By Cindy F. Solomon, CPM, CPMM

As former president of the SVPMA, is the CEO and Founder of the 280 Group, Brian is a relentless evangelist for the product management profession, product manager excellence and purveyor of rigorous product management education and training.

He covered the foundations of strategic planning, including what strategy is (and is not).  Also used the AIPMM’s Seven Phase Product Lifecycle framework as a foundation to walk through the process that every product travels through regardless of type or industry. He then did a deep dive on strategic planning tools and techniques that can be applied by product managers in order to manage their products more effectively. 

Beginning with an attempt to define strategy, He cited Michael E. Porter’s 1996 Harvard Business Review article entitled, “What is Strategy?” Porter refers to operational effectiveness (OE) as the means of performing similar activities better than rivals and strategic positioning as the means to perform activities in a different way. Brian re-enforced that operational effectiveness however necessary is not a strategy.  In order to create unique and valuable positioning, different sets of activities are involved. Strategy requires tradeoffs, including choosing what not to do. Strategy must fit within the corporate mission, business objectives and other company activities.

Lawley went on to name strategies and invited the audience to call out companies that employed them, such as:

• Razor and blades – give away the razor, sell the blades. i.e. HP with printers/cartridges
• Land grab – be everywhere you can be. Common with emerging markets. HotMail, Facebook, Twitter
• Low cost provider – i.e. Dell computer had no premium products; was the lowest cost but not the lowest price
• Premium brand & price – (need we say it…Apple) Bentley, Rolex
• First mover advantage – establish early i.e. Verisign SSL certificate

Good discussion about the disadvantages of being first in the market such as the efforts and resources required to educate and create a market that hasn’t previously existed and then defend that market against entries that have the advantage of learning from mistakes.  Brian pointed out how Apple, although credited with being first, actually waits until there is a market, and then improves on the user experience. With the iPod there were other mp3 players, but Apple recognized the need for iTunes, similarly there were previous smart phones and tablets, not to mention micro-computers before Apple entered. It was recognized that being a market follower and doing it better is a powerful strategy.

After defining strategy and discussing examples, Brian gave an overview of the AIPMM Seven Phase Product Lifecycle Framework.  Brian explained that the AIPMM framework is a vendor independent worldwide standard that takes into account best practices used in a wide range of companies and industries and ensures that the most modern and up-to-date challenges faced in product management and product marketing are addressed. The framework is part of the AIPMM Product Management Body of Knowledge (ProdBOK), which was developed with input from over fifty experts and is endorsed by more than half a dozen　training　and consulting companies. The AIPMM introduced the Product Management Life Cycle framework to drive continuous improvement of products and processes within any organization viewing continuous improvement of products as an ongoing effort best evaluated once a formal product management and marketing process is defined and implemented. The framework includes seven distinct product phases, from Conceive to End of Life, and covers every aspect that needs to be addressed for every product or service during the overall lifecycle.

Brian said that whether you realize it or not, every product passes through these seven phases from inception to retirement. Oftentimes one or more of the phases are ignored, shortchanged or not focused on, resulting in a less-than-optimal result for the company and its customers.  In many cases product management and/or product marketing are only involved in one phase, and no one is watching the “Whole Product” concept that the customer ultimately perceives as what they are buying. By being aware of… and prepared for all seven phases, a company maximizes its chances for delighting its customers and increasing its profits.

The seven phase model uses a phase-gate approach. Although this is described as a phase-gate process (also referred to as waterfall) the notion of Agile development fits in and can be used effectively – the company or team just goes through the phases more rapidly with a smaller set of features for each sprint. They are still doing required tasks in each phase and must pass through the corresponding gate. A phase is a stage in the product lifecycle and the gate is the critical decision point or milestone that marks the end of one phase and starting of another. Brian has a mnemonic to remember the phases: “Clever Product Developers Question Lousy Market Requirements.” The 7 phases are Conceive, Plan, Develop, Qualify, Launch, Market, and Retire (the AIPMM version references the Market phase as the Deliver phase.)

Mapping strategy to each phase, in the conceive phase which includes brainstorming or crowd sourcing ideas, prioritizing and choosing ideas, make sure that the ideas fit within the capabilities of the company and immediately eliminate the ideas that the company cannot implement effectively with current resources and organization.

The plan phase includes all the upfront market and competitive space research and data capturing, creation of the business case including the market needs and product description, and documentation of the roadmap. Strategic upfront thinking prior to development necessitates a holistic view of the market place and guarantees that products won’t be built that are set up to fail. 

