Many readers had specific questions and needed advice on how to address specific aspects of product management. At the time, there were few resources for them to turn to, so I ended up fielding a lot of questions and responding directly via email. Soon, I realized this wasn’t efficient for me nor readers. The questions were probably ones which many product managers (or those interested in product management) had as well. And, selfishly, I was spending a lot of my time responding to questions, so I wanted to still get those questions answered but not have it take up as much of my time.

Ask A Good Product Manager solved those problems — readers got their questions answered; those answers were shared with the world; and I was able to recruit a fantastic group of product management experts to provide their input as well.

Of course, times have changed. With new — and, quite frankly, better and more efficient — ways of getting questions addressed like LinkedIn Answers and Quora, the need for a service like Ask A Good Product Manager has diminished. Plus, there are so many other books, blogs, and resources for product managers to turn to to get information and get their questions answered. There will always be a need for Q&A for product management, and I’m pleased to see that there are so many great options available.

So, just as good product managers should evaluate their products with respect to the overall product lifecycle, I’ve been evaluating Ask A Good Product Manager as a “product” and have decided to put it on hiatus. What does that mean?

• There will be no new posts on Ask A Good Product Manager.
• All of the existing blog posts will remain on the site unchanged. They still serve as valuable references for tens of thousands of visitors and continue to generate comments discussion. Hopefully they will continue to be useful for a long time to come. They will still be licensed under a Creative Commons license, meaning you’re free to republish or create derivative works at no cost with just a few tiny conditions.

If you’re wondering where to go to get your product management questions answered, there are a number of sources:

• Personally, I’ve been spending more time on Quora lately (you can see my answers and follow me) and they are starting to build up a good collection of product management questions. It’s also a great way to get input from some top-notch product leaders in many different industries.
• LinkedIn Answers is another platform for asking a question and getting good responses.
• Twitter is becoming a good vehicle for product management discussion — the #prodmgmt hashtag is the source for all things product management.
• The product management community tends to be incredibly open and collaborative, with many authors and bloggers (including those who’ve responded to questions here) very willing to provide help and advice. Reach out to people directly if you have questions think they may be able to assist.

This also coincides with some other changes going on for me. I’ll be changing my approach to my “main” blog, How To Be A Good Product Manager, and have also recently joined SiriusDecisions, a research and advisory firm focused on helping business-to-business companies improve their sales and marketing effectiveness. I’m humbled to be part of a tremendously talented and experienced team which is doing some fantastic work in aligning sales and marketing functions across various industries. One area they focus on is Product Marketing and Management, and I am now part of a team which works with companies to improve how they develop, manage, and market products and services and improve their product management effectiveness. So, if you’re a b-to-b company looking to get questions about product management answered — plus data-driven research into best practices, webcasts, in-person forums and workshops, e-learning, and other advisory services — we can help.

So while you won’t see any new content posted here, you can keep up with all things product management via How To Be A Good Product Manager, read posts from me and my colleagues on the SiriusDecisions blog, and follow me on Twitter (@jefflash) as well as the aforementioned Quora.

To everyone who has asked questions, answered questions, contributed comments, and visited over the years — thank you for making this a great resource for product management, and looking forward to continuing to interacting as part of the global product management community.

Answer from Michael Hopkin of Lead on Purpose: You will be better served by a degree in Product Design

First of all, congratulations for your decision to get a college degree! No matter what you choose for your major, a college degree is absolutely critical to getting a job in product management. Every job opening I’ve seen in the last five years states “bachelor’s degree required, MBA preferred.” Regardless of what you end up choosing, stick with it and get your degree.

Until recently no university offered a specific degree in Product Management (and even today those programs are few in number). Nearly every current product manager has a degree in some field other than product management. What’s more interesting is the wide variety of degrees — and work experience — which lead to product management careers. However, product managers with technical skills have often proven more valuable to their companies. Though very different in focus, both Economics and Product Design will provide valuable technical credentials.

Knowing the market your product competes in is an absolutely crucial skill for a product manager. A degree in Economics gives you a solid business base and experience that will help you discover key market information. Economics focuses on the big picture and will be useful in building a strong business base as a product manager.

A degree in Product Design (or user experience design) is a solid choice. Whether you immediately pursue product management or you work as a designer, this degree is in high demand and the skills it engenders are widely beneficial in many jobs. With a degree in design you will have a keener eye for product enhancements and specific improvements that will delight your customers.

Back in my college days I got a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and an MS in Information Systems. I fell in love with computers and software during my accounting program and knew that was my destiny before I graduated. I took some programing classes and worked as a software engineer (Java and C++) for five years to establish my technical base. From there I jumped into product management and have never looked back. The only accounting I’ve ever done is my own taxes, and I even outsourced that about five years ago when it got too complicated to be worth my time.

When all is said and done, the focus of your degree is less important than your personality and drive to get things done. It really comes down to doing what you love and giving it your all. The demand for skilled designers is very high now and projected to be strong well into the future. So, in my opinion (though interesting but irrelevant), the technical aspects and the focus on quality experience make a degree in Product Design more valuable than a degree in Economics. Product Design will give you a technical base and background, and perhaps a few years later you can go back for your MBA. You will be well served with this educational background; and, if you don’t get wooed by the money and demand for designers, you’ll be well prepared to jump into product management.

Good luck in your pursuits!

Answer from Nick Coster of brainmates: A Good Executive Management Team.

Without a good executive management team, you may or may not have a good product. If you have a good product, it will only be for the short term. For long term success the entire business needs to be aligned.

A product is the good or service that customers pay money or exchange value for. A good product generates sustaining revenue for a business. It is possible that a single Product Team can develop and deliver a good product to the market place but it requires the support of the entire organisation to make it an ongoing success.

A successful product is the result of an organisational team effort that has

1. identified and understood an unmet need in the market place,
2. developed a product and/or service that will satisfy that need,
3. created a compelling competitive difference and reason to buy the product,
4. communicated to the target market how the product addresses the need better than competing alternatives,
5. provided an effective way for customers to obtain and pay for the product,
6. developed a stable and scalable way to deliver and support the product for as long as it is in the market.

All of these things require significant effort and if not considered will result in gaps in the customers experience that will potentially damage any otherwise positive experience that the customer may have with the product.

Imagine a professional sports team where there are just one or two star players in the team. These star players may be so good that in spite of the ordinary team members, the team actually wins some games. Unfortunately this is hard or impossible to sustain for a whole season, and the team will may not long term success.

Long term success comes from a top down and bottom up unity of vision that focuses on delivering solutions to the market that address problems worth solving.

For Product Management one of the key challenges is to juggle and balance the competing internal demands of the different stakeholders. An awesome product manager may be able to deliver a great product to market, but for the product to be a success the rest of the business also needs to sell it, market it and support it. If the company is not working together such that this is happening well then failure will only be a matter of time.

Reflecting on the recent passing of Steve Jobs and his effect at Apple we can see the trajectory of a company that was delivering great successful products. Then the executive management started to fragment, ultimately resulting in the departure of Jobs. During this period the executive team lost it’s vision and while there were still some great products they failed to support the long term growth of the business. When Steve Jobs returned he was able to rally the company and create a collective vision again that as we know has resulted in the current success at Apple. While this may sound like the story of a single individual, it is not. It is the story of a shared vision for delivering better outcomes to customers and the market at large.

Organisational success is a result of product success but product success is the result of organisational focus. Organisational focus can only be effectively driven from the top down, otherwise all actions feel like a running battle towards an uncertain goal.

I am a new product manager working on developing a new product. One thing that I am struggling with as a product manager is how to get out there and set up time with potential buyers / users who would fit within my product demographic. Since I don’t have an existing product, I can’t interview current customers, since there aren’t any. I am trying to find ways of being able to reach out to the target market segment without coming across as too “salesy” and in a manner that is approachable and efficient.

I know that understanding the market first-hand is an important part of being a product manager, but I’m not sure of exactly the right approach. What are some methods I can use to identify potential customers and users?

Answer from Jeff Lash of How To Be A Good Product Manager: Congrats on the new role, and on focusing on the most important (yet too-often) ignored part of product management — understanding the market and potential user/customer needs.

It is easy to get hung up on the logistics of customer interviews (and I use “customer” broadly, to refer to any current customers, competitors’ customers, or non-customers in the target market), and it is a shame that many product managers use challenges setting up customer interviews as an excuse for not conducting enough market research. Yes, there are challenges, but the reward is well worth it.

There are a few general rules when reaching out to set up interviews, regardless of the method you use:

• A “warm” lead is always better than a cold call. You are more likely to get a request if you have some sort of connection to the person you are trying to reach, even if it’s fairly loose (“My cousin’s landlord’s girlfriend suggested I get in touch with you…”)
• Use courtesy and respect when contacting people — don’t bombard with requests over and over, and don’t be pushy. Pretend that you are on the other end of the phone / voicemail / inbox — how would you want someone “recruiting” you?
• Follow the rules / conditions of the services you utilize, and when in doubt, use courtesy and respect. Sure, a web site may have a list of individuals with their contact information, though emailing them en masse may violate the site’s Terms and Conditions (you know, that little link in the footer that no one reads). Remember the golden rule — how would you feel if you were on the receiving end?
• Offer something in return — it may be a cash or a gift card, it may be free services or discounts on your products, or it may just be your heartfelt thanks. State the incentive up front, so there’s no confusion or incorrect assumptions.
• Make it clear that you are not in sales and you are not trying to sell them anything.
• Make them feel important (because they are!) — emphasize that you are trying to understand their problems and help design products that will solve those problems, and they can help you along in that mission.

