who are good at finding synergies between product design (engineering, usability, data analysis, etc) and product marketing. In the course of my career, I have lived through a good number of business scenarios and have come across a great number of resources that in part shaped me into who I am today.

Product Management in Three Bullet Points

Product Managers aren’t born and aren’t simply trained to become such. Some of the best product managers I have met evolved from engineering or marketing specialists and as a result tend to have blended backgrounds that offer a balance of at least two of the following (in no specific order): (1) marketing skills, (2) data analysis skills, (3) engineering skills, and (4) product design skills. But let’s crystallize Product Management in three manageable bullet points (again, INPO):

1. Product Management Starts with Marketing

Whether you like it or not, product management is “married” to product marketing. So, if you want to be a product manager, you need to understand the principles of marketing. Start with learning about the “4 Ps of Marketing” – Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.

To start, accept one fact: nine out of ten good-looking and perfectly functional products fail – usually within a couple of months after deployment… because they are not marketed properly; this applies to shoelaces and to space rockets and to everything in-between. Moreover, two out of three marketable, successful products happen to be not-so-good-looking and don’t do “everything” – because successful products are good at reaching and connecting with (targeting) their audience and addressing that audience’s needs. A product can target more than one audience (e.g., college students vs. veterans vs. divorced females with two or more children), but it doesn’t have to target more than one audience in order to be successful! To identify your target audience (also known as “target market”), you perform a market segmentation analysis and a competitor analysis, and you define a positioning strategy, among other things.

As a result, in managing a product, you don’t only develop and iterate it – as that way you would be either a project manager or a product developer or designer. Instead, you look for (and hopefully find) ways to market the product effectively to your target audience. Long story short, if you want to be a successful product manager, you absolutely have to understand marketing: know your audience, know your competition, and know how to connect your product’s value offering to your audience’s needs without over-developing or prematurely optimizing the product, as – love it or hate it – “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (Donald Knuth).

2. Evangelize the Product

This one is obvious: you must know what your product or service does, and you must know its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis), as well as its competitive advantages (that is/are sustainable, hopefully); this applies whether you are making and selling floor tiles or a software platform to manage real estate rental properties. And finally, you must understand how your product fits in your overall marketing strategy. But how do you “really” evangelize it? You take responsibility: you become the voice of the customer/user and you take pride in ensuring that your product does what it is supposed to; and you make solid, systemic effort to grow your user base and to understand (and correct) the pain points of your existing user/customer base, thereby reducing churn and contributing to your brand’s customer success and loyalty.

You need to know the product inside out, like the back of your hand. And you need to be prepared to defend it with arguments and examples that can effectively dissolve any doubt in your target audience’s mind that your product is the best.

In other words, you must “own” your product and you must (really) believe in it – evangelize it inside your head, on paper, at trade shows, in your promotional materials, in face-to-face interaction with prospects and clients, as well as when working with engineers, designers, business developers, and stakeholders in your company to deploy and iterate the product.

3. Be a specialist in at least two fields

That’s right. No one likes product managers that have minimal or no technical skills. If you have zero technical skills but want to be in charge and have a classic Type A personality, become a salesperson. But if you want the responsibility of managing the product’s strategy, you need to be technical.

My personal background includes business development, product design and marketing, investment analysis, software development, and real estate brokerage skills, plus a college degree in marketing, extensive experience in project management (including agile/scrum), and training in process design and BPM (business process management). It also helps that I know quality assurance and testing routines, data analysis, and economic analysis. For me, managing a product is a natural way of applying my diverse skills to contribute to my team’s performance and to customer success.

If you have at least two technical skills (for instance, data analysis and interaction design, or finance and visual design) and understand marketing, you can be an effective cross-functional player – capable of leading products to success by productively collaborating with other team members in your organization – i.e., you will “speak” their language, understand their needs, and communicate your needs to them in order to successfully design, deploy, improve and promote your product(s) together.

Learning About Product Management

Few accredited colleges offer degree programs in product management. Further, self-study materials are rather limited due to the young age of the product management discipline – particularly in the digital domain. Where does this leave you if you are eager to become a hot product manager but have never managed a product? This is the easy part. If you are in fact passionate about product management, I can offer you these educational resources to help you become an ace of product leadership.

The list is organized in sections sorted in ascending order by complexity. Enjoy.

Product Management 101: What is Product Management?

• Product Manager You Are… – Mat Balez
• What Product Management is Not – Marty Cagan
• PM at Microsoft – Steven Sinofsky
• What exactly is a Product Manager? – Martin Eriksonn
• What is Product Management? / Slideshare version – Sachin Rekhi
• Product Management vs. Product Marketing – Marty Cagan
• Use your Product Powers for Good – Bruce McCarthy
• A Product Manager’s Job – Josh Elman
• Product Managers: Who are these ‘mini-CEOs’ and what do they do? – Ken Yeung

Product Management 102: The Philosophy of Product Managers

• The DNA of Product Management – Hunter Walk
• 3 Skillsets for PM Success – Kenton Kivetsu
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Ode to a Non Technical Product Manager – Hunter Walk
• Should nice people be Product Managers – Alex Pukinskis

Product Management 103: Product Management as a Career Path

• How do I become a Product Manager? – Multiple authors
• So You Want to Manage a Product – Rohini Viba
• The 4 ways to break into Product Management – Jackie Bavaro
• 12 things Product Managers should do in their first 30 Days – Kenneth Norton
• 4 mistakes new Product Managers make – Matt Schnitt
• Do Product Managers really need a background in CS – Jackie Bavaro
• Starting and maintaining a career in Product Management
• Cracking the PM Interview
• PM Interview Questions

Product Management 104: Product Development

• How to build great products – Slava Akhmechet
• Make things as simple as possible but not simpler – Adam Nash
• 10 essential steps to create products that customer love – Laurence McCahill
• The power of the perfect slice – Alastair Lee
• How to build products users love – Kevin Hale
• Ten principles on the journey to building great products – Avid Larizadeh
• Quality is not a tradeoff – Julie Zhuo

Product Management 105: Advanced Practices

• Listen to customers – Kenneth Norton
• The customer is always right. Except when they aren’t – Wade Foster
• Your MVP is about discovery not product – Kevin Dewalt
• Beginning Customer Development – Kevin Dewalt
• How do Customer Development and Product Management fit together – Cindy Alvarez
• The 4 steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank
• How to structure and get the most out of customer development interviews – Jason Evanish

Product Management 106: Working for Requirements

• The end of requirements – Marty Cagan
• Requirements are not – Marty Cagan
• Feed the beast – Marty Cagan
• Painless functional specifications – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 107: Planning, Strategy and Roadmapping

• You don’t need a product roadmap – David Heinemeier Hansson
• The opportunity backlog – Marty Cagan
• The dirty dozen roadmap roadblocks – Bruce McCarthy
• The pyramid model & what it means for PM focus – Kenton Kivetsu
• How am I going to move my product forward today – Sachin Rekhi
• The seven deadly sins of product planning – Marty Cagan
• Magical thinking and the zero-sum roadmap – Rich Mironov
• Drop feature-based product roadmaps – Teresa Torres
• The inconvenient truth about product – Marty Cagan
• Product strategy means saying no – Des Traynor
• Product priorities start with strategic goals – Bruce McCarthy
• Software Inventory – Joel Spolsky
• What are the best ways to prioritize a list of product features – Ian McAllister
• Before you plan your product roadmap – Des Traynor
• Rodmaps focus on vision benefits, not features – Bruce McCarthy
• The one cost engineers and Product Managers don’t consider – Kris Gale
• Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets – Adam Nash
• Product Management Hierarchy of Needs – Joe Dempsey

Product Management 108: Collaborating with Developers, Engineers and Designers

• 5 things Product Managers wish they could tell developers – Brandon Satrom
• How to work with PMs – Julie Zhuo
• Peopleware – Tom DeMarco
• Team Geek – Brian Fitzpatrick
• How to work with designers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with engineers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with software engineers – Kenneth Norton
• The Iceberg Secret, revealed – Joel Spolsky
• Leading cross-functional teams – Kenneth Norton
• The care and feeding of software engineers – Nicholas C. Zakas
• The ten project management commandments – Slava Akhmechet
• Nerds, get the Product Management you deserve – Jeff Enderwick
• Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 109: Living for Feedback

• Thirty percent feedback – Jason Freedman
• How to run a design critique – Scott Berkun
• You won’t regret positive feedback – Zack Holman

Product Management 110: Shipping Win-Win Deliverables

• Always be defining success – Jackie Bavaro
• The only metric that matters – Josh Elman
• The lost art of the soft launch – Wade Foster
• The Mythical Man-Month – Frederick Brooks
• The blind Product Manager – Paul Adams
• Great product leaders win games – Adam Nash
• How to deliver more software projects on time – Mark Suster
• Shipping beats perfection explained – Ben Kamens
• Measure twice, cut once – Rick Klau

Product Management 111: Building Solid Product Management Teams

• Product organizational structure – Marty Cagan
• Enter the Matrix – Organizing Product Management – Mark Tattersall
• Good product team, bad product team – Marty Cagan

Product Management 112: Becoming a Guru

• Stakeholder Management – Marty Cagan
• Managing Up – Marty Cagan
• Top hacks from a PM behind two of tech’s hottest products – Todd Jackson
• Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write – Walter Chen
• Court scribe or Hand of the King – Bruce McCarthy
• Influence without authority – Sachin Rekhi
• Management clichés that work – Steven Sinofsky

Product Management 113: Becoming a Monster

• Be a great product leader – Adam Nash
• How a football coach taught me to product manage like a boss – Mike Su
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Top 10 product leadership lessons – Adam Nash
• What distinguishes the top 1% of Product Managers from the top 10%? – MacAllister Ian
  
• Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager – Ben Horowitz
• What innate traits do great internet product leaders share? – Chris Wetherelle
• Musings on Product Management – Mike Sukmanovsky
• Hiring a great product leader – Sutha Kamal

Do you want to talk about this topic? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 
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