In the development phase of the actual engineering, tradeoffs and feature schedule and plan, you continue to monitor the market and adjust strategy to guide development.

The qualify phase gets the product in the hands of lots of customers, both internal and external to develop pricing and value propositions aligned with the strategy. 

The launch phase includes properly timing the announcement of the product into the various channels of distribution, customizing messaging and narrative of the product for segmented targets, guaranteeing availability and exposure in the market. 

The market or deliver phase encompasses ongoing programs and iteration of the market activities and strategy to measure the Return on Investment and optimize revenue.

The retire phase includes end of life planning aligned with the rolling out of new versions and planned obsolescence. Each phase requires strategic planning aligned with what you’re trying to achieve and specific actionable objectives to achieve them.

Brian concluded his talk highlighting concepts including market opportunity assessment, using the product lifecycle to determine the most effective strategy, the VMOST framework, the BCG Matrix, the Chasm model, SWOT analysis, Porter’s models, the McKinsey matrix, Kotler’s strategic pricing models and the Optimal Product Process. 

Cindy F. Solomon is Founder of the Global Product Management, creator of the ProdMgmtTalk mobile app and organizer of Startup Product Talks SF.　Join in weekly #prodmgmttalk http://www.prodmgmttalk.com  Follow @ProdMgmtTalk and @CindyFSolomon Contact: cindy@prodmgmttalk.com

By Chen Zou

Rick Chavez heads Microsoft’s advertising Online Services organization, which delivers solutions that enable companies to connect and deeply engage with their customers. In this capacity, the marketing solutions team spans field sales, strategic, product marketing, and R&D organizations.

With over 20 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and advisor, he’s been helping organizations build substantial market and competitive value through commercializing technology products, services and management approaches. Prior to joining Microsoft, Rick was a managing director at TCG Advisors, a boutique strategy and transformation firm based in Silicon Valley.

Rick kicked off his speech sharing his thoughts on today’s digital trends, which also coincides with Microsoft’s. Today’s digital trends, as we might feel, are user-centered, more natural, and appear in many different forms. In other words, the idea of today’s digital world is letting users decide when and how to get the information he/she needs in the most convenient (natural) way. Therefore, the path ahead for companies (big and small) that play in this digital world; is to plan the product/project with ambition and execute pragmatically. Rick is a self-identified pragmatist, so he provided some pragmatic tools for finding and targeting the right buyer: be prudent, manage expectations, maintain relationships, spend to budget and have staying power to ‘go the distance’.

Key Takeaways from Rick’s presentation:

1. Toolkits he proposed are:

1. Framework to build up market strategy
2. 9 steps to identify new target customers/markets
3. Chart to develop solutions that are both attractive and appropriate
4. A model template to build up the whole solution

 2. Enterprise platform solution toolkit has three varying and even polar opposite models (as the Qualitative focused Volume vs the Quantitative focused Complex Models):

1. Volume operations model
2. Complex systems enterprise model
3. Operating model implication

Chen Zou is a product manager at Foxit Corporation. In his previous roles, he has led product management for SaaS and Mobile Software Products. His interest areas include mobile applications & SaaS products and services.

By Jae Kim

Product Management: Minimum Viable Product

I was at 5th annual SVPCamp today. There were several hundreds of product managers, entrepreneurs, programmers and designers to share ideas and network. It was my second time at the event. It felt great to connect with fellow product managers in Silicon Valley. For those of you who missed SVPCamp 2012, I highly recommend that you attend the next year event. I found that SVPCamp is the single best event for product managers to network and exchange ideas about product management challenges.

This year there were several sessions around minimum viable product (MVP). Discussions ranged from what MVP is, how to use it to reduce risk of launching a new product and what best practice looks like. It looked like most of product managers and entrepreneurs were learning how to put together MVP on the job.

After listening to a couple of sessions and having some time to digest, I wanted to share my view on MVP. As for slides from MVP-related sessions, I’ll share the link once they come up. For now, these are what I found to be key points of MVP through listening and mapping them to my own experience about MVP.

1. MVP is not a final product.

MVP is an exercise that you do when you are launching a new product. 　When there are lots of risks in going into new area, you set up MVP. What you must understand and help other key stakeholders in your company understand is that MVP is not yet a shippable product. You put MVP together to get real feedback from users (customers and earlyvangelists). Catherine Connor talked about her long cycle from beginning of MVP to final product being longer than a year due to nature of portfolio management cycles.

MVP is not a final product. It’s somewhere between alpha and beta stage. It’s what comes after product idea and initial product scope definition.

2. MVP must capture the best guess of a few key user stories.

MVP must be built based on assumptions. What user cares most about solving, how user might visualize the solution to be are all good questions to think about. In order to answer them, as product designer you have to make certain assumptions. Be clear on what you are assuming. 　Use iterative brainstorming sessions to drill down on promising ideas. Make sure you don’t go boiling oceans, however. What you are looking for is a couple of user stories (maybe three, but no more than three) that you want to nail down completely. Idea is for users of MVP to be able to solve their real problem using MVP.

3. MVP must be quick and cheap.

You cannot spend months to build MVP. That defeats the entire purpose of MVP. Scope has to be small. Its functionality must be simple. It has to be put together quickly, so that you can start collecting real user feedback quickly. If you are finding yourself spending more time discussing what MVP scope should be than building, you are wasting your time. Build something quick and let customers tell you whether it works or not.

4. MVP must be iterated based on user (or earlyvangelist) feedback.

One of key reasons why MVP works is that it’s working product. It must be a working product regardless how little it does or how unfinished UI might look. Your job as product manager is to use that MVP to see whether and how user can solve their problem per your assumption. It’s best done in user’s natural environment as Chris Kocher pointed out in his Intuit example. 　During the early days of Intuit (back when software were sold in a shrink-wrapped box), Intuit had a program where a developer would follow customer back home to see how their software was being used in user’s environment. Seeing how user gets distracted away from install process to tend to crying toddler shed light on what were really important to customers.

You want to speak to several users who understand what the product does and are passionate about solving the problem, i.e. earlyvangelists. Not all users are earlyvangelists. Rigorously qualify earlyvangelists using your sales team’s help.

Once feedback is collected, you have more information to make better informed decisions. Go back to MVP and see whether there were any assumptions that were violated. See if there is a better method to solve the newly defined problem. Evolve your MVP to solve the new problem and release it back to earlyvangelists for feedback. Rinse and repeat.

5. MVP is ready to be released when users start depending on it (or need it bad enough to pay for it).

You are done when your earlyvangelists or users start depending on MVP. That means it will cause some pain when they lose the product. And this usually means they will spend money to get the product once it’s out as real product. Now you are ready to productize the MVP. One thing to be careful of is how to set the right customer expectation when you go out to build a real product. Not all features included in MVP may make it to final product release.  Make sure customer understands them and none of the ones that you have pivoted away from are key user stories that prevents the rollout.

 Jae Kim is the Director of Social Media Products at Actiance. He closely tracks social media market and is responsible for social media product strategy. He is also an active blogger sharing social media trend and product management tips at www.futureofsocialnetwork.com

by Dan Galatin

Ravi Belani, a venture capitalist and instructor at Stanford, presented at the March 7^th meeting of the SVPMA.  Mr. Belani discussed techniques for gaining access to VC funding, understanding term sheets, and even transitioning to venture capital as a career.  He focused on providing information that is not readily available on the web but stemmed from his own experience as a venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Fundraising pitches should include certain common elements such as information about the team, the target market, and the product.  In general, there are two ways to pitch: based off of potential or off of existing product traction.  The biggest factors for attracting Series A fundraising are the team and the market.  Pitch decks should be short (no more than 12 slides) with an appendix.

The size of the fund you pitch to should mirror the exit outcome you expect.  For each investment, the VC needs to return about 1/3 of the value of their fund.  It is not worth trying to raise money from a large fund that doesn’t match the size of the outcome you expect, since your incentives will not be aligned with the VC’s.  It is worth pitching to a variety of funding sources (large VCs, angel investors, and strategic investment funds), since different types of sources will be interested in different types of markets at any given time. The advantage of getting funding from VCs is that they have reserves to provide additional cash if required.

In some ways VC is a job with a lot of authority but very little direct responsibility – arguably the opposite of product management!  VC is not an industry, but a consortium of a few core decision makers managing a large amount of money.  Each firm has developed its own culture, but overall VCs are all “hunters” psychologically.  The odds of getting funding are low, but VCs tend to want to learn about all opportunities out there.  VCs think about what advantage they have in investing in a given company over other VCs.  Therefore, you should appear like “healthy prey” that the VC wants to chase, and demonstrate that you have attracted a lot of attention from funding sources.  Before simply approaching a VC firm for a second meeting, try to find another source of funding, demonstrate a significant milestone, or demonstrate product traction.  Remember that the entrepreneur’s greatest asset is the restricted opportunity for VCs to invest in the company.

As an entrepreneur, you should try to unearth the biases of the firms you are pitching to: is the VC focused on the team, the product or the market?  VCs will be considering whether they like you and can work with you for the next several years: are you passionate and yet coachable?  VCs often judge the fit around the entrepreneur’s vision and personality, more than tangible, objective criteria.  The best way to approach VCs is through a trusted shared connection.  It’s worth shooting high and approaching the managing director of the fund, and keeping the fundraising process short and intense to demonstrate interest within the VC community.

In Series A funding, the valuation is a function of the ownership needs of the VC and the amount of capital the company needs (typically for the next 18 months) – not anything having to do with the intrinsic value of the company.  For Series B funding, the company will be valued based on its results and typically need to have a step up (ideally 3x) from the Series A valuation. As part of understanding the term sheet, one should be aware that the employee pool usually comes out of the founders’ share of company. Other funding terms that entrepreneurs should pay attention to include vesting schedules; board composition and control; terms for paying back the investors (liquidation preferences); and rights the VC has to sell stock at the same price as the founders.

Finally, Mr. Belani recommended that if you’re interested in becoming venture capitalist, act as if you’re fundraising: attract the VC’s interest by knocking on a lot of doors, but not get attached to any one opportunity.  Demonstrate interest by sharing reports and analysis with the firm.  The best way in is to become a successful entrepreneur and become a VC later on!

Dan Galatin has 19 years combined experience in product management and software engineering.  He is currently a Senior Product Manager at Keynote Systems and can be contacted at dangalatin@yahoo.com^.

By Tej Ravindra

In February’s SVPMA monthly meeting, Mike Tschudy shared his experience and insights on developing SAAS solutions from a scratch. Three key takeaways were: a design thinking based approach to new product development, quick prototyping and team development for customer focused solutions. 

DESIGN THINKING APPROACH TO PRODUCT MANAGEMENT:

The focus of this talk was the new product development process that was used to develop the SAAS solutions at SAP.  Mike emphasized 4 principles of this process:

1. Empathy for people

2. Interdisciplinary teams

3. Shared Vision

4. Iterative build cycles

This methodology is people and team centric. Team building is the most important thing.  An example: At the start of the project, invest time in getting everyone on the team to share some background on their interests and experiences.  You learn all sorts of things. There are a lot of people hiding behind their roles and have passion and excitement.  Often teams are in a hurry to execute. Different teams are measured on competing priorities and the end result can often be a product that may only be marginally successful although each specialized team met their specific goals.

Customer centricity and constantly gathering feedback on your prototypes helps the product evolve fast and in the relevant direction.  Connect with the people you build products for. Engineers have to be part of the conversation right from the beginning. Get engineers and designers engaged on the customer problem you are trying to solve from day 1.

Example: The team members built out scenarios and went through real data. Engineers, product managers & designers story boarded out their product requirement documents. Customer stories, backlog definitions and storyboarding were used to define what was being solved. Having visual cues on what’s being solved help people get on the same page really fast. Turned out that this scenario was not right for SAAS and the team was able to move in a different direction.

Prototyping and building up front without too many months of time investment. Organizational design is a key factor in facilitating this. Service organizations with specialized departments for each functional area are not best set up to do this. The product team needs to own the resources and the function to stay agile. Every person on the team needs an understanding of the customer’s context and pain points.

For SAP, a company that was focused on enterprise solutions,  building a SAAS solution was a fundamental change in the product context, the customer they were building for and the speed at which they could execute. This paradigm shift for new product development demands an agile and design based product management approach.

Lessons Learned:

• No employees, only true believers: Clearly state what the product values are and how they will influence decisions. People with full buy-in need to be handpicked.
• Start small… Keep the team size minimal. Work on specific products or cross-topics with dedicated teams of ten (max. 2)
• Team is everything… Break the role SLA and get people to share their talents and competencies openly, then decide on role responsibilities
• Buy in… Clearly line out our approach at the beginning of a project and get buy in from the stakeholders. No shortcuts!
• Common MBOs… Everyone needs to know what they are working for. Its bureaucratic but it makes a difference
• Get out of the building and validate… This builds confidence and reduces ambiguity

Tej Ravindra is a Sr. Product Manager at eBay. In her previous roles, she has led product management for SAAS and B2B software. Her interest areas include technology & business strategy, mobile applications & data analysis to drive better business decisions.

Choosing the right product management leader might mean success or failure for your startup. How to find great ones?

by Tien Anh Nguyen, Senior Associate at OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital fund in Boston

In our portfolio companies of expansion stage software companies, the product management process is a critical function because it affects how successfully a company can evolve in its rapid trajectory from a startup to an established player in the market. Along this evolution, the company has to be constantly evolving its whole product experience to adapt to changing customer needs and to the changing market segments. The ability of the product management organization to guide and execute this process both strategically and operationally plays a large role in the company’s success or failure in the market.

For example, many startups fall into the classic trap (or chasm) after they have saturated the early adopter market with their cool new products. The company has benefited from its understanding of these early adopters. However, in order to break into the mainstream segments, the “cool” new product has to be reinvented, repurposed, or repackaged in a very different way from how it was done before. This responsibility falls mostly on the product managers or product marketers, who will have to perform additional market research and numerous product tests to guide the product’s evolution.

To be sure, in order to build a great product management function, one needs great product managers. In some cases, the product managers are needed to fill the gap in an organization; in other cases, the product managers are hired when it becomes clear that the chief technical leader (VP of Engineering or CTO) can no longer manage both Product Management and Product Development.

So who would make a great product manager? What essential skills or personal traits would a great product manager possess? Is there a special requirement for product managers in companies with agile product development?

I did some online research to see what others have written on these topics and found a number of great articles. They are, just to list a few:

1. Assessing one’s product management skill http://productmanagementtips.com/2010/05/23/product-management-career/

2. Judgment – #1 skill that a Product Manager Needs http://blog.openviewpartners.com/keyword/product-management-process/

3. What to look for in a product manager http://productmanagementtips.com/2007/07/26/what-to-look-for-in-a-product-manager/

4. Eleven skills for product managers to win over any situation http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/eleven-skills-for-product-manager-to-win-over-any-situation/

5. Seven traits of a successful product manager http://michael.hightechproductmanagement.com/2006/12/seven_traits_of_successful_pro.html

These are great resources, and they form a really comprehensive set of skills and traits that will help a product manager succeed. However, if I were to really narrow down 3 things that matter the most from my own personal experience, I would list the following:

- Flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing situations and inputs: As we have noted, product management is so important because it drives the company’s evolution. Product managers have to espouse constant improvement with remarkable flexibility. They also need to be ready to accept new circumstances and embrace them, turning adversities into opportunities.

- Passion to build something great: because “product” is in their title. Without the passion to create something new that is valuable, product managers will not find satisfaction in their work, and will not be successful.

- People skills to facilitate, negotiate and persuade stakeholders: Product managers sit in the unique nexus of sales, marketing, development and corporate strategy. They have to be effective at building consensus, bringing divergent ideas together, and be persuasive enough to convince disparate groups of stakeholders to agree to their product vision.

While technical skills and methodologies can be learned over time, these are three characteristics that are non-technical, non-domain specific, and yet are the most important in the success of a product manager. Do you agree?

Tien Anh Nguyen is a Senior Associate at OpenView Venture Partners and leads the Research and Analytics team at OpenView Labs. He focuses on market and product strategy engagements in areas such as target segmentation, marketing operations management and Go to Market strategy development with portfolio companies and investment prospects.

By Cindy F. Solomon

Glen Lipka is the Vice President of User Experience at Marketo where he was the first non-founder employee that ran product management and UX for several years of the company’s development. Prior to Marketo, Glen was a Senior UI Designer at Intuit, Director of User Experience at Adchemy and started his career running a thirty-person web development company in NYC during the Internet bubble. Glen has been a pioneer in websites and web applications for over 15 years, pushing the envelope in interactivity on public facing websites to Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for businesses.  He speaks frequently on all aspects of building great products on the web, including NYU Stern School of Business and Stanford University.

Lipka kicked-off his talk acknowledging that most companies do not have a strong UX department and most products do not have a pleasant user experience.  His definition of user experience, which he repeated several times during the presentation is; “User experience, specifically “design” is just a decision.”  He suggested that who makes the decisions is not necessarily a specific designer, but rather an accumulation of all the decisions that got made by everyone in the company.

There is decision in any design process and who is making these decisions really matters, it might be engineering people, an end-user, a manager or a researcher, etc. but at the end of the day, according to Lipka, the designer is the one who writes the PRD (Product Document Requirements). The UX designer and the Product Manager roles might overlap. At Marketo, UX sits in the middle of engineering in order to iterate with a lot of people.  Design doesn’t stop when the product is handed off to engineering, rather it continues until the product ships.  PMs should be a dedicated position that works actively with marketing to provide comprehensive MRDs (Marketing Requirement Documents) that include the competitive landscape, packaging, go to market strategy and research. Lipka suggested that an ideal structure of the team is flat so that everyone is working as peers together to collaborate with specific responsibilities. The Product Manager must determine “What is the real problem we are trying to solve.”

Key Takeaways from Lipka’s visual presentation:

Get a direct interaction with users, learn from them, (e.g. make up-front calls), understand their problems, what they are trying to achieve, why they didn’t choose your product, etc. but don’t let them define the actual requirements, people are terrible about their own perception… If you ask customers, they will tell you answers to your questions – but they don’t know why they operate in certain ways.  It’s better to observe customers in their natural habitats to see what they do. Let users teach you their job and show you how they use the product in their own world.

Accept the fact that people don’t read – they skim at best. The fewer words in your instructions, the better.  Enable people to use the product and learn directly from hands on experience. Pay attention to important distinctions to remove frictions in the product that frustrate the user from using the product with ease.  Respect the “Halloween principle” where there is an irregular, but repeatable interruption by doorbell. Build in reinforcement of where users left off within the product so they can easily return without requiring additional effort.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” visual PRDs not only explain complex ideas or UI concepts, but also help to convey ergonomic features which are difficult to describe with words yet critical for the user experience (e.g. moving / manipulating objects on a page)

Remove blockers. Address the overall user experience, from product design to support and observe what happens in worse case scenarios when things go wrong and take that information in to the total experience. – i.e. The way to handle things that go wrong is more important than the way to handle things when they go right.Over-invest in support. The reality is that in order to make things better, they might have to get worse first.  Product Managers must be the leaders to enable this process, to have the vision for how much better it will be if the deconstruction process can proceed. 

Don’t bend users. Don’t make users bend to our ways of doing things.  There are only so many ways to do something, so give users the options to do it their own way and they will think it is customized to their specific work process.  He used the example of how Marketo changed a flowchart by analyzing a kinetic gesture to make using the product fun – instead of clicking and pointing, they changed it to grabbing and dropping, which was unique amongst competitive products within a business application.

Consistency is better. Don’t always optimize for what’s perfect.  Stay consistent so there is less to learn. He cited examples of scenarios where details were left out in order to ship in time and those details were the ones people loved. Because users don’t have the same perspective as the designers, small improvements are often perceived as better than one big one in their direct experience – they have no idea how much work is required to produce either improvement and they don’t care.

Everyone responds to fun – build fun stuff into your B2B product, user experience and content messaging. Corporate people are desperate to be treated like human beings and if it’s an authentic voice, they will respond to it.  How much more will they use a product that enables their required work to be accomplished in a more enjoyable way?

Cindy F. Solomon is Founder of the Global Product Management Talk on Twitter, host of Tools of the Trade and Product Camp Radio, and creator of the ProdMgmtTalk mobile application. You are welcomed to join the weekly #prodmgmttalk http://www.prodmgmttalk.com

by Greg Geracie

Ask virtually any person inside your organization what the value of product management is and you’re likely to get a series of different answers or even quizzical looks. This is ironic, because product management is critical to company success. Although no one inside theorganization wants to eliminate product management, few people can succinctly describe its value to the organization.

This begs the question, why is it so difficult for people to understand and communicate product management’s value?

The main contributor to this confusion can be traced to the lack of a body of knowledge to lay the cornerstone of the profession. Without industry-wide clarity on the profession’s core language, process groups, and knowledge areas, it’s easy to understand why product managers and extended team members struggle to describe product management’score value proposition.

Another part of the problem is the way the product management profession chooses to illustrate the value of the function. The traditional — and commonly accepted — view of product management typically places the product management function at the center of a daisy wheel, the hub. Radiating from the hub is a series of circles. Each circle represents a different function — sales, marketing, and operations to name few. The product management hub is connected to the spokes by a series of double-sided arrows. These arrows represent two-way communication between product management and the other company functions.