Now, as far as where to look to find people to interview, here are a few suggestions:

• Contact existing customers. While your product is not yet in the market, if your company offers other products targeted at the same buyer/user, starting with current customers is a great first step. You may be able to “advertise” within your existing products (maybe on the web site or within the user interface, or via a newsletter to customers) to recruit volunteers that way — the benefit is that you start to build up a panel of interested participants for future activities, rather than starting from scratch every time.
• Use LinkedIn, Facebook, Meetup, or other social networking sites to identify groups of these types of customers. The explosion in social networking has made it easy to find groups of people with similar job roles, in similar markets/industries, and with similar tastes and preferences and interests. Many of these groups are open to all and allow group members to contact other group members directly.
• Use your personal connections to find people fitting your target buyer/user. Your personal (and professional) contacts may easily be able to put you in touch directly with their contacts who fit your profile. A simple email request with some details about whom you are looking to find — e.g. anyone with experience in middle school science education; people in payroll functions in companies with between 500-1500 employees; recreational kayakers — may yield a lot of responses, and as I wrote above contacts through connections are much more likely to respond and be willing to spend time with you. Make sure to look beyond your usual circle — in addition to close friends and (current and former) colleagues, utilize your family, neighbors, members of your church or temple, hairdresser, dog walker, random high school classmates you reconnected with on Facebook, etc.
• Look for local associations of professionals, if you have a specific B-to-B market. Most professions have membership organizations (e.g. The American Accounting Organization), and most of them have local chapters (e.g. Society of Human Resource Managers – Atlanta), so if you are targeting a specific job function, those can be great resources. If you are targeting a specific industry, there are often local organizations or chapters focused on these specific verticals (e.g. New Jersey Chapter of the Healthcare Information Management System Society). These organizations may be able to provide access to their members, and you get the extra benefit of potentially being able to conduct in-person interviews with minimal travel expenses.
• Leverage college alumni databases and college programs. Most universities have online alumni databases where alumni can search by employer, job title, degree, and other relevant criteria. These can be great for pinpointing specific types of people, and mentioning your alumni status in your introductory email/call hopefully will make them more likely to respond. If others on your product development team went to different colleges, have them utilize their alumni directories also and help contact potential interviewees. Also, if you are trying to find people in a specific field (people working Arts Administration, for example) then contacting college programs (in this case, any school with an Art History degree) may provide some good leads to alumni or friends of the school.
• Post an ad on Craigslist or other similar local or classified sites. This may not be the most effective method — you may either get no responses at all, or lots of responses from people who do not fit your target persona. However, if you are clear about what criteria you are looking for, or if you are serving a broader market and have less stringent criteria, this may be an option worth trying. Ultimately, the only thing it costs you to try is the time to post and sift through the responses.
• Look for people fitting your target personas on Twitter, blogs, and other publicly-accessible social media. With the explosion of blogging and Twitter (and, to a much lesser extent, other similar micro-blogging sites), it may be very easy to find people who meet your criteria through some simple online searching. People active in social media are probably more likely to respond (quickly!) to any requests, and may be more willing to spend time with you, given that they are actively involved and engaged in activities outside of their “main job.” However, they may not be representative users (for example, you may be able to find 70-year-old sailing enthusiasts on Twitter, though they may be totally unlike the rest of the 70-year-old sailing enthusiasts who rarely use computers), so make sure to have appropriate screening criteria in place.
• Pay for a recruiting company to identify candidates and arrange interviews for you. There are plenty of market research firms who have large databases of people meeting all sorts of criteria. They can do a lot of the work for you — help identify screening criteria, contact individuals, schedule sessions, even conduct them for you if you want. However, these services cost money, sometimes up to hundreds of dollars per interview, usually based on how specific the criteria you are looking to meet. If you’re asking how to arrange interviews yourself, you likely do not have a huge budget, and over the long term it is probably less expensive and more efficient to build-up an in-house database.

Now, that all being said, I would love for readers to offer any additional ideas, advice, and suggestions on ways to effectively recruit for user and buyer interviews.

I’m a product manager in a services organization. As a “product manager,” should I be responsible for just the elements which go into the “product” which we’re selling, or do I need to worry about all of the other pieces which are part of the customer experience?

Answer from Derek Britton, Independent Product Management consultant: If a restaurant were to open, with no expense spared, with a lavish gala and a visit from the Mayor, with free cocktails greeting the hundreds of guests, hand-picked because of their influence, you’d think “great planning.” If they then didn’t have any chefs working that night, you’d think, “Oh dear, bad planning”.

And yet how many high tech organizations today see their “product” as merely the technology they are selling?

If you were to ask any of the customers, you’d expect them to describe their view of the “product” they are investing in as a combination of the technology, the services that go with it, the after-care hot-desk, the ongoing service to provide updates or fixes, the regular news and information from the vendor’s newsletters, regular visits from the vendor account team, and all points in between. Just the technology piece, while it is by one measure (fees) vital, is really nothing without the rest of it, which brings it to life and makes it work for that customer — wahich means they will come back.

So, as product managers, do we spend anywhere near the right amount of time thinking about and planning for improving the way the “other stuff” is provided to our clients? For example, for each of your products, do you KNOW what the value-add services should and could be provided by your services people or 3rd party partners? Do you know what’s mandatory in service terms to make that product “work” onsite? Do you know what else will then “up-sell” service opportunities and how to go and spot that in a post-implementation customer-care situation? Do you know what tangible customer product usage conditions would prompt your account managers or service leaders to instigate a new service initiative to tackle a particular pre-identified customer challenge and promote a new set of service offerings? Do your customer support people ask any questions about the product usage environment and “new projects” underway? Does your account team include the delivery services people or are they merely brought in to “deliver the service” and nothing more? Is your services delivery team carrying any incentive at all to spot up-sell oppourtunity of either product or service?

Typically, no one has satisfactory answers to these questions even though most of them are just common sense practices and relatively easy to implement.

However, most organizations will struggle with handling this internal business process of managing the knowledge of the customer across sales, support and then service delivery. And who is going to get a bad rap? The product manager, of course, simply because, as the CEO of their product, they ought to care about this business process, because that’s how THEIR CUSTOMER will see it. It is the customer who needs to be successful, and therefore the functions that do certain tasks based on a certain order of things, is not a sufficient reason to overlook basic business process.

If you care about the customer, put their view of working with your solution first and put what they might need as a key objective — and determine this in terms of the services you can offer. And then don’t let your structure or hierarchy stop you delivering on it.

Technology companies I have seen in action would sell the “product” including some nominal service, and then (if you were lucky) let the customer “opt” to take further services. What must the customer have felt of the vendor’s confidence in their own services? And who knows what else might have got left on the table if no one was really trying.

A go-to-market program should include all the relevant elements to make your product successful, and that must include a clear value matrix for the value-add services, which themselves must be clearly described and defined effectively as their own product.

Ensure you can describe each of the services you can provide in terms your client can understand. Ensure you robustly define rationale, pricing, target attach-rate (service-per-product ratios) and ensure you can set targets your delivery teams and revenue owners buy into. If you fail to define the breadth of total service you aspire to provide, you will surely fail to provide it.

Even if your service revenues (or margins) are low, setting no objective will reduce them further. Define what your overall solution includes, and ensure each piece can be defined in its own right and as part of the whole.

Answer from Mara Krieps of Pivotal Product Management: This is a great question, and solving this problem will give you an excellent opportunity to demonstrate strategic planning and cross-team leadership.

Here’s how to start:

Before you can convince executives to invest in delivering on your product requirements, you have to have the bigger picture clearly in mind, find the common opportunities, and present a business case that shows how the company will benefit.

• First, get the bigger picture clearly in mind. Do your homework to understand the current strategy at the company level, as well as at the product portfolio level. You will need to tie your own product strategy to these higher-level strategies in order to convince executives to follow your recommendations. It may take some digging, so work with your manager and fellow product managers to identify and map out the strategy at each level.
• Find the common opportunities across the product portfolio. Know what your product line has in common with the company’s other products, in terms of target customer segments, highest-priority customer requirements, greatest competitive threats and most compelling product development opportunities. Where are the common needs and opportunities between your product line and others in the portfolio? Your challenge is to convince executives and other managers “what’s in it for them” by showing the common opportunities and why they are important.
• Develop a business case that shows why the company should invest in your ideas. If you’ve identified opportunities that benefit not only your product line but others as well, most likely your business case will show greater opportunity than investment in any one product. Collaborating on a business case with other product managers also can create a “win-win” situation for multiple products, and shows your ability to lead a cross-functional effort, which is good for your longer-term career growth.

Good luck in your product planning!

If you have the title of product manager, but all you do is launch new products, does that make you in fact a product developer / project manager, rather than a product manager? After all, many of the same skills are required for product management and product development — e.g. understanding user requirements / needs.

Answer from Adrienne Tan of brainmates: Your question touches the very heart of Product Management. Before answering your question, we should put some loose definition around Product Management.

