The Product Manager's Survival Guide

by Steven Haines

Attribute Cluster 1: Environmental Product and technical knowledge and experience. Includes a comprehensive understanding of product functionality, capability, and usage so you know how your product is used and how it solves a customer’s problem or meets a customer’s need. This also includes characteristics of the technology used in the products you manage (such as software, development methods, materials, and components) or in the techniques, processes, or methods used by your customers. Last, it covers aspects of the product’s business that encompass pricing models and promotional techniques as well as sales and distribution channels. These areas, and others, will be discussed further in Chapter 3. Domain knowledge and experience. Involves the collective aspects of the industry, technology, and other factors related to your product. This can broadly be thought of as domain (or as I’ll discuss in Chapter 4, the product’s “environmental domain”) in which products are marketed and sold. Note that while technical knowledge is listed above, there is a difference between the state of a technology and having technical experience. International business experience. Relates to your travels to other countries to transact business or work with colleagues. It must include the analysis and comprehension of discrete market areas—a country or a region. It can also include working with external partners and internal structures such as a manufacturing plant or a customer service center—a...

As you navigate the organization, meet people, and learn what people do, refer to this set of common definitions as your guide: The role of a business function in an organization is that people associated with that function produce an agreed-upon outcome. The role of a person in a function is to use specific knowledge, skills, and experience to produce the desired outcome for that organization. A responsibility represents the work steps or tasks that are undertaken by people in a given role. An outcome is the actual goal that must be fulfilled or accomplished. Within this context, your action plan will include: 1. Putting together the organization chart that best represents the organization’s design. 2. Fine-tuning the chart by ensuring that you have the right names, job titles, roles, and responsibilities for each person in the chart. By doing this, you must meet with key players in each function. By so doing, you’ll learn what people do, how they do what they do, and with whom they work. 3. Creating a Functional Support Plan. The Functional Support Plan is essentially a cross-functional contract that you can use to negotiate with people who work in other functions. It serves to clarify roles, responsibilities, and outcomes of all relevant players who work on a product team. I’ll talk more about this in Chapter 5.

Harold S. Geneen, the former CEO of ITT, said, “Every company has two organizational structures. The formal one is written on the charts; the other one is the everyday relationships of the men and women in the organization.”

Henry Ford once said, “Obstacles are those frightful things you can see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

Each customer is a customer type and may have different motivations. To understand what their motivations are, you can create a chart. It might actually resemble an organization chart at first glance but actually looks like the chart in Figure 3.2 and lists: Figure 3.2 Simple B2B Customer Company Organization Chart 1. The name of each person who may come into contact with your product or what your product enables in that company. 2. The title and role of that person in the company. Try to discern whether that person is a user, influencer, or decision maker. Of course, the customer may be a person in the Purchasing department—in which case, his or her need may only be to save the company money. 3. Create short stories about each customer type you discover. This is not a childish activity, but using imagination plus logic when doing so is a great way to visualize and characterize the day in the life of each customer and how each one does what he or she does. These stories can play a vital role in understanding or validating customer-need profiles. As you become familiar with using this customer-typing, you’ll employ this method for the creation of user stories, customer personas, and other techniques that are used to devise new products or to enhance existing products. 4. Evaluate the underlying need profiles for each customer type. For example, influencers may want to improve communication or data flow between functional departments. Users might be looking for efficiencies ...

When you have conversations with people in other functions, especially Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing, you can ask questions like: Who are the customers you’ve come to know? Where are they located? What do you think they like about our product? What don’t they like? Is there anywhere this information is stored so I can review and become more familiar with the picture (e.g., complaint reports, service requests, marketing campaign responses, sales reports, and call reports)?

