Steve Johnson on Product Management

More notes from another Business of Software 2008 lecture by Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing.
He talks about what product managers' role is, what they actually end
up doing, and what they need to do, in order to be meaningful
representatives of the actual product's users.

• Companies
  tend to start off as technology-driven, then become sales-driven (each
  new sale requires custom development), then become marketing-driven
  (lots of money spent on their brand image).
• Then they cut costs,
  and go full circle to technology-driven, and repeat the cycle. Good
  product management can help to break this cycle.
• Illustration of
  how wills are only executed: you are already dead when the will gets to
  court. So the document needs to be long enough to deal with all
  possible arguments.
• Application specifications have the
  advantage that the specifier is normally still alive when the
  development teams come to implement them!
• But we keep writing
  specification documents (product requirements, marketing requirements,
  functional specifications...) in order to cover all managers'
  worries/requests.
• The right answer is not to create more
  artefacts. Tightening your grip will mean more slips through your
  fingers. Instead it's to have someone who really understands what's
  needed, and can back up their assertions with evidence.
• Many
  companies are like Star Trek (original series): Spock (development)
  logical, trying to be human. Bones (marketing) upset about what he
  hasn't got, or what he's being asked to work with. Kirk (sales) always
  committing the ship to more than it can do. Scotty (product
  manager/sales engineer) lies to Kirk at all times, then says "OK, let's
  go!".
• Agile development crowd wants to improve these
  development/specification processes by having a customer representative
  on hand to try out each iteration on.
• Problem: most of us don't program for individuals. We program for multiple customers!
• Agile/Scrum methods seem to make us more
  introspective. We spend so long in development team meetings that the
  product manager does not go out and talk to the customers!
• Sales
  don't tend to understand why some of their development requests are not
  possible. An interesting idea is to turn this round and ask similarly
  unrealistic questions to sales. Example: "Why can't you give me a
  well-defined feature set by a guaranteed date?" is replied to with "Can
  you tell me what hour of the day and the exact amount that you're going
  to close this contract for?"
• In many cases, the only people who
  talk to customers are technical support. But are they talking to all of
  our users? (Hopefully not!) They're only talking to the people with
  problems, and not even all of them. What comes out of this?
  "Remember the 'L' in (L)user is silent". "Losers" are those who you have
  to teach basic computing to. "Power Losers" are those who are trying to
  use your product in ways that you never intended. But you can't just
  try to market to "smarter" users!
• Biggest contribution that a product manager can make is to be representative of users. That means the PM has to leave the building, and talk with users, and potential users!
• Causing customers to switch is one target, but selling to potential customers is hugely important.
• Three
  groups: current customers, evaluators (people currently shopping: only
  sales talk to them. If they don't buy, then product management analyses
  why), and the untapped potential market. The last group is very
  important.
• Customers tell us what new features they want, but potentials tell us what would convince them to buy. Get evidence for what features are really asked for by customers. That helps choose which of the many ideas that come out of our company are to be implemented.
• Development
  and Sales have different views of product managers should do. Sales
  tend to want people who can demo/explain the product. This is probably
  best done by sales engineers. (See Steve's post on sales people as order takers.)
• Work
  out what areas of the business that are thought of as product
  management are not actually officially assigned to someone at your
  company: they will be happening, but are they happening well, or "just
  being done"?
• Jargon: Inbound marketing is understanding what
  customers want the development team to do (product management). Outbound
  marketing is about actually selling the product (product marketing
  manager).
• The product management triad: executive direction,
  marketing, and technical management. All require different skills. May
  end up splitting into three separate roles.
• Sales people tend to
  think one deal at a time, which is as needed. But when sales comes back
  with a new idea, put it in the list of possible new features, but wait
  and see how many people actually want it, rather than just the one deal
  that that salesperson is currently progressing.

To me, it's
interesting how broad the role of product management can be. It's also a
salutory reminder that when two companies recruit for a position with
the same name, it might well be for totally different roles...