Very often Product Management tends to fulfill tactical roles in organisations. But the role of Product Management is twofold; it is both strategic and tactical, long term and short term.

Product Management is responsible for identifying long term customer value and deliver ongoing financial results to the business.

To achieve these objectives, Product Management has to:

• Understand customer problems,
• Uncover Market Insights (competitors, industry trends, economic climate)
• Determine the market potential of new ideas
• Prepare Business Cases
• Define (Market and Product) Requirements
• Price new products
• Plan product launches

Depending on the size of the organisation, not all tasks may fall under 1 role but may be split across various people within the Product Management team. The larger the organisation, the larger the Product Management team and the more varied the roles within the team.

The person responsible for launch activities may be called a Product Manager or a Product Marketer or sometimes a Product Planner.

To answer your question more directly, those responsible in the Product Management team for product launches are sometimes called Product Managers. However, it’s important to remember that there should be a team of people responsible for product launches. There are Project Managers, Product Developers, and — yes –Product Managers as well.

Each role (should) coexists well together and is accountable for different components of the product launch:

• The Project Manager focuses on launching on time and within the project budget.
• The Product Manager focuses on articulating customer value and making sounds business decisions that impact the product’s finances.
• The Product Developer focuses on delivering a functioning product with the required features.

Launching a new product from idea to market delivery is a complex process. But perhaps the key ingredient to any product launch is the ‘upfront’ work around customer and market definition.

And, if all three roles consider the customer and appreciate their needs, then the product’s success in the market is greatly enhanced.

I recently joined an organization that develops software for life sciences, a highly regulated industry. As a vendor in this vertical, we are constantly audited by clients for our quality practices in software development. We are about to launch a new product line and the question of Product Requirement Documents have come into play. Our Quality Management team has asked my team to continue carrying requirements from older product releases into the PRD for the next product release version. My software product management career has typically involved writing “delta” PRDs – the net-new features that are going into the product, rather than one large document that covers 100% of the new product’s functionality. This is the case where the PRD serves as an internal communication tool with Engineering and Marketing but also an outward facing document that may get audited by multiple clients. Has anyone worked with writing requirements that carry 100% of the functionality forward with each new software release PRD?

Answer from Tom Leung of Always Be Shipping: Yikes, that’s not the most sexy assignment I’ve ever heard so accept my condolences. That said, it’s clearly an important requirement given your industry and low tolerance for product error. Here are some suggestions as you embark on this old-school, document heavy approach.

1. If you’re new to the life science software world, make sure you grock why they need so much detail. Ask “why?” a few times to really nail the underlying need. Talk directly to some of those outside clients who might audit this doc. This may result in you doing a delta PRD and just referencing the previous PRD or you may learn that the PRD is used in a way that really does require a new tome on the product as if the audience knows nothing. Alternatively, maybe you can come up with a more clever approach based on the real needs of the PRD’s audience. In a lot of ways, the PRD is a product in and of itself and not immune from the need for customer empathy.
2. At the risk of stating the obvious, you’ll probably want to look at previous PRDs to see how others at your company have approached it. Often times, new PMs to a company are fearful of asking basic questions and appearing incompetent, but that’s just pride messing with them. If the current format meets the needs from tip #1, then you may not need to re-invent the wheel.
3. One thing that people often overlook when launching highly complex projects is the power of pictures, especially if you need to educate external audiences. While you’ll need to satisfy whatever expectations there are, make sure you go heavy on visuals, mock-ups, diagrams, etc. It’s much easier to “click through” a series of wired mock-ups or screen shots than reading a bunch of words, lists, or tables describing those images.
4. Since you mentioned quality a few times, make sure you have a thoughtful description of QA practices, minimum quality requirements, etc. You will at least want to get input from your QA team or ask them to write it themselves. It may very well be that this is the section everyone really wants covered versus the complete feature audit. I’d probably also include some discussion of top quality risks and mitigation methods and owners.
5. If you have to document every feature anyway, take this as an opportunity to do some pruning. Chances are, some features are rarely used, don’t work, or no longer relevant. If you are carrying over ever single feature in your new release (unless backwards compatibility is a requirement), lifetime feature support is probably a recipe for some serious bloatware after a few versions. Given the sensitivities of your audience, probably worth calling out killed features very clearly and up front in the doc.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

I’ve been hired by a software company to be their first Product Manager. There is no product manager today, and each part of the job is done either by engineers, sales, marketing, QA, etc.

What would be the first steps to establish the product manager role within the company and bring value while learning products and context?

Answer from Mara Krieps of Pivotal Product Management: Congratulations on being selected to launch the product manager role in a company! This is one of the most challenging (and sometimes risky) assignments a product manager can have, and yet it can be one of the most rewarding. Here are my recommendations for what to do during your first weeks in the role:

1. Get a clear picture of the stakeholder landscape. Meet one-on-one with all known and potential stakeholders. Your goal is to answer these questions:
   1. Who understands the role of a product manager?
   2. Who currently holds some or all product manager responsibilities?
   3. Who is in favor of this change, and who is not? (Who sees this change as a gain vs. loss for themselves or their department?)

   Based on the responses you receive, it can be helpful to draw a “map” of the stakeholder landscape and identify your likely challenges and relationship-building opportunities.

2. Identify and prioritize the current issues around the product development process. Consider facilitating an Innovation Game like “Speedboat” with your stakeholders to identify the key issues in a non-threatening way. Include your own expected challenges in this exercise. They will include migration of product management tasks from the current owners, and getting the organization to agree to move from an ad hoc process to a predictable processes.
3. Develop a plan for the processes and tools you’ll use to get the job done.
   • Ask the team to show you the documents, models and templates they are using now
   • If your own toolbox is lacking any templates, come and get what you need from ours: www.pivotalpm.com/learn

Also, you’ve correctly identified ramp-up as an underlying task. Do get up to speed on the product, customer and market as quickly as possible. As you know, your credibility ultimately will rely on your domain expertise.

Good luck in your new role!

I am a Project Manager by trade, but have recently got a new job as a Product Manager, working on an existing product in a new company. I enjoyed working as a Project Manager, but one of the issues I had was it was quite a technical role, and I don’t really enjoy that, even though I am working on online products.

My new role had zero technical questions in the interview, but my question is this: How technical do you think a Product Manager should be?

Answer from Derek Morrison of All About Product Management: How technical do I think a product manager should be?

The day-to-day work of an online Product Manager can be quite varied depending on the company you work for — it can even vary considerably in different teams within the same company. The department (e.g. sales, engineering, marketing or product management/marketing) or to whom the Product Manager reports to will also have an influence on their day-to-day activities. So let’s start by looking at what Product Management is — then what Product Managers do — in order to help us answer the question “how technical do I think a product manager should be?”

What is Product Management?

In his book The Product Manager’s Desk Reference, Steven Haines states that “Product Management is the holistic business management of the product from the time it is conceived as an idea to the time it is discontinued and withdrawn from the market.”

Wikipedia gives a little more color to the definition by stating that “Product Management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning or forecasting or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.”

What does a Product Manager do?

Again Steven Haines writes that “the Product Manager is a person appointed to be a proactive product or product line ‘mini CEO’ or general manager.”

Marty Cagan of the SVPG gives a bit more detail when he says that “discovering a product that is valuable, usable and feasible … is the primary responsibility of the product manager, and that product discovery requires collaboration between product management, user experience design, and engineering/architects.”

We can deduce then that Product Management is a function that exists with in an organisation and caters to ALL aspects of the product from the cradle to the grave. The Product Manager is responsible for ensuring that all these aspects get done, that all departments and functions are kept in the loop and are updated. This is done best when the Product Manager effectively collaborates with stakeholders and successfully leads a cross functional team to envisage, develop, launch and maintain the product.

Taking this into account we could restate the question by asking “how technical do you have to be to effectively collaborate and successfully lead a cross functional team?”

The answer depends on two scenarios:

1. What type of products are you developing and managing, and who are your users?
2. What is the structure of your team: who defines the ‘WHAT’ and who defines the ‘HOW’?

1) What type of products are you developing & managing and who are your users?

If you are managing a technical product (e.g. developer tools, debugging tools) for a technical user base (e.g. software engineers, system analysts) then I would say that the Product Manager need to be technical enough to use every aspect of the product in the same way as the end user will in their daily jobs.

What is the structure of your team: who defines the ‘WHAT’ and who defines the ‘HOW’?

The Product Manager should be the voice of the customer in the Product Management process. S/he needs to be able to effectively connect the wants and needs of the customer (and user) and the business directly to the development team(s) without having the customer (and user) dictating what the product should be. Henry Ford said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” For Product Managers working with online products it’s important that they define products that will give the user a good user experience. This skill warrants a bias towards design and usability as opposed writing code or being deeply technical. Reading “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug would be a good starting point for anyone wanting to acquire design and usability skills.

That said you need to have a good appreciation and knowledge (not necessarily the ability to write code) of online technologies and how they can be used to provide a great user experience. For examples you should know what web technologies — such as Ajax, HTML5, RSS, Java script, CSS, SOA, APIs — are used for, and you should appreciate some of the benefits and trade offs. You should keep abreast of the latest technologies that are coming onto the market. (See my blog post “How do Product Managers Keep up with Technology.”) That said, there’s a fine balance between using new technologies just for the sake of it and using new technologies in order to solve problems and build competitive products and features that the end user will appreciate.

The Product Manager needs to lead the product discovery process: WHO the product is for (communicating this using personas and segmentation) and WHAT the product will do (using artifacts like use cases, user stories wire-frames). The developers and engineers, in conjunction with architects, are responsible for HOW the product will do it.

I started off by stating that the job of the Product Manager can be quite varied depending on what company, team and/or department you are in. However, one thing is pretty much consistent irrespective of your situation — you’ll need to work very closely with the development team(s). Therefore, the more you appreciate their world the easier you’ll find your job. Working as an online Product Manager necessitates that you understand web technologies and keep abreast of new technologies as they arises. The online Product Manager should know what the different technologies do, what are some of the benefits and trade offs and how they can be used to discover and create products and features that customers & users love and enjoy.

Having a strong technical background does not automatically mean you’ll be a successful Product Manager whilst not having a technical background does not automatically mean your be a failure (two extremes, I know). The key prerequisites for Product Managers are (a) having the ability to communicate with technical and non-technical people in order to drive the product through each stage of its life and (b) being willing to learn the appropriate technical and non-technical competencies in order to communicate with all types of stakeholders.

Finally, there could be many reasons why you where not asked technical questions at the job interview; please do not take this as a sign to ignore technology.

Suggested further reading: Pragmatic Marketing framework

Answer from Greg Cohen of 280 Group: Many things break down to the 80/20 rule. This question gets to heart of what is in that remaining 20% that will move a good product manager to great. A product manager must be an expert in many things, including the customer, the product, the market, the competition, the technology, and how engineering develops products. All of this, to use a poker analogy, is the ante. You have to master these areas.

But “what separates the best from the rest” are the soft skills. Most important are leadership and influence. The product manager must sell their vision up down and across the organization including the executive team, their product team, sales and marketing. Selling a vision is never easy; it demands persistence. To have persistence, you have to believe in your vision and this requires passion. Lastly, product managers are pulled in many directions. The great ones maintain focus on the activities that will make an impact on their products success.

To summarize, there are five soft skills that separate good product managers from great: Leadership, influence, persistence, passion, and focus.

Answer from Derek Britton, Independent Product Management consultant: I imagine that if you ask 10 people this question, you will get 10 completely different perspectives! Such a diverse array of opinions has already been voiced across the ‘net and in published texts, which tells us this:

1. it’s a great question!
2. the answer is quite involved, but is difficult to describe

First, I would agree with the hypothesis that a product manager should be CEO of the product — that’s exactly the behavioral trait they must show to be truly effective and to lead those around them to help the product truly excel.

We must also consider that some “CEO type” activities are beyond the remit of a PM, such as interactions with shareholders, establishing management policies, process, culture, etc. The point here is that to be “CEO” of anything (even if you are really a PM) means you have to assume responsibility for things and lead or influence others to do the right thing for your product. So, for example, as a PM, you want hiring managers to bring in those with the right skills to sell and support YOUR products, you want the sales leaders to focus on YOUR product, you want your marketing team to put the right spin on the collateral, you want your organization’s other product managers to share your vision of the future so you can work together (and not steal resources from one another), plus a million other challenges. By being “the CEO” you will see it as your role, your responsibility, and your opportunity to solve each of them and more — usually through effective leadership, influence and persuasion… and usually by enlisting others in a shared vision, since you won’t achieve it with merely hard work — it must be a team effort.

That’s where this question gets interesting — defining what a CEO “does”. Certainly if we think that all they do is make the big decisions, sort out the funding, hire the VPs, fire the wasters, help on the big deals, then we are missing the role of the CEO entirely. You will notice most of this is just operational day-to-day routine stuff. This isn’t the key bit, though of course it is important. The CEO sets the strategy, establishes and monitors the culture, builds a vision, challenges the process, and (usually) lines everyone up to squarely support “the customer.”

Not much of this is about barking orders; it is about building consensus, establishing a pattern of leadership, and a culture of empowerment. It is about setting a pattern of behavior where others feel like they can and should make changes for the good of the company, of the product, and of the customers.

Not much of it either is about technology or technical prowess on the part of the “CEO.” It is about reaching out to those with those skills and utilizing them correctly. The same is true for a PM — you don’t necessarily need to know all the techie stuff, but you do need to know how it affects your clients, and you need to know who in your “team” you can refer to for the complex technology questions.

But mostly, for me, the CEO role is about understanding what the company exists for, and this is usually based on their customer. A company is nothing without its commercial lifeblood — its client-base.

I think because of this, effective CEOs almost always have a strong commercial background, and are salespeople by trade, and businesspeople and leaders in equal measure. All of these facets are also within a product manager’s remit, but I think the balance is tipped by the typical sales leader’s experience in getting genuine commercial results, which of course is the cornerstone of any organization doing well. Commercial experience also suggests a cost-management perspective too, which is equally important (and why many CFOs are also good candidate CEOs).

There are for sure thousands of other considerations, but an executive recruiter will usually look for evidence of commercial success in a direct capacity for a would-be-CEO to be a genuine candidate. PMs typically don’t have direct authority over revenue in the same way sales guys do, and that for me, boiled down, is the answer to this, because many organizations see revenue as vital and everyone else as secondary.

I would imagine that seasoned PMs with some specific commercial experience would be very much in the running though. The first step for any PM in becoming a full-blown CEO would be to “assume those responsibilities” in their current PM role. This is the acorn from which greater things can grow.

How is it that some products achieve huge customer loyalty and high usage (and therefore renewal revenues), and yet other products find it very hard to gain any long term traction? What are the key factors affecting “stickiness” and what can the PM do to move the needle?

Answer from Alain Breillatt of Picture Imperfect: How do I make my product sticky? If you worked for 3M then the answer would be to slap some low-tack glue on it and declare it a new type of tape, Post-It note, etc. Okay, so the joke isn’t helpful, though it does reveal the conundrum a Product Manager faces as they try to sort out the question of how to make a product a “need” in the regular work/life experiences of customers rather than simply another tool that sits in the bottom of the bargain bin.

But to answer your question, let’s dissect customer loyalty and high usage.

What drives customer loyalty? Generating loyalty is actually a very simple formula, but not one that is easily put in place by the Product Manager alone. Let’s address these briefly and then go into more depth below. Customers love your product / company because you:

1. Get the JOBS Done: Your product solves the problem that your target customers are trying to solve better than any other solution available. In fact, if properly developed, it is tightly aligned with only the dimensions of performance that are relevant to the job. Professional photographers, for instance, know they can rely upon Photoshop to get the job done when it comes to manipulating and finishing their photos properly.
2. Happily Engage with Customers: When your customers have questions about/issues with your product, they find an open, capable and interested organization that is willing to hear them and assist them. Try contacting Zappos.com with questions or concerns about a purchase – they do EVERYTHING possible to answer questions while ensuring that you are happy and they do it with a smile.
3. Understand your Market: Your Marketing Mix (i.e. the 4 P’s of Product, Placement, Pricing, and Promotion) creates a sense of value in the minds of your customers, is focused to best reach your ideal target, and generates a “need” to own/upgrade. Remember back in 1999 when VMware was just this little workstation tool which your testing, development, and support teams used to perform software testing against multiple platforms? The message was simple: we’ll cut your capital investment costs by 50 – 80% and you won’t have dozens of machines cluttering each team member’s workspace. They did the same thing with servers but added redundancy and quick recovery to the mix. Any wonder why they went from 0 to $1.9 Billion in revenues in 10 years?

What constitutes high usage? High usage is a relative term as it does not necessarily mean customers are opening your product on a daily or even weekly basis. What it does mean is that your product is a critical part of the workflow of a customer’s business or personal life. It saves them time. It makes them look good. It connects them to people they care about. It saves them money. It makes them money. Better yet, it saves their assets on a regular basis. They don’t even bother looking at competitive imitators because your product is the rock solid, go to the mattresses, gold standard.

So, as the Product Manager, which of these levers do you control in order to make your product sticky? That depends on how your role is perceived within the organization. Personally, I prefer to look at the PM as the CEO of their Product. You own it, you’re responsible for the revenues it delivers, and you can advocate for the changes that are necessary to make your product more successful. Not every company regards the Product Manager in this fashion, and if yours doesn’t then you will have to pull what levers you can and either wrest control of other levers or coax the owners into seeing things your way. Generally you will have to collaborate closely with the sales, support, and possibly marketing teams to ensure they have the same vision you do. Prepare to do a ton of evangelizing and sweet talking.

With that said, let’s examine the three sets of levers more closely. But let’s examine them in the inverse order from how they are listed above because this is typically the approach that unfortunately is often taken when organizations think about making their product a hockey stick graph of success. The conversation usually goes like this, “Hey, we built this cool piece of software, now how do we make it REALLY successful?” [cue crickets] That’s what the engineer or product manager is going to hear if they approach me with that question since it implies that none of the proper due diligence was done before going out and creating.

Understand your Market

The Marketing Mix is the first thing that comes up when you start asking questions about how to make your product wildly successful. This is because most people equate success with visibility, availability, and enticing pricing. Much of this failure comes from spending too much time in the aisles of the supermarket or in over-competitive markets where coupons and promotions reign supreme. But if you’re in this situation here are the potential approaches you could take.

1. Market the hell out of it. This generally implies throwing tons of money in advertising and promotional dollars at the product to ensure that you get glossy prints in all of the right periodicals, skyscraper ads on the major websites, booths at the major trade shows, and beautiful direct email and mail pieces to large lists of target customers. Supplement this with a PR blitz to all of the major influencers including major journalists, A-List bloggers for your market and – if your product targets IT – the streetwalkers in disguise (i.e. technology analysts) and end-user communities. Finally, you need great case studies and endorsements from a few big corporations (again if targeting IT) that may require you practically give the product away to these endorsers. This is called the “throw away money as fast as you can” or “the why the VCs lost so much money in 2001” approach.You can scale this up or down and target your marketing activities according to the budget you’re able to wrest out of the pockets of your executive team. To be clear, you need to promote your product to gain visibility for it as well as credibility – especially if you are targeting organizations that will spend more than $1000 on your offering. But all of the advertising in the world isn’t going to generate loyalty and renewal revenues unless your product does the job your customers need it to do. (See “Get the JOBS Done” below for more on this topic.) I’ll just share one more example here because branding and marketing do make a huge difference. Ever heard of the Freedom Blanket? What about the Slanket? My bet is you immediately thought about the PATRIOT Act when I mentioned the first one and wondered if the second one was a new kind of venereal disease. Now, what if I told you these were both predecessors of the Snuggie? Ah yes, you know what a Snuggie is don’t you. Wonder why that is? Well, read this article and you’ll see that in this case it was ALL about marketing, good branding, and coming up with a quirky way that connected to customers to drive the Snuggie to become a cultural phenomenon.
2. Take it viral. You know how it works — create a quirky video or online game that creates a huge buzz and generates enormous visibility for your product. Of course, you still need to convert these people into customers, so make sure that your viral effort is engineered to connect with your target groups and that there’s a call to action that actually engages them with your product. Creating visibility is wonderful, but if you fail to attach a strategy or mechanism for capitalizing on that visibility, then why are you wasting your time?
3. Give it all away. So you’ve read Chris Anderson’s “Free” and you either scoffed at it or you’re a believer. Nothing generates faster visibility for a good product coming from an obscure background than making it free. But you need a strategy in place that is going to take advantage of the Freemium approach and turn it into money. It works — but again, you need to align mechanisms with a longer term strategy for capitalizing on the huge population now using your solution. A word to the wise though: it’s entirely possible to create what you think is a fabulous solution to a very real problem, make it freely available to all, and still watch your downloads / usage stagnate in the hundred or thousands when you expected it to hit millions like Twitter. Free does not guarantee widespread usage. In some cases, your timing may be off and your product may be well before its time as was the case for many MP3 players before the total Apple solution was delivered.
4. Align in with strong partners. Teaming up with the giants in your industry often makes complete sense when your solutions are highly complementary. Their sales team is always looking for additional tools to line up and increase the size of the sale, and you benefit by riding in on the coattails of their efforts. When InstallShield (now Flexera? – don’t ask me, I don’t work there anymore) decided we wanted to tackle the IT administrator market against an entrenched competitor in the application repackaging business, there was one clear path to generating fast growth and that was the Freemium model combined with aligning with heavyweight partners. We built customized solutions for Novell and Microsoft which were hosted on their websites and promoted to their user communities. Value to the customer came through making these products fully functional but limited in feature availability. An Administrator could accomplish the basic repackaging tasks with the toolset but advanced features which were visible required purchasing a license. We even integrated the online license acquisition to simplify the effort for a willing customer. Value to InstallShield came through the validation of aligning with the big partners as the “go to” solution and by requiring every user who installed to provide registration details in order to receive the installation key. I will admit that it took months for the solution to really take off and brought increasing scrutiny by executives who questioned whether we were simply giving away money rather than growing the potential revenues. But staying the course brought significant success to InstallShield as we eclipsed the competition, helped several of our partners terminate their own repackaging solutions, and become the default offering.
5. Create lock-in. Are there steps you can take to make it less favorable for a customer to consider other competitors after they invest in your solution? IBM and Microsoft do this all the time. Facebook even does it. Once you are on their solution and build up your investment in their solution, it can be quite costly to consider moving somewhere else. If you create advantages that come with loyalty (consider the airline loyalty programs back when they truly were highly valuable) you increase the costs to a customer considering leaving your solution. For example, if I use WordPress for blogging, as I customize and take advantage of the many widgets available, my switching costs continually increase. Who wants to go through the pain of migrating years worth of content and struggle through rebuilding expertise in another solution when a large amount of content is involved? Lock-in is not evil if it creates significant advantages to the customer, including such benefits as strong community of users who collaborate and provide support / new tools. My parents are still on their old Juno email account — even though I set them up with a vastly superior Gmail account — simply because they don’t want to go through the switching costs of migrating all of their contacts and updating everyone with their new email address. The barrier CAN be that low.
6. Take advantage of network externalities. The mobile service providers have been cashing in on this for years with their “Friends and Family” programs or Fave 5 approach. If I can get my family on the same network then we can all talk to each other for free. And if they tell five friends, and they tell five friends… well, you get the picture. There are very real benefits to getting large populations. If you want to delve deeply into the economics of it, I suggest the following paper written by a good friend and professor with whom I worked at one time: “Snowball: A dynamic oligopoly model indirect network effects.” [PDF]

Happily Engage with Customers.

Does your company like its customers? That may sound like a funny question, but honestly, how many times have you sought to get help or ask questions of a company about their products and struggled to access a live person? Ever called up a tech support line and had the agent on the phone hang up on you? Have you ever sent an email to a company and never heard back from them? Has your company had discussions about how to reduce calls to your support line by obscuring the location of the contact details? Do you empower customer service or help line technicians to go the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction? Look — managing costs is all fine and well, but if you want to turn disengaged customers into raving advocates for your product (word of mouth is the single best method of driving product adoption) then you need to think about how your customer touch points impact the end to end customer experience. Southwest Airlines and Zappos have at least one thing in common: they carefully consider the personality type of the people they hire to engage with their customers. Check out Zappos core values as a clear statement of what serving their customers means to them. And this interview with the President emeritus of Southwest gives a clear understanding of how their customer focused values have helped the company succeed. As a product manager, you may be asking, “Isn’t this something the CEO and HR team should be thinking about?” Well, yes, sure, but that doesn’t mean your product and your efforts can’t help make that happen if your culture is in the wrong place today.

Get the JOBS Done.

JOBS is a four letter acronym that refers to the new product development process outlined by Clayton Christensen – he of disruptive fame – and used liberally by his firm Innosight. The approach is standard fare for anyone who has studied the accumulated innovation literature from the last 15 years. I cite Christensen here because A) he’s earned his street cred in the tech industry, B) his approach tightly encapsulates the best practices you should be following, and C) like most writers I am lazy and would prefer not rewrite something if an appropriate source is available to provide the necessary reference material.

Allow me to explain the basics but then I would highly suggest you jump over to the Innosight website and explore their methodology. Of greatest interest is the article Christensen co-authored for MIT Sloan Management Review back in 2007 where he explores the concept of finding the job a customer wants to accomplish and aligning your product with that task. The simplest way to explain is that most likely you are segmenting your markets incorrectly if you are defining them

…by the characteristics of [your] products (category or price) or customers (age, gender, marital status and income level). Some business-to-business companies slice their markets by industry; others by size of business.

Surely this sounds familiar to most you reading this article. In fact, you may feel your hackles rise up as you growl, that’s the way everyone who knows anything about our industry does it. If that is your response then please go read the article now, before proceeding further.

Got it? Good, so let’s explain the concepts behind JOBS.

1. Jobs-to-be-done. The focus is understanding the problems your customer faces and the context in which they occur. Success at doing this means you can distill it down to a simple statement like this: Professional photographers want to refine their raw photos to create a finished image that matches the requirements of their client.

   Another simple statement would be: Parents want a brain-dead simple approach to share pictures of their children with friends and relatives.

   And finally a last statement would be: IT administrators want to deliver packaged software that is customized to their business and security specifications to the computers on their network without creating downtime for the network or their end users. Actually, this could be further resolved to clarify the true job: IT administrators desire to provide the software their users need without creating disruptions.

   Each one of these job statements conform to this format: [Customer] wants to [solve a problem] in [this context].

2. Objectives. What are the objectives or decision points your customer uses to evaluate potential solutions? This is not just about the functional aspect of product usage (i.e. use cases) but equally the psycho-social constraints that define the desired outcome of using the product.When you say, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” you’re exploring multiple objectives that the IT guy responsible for the purchase is trying to satisfy. There is the social impact of knowing that the new solution will make you look good to your boss and peers because you chose it and it just works. There’s the emotional impact of knowing that when things do go wrong, IBM has a staff of consultants who are on-call to smoke-jump in and help solve the problem quickly. And there is the functional consideration of how the product delivers the functionality necessary to satisfy your business intelligence platform requirements.Think about the Verizon Droid for a second — why would people purchase that phone over other smart phones? See how many objectives you can come up with that might drive a teenager to purchase that phone. Then consider the crackberry addicts out there in the business world and explore what objectives are driving their decisions.
3. Barriers. These are those characteristics, often functional in nature, that limit the ability of customers to use your solution. Typical barriers include cost, skill set, performance, available infrastructure, and business limitations.If your product requires customers to jump through new hoops and learn new skills, then there is definitely a barrier to adoption. The classic example is Microsoft Word developing extensive documentation, a detailed on-board Help, and conversion algorithms for dealing with WordPerfect documents to ensure ease of transition. Consider another example: ask the average kid driving a riced up Civic if they would prefer a Mercedes SL 65 AMG Black Series and they would probably rip the keys from your hand because few can pony up $300k to purchase that car, let alone the cash necessary to maintain it. And so they make do with lesser vehicles that they festoon with a variety of accessories to enhance the performance and simulate the look of the cars they admire.
4. Solutions. These include the various available offerings that customers consider when seeking a solution to their problem.  It’s important to realize that not every solution falls neatly into how you might categorize the problem space.  In fact, end users often create their own solution in MacGyver style retrofitting of products from diverse spaces in the marketplace. Especially in today’s evolving environment of “Makers” you will be surprised at how creative end users become when they are passionate about scratching a particular itch.There is much to be learned in examining how end users are making do or creating workarounds which leverage existing solutions in order to imperfectly solve their problems. Finding an area where imperfect solutions exist is an obvious key to driving rapid and significant growth.How does this differ from your product MRDs?  I’ve discussed this in other answers on this site and there’s a reason why. If you get this framework right, everything else falls into place. It’s not quite as simple as Kevin Costner’s “if you build, it they will come,” but the metaphor is not far off the mark.

So the point is that the formula to achieving wild success for your product has many levers. If you really want to succeed then the genesis of wild growth starts well before you begin thinking about a marketing plan. I’ll close with one pertinent point that Josh Kopelman from Redeye VC recently made: virality and a strategy for customer acquisition must be built in as drivers of the product development effort.  As Josh puts it when he asks entrepreneurs how they intend to acquire customers,

The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”  As if virality is something you can choose to add in after the product is baked – like a spell checker.  Let’s imagine the conversation at the marketing department of the wireless phone companies.  “Let’s see.  Should we spend $4 billion on advertising this year…or should we just make it viral?”

Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product.  That’s why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality.  The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard.  If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.

We have a server-based software product and we are introducing a new desktop-based product. The products have the same features, they just differ in how they are installed. Rather than the new product replacing the existing one, we want both products to continue to exist in parallel, though obviously the goal is to increase revenue overall. What are some techniques and approaches to launch the new product without it having a negative impact on our sales?

Answer from Mara Krieps of Pivotal Product Management: This is an interesting question, and it has raised a bunch of follow-up questions, such as:

• Was there any customer request for the desktop version?
• If so, what problem were they trying to solve with this solution? (e.g. non-workable pricing levels with the server product; performance issues)
• Was the goal to broaden your market with the desktop product? In other words, are there customer segments that you’re not addressing with the server product?
• Or do your competitors have a desktop version and is your win/loss analysis showing that the competitive solution is stealing market share?

Bottom line: You’re likely to cannibalize the server version, unless there is a compelling customer need that will enable you to expand market share in your current segments, or target new segments.

Given the information you’ve provided, my best advice is:

1. Get really focused on what the customer’s problem is, and what they are asking for which points towards the need for a desktop version.
2. Once you’re really clear on #1, think about the 5 Ps of marketing as follows, and then apply the strategies that make the most sense.

Product: You’ve said that the features currently are the same between the two versions. But is there any way you can differentiate the two by thinking about the “whole product” (in the Geoffrey Moore sense)? For example, are there any additional consulting services, or support or documentation, that you can offer with one version or the other? Maybe some different reports, or an enhanced reporting package for one version, as part of the product roadmap?

Pricing: Pricing could be a possible way to differentiate. You could structure pricing so that the desktop product priced best for customers who need up to X copies, with pricing on the server version that represents a lower per-user price for companies that need more licenses. Experiment with different models, and think about the level of overlap you want to create for customers in the mid-range. Also, I strongly recommend doing some price testing, either in-market or as a research study.

“Place” (Distribution): Depending how your product is distributed, you may have an opportunity to offer the desktop version via a subset of current channel partners or sales teams – or possibly through a new and different distribution channels. Thinking about this possible strategy makes me go back to the question “Did your customers ask for this, and if so, which ones, and which distribution channels currently serve them?” The answer will help point you to the best distribution strategy.

Promotion and Positioning: This brings us back to the segmentation question. Do some market segments have a stronger need for the server product and others would benefit more from the desktop version? Structure your promotional messaging and offers to make one of the two products more attractive to the most applicable segment. Also, back to the comments re: product – differentiated promotion and positioning will be easier if you can create some real differences between the two versions.

Each of these possible strategies is promising, but do make sure that you’re clear about customer needs and requests before you make your plans. Best of luck to you, and please do comment back if you have additional questions!

Related questions: How can I avoid cannibalization with a new product?

Are your goals/objectives and tactics essentially the product strategy? If you’ve defined what you want to achieve (goals), the way that they can be measured (objectives), and then the plans for how to get there (tactics), isn’t this essentially your product strategy?

Answer from Janey Wong of brainmates: A product strategy does include goals, objectives, and tactics; however, what differentiates it from other strategic documents is the purpose and supporting content that explains — and perhaps even justifies — how the strategy will meet its goals. The product strategy will ultimately be the document that guides the Product Manager’s decisions through Product Management activities over a specific time period.

The product strategy’s overall purpose is to help your company achieve corporate goals and therefore should be aligned to the corporate strategy. The corporate strategy should direct the goals for the product strategy.

As the document is strategic, it should also include how the product strategy will be competitive. An assessment of the market should be conducted before you write your tactical plan and can consist of one or more of these elements:

• Competitor analysis
• Product comparisons
• Market and industry trends
• Customer insight
• Structure of current product/brand offerings

The information from this research will help you build a SWOT analysis, identifying areas where you might want to focus your product strategy to help you gain an advantage over your competitors’ products. If the strategy is for a completely new product, it’s often better to conduct your research and analysis using Porter’s Five Forces.

Sometimes, I do my research before I define my product objectives or at this point I go back to my objectives and refine or add to them. I also do a quick check to make sure the focus of my strategy is still in line with my goals.

A good reference tool to help you think through your product strateg(ies) is Ansoff’s Growth Share Matrix:

You can now start to draft your tactics and from this you should also start to think through what resources you will need to implement the strategy. The last section should be dedicated to how you would evaluate progression and the attainment of your goals and objectives throughout implementation. It can also include key milestones.

As a final note, remember that all strategies are living documents. They guide decisions but may also need to respond and change with the market so regular research is required to ensure your strategy maintains relevant.

I have an existing product that I am planning to introduce a new update version. The update version is needed due to competition.

My question is how to manage the new product planning so that it will not impact the sales of the existing product, or at least minimize impact on current sales.

For example: How late I should go to avoid letting sales and/or customers know about the new product? And what are the considerations to migrate existing customers to buy new product?

Answer from Bob Corrigan of ack/nak: There are a few questions here, but let’s explore the heart of the issue first before throwing any ideas around, shall we?

You have elected to respond to competitive pressures by releasing more product. I’m going to assume (danger danger) that this was the best approach, but I’ll come back to this later.

You’re concerned that customers will stop buying the old product as they wait for the new one.

You’re right. Once knowledge of a new version gets out into the wild, prospects will wait for it, slowing down sales cycles to evaluate the new version if these new features are truly core to its competitive position.

One challenge is that your sales folks and sales engineers are probably aware that there’s a new version cooking and have been telling prospects “that’s fixed in our next version” or “we add that in the next release.” It’s entirely possible they know this because you told them. This has the impact of slowing down sales. It also has the impact of putting your sales channels on the defensive.

If you’ve taken the extraordinary step of publicizing the features in this new release to a broader audience, this will also slow down sales. It will also aggravate buyers who are not on maintenance contracts who purchased your software prior to news of the new feature(s). And depending on how often you spring these new releases on the market in response to competitive pressures, you may earn the reputation of being a follower who isn’t anticipating customer needs.

So now let’s look at your question of “how to manage the new product planning so that it will not impact the sales of the existing product, or at least minimize impact on current sales.”

For planning purposes, the best way to address this by baking it into a rigorous roadmap process. When I was the product manager for InstallShield, we had a schedule for releasing new versions of the product in the spring and fall of each year — customers and prospects came to anticipate when new stuff would land, and we were able to structure our marketing (and revenue expectations) around that schedule.

In the absence of a regular release calendar, again I recommend a structured way of communicating new capabilities to the channel. I’m not suggesting you treat them like mushrooms (“keep them in the dark and feed them s__t”), but that you wait to publicize the full range of product capabilities to them — with associated sales enablement tools — until a fixed time before the launch, perhaps a month. It’s hard to control the flow of information, but it’s better to ramp up the channel once with comprehensive data than it is to dribble half-facts and non-actionable information to them over a long period of time. This helps reduce the impact on sales because it reduces the “freezing effect” of ersatz announcements on current sales cycles.

The second approach to minimizing the impact on current sales is to push maintenance harder or to offer some form of 30-day upgrade guarantee to buyers. This should be tuned to your particular type of software and the length of your sales cycle, but it helps buyers feel like they can buy now and still get the benefit of new stuff. Note that this works best if you’re doing a super job of controlling the flow of information and doing a good job of communicating with customers about new releases.

Without knowing more about your product and the problems you’re seeking to solve, it’s hard to be more specific. But I can offer the following universal truth: the best response to a competitive action is not always an equal and opposite reaction. Did you really need to respond to their capability with a similar one? It could be that they are working to redefine the problem in the minds of the customer to steer the solution closer to their core competency, not yours. It could also be that they are trying to throw you off your release cycle by putting a “must have” feature into the market and calling you out to respond to it immediately.

But the most insidious possibility is that the feature — while important to a vocal subset of the target audience — really isn’t that important in a strategic sense. Did you really confirm that the capability is necessary to solve the core problem at the heart of your product strategy? To put it in Pragmatic terms, does it help solve a problem that is “urgent, pervasive and which people are willing to spend $ to fix”?

You can’t assume (there’s that word again) that the competition is addressing a compelling need just because they took action. Sometimes you need to respond to a feature with words: “The competition thinks the problem you have is x, so they released feature foo. What we’ve learned from talking to companies like yours all over the country is that the problem is actually y, and here’s our strategy for addressing it. What’s unfortunate is that while feature foo doesn’t get you any closer to solving your problem, it is really appealing to some users. Here is how we address it with our current product with bar…”

Product management can’t solve every market problem with product. This leads me to the very brief answer to your last question: “what are the considerations to migrate existing customers to buy new products?”

The answer is “do a better job of solving their problems than the other guy, and do so in keeping with a strategy that they understand and value.” Selling software isn’t like gavage — give your customers a compelling reason to move and they will.

I have been a sales engineer for the past 10 years or so, and would like to move into product management. How can I best make the transition? Should I target specific sizes or types of companies? My thoughts are that a startup would want a seasoned professional, but perhaps a mid- to large-size company might be willing to hire someone who had not had a PM position before.

Answer from Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing: Small companies seem more inclined to take risks; larger companies may tend to favor a candidate with experience. But I don’t think the issue is company size; I think the issue is the hiring manager. Some want to bring someone in who already knows the job and the industry and is willing to work for the same or lower pay. Fools! Instead the smart hiring manager should be looking for an SE rather than a product manager. My best source for product managers was in fact my competitor’s best SEs.

How does a SE become a product manager? Illustrate in some way your ability to see patterns in the market. Don’t be the guy who says “I’m in sales and I know what people need.” Be the guy who says “78% of our lost deals are because we don’t have this feature.” Those who attend Practical Product Management learn that opinions are cheap but market data is dear.

I suggest that you sit down with the VP of Marketing or the VP of product management to discuss what they’re looking for and how you can be on their short list for the next product management opening. Many folks start with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework at http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pragmatic-marketing-framework serving as a vehicle for discussion. Which of these activities are your best features? Which activities are driving the VP crazy? And let’s hope that your skills fit a void in the VP’s current staffing.

In the end, product managers come from many places: development, sales, marketing, support. But the best product managers are those who see patterns and create a consistent, repeatble method for defining products and working with other teams.

For more on the product management roles and compensation, see www.pragmaticmarketing.com/survey

I am developing an innovative product which is truly “new” to the industry. How can I determine the need and saleability of this type of product?

Answer from Alain Breillatt of Picture Imperfect: This is a question every product manager will likely face at some time in his or her career and it is one of the more complex challenges due to the multi-faceted answer it requires.

But let’s start at the most basic assumption: you know who your initial customers are and you’ve determined what problem your product solves for them. You do know this, right? Somewhere among your PRDs, MRDs, spreadsheets and extensive collection of feature defining Keynote decks is a single document with one short paragraph that describes:

[This group of customers] will use [my product] to solve [this problem] in [this context].

You have this right? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. But if you haven’t started actual production / development of your product, don’t go any further until you have this nailed to the wall of your boardroom with the signatures of all internal parties.

[Note, I’m not going to go into the details of what it takes to generate this target customer / product profile but if you want a good primer on this go read Innosight’s write-up of their “JOBS” methodology. Christensen didn’t invent this concept of ensuring your product aligns with a real job a customer needs to do — it’s Marketing 201 (a.k.a. market segmentation by need states) — but his team does a nice job of framing a successful approach for avoiding the all too common dilemma I’m about to describe. I’ll just say you won’t truly succeed until you learn the full meaning of the word ethnography.]

In my experience, especially when dealing with engineering-minded entrepreneurs developing “new to the world” products, there is a tendency to enthusiastically focus on developing the new product without stepping back to ask, “Who will want to buy this and why?” Some people call this the Mt. Everest Syndrome — we build because we can and because it is a very cool and extremely technical challenge. There’s nothing wrong with doing it this way, but the problem is that once you’ve reached the “summit” of developing this amazing, mind blowing new widget you suddenly look up and realize, “Wait a second, now what do I do?”

The natural response is to begin chasing after potential customers because you want to get paid for your work. But if you don’t have a clear conceptual model of the person and behaviors you’re targeting, then this will be a very frustrating endeavor because at every turn you will hear a different response from a different type of customer. The Director of IT at one of the still surviving major financial institutions will tell you that your solution would be perfect to audit their expenditures of TARP funds if it had an ITIL compliant server back end that could interface with their Exchange setup. At the same time, the “typical consumer” will tell you that your GUI is too complex and ask why yo ucan’t just dumb it down so that little Kylie can embed photos of her pet fish in her newsletter and easily send them out to the local family mailing list? And of course, the 3l33t programming types will just shake their heads and say, “Dude, where’s my command line interface so that I can link up to my headless virtual servers to manage my growing collection of torrents?!?!”

So, which one of those customer types or “personas” did you want to use for your pricing, sales growth, and marketing outreach planning purposes?

Skriiiiiitch! [mimicking the sound of a needle being yanked across an old LP].

Remember when I said there was nothing wrong with building the product first and then trying to figure out how to market and sell it? Please reach into your ears and yank out this piece of nonsense because in most cases it is absolutely wrong advice. What I haven’t said — and experience teaches — is that there is a strong possibility that you’re going to show your widget to every potential customer out there and people will shrug and say, “So what?”

Those two words should be among the most used words in a good product manager’s lexicon. “So what?” is the defining question for determining whether you have identified a solution that delivers a unique and valuable answer to a real job that an identified segment of customers want to accomplish and for which they would be willing to pay real money.

Unless you work for Microsoft Research or Los Alamos National Laboratory or some other well funded research tank, every single product idea you pursue needs to be latched onto a well-defined customer persona. That customer group is who you will target for your roll-out of the new product when it is actually released.

This is why a proper new product development effort would begin with identifying a problem or “job” that a target group of people need solved and determining:

1. Who are these target customers? (think demographics)
2. What existing solutions do they use and/or what work-arounds do they leverage against said existing solutions?
3. Where and when do they use these solutions; or, better yet, where and when would they like to use these solutions?
4. Why aren’t existing solutions solving their problem?
5. What are the key attributes a successful solution needs to provide? (this should be a very short list of probably no more than 3 attributes)
6. What value do these potential customers place upon such a solution?

See, here’s the thing; once you’ve identified the target customer and have some understanding of the value they place upon an optimal solution then you have completed 80% of the work required to answer your original question: how do I determine the need / saleability of a new to the industry product?

You should now know:

1. Your hypothesized initial target customer persona — when applied against the right demographic data this should enable you to identify a market sizing, which is a critical component for defining your growth model.
2. The value they place on the ideal solution — when combined with an understanding of the competitive landscape and your fixed plus projected variable production costs, this will help you determine pricing.

You still have to do the other 20%, but at this point it’s more a process of filling in the blanks than it is inventing something from whole cloth.

I know, you’re sitting there staring at the screen and thinking, “OK great, Alain, if you’re so smart, how do I accomplish that last 20 percent?”

Well, I’m glad you asked because that was my next point. When I worked in business development it was not unusual for someone from marketing or sales to send me a hurried email asking about a particular solution space and what our potential TAM was if we decided to expand in that direction. I always was quick to ask, “Are you looking to understand our Total Available Market or the Total Addressable Market?” Usually if I was talking face to face with the requestor I got a blank stare in response to that question.

Here’s the thing — if you want determine the potential opportunity for your product, you first need to know the size of the market you are considering entering / creating and what share of it you intend to own. That is the distinction between Available and Addressable. And this isn’t an easy effort. In the book, Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master, the authors elaborate:

Market definition is never a trivial exercise: If a firm defines its market too broadly, it may dilute its focus. If it does so too narrowly, it will miss opportunities and allow threats to emerge unseen. To avoid these pitfalls, as a first step in calculating market share, managers are advised to define the served market in terms of unit sales or revenues for a specific list of competitors, products, sales channels, geographic areas, customers, and time periods….

Data parameters must be carefully defined: Although market share is likely the single most important marketing metric, there is no generally acknowledged best method for calculating it. This is unfortunate, as different methods may yield not only different computations of market share at a given moment, but also widely divergent trends over time. The reasons for these disparities include variations in the lenses through share is viewed (units vs. dollars), where in the channel the measurements are taken (shipments from manufacturers versus consumer purchases), market definition (scope of the competitive universe), and measurement error. In the situation analysis that underlies strategic decisions, managers must be able to understand and explain these variations.

