After almost four and half years, my time at Ryma has come to an end. On Monday March 1st I am starting my new role as a Senior Product Manager with ACL Services Ltd. Some of you may know, I moved to Vancouver and this is an extension of that change.

ACL provides audit analytics and monitoring software to the audit and controls professions and the financial management community.

Doing professional services for Ryma has offered me the opportunity grow professionally, but most importantly meet, both in-person and online, a bunch of really great people across the world. I have seen how you work and plan to apply as many of those best practices that you have shared.

I am looking forward to the challenges that face me in taking on a new-to-me product in a new-to-me market.

I guess it is time to practice what I have been preaching!

I was able to find a rock star graphic designer who made me a professional looking logo for my blog. Yeah! For those of you reading through RSS, click the link to check it out – www.strategicproductmanager.com.

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I have read some interesting posts recently and I thought I would share a few with you here.

22 JAN 10 – Agile Product Manager Chapter “Scaling Software Agility”

… I’ve decided to push this early draft Chapter out for review and comments…

22 JAN 10 – A CEO’s Perspective of Personas “Where the Product Management Tribe Gathers”

…I have been engaged with several companies recently who are pursuing personas as an avenue into buyer and user knowledge, and an intimate look at the behaviors, goals and motivating factors of each…

25 JAN 10 – Product Management Interview: Jim Holland “Product Management Meets Pop Culture”

…kicking off a series of one-on-one interviews with product management professionals…

27 JAN 10 – The Basics of Software as a Service Pricing “The Software Maven”

…It is pretty unanimous that software pricing is one of the hardest parts of a product manager’s job…

27 JAN 10 – Pragmatic Personas “StickyMinds.com”

…Knowing who will use your software is important to the software development process. Having the end user in mind helps you develop features that fit the user’s needs…

28 JAN 10 – My Rules “outside-in view”

…This is a tab on my site here where I will list the rules I believe are worth following for product managers and product marketers…

01 FEB 10 – Lunch is an event. Product launch is a process. “Launch Clinic”

…Too often we think about product launch as an event. The magic product launch checklist is consulted…

03 FEB 10 – Using Metrics to Manage the Growth Stage “Pivotal Product Management blog”

…Measuring product success throughout the product life cycle is a fundamental skill for product managers in any size or type of organization…

05 FEB 10 – “10 Books To Make You A Better Product Manager” “The Experience is the Product”

…These are not books that tell you how to do product management. Rather, these books are full of ideas that will challenge you to work smarter, communicate better, and get in the heads of your users…

08 FEB 10 – Removing Features “ignore the code”

…Applications have a natural tendency to grow…

09 FEB 10 – Setting prioritites grounded in the market “ProductMarketing.com”

…If you’ve ever had to review a long list of requirements, you’ll appreciate this…

You can always track what I am reading here (delicious.com) and here (Google Shared).

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I suspect that one of the major impacts to your roadmap is a budget change. And by change, I mean a reduction in available funds for product development. I suspect a lot of you dealt with this last year as you suffered through many rounds in workforce reduction. I am curious how you handled that.

Picture this scenario, late last fall you reviewed all your feature requests, dusted off the roadmap, the business case is shiny again and it is all aligned with your vision and the corporate vision. With your budget approved, you are ready for 2010. Enter January 2010 and due to slightly missing the Q4 numbers you are now forced to chop $75,000 from your budget. Basically the equivalent of one developer. What do you do?

• Band together with the other product lines and pray for Management to realize that chopping 75k is guaranteed to affect more than 75k in revenue this year?
• Offer to combine forces with another product to share revenue (knowing that you will likely never be able to undo this) in hopes that your new increased revenue will offset your requirement to reduce cost?
• Suck it up, chop the developer and leave the roadmap unchanged and modify the business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost but leaving the revenue numbers unchanged? The more with less scenario or in this case same with less.
• Suck it up, chop the developer and scale back the roadmap and business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost and revenue numbers?

I am less inclined to do anything that will affect revenue for future years. Depending on how many rounds of workforce reduction you have survived, I am less comfortable selling the same with less scenario. If you are in your first or second round, go with that. Teams generally perform better after the first and second cuts. I am not hopeful they will “see the light” and let you keep a full team in hopes of achieving your revenue targets. Although, this is probably the scenario I start with. Sell the vision, sell the facts and get buy-in on the business case. Failing that, cut, reduce and move forward.

I am hopeful someone will share a situation where a budget cut has affected their roadmap and how they responded.

I meant no offense to any development types by suggesting we cut you, it was a just a random example. We really hate cutting our roadmap in any scenario.

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We are searching Agile Product Management submissions for the Agile 2010 conference in Nashville. The Agile 2010 submission process will be somewhat different than in past years. In the past submissions would be submitted to individual stages for consideration. This year you will be submitting to one of the broad conference themes, Business, Technical, and Leadership & Organization. Once submitted the program committee will identify and forward to the most appropriate stage. The length of the sessions will either be 60 or 90 minutes and will be presented Tuesday – Thursday ONLY.

Please contact me if you have any questions, I am on the review committee.

The submission system will be open on January 11, 2010 and will remain open until February 26, 2010. Please see this link for more information – Agile 2010 Be a Speaker (http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/speaker.html).

** New link: http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/product

Business Theme Stages

Agile Product Management: As with many disciplines, agile techniques leverage our best practices, adapting them with short, empirical feedback loops. This track presents and explores: What best practices in product management are leveraged by agile teams? How have product management practices been adapted for agile? What new product management techniques have emerged from agile teams?

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I’m pleased to announce I am on the Agile Conference Review Committee for 2010 for the Agile Product Management track. The Product Manager review committee is lead by Rich Mironov of Enthiosys.

This year, the conference is in Nashville, TN, August 9-13. The deadline for submissions is February 26th.

Visit http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/ for more information.

Is there a date when it is not cool to do this type of post anymore? I think I am well past it. Heck I even did a top 5 post this week too. I figure I am roughly a month behind schedule anyway, so it all passes as acceptable in my books.

To provide some historical context to this post, here is a link to my 2008 predictions and my declaration that 2009 would be the year of the product manager. I have been inconsistent with my blog post titles, but the gist was about the same.

This past year was an interesting year from my perspective. Here are some thoughts on why I think it was interesting.

Agile
Everyone is still talking about Agile and no one has a clue what to do with it. Quite frankly, I am tired of talking about Agile. That being said, it is a BIG problem in the industry today. To be fair to the product management people, your R&D teams have hi-jacked it to the point where it is barely recognizable as Agile any more and you are doomed. How was that for an in-your-face comment? I suggest you become familiar with the Agile smells and suggest they start taking up regular retrospectives to improve. Agile can work and is a good thing, if done properly. Please start to suggest that the teams get help. I know people if you need people.

Product Management Community
This is one of the things I am most proud of, as a regular contributor, promoter and evangelist of all things considered product management socials. First the ProductCamps were a huge success all over the world. Austin has hosted three, Amsterdam was the first outside of North America and we have 5 already scheduled for 2010. Next, the number of product management blogs has grown again with a few mainstays that continue to produce new and relevant content and a few newbies that are challenging the others to stay current and fresh. Lastly, Twitter. You know I am a big fan and this medium has single handedly exploded the amount of collaboration between like-minded product managers. It is so easy to reach out and connect with other product managers, ask questions, and share experiences. if you are not there yet, why not?

Product Management Potpourri
Is it just me or is life as a product manager about the same as it was 4 years ago? I have met 1000s of product managers in the past four years and it seemed they are struggling with the same problems in 2009 as they were in 2006. Will it just take more time to make it better? I am sure, since you are reading this, that you are in the top 20% of product managers that are engaged and trying to make it better. I suspect the remaining 80% are still working the same processes and doing the same things they were in the past. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that most of those 80% love their job. Imagine how great it would be if you were actually doing the things they liked about the job – talking to Customers, roadmapping and general strategy work. I guess I thought some of the financial constraints over the past year would have accelerated the adoption of product management best practices.