The hub and spoke model highlights two distinct but interconnected aspects of product management. The first is product management’s primary function to ensure appropriate levels of communication between the various functional spokes, illustrated by the arrows in the diagram. The second aspect highlighted by this model is product management’s active work coordinating all of a company’s various functions in pursuit of their product objectives. This is illustrated by the neat arrangement of the surrounding circles.

The implied value proposition of this model is its emphasis on product management’s role in ensuring functional alignment and effective communication in pursuit of a company’s product goals. No one would argue that functional alignment and coordinated communication is important to the success of a product management organization, but this model only marginally touches on product management’s true value to the organization.

The true value of product management — and what makes it so critical to company success — is the function’s unique focus on creating and sustaining value throughout the entire product life cycle. This role in the organization clearly differentiates product management from all other functions. For instance, project managers focus on successfully managing projects to completion across one or more stages of a product’s evolution throughout the life cycle. Business analysts are actively engaged in the upfront analysis of business problems, requirements gathering, and documentation. Only the product management organization is responsible for optimizing product performance throughout the entire life cycle of a product — from conception to retirement.

Perhaps a better way to think about product management and its critical role in ensuring organizational success is to envision three pillars. These three pillars make up the entirety of the organization. The first pillar is Operations. The operational pillar encompasses the executive leadership team, shared services such as finance and human resources, and the remaining staff who spend most their time ensuring that the organization runs smoothly. This operational group generally makes up the smallest percentage of the organization’s total head count.

The second pillar is the Value Creation Team. This pillar includes all the individuals in the organization who contribute to creating and sustaining value. This is achieved by producing new products, enhancing existing ones, or simply supporting the value that has already been created.

Depending on the size of the organization, a value creation team will be led by one or more product managers that are held accountable for achieving the company’s product objectives. Although product managers are responsible for achievingresults, no product manager can do it alone. Effective product managers work closely with cross-functional product team members from across theorganization. These include project managers, business analysts, engineers, quality assurance staff, research and development personnel, and customer support workers. The Value Creation Team pillar usually makes up the largest percentage of employees on a head-count basis.

The third pillar is the Revenue Capture Team. This team includes most of the marketing organization that supports the activities of the sales organization. These activities include lead generation, collateral development, and outbound marketing programs. The Revenue Capture Team also includes the entire the sales organization, whose mission is to contractually capture the revenue that results from the value of the products.

When viewed from the perspective of the three pillars, product management’s value becomes clear. The product management organization acts as the focal point for value creating and sustaining activities.

Communication and alignment are important to product management’s success, but they’re secondary to product management’s real mission — creating and sustaining value throughout the entire product life
cycle. This role fully differentiates product management from all the other business functions and demonstrates why product management is so critical to company success.

Greg is the President of Actuation Consulting, a world-class provider of product management training courses and advisory services to some of the nation’s most well-known organizations. He is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management and the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge.

by Nate Zou

Mike Harding is an entrepreneur; mixing business and technology to solve hard problems. Over his 25-year career, Harding has founded seven startups and has had four successful exits. Two of these were dismal failures, for which Mike bears complete responsibility. He indicates that these failures represent at their worst “the most expensive business school in the world” and at their best “the most valuable learning experience about business, technology, and self.” The remaining startup is still active, re.vu (pronounced review) – it is the cure for the common resume.

In between startups, Mike held executive leadership positions with Sun Microsystems, SAP, Charles Schwab & Co, and the US Department of Defense. His day job is leading the team that designs the products and programs to create a thriving software developer community for Juniper Networks.

Mike is an autodidact. His education consists of varied work experience, supplemented by reading (over 7,000 books), professional training (in his various roles), and a short (unsatisfactory) stint at a public university.

Mike’s presentation gave examples of past failed products with the common technics used to build them. And when almost everyone in the room felt the desperation, he showed us the new ways and examples of building successful products. He ended the presentation by sharing his multiple “night job” product build experiences. His rich content so totally engaged attendees that the meeting time just flew by.

With couple of failed products, Mike started his presentation by looking back with us of those horrible products people made before (including the famous color.com). To answer why these products failed, Mike discussed about the traditional tools, processes and assumptions we use when we build a product. For process, we always follow the collecting marketing requirement->product definition->product development->ship process. Then we talked to customers to collect customer feedback, did market research to make market size assumptions, and ran benchmark testing. And at the end, no matter how hard people try, we still build lots of products that failed.

So what should we do or what can we do to build a successful product? Mike shows us new ways to build a successful product, again, with examples of the best products on the market.