So in defining your market the steps to follow include:

1. Define the boundaries of the target market and determine / estimate the number of consumers / business entities who would be buyers of any solutions that are or could become available. In this case we are considering a “new to the industry” product so, while an existing solution may not exist, there likely are substitutes available that customers are using. Back in the 1950’s before there was a handheld mobile phone, everyone who needed to communicate by voice used landline phones or two-way radios. Therefore, if you were Motorola developing your analog handheld mobile cellular telephone — of which the DynaTAC was the first US public commercial prototype in 1974 — you would have defined your Total Available Market as the entire population of people who seek to communicate by direct voice transmission. Because Motorola was a large successful company at the time, they likely projected against a global TAM. Of course, a true visionary might have said that the market was broader than just voice communication and included wireless and image communication as well and therefore broadened the TAM to include users of snail mail, telegraph, teletype, television, and messenger services.But where do you get the data to put an actual number to that projection? Well most industries have a trade association that annually reports the manufacturing numbers or revenue for each defined product space. For PC and software worldwide and regional numbers I always relied on data from International Data Corporation (IDC), Gartner, and Jupiter Research. Here’s an example of how Macromedia defined their TAM methodology which pretty much mirrors the approach I used to take for Macrovision. What’s interesting about their example is that they also leverage point of sale (POS) data from NPD. Nielsen, the company I work for now, provides this type of data for manufacturers and retailers in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods space. Using this level of data sophistication dramatically improves the accuracy of product growth projections, although access to this data is a costly option on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

   If you’re focused exclusively on the consumer space then census data is your friend and a good starting point. Typically you can search out additional descriptions by analysts that spring up in corporate quarterly reports, investor presentations and online repositories including blogs authored by sector experts.

2. Describe the competitive landscape including the type and size of competitors and the nature of their rivalry, threat of entry, threat of substitute solutions, bargaining power of customers, and finally bargaining power of suppliers. The astute among you quickly identified this as a five forces analysis as defined by one Michael Porter of Harvard Business School fame. I’m not going to dive into detail here other than to say, if you haven’t done so, go read his seminal article describing this model and how to effectively use it in defining a competitive market space. A critical component is building an expanded SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis for each primary competitor since it provides a useful characterization of their capabilities and product directions. You need to avoid becoming simplistic in building this analysis and you should clearly identify where your knowledge is factual vs. hypothesized.
3. Break the market into segments and estimate their size. Market segmentation here should really focus back on the jobs a customer is looking to accomplish when they use this solution. For instance, mobile phone users differ significantly between corporate users who are looking to stay in touch with the office and their professional network as they travel across the country and the globe as compared to heavy socially mobile consumers who want the latest games, ringtones, and to be able to share photos and texts with their wide group of close friends who probably live within the same metropolitan area. Each group has a defined set of requirements that you should ferret out and determine how valuable the opportunity is in pursuing them. Part of your consideration should include attitudes and speed of adoption. It is not always fair to assume that the best market is the 18-34 year old market in spite of what many on Madison Avenue believe. Age and socioeconomic status may not even be the appropriate characteristics for measuring the markets you are trying to define.Let that sink in for a minute.

   Your market segmentation is not necessarily based on age, income, or gender. It should be focused on people who highly identify with the problem your solution solves — whomever they might be and their likelihood for early versus later adoption.

4. Estimate market share of competitors in each defined segment. This is fairly straightforward — like I said, filling in blanks — but you should carefully consider who the competitors and how tightly they hold to your target customer base. Since this is a “new to the industry” solution you need to keep your definition broad until you have narrowed down the precise requirements. With your requirements in place you can effectively identify who plays in your identified target segment for initial launch.

So now what? Well, with all of this data in place, you need to create a market growth projection. There are a number of ways to go about this and in reality all of them are filled with guesswork, estimations, hypotheses, and at least a little gut based decision making. But no VC or CEO is going to accept that you’ve built this model based on your gut so you need some type of analytical model to back up your assertions. Let me introduce you to the Bass Diffusion Model of adoption. If you’re familiar with the Crossing the Chasm series then this graph should feel comfortable. If you’re not familiar with it then you really should just go read the book or at least a summary of it. Unless your product is completely lacking in analogous solutions that are already or historically have existed in the market place — it does occasionally happen — you should be able to use the Bass Model as a means of projecting your sales or unit growth over the next 1, 3, 10, or 20 years. The formula may appear daunting at first glance but the two key variables you need to worry about are the coefficient of innovation and the coefficient of imitation. As the folks over at smbZen BizJournal state:

The “coefficient of innovation” is the probability that an innovator will adopt the product and, in its calculation, includes the impact of awareness building efforts. The “coefficient of imitation” simply represents the probability that your friends will adopt the service if you did.

“But,” you say, “what if there is nothing analogous that I can project against?” Well, you need to be creative and figure out an appropriate analogy because this is to some extent how you will describe the solution to your target investors as well as your target customer. If it’s completely new to the world then they will be looking for an appropriate analogy and you should be the one to provide it to them.

In the consumer packaged goods world, brand managers typically will supplement this data with test market research that includes both panel and test market research. My employer, The Nielsen Company, has a strong lock on the former with our BASES studies methodology that leverages a very deep database of historical product introductions and actual sales performance as measured against advertising and promotional spending. We help clients like P&G build concept boards that describe the product in significant detail including imagery, branding, messaging, product SKUs, benefits, and pricing. These boards are then put in front of a few thousand consumers who fit the target customers’ characteristics and feedback is solicited through online surveys and webcasts. Depending on how the product performs, clients may decide to put actual prototypes of the product in the hands of the sample consumers and test out their experiences with the solution. All of the data gathered from this experience enables a more realistic projection for how the product will perform at launch time.

But if you’re not a P&G you can still go out and do some of this similar effort in alpha testing of screen shots and product descriptions either through online surveys or in-person focus groups. This in part is why Google takes their “Beta” approach to many of their solutions that evolve out of Google Labs.

Finally, it is possible that you can’t go out and do any of the research I have outlined. It is entirely possible that you have developed something like Twitter — a technology that was originally created because someone thought it would be a cool idea and it slowly evolves through constant iterations and significant stumbles into a true utility that consumers love and use ravenously. But unless you are already independently wealthy or have an understanding sponsor, or are willing to spend all of your free time outside of that you spend doing your day job, this is a very difficult path to pursue. Further, there’s no evidence at this point that Twitter is actually going to produce real revenue in the long run, so you may want to focus on developing a solution that pays the bills from day one.

I’m in my 40s now and have reached the Product Management Director level, managing enterprise software product lines and a handful of product managers and user interface designers. I’ve been successful in bringing products to market and generating over $30MM in product revenues over the course of my career. In today’s woeful economic climate and a desire to balance work and family life and possibly downsize one’s lifestyle and career aspirations, what alternative career paths do you see in a post-product management path that doesn’t include aspiring to VP or CEO levels?

Answer from Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group: There is no question that leading a product management team is one of the most demanding and high-stress jobs in a company. In a very real sense, this role drives the future success of the company. It’s not unusual for people to spend some time at this level and decide that they miss having a life. Fortunately, the experience in this role turns out to be very useful for other, less stressful positions:

Principle Product Manager – This is a very senior product manager, but the key is that they are no longer responsible for managing people. You might be given a particularly challenging product, or often your job is to provide that holistic view of product and help the other product managers. But as an individual contributor your stress level will be much lower.

Interaction Designer – If you have talent and skills in interaction design, or if you have the aptitude and desire for some more education, this role of interaction designer is in extreme demand and can be very rewarding without the pressure associated with being ultimately responsible for the product. There are some good programs ranging from as short as two-days to help provide training to product manager types in this area.

Product Marketing – You can certainly leverage your product management experience by taking your knowledge and helping the sales or marketing organizations to spread the word. Without the pressure of ultimate responsibility, you can spend your time sharing what you know rather than being responsible for coming up with the actual products.

Online Marketing – This is really where marketing meets product, and this is a rapidly evolving field where you can often make a big impact for your company (especially in lowering the customer acquisition costs). Your knowledge of product and the people required to get changes implemented will prove a big help.

While there are many other positions in the company that would benefit from your knowledge, these four are all individual contributor spots that will most leverage your value.

2009 has arrived and with it one of the bleakest outlooks for the economy in a long time. During recession, organizations typically take drastic measures and cut right back on anything that isn’t directly revenue generating. In these dark times, how does the discipline of Product Management maintain its “strategic value” in the eyes of the organization’s decision-makers? And, on a more personal level, how do you maintain your own personal profile and “strategic value”?

Answer from Brian Lawley of The 280 Group: The biggest strategic value that a product manager can add during tough times is to help the company decide where to focus limited resources. Most companies chop heads but don’t cut products or projects. Thus everything is still expected to get done but if it does the results are mediocre at best. If you can use the Boston Consulting Group matrix and map out your products in terms of growing markets and ability to capture them and then either kill the dog products or shift the resources and effort to the stars it will be very helpful to your company.

In terms of your own personal profile, the archived webinar on “How to recession-proof your PM career” has lots of good strategies and tips.