That is the extent of my reflections for the past year. Overall, I think it was a positive year with the Agile push being positive (despite there being lots of room for improvement) and the product management community that has grown leaps and bounds. There are lots of positive movements that any product management team can grab a hold of one and build upon it.

On a positive note, I hope you appreciate the fact that I didn’t brand this the decade of the product manager (I know i did that last year, but a whole decade?) or declare a need for product management 3.0 principles or a need for Kanban Product Management.

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This is a repost of a post that I did on the Product Management View.

This post – Ann Handley: Marketing: Science or Art? – reminded me how much this phrase is starting to annoy me. My high-level thought is…. unless you have paint or crayons it is a science. Largely, I come across this phrase when discussing the exercise to prioritize requirements, features and problems but it creeps up in other discussions as well. According to Wikipedia, science refers to any systematic methodology which attempts to collect accurate information about reality and to model this in a way which can be used to make reliable, concrete and quantitative predictions about future events and observations. Using the same source, there is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of “art” is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity. Since building and delivering software or other high-tech products is generally done with the goal of making a dollar and sustaining a business, I sure hope decisioning is not done within the realm of “human creativity” but with quantitative predictions.

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Pretty simple, but I think it is worth noting what people are reading.

1. What is Strategy? Not Operational Effectiveness
2. Roadmap: Product Vision Statement
3. Your Strategic Friend, Mrs. Win/Loss Analysis
4. Strategize your Product Roadmap for Success
5. Authority vs. Influence

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productcamp.org is your definitive source for all product camps.

There are five ProductCamps in the near future. While you are here, why not check out my events (or subscribe to the RSS feed) page for the most comprehensive list of product management events available.

In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing. At ProductCamp there are no “attendees”, since everyone is an active participant in some way: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, sharing their experiences, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn, share, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development.

Having attended six (!) ProductCamps, I can attest to the content and value you will receive from attending. I also encourage you to participate and volunteer.

ProductCamp Minnesota (Minnesota, MN)
Date: Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Location: Mall of America
URL: http://www.pcampmn.org/
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampmn

ProductCamp Atlanta 2.0 (Atlanta, GA)
Date: Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Location: GTRI Conference Center
URL: http://www.barcamp.org/ProductCampAtlanta
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampatl

ProductCamp SoCal (Irvine, CA)
Date: Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Location: University of California, Irvine’s Student Center
URL: http://www.productcampsocal.org/
Twitter Hashtag: #pcsc

Silicon Valley P-Camp 2010 (Sunnyvale, CA)
Date: Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Location: Yahoo! Headquarters
URL: http://pcamp10.weebly.com/

ProductCamp Sydney 2010 (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
Date: Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Location: Atlassian
URL: http://www.brainmates.com.au/?page_id=1812
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampsyd

ProductCamp Austin Spring 2010 (Austin, TX)
Date: Saturday, March 27th, 2010
Location: AT&T Conference Center on the University of Texas campus
URL: http://www.barcamp.org/ProductCampAustinSpring2010
Twitter Hashtag: #pca10

ProductCamp RTP (Raleigh, NC)
Date: Saturday, May 22, 2010
Location: Cambria Suites at RDU Airport
URL: http://barcamp.org/ProductCampRTP

ProductCamp Boston (Boston, MA)
Date: Saturday, May 22, 2010
Location: The Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
URL: http://barcamp.org/ProductCampBoston

ProductCamp Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Date: TBD
Location: TBD
URL: http://productcampchicago.eventbrite.com/

Have a Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, Innovation or other related event you want to promote? Contact me and I’ll add it to the growing list for others to see. Also, why not subscribe to the events feed. Tell other people about these events.