The methods are simple: 1. Image the best product in your mind, 2. Design as a product 3. Consider Self as a customer

Above methods are not that complicated, but few people can do it right. Mike tells us the key point is if you can think in a different perspective. A good example is: when most companies (like JetBlue) are focusing on developing a product/service to improve people’s travel experience, some companies are fixing the problem in a different perspective. They build conference software to help customers have business meeting online and avoid their travel. So instead of investing countless time and efforts into make the existing product/service a little bit better, people are trying to solve things in a different way. They do not try to improve current flying experience of customers but avoid traveling by achieving their goals within their office.

To show us how to design as a product, Mike also offered a good example, a hotel called Ace. The hotel owner designs their hotel rooms in all different styles. The Ace hotel’s customers are people who love traveling and want to experience different life style. So the hotel owner put lots of effort into designing their hotel. Every room has its unique design to offer their customers the best experience. Owners also keep updating the decor to make their hotel rooms to be fresh.  Ace hotel got huge success by their amazing room design and is beloved by their customers

And at the very end, Mike shared his own story of his “side project” to demonstrate the “self as a customer project”. Self as a customer means sometimes you have some problem need to be solved in your own life and you may not be able to find a good product or service to help you solve it. Therefore, in order to fix it, you have no choice but to build something by yourself. Then triggered by this idea, the service/product is promoted to millions of people who face the same problem in their daily life and had a great success. Mike’s side project is exactly a “self as a customer project” example. When Mike tried to update his resume, he found all existing resume templates are plain. So he asked his friend to make his resume with some visual effects. By doing this together, his friends and he found it might be a good idea to turn this project into a product/online service for everyone. Therefore, people who have the same requirement can solve the problem with the service. And now we have this http://re.vu/and we all love it.

Chen Zou is a product manager at Foxit Corporation. In his previous roles, he has led product management for SaaS and Mobile Software Products. His interest areas include mobile applications & SaaS products and services.

by Dan Galatin

Anthony Yung, Group Manager of Product Management at Intel, presented at the November 2^nd meeting of the SVPMA.  Mr. Yung discussed the history of mobile computing, major milestones over the years, and some of the lessons learned from notable product successes and failures.  Although he focused his analysis on mobile computing, many of the themes he introduced naturally apply to other quickly-evolving sectors as well.

Mr. Yung demonstrated the usefulness of taking a “big history” approach in understanding the development of mobile computing over the decades.  In this approach, one identifies major thresholds that represent discrete, crucial advances in the field.  Over the long term, these include advances such as the first HP pocket calculator, the first portable computer from Osborne, and the first PDA from Palm, as well as more recent products such as the iPhone and iPad.

When television was first introduced, experiencing it as a family in the living room was similar in many ways to listening to the radio, albeit with a visual component.  Likewise, not all new classes of mobile computing devices delivered a radically different experience from what had come before.  For example, using the Osborne was fundamentally the same experience as using a desktop PC.  Talking on the first Motorola cell phone in the early 1980s was the much the same as using a land line.  These are examples of mobile devices that delivered the same basic experience as their non-mobile analogues; with additional compromises to boot (e.g. small screen size and limited talk time, respectively).

There are several approaches that Mr. Yung argued could be used to deliver a better experience for customers.  These include mitigating or eliminating compromises; borrowing functionality from other classes of devices (such as video from TV or GPS from portal navigation devices); adding brand-new functionality (e.g. wireless connectivity in portal computers); and evolving or revolutionizing existing classes of devices in order to take them in a new direction.

Mr. Yung then presented a couple of case studies of mobile computing devices: the Apple Newton and the original iPhone.  He led a discussion in which the devices were analyzed across the dimensions of baseline experience; compromises that are mitigated or eliminated; functionality added from other types of devices; new functionality; and platform evolution.  It was interesting to observe that the original iPhone ad featured an incoming phone call at the end of the spot, almost as an afterthought; the baseline functionality was a given, and more emphasis was placed on the evolution from the iPod.  Finally, Mr. Yung demonstrated how to use this framework to consider possibilities for future mobile computing devices by presenting videos of types of devices that are not yet on the market.

In summary, Mr. Yung reiterated that mobile devices are based on a previous baseline experience, with necessary compromises.  Ultimately, the success of mobile devices depends on delivering a better, broader experience than what came before, as well as timing the market correctly.

Dan Galatin has 19 years combined experience in product management and software engineering.  He is currently a Senior Product Manager at Keynote Systems and can be contacted at dgalatin@yahoo.com.