The marketing mix model is based on the classic 4 Ps: Product Price Promotion Place or distribution channel

The key documents you need to become familiar with include: 1. Business Case. This is the primary business document that catalyzed the product’s original justification and definition—or is the documentation of major enhancements to the product over its life. The Business Case is used to justify the firm’s investment in the product. It also affirms and solidifies the product’s linkage to the fulfillment of the company’s strategic intent—or the intent that existed at the time of the product’s creation. The Business Case contains many important pieces of information that cover: a. The historical context that portrayed the market requirements for the product b. The underlying customer needs or problems c. The product description d. The overall marketing mix strategy e. The value proposition and product positioning statement f. The people in various functions who participated in the production, launch, sales, and management of the product g. The initial forecasts and associated assumptions h. The implementation plans i. The possible risks that could materialize 2. Product requirements document (PRD). The PRD describes the functional and nonfunctional characteristics of the product that reflect business and customer needs. PRDs are written by product managers and should be maintained in a central repository, which should make it easily accessible to you. Functional requirements reflect the basic intent of the product, or “what the product is supposed to do.” A lawnmower cuts gra...

In your first few months on the job, you’ll need to construct a framework to help you learn: 1. How your product produces value for its targeted customers 2. How the company has used pricing policies to achieve its strategic goals The first thing to look for is who’s actually accountable for setting product prices and discounting structures.

you can evaluate linkages between product investments, promotional programs, and demand patterns. You can also evaluate whether the value proposition as set forth in prior periods bolstered the product’s pricing strategies or led to excessive discounting.

PRESTO is not a magician’s word. It’s an acronym that all product people should know. It stands for: P: The political environment that determines how governments and political parties treat businesses R: The regulatory environment that relates to the laws that govern how businesses are to behave in a given area E: The economic environment in any area that creates context for favorable or unfavorable business conditions S: The social or societal environment that influences given trends and activities with respect to behaviors and attitudes of people in different customer groupings T: The technological environment in any area that provides indicators related to the pace of innovation or the enabling techniques that become available for exploitation O: Other aspects of the environmental domain that may provide clues to investment cycles or funding trends, business organizational structures (see Chapter 2), and so on PRESTO refers to the characterization of a multifaceted, ever-changing landscape in which your company does business. Each aspect of the PRESTO model, each indicator, can vary based on the areas in which your company operates. Some of the aspects that you can explore are: 1. Industry sectors or groupings (e.g., communications, financial services, healthcare, etc.) 2. Competitive intensity or the degree of concentration or fragmentation of various competitors 3. Competitive scale—meaning the relative size (revenue) of the competitive companies; some industries are ...

When I was a product manager, I produced a brief newsletter called a Monthly Insight Report from Product Management. This was a digest of interesting highlights from various sources—data I had read, comments from customers, industry information gleaned from syndicated reports, and more. These communiqués helped me stimulate and inspire people to think about our markets. It required a lot of time and effort, and I often wondered how effective it was. Then I missed a month because of a heavy travel schedule. I got dozens of notes from people who asked, “Where’s the market newsletter?” I knew then that I was on to something. This might not be the solution you would prefer.

These meetings would review results, address issues, and refine plans. The effect of these meetings would be to help align team efforts to plan, execute, and manage the product’s performance.

cross-functional product team meetings can be held less frequently. The idea behind any regularly scheduled meeting is to deepen and broaden the scope of the team’s knowledge. However, and of greater importance, these meetings are designed to help the team to make meaningful progress and better decisions that positively impact the business. Through this medium, you ensure that team members all become aware of the collective key learning moments that might have gone unnoticed. This type of team meeting should take approximately 90 minutes. It should be structured around a common agenda that allows for all members to: 1. Recap issues and resolutions that would have been assigned to others at a prior meeting. This should be available from properly transcribed and distributed meeting minutes and action items. 2. Review the issues and activities in their own functional areas with respect to the product’s business and desired outcomes. As team members discuss issues and challenges, or successes and wins, everyone shares in solutions or in the celebration of wins. 3. Discuss aspects of the market that were learned since the prior meeting. Since team members from different areas usually have access to various sources and are generally interested in customer activity, industry movement, and competitor action, they have perspectives that can be tapped. 4. Review the product’s financials and other performance information. When you provide cross-functional product team members with in...

Table 5.1 Product Team Scorecard

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT