A Great Product Manager

May 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Someone asked me about the importance of product management in my prior tech businesses. My answer was blunt. Great product managers see beyond customer requirements to the often unspoken needs, and they move organizational mountains to fill those needs.

If you’ve ever worked around, for or with a great product manager, you know this to be true. I’ve worked with a few who live up to this lofty description. Without them, there would have been less success. Maybe no success.

For those of you who aspire to follow in their very big footsteps, you need to think bigger about your role…about your cause. Learn to lead across boundaries…quit staring at your competitors so much and climb into the businesses of your customers, until you can feel their stress and pain and see their opportunities. And then do something about it.

A great product manager is a difference maker.

Filed Under: Career, Performance, Product Management Tagged With: ,

Leadership Caffeine: Supporting the Rise of the Informal Leader

March 28, 2011 By 14 Comments

Want to know where to find your best and brightest emerging leaders? Here’s a hint, you’ll have to use your peripheral vision to see them, because they are moving sideways at a high rate of speed.

The Rise of the Informal Leader:

While it’s unlikely that hierarchical leadership will disappear anytime soon from our long-standing organizational models, it is my opinion that we’ve entered an era characterized by the rise of the informal leader.

The ever-shrinking middle layer of management has been replaced by a variety of different individuals fulfilling roles as project and product and team leaders. Their titles say, “manager,” but the real meaning is something like, “tons of responsibility and no authority.”

These Informal Leaders are the ones busy getting work done through and with others by marshaling resources, building coalitions and cutting through the organizational crap that slows many functional leaders to a “protect my turf” crawl.

Informal Leaders are often on a mission to change the world and improve their organizations for the better.  They are organizational and initiative focused zealots with the passion and confidence necessary for success.

Existing leaders will be well served to cultivate an Informal Leader culture and class to cope with the prevailing market forces. The need for speed, flexibility and adaptability have never been greater, and the better your people are at traversing functional boundaries to “get stuff done,” the better your odds of success.

And for those seeking to strengthen and grow your careers, instead of looking up the organizational ladder, it’s time to rethink your view of success and start looking sideways as the best way to make a difference.

7 Ideas for Cultivating Informal Leaders in Your Organization:

1. Give your people room to run beyond your boundaries. Hell, encourage them to run. Don’t create artificial silo or turf barriers for your people. You will succeed if your people are encouraged to create value and build coalitions across the organization.

2. Use your functional power to broker alliances with peers that pave the way for people and teams to tackle the big issues of the day. Actively encourage teams to work to solve problems across boundaries and you will be supporting the development of an Informal Leader culture.  Those with passion and skills will take the opportunity to grab these initiatives.

3. If your culture is already project centric, recognize that great project management has two components: the tools of the trade and the socio-cultural (people) issues. You can be mechanically sound and still fail. Invest in strengthening people skills to improve your chances of success.  Don’t assume that people know how to collaborate.  I see far too many cross-functional initiatives reduced to “debating societies” to be comfortable assuming that people truly get how to collaborate for results.  Provide resources and coaching to teach teams and Informal Leaders how to succeed.

4. Change at the top to promote growth across the organization. Current leaders need to learn what it means to effectively sponsor working teams.  Those at the top of the ladder (yeah, there is still hierarchy) need to consistently model the right behaviors for cross-functional and Informal Leader success.

5. Design developmental assignments to push people into informal leadership roles. Ensure that assignments challenge individuals to quickly form relationships and guide groups towards problem resolution.  Ensure an ample flow of feedback from participants and stakeholders, and provide a reasonable blend of skills development in areas such as: communication, negotiation, critical thinking and facilitation.

6. Engage Informal Leaders in the strategy processes of the firm. Too often, the people driving progress are simply “receivers” of direction. This devalues their understanding of talent, organizational capabilities and their tremendous insights and lessons learned along the way.

7. Create diversity in your upcoming Informal Leader ranks.  Far too many organizations create “project managers” out of just their technical professionals. While cautious to generalize, many of these same organizations end up with a project management culture that is mechanically excellent but truly weak on the soft, people side of the equation.  Draw from and build informal leaders in all areas of the organization.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The issue of building a powerful Informal Leader culture transcends the topic of project management. This is neither a functional nor a vocational issue as much as it is about building an environment that works effectively in this challenging and ever-changing world.

I see successes all of the time, although they tend to emerge due to the tenacity of one or more passionate individuals, rather than through a deliberate development process. The challenge now is to find ways to deliberately develop an Informal Leader class and quit relying on its emergence by accident.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Performance, Product Management, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , ,

Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need

October 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

A Better MousetrapThe article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone.

The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need.

“If entrepreneurs want to succeed…they’d better be selling aspirin rather than vitamins. Vitamins are nice; they’re healthy. But aspirin cures your pain; it’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.”

The article speaks to our tendency to become enamored with our own ideas and offerings, and to make the leap that because everyone can benefit from this (a vitamin), they will jump at the opportunity to buy.  They provide a number of great examples from the publishing and technology arenas.

In my own experience, technology businesses do this all of the time, often as they race to either out-feature competitors or to blindly reflect the input of customers. Not that beating competitors or listening to customers are bad ideas, but both can lead you down blind trails if you’re not careful.

I know better than to fall victim to “The Felt Need,” yet, I’ve produced a number of vitamins during the past few years. On several occasions, I’ve invested considerable time in creating programs that I would take a bullet for as offering career-critical content.  While no one disagreed with me on the importance of the programs or the value of the content, they responded to them much like people respond to their gym membership in February.

4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need:

1. Measure and monitor the success of your new offerings. Are they selling like vitamins or, are they selling like aspirins. If you’re listening to your clients properly, they will tell you loud and clear what level of pain that you are addressing.

2. Evaluate new offerings and investment ideas with the filter of “The Felt Need.” It’s not difficult to assess if your marketer, developer or product manager can substantiate true audience pain. Ask tough questions. I love people that are passionate about their ideas, however, I still advocate a “trust but verify before investing” approach.

3. Quality-check your “Voice of the Customer” processes. Many a well-intentioned firm or product manager has listened carefully to customers only to find out that the requests, while valid, were not material. Too much blind followership leads to a bad case of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

4. Cultivate the practice of social anthropology. Ensure that your people are out in the market and in customers’ businesses observing. Ask someone a question and you will get an answer, but watch them in their own environment and you will learn something about them.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Read the article and spend some time looking at your own mix of current and planned offerings. While as the article indicates, you might end up with some vitamins, you better have a good number of aspirins to address burning pain points.  Make certain that your primary strategy is not “follow the competitor” or, “the customer’s need is our command.” You need good systems and great people to observe, translate and mostly uncover true pain points that merit a cure.  And remember the Heath’s warning about building a better mousetrap. Most people aren’t interested in a better mousetrap. They simply want a dead mouse.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Management Excellence Audio Interview: The CEO Perspective on Product Management

August 26, 2009 By 1 Comment

Notes from Art: I recently mentioned that I would be kicking off the Management Excellence Audio Interview Series, and I’m thrilled to be doing it today with Mike Mulcahy, a technology industry executive that has served as a CEO, a Founder of his own start-up and a Business Unit Leader inside one of the world’s largest organizations.  Oh, and Mike just happens to be one of the best sales professionals that I’ve had the privilege of knowing.

Mike is also one of those all-too-rare top executives that consistently champions the cause of product management inside his organizations. I know this first-hand, because it was Mike that provided me with an early opportunity to build a product management organization from the ground up.

We recently reconnected and Mike highlighted his on-going challenges in supporting the development of great product management and great product managers on his teams. I invited him to share his thoughts and perspectives with the community in this inaugural interview program, and he graciously agreed.

A few last comments and then on to the interview.

  • The audio recording tools that I used are new to me and there are some sound quality issues. Bear with me as I improve those in future interviews.  Fortunately, the issues in this one are that Mike is very audible, and I’m a bit quieter.  At least we got that part right!
  • I took the opportunity to poll the very active pm community out on twitter (#prodmgmt) and asked what they wanted to hear from the CEO. I received some phenomenal questions and based on the volume was only able to tackle a few here during the interview. I’ve included the full listing of the questions below…and encourage all interested parties to share their thoughts on these important issues. They are great content for future posts and interviews as well.
  • Last and not least, Mike has graciously volunteered to field specific questions about the audio interview here on the blog via the comments. Ask away.

With no further adieu, here’s Mike Mulcahy for 17 minutes offering his very experienced perspectives on product management.

The CEO's Perspective on Product Management [ 17:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Summary List of Questions from Product Managers for “the CEO” Via Twitter (#prodmgmt)

Note: some great content for comments, questions and follow-on posts.  Thanks!

  • What is the most compelling problem the CEO faces that he believe a pm can help solve?
  • How does the ceo believe he best connects with the pm team?
  • Does the CEO see prod mgmt becoming commoditized?
  • What metrics does he use to determine if PM is performing well?
  • Does he trust PM to stop development on a dead product?
  • His view on relationships between pm and company/depts.
  • What are the driving metrics he seeks from product mgmt?
  • How does he encourage continuous learning from product management?
  • What is product management’ss role w. development if the company is using agile?
  • Do you view product management as product focused or more product marketing?
  • Is product management really the Voice of the Customer?
  • Does product management have a seat at the leadership table?
  • I am interested to know how he feels about compensation based on product revenue.
  • What innovation initiatives/practices do they have in place?  What is the role of PM in them?
  • How important is domain vs functional pm expertise?
  • How has he positioned the PM function in his org?  i.e. VP level, stand-alone or within marketing or development?
  • Does PM own the product /line of business at a P& L level?

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, Marketing Yourself, Product Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , ,

Jump-Start Strategy By Jumping Straight to the Middle of the Process

July 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Note from Art: this post was prompted based on my general rankling at the annual migration of corporate teams to strategy offsites.  There are more effective ways to get organizations focused and moving than this traditionally dysfunctional, low-outcome event, and the process that I outline below is one of those.

Both consultants and clients are all too guilty of massacring the strategy process inside organizations. Clients often treat strategy as an “event” with the expectation that there will be some meetings, some form of Ah-Ha type enlightenment and then some new initiatives. Involvement is grudging and political.

Consultants are often all-too-happy to enable the “strategy as event” process by facilitating a series of naval-gazing and Hubble-viewing sessions that while in isolation are appropriate, don’t really do much to improve anything about the organization’s ability to create value for customers and stakeholders.

An alternative to the tired approaches that start with retreats and end with lengthy power-point decks and feelings of relief that we can now get back to work, is to skip the S.W.O.T. and jump into the middle of the organization’s processes around activity/project/investment selection.

Now I have to offer a quick caveat for all of the process purists that will rake me over the coals for talking about strategic issues without the appropriate amount of market scanning, forces assessment and capabilities/mission/vision fit scrutiny. I get it and I’ll get there…just in different order than starting from the painful beginning.

How Do We Know What Investments Are Right?

At any point in time a firm faces a variety of core activity and investment choices. These can include infrastructure investments, new product/service development opportunities and potential new partnering arrangements. Invariably, each option has its own advocates and of course every advocate views his/her program as a must-do. Many firms default on making a tough call here because they lack the necessary strategic filters and they simply line the projects up.

One approach that I’ve both observed and ultimately used to great success has been to challenge teams to attack the selection process by creating a mechanism to evaluate options in as close of an apples to apples comparison as possible. This “Strategic Choice Analysis” can be implemented quickly and serve as a means of both near-term and long-term improvement for decision-making.  The short form on the process:

Establish core criteria about What’s Important:

Key stakeholders (does not have to be senior management…can be project teams or functional teams, depending upon how decentralized decision making is within the firm) work to establish the core criteria by which activity/investment choices must be scrutinized. Examples might include: directly improves the customer’s experience; impacts near-term sales; fits with our vision of the future; adversely impacts competitors to our benefit; reduces costs; critical to our long-term vision.

The process of vetting and reducing to 5 or 6 absolutely core criteria for evaluating and comparing choices is difficult at best.

If the team is taking things seriously, the criteria will be hotly debated with questions raised about importance to customers, impact on costs and revenues and impact on competitors. I advise using an external facilitator for this process.

The great news is you will find that deciding on “what is important” drives widespread discussion about the hard questions of performance and impact. It also begins the process of creating filters on “what not to do,” something that is often missing from a firm’s strategic discussions. Last and not least, establishing the criteria and the next step, creating weightings for each criterion beg tough questions and drive relevant data gathering as part of the fleshing out process.

Establish Weightings for Each Criterion:

Once a manageable number of criteria have been established, the painful but important process of weighting begins. Each criterion must be evaluated in isolation for its relative importance to the firm and ultimately to investment selection. The use of an objective facilitator will shave days off of the debate. I use a simple 1-5 scale, and of course, there is some subjectivity in defining the relative difference between a 3 or a 4, but that is healthy discussion, as long as it is resolved, captured and a mechanism created for understanding it.

Evaluate Investment Choices Against Each Criterion

The fun continues, but the dividends are huge as teams begin for the first time looking at an investment choice against the established criteria. If done right, the criteria are great equalizers, where infrastructure improvements and new product investments are compared and evaluated against what is most important to the firm. We already weighted the overall criterion based on relevance to the firm (1-5 for this macro weighting), now each project must be rated according to its fit for each criterion. I use a 1-10 rating scale here, and again, there is some significant background work to get people on the same page about the meanings of the relative rankings.

Compare Investment Options:

At the end of the day, you should end up with a series of projects or investment choices that have been evaluated and ranked for each criterion. A simple math exercise…multiply the criterion ranking (the 1-5 number) times the project/criterion rating (the 1-10) number, sum the numbers for each project and compare.

A Health Warning and Some Encouragement

There is no magical number, you should not blindly trust the output and remember that the process is highly subjective. However, it is less subjective than endless debate or the political decision-making that guides many choices.

The first few times through are rugged, but the process demands discussion of the relevant strategic topics. Does this project really help our customers or our ability to serve customers or beat competitors? Does it do it better than other alternatives where we could invest our time and money? Does it fit with our view of the future? Does it take into account the prevailing market forces? All of these are the questions that I want my teams debating, and we got there without saying S.W.O.T. even once.

The Bottom Line:

Get your team talking about the right topics and get them focused on assessing and comparing based on the criteria that are the most important to your success. Skip the summer strategy offsite and start the dialogue on determining what’s truly important, and you’ll find yourself and your organization moving and working the right things faster than you might imagine.

And remember that this is a process that screams for continuous improvement. You’ll get better, the strategic awareness will improve and the teams will make process improvements every time through it.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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