I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned as a product manager.

If you’ve worked in product management for a while, you’ll almost certainly have been annoyed by others taking credit for your hard work.  Your boss will make some kind of announcement that Salesy McSalesdroid had won a massive deal, aren’t they great, they get a free island and half of your salary as bonus, yadda yadda yadda.

Everyone conveniently ignores that you held their hand to all the customer meetings, wrote AND DELIVERED the pitch to the customer, rearranged your roadmap to squeeze in some customer-specific features, and basically did everything needed to secure the deal.  But the main reason nobody else knows this is because you didn’t actually tell anyone!

From the product managers I’ve met over the years, many of them have said how difficult they find it to trumpet their own successes.  Unfortunately, this also meant that they generally failed to be recognised for the extent of their contribution.  It wasn’t necessarily because they were shy, retiring types either, more that they felt it was a little crass to take credit for something they felt was a team achievement.  Incidentally, I don’t know whether this attitude is exclusively a British thing or more generally a product manager thing.

You know what?  It doesn’t hurt to remind the people who review your salary each year how much you contribute to the success of your products and company.  Sure, product managers achieve results through team effort, but as long as you’re highlighting your contribution and crediting others’ efforts appropriately, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of self-publicity to balance the praise heaped upon the needy Sales team.

You’ll also be doing the profession a favour by illustrating the kind of things product managers do, and how important we are to the business.  So get out there and blow your trumpet!

Do you find it particularly difficult or easy to publicise your achievements?  Share your experiences in the comments.

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.

Knowledge is power for product managers, but you have to gather and interpret the right metrics.  I use these seven key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep track of my customers and to identify products that need some love and attention.  I hope that you can use similar KPIs to expand your customer insight and to drive better performance.

Your customers fund your company. Your repeat customers fund your growth and new development. You need to identify and focus on the ones that benefit you most and those that cost you least.

1. Size / industry / demographics of the customer

Why?  Helps you filter (segment) your findings, which in turn may draw out clearer trends or hotspots to investigate further.

2. Number of customers (now and trend over time)

Why?  Tells you whether your customer numbers growing or declining.  When combined with the segmentation criteria above, it may tell you whether you’re finding traction in a particular market or industry (do you know why?), and whether you’re replacing less profitable customers with more desirable ones.

3. Number of products / users / licences per customer (now and trend)

Why?  Helps you identify the characteristics of a repeat or growing customer so you can go hunting for more of the same and tells you whether you’re broadening your sales footprint within those customers.

4. Percentage of customers retained (now and trend)

Why?  It’s important to know how many new customers (and of what value) you need to be acquiring to keep the company growing.

5. Length of customer relationship with your firm

Why?  To understand what keeps your customers with you for longer, because it’s a lot cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

6. Average value of customers and users (now and trend)

Why?  Tells you whether you’re successfully attracting more valuable customers.

7. Profitability per customer (this can be tricky if you don’t know how much your products cost to maintain and support)

Why?  Helps you identify which are your ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customers.  If you’re going to focus your efforts somewhere, it should be on cultivating more of the ‘good’ customers.

Here’s the thing, if you don’t really understand your customers, they’ll be far more likely to want to break up with you:

What is important for your company to measure about your customers?  How do you change your actions based on those finding?  It would be great for you to share your experiences in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Pre-empting customer churn
2. 2: Find problems rather than guess solutions
3. 4 key ways to spot a successful product manager
4. 7 guiding principles for product install/upgrade usability

Everyone seems to be hyping Big Data right now.  I think we’ve reached that slightly scary point where CEOs are aware of Big Data and are beginning to think it a panacea for all business ills.  But I’m asking the question: what’s the big deal with Big Data?

We’ve always had more data available to us than we can deal with.  Our ability to manage that volume of data has increased over time, although so also has the amount of data we generate.  We’re always going to be playing catch-up.  But are we any better at turning all this data into useful and valuable meaning?

• techies love to indulge their hoarding tendencies (Must. Store. More. Data.);
• armchair lawyers still love to digress on high-impact, low-probability concerns such as the Patriot Act and how likely cloud tech companies were to be raided by the Feds (although this did provoke an amusing slap-down by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon); and
• very few people seem to be really thinking about the ultimate point of being able to store and query such large amounts of data, i.e. what questions will all this data help us to answer?

While being able to store more data and query it more quickly is fundamental to our ability to start deriving meaning from it, I came away from CloudCamp’s Big Data event with the overriding impression that technology vendors in this space are continuing to focus primarily on size and speed (features) rather than facilitating knowledge and insight (benefits).

• Where should I build my next retail store?
• How can I identify the people most likely to want to consume my products and services?
• How can I understand more about my current and prospective customers so that I can tailor my content and services to them?

Although the ability to answer these questions absolutely depends on being able to store and query the underlying data, the typical CEO (think: glorified sales person) is not going to appreciate or concern themselves with the capabilities of Hadoop, Hive, noSQL or any other Big Data technology.  In other words, they don’t care how you get to the answer – they just want the answer.  We know Einstein’s equation E=mc², but history is more concerned with its meaning rather the type of paper on which he wrote the proof.

So where does this lead us?  Transactional information is becoming less dense in meaning so we need to be able to store and query larger sets of data before we can start to see the underlying picture.  Big Data provides us with the ability to do this, which in turn allows us to find and articulate meaning within that data.

What I feel we’re lacking are similarly strong analytics tools, designed to cope with this volume of low-density information.  In other words, we can store all this information pretty well, but we can’t unlock the meaning of that information quite as easily.

Big Data is a big deal.  But our challenge remains to ask the right questions, understand the answers hiding in our data and then turn those answers into the valuable insight that will then drive those business decisions.  Big Data is a great foundation, but I’m much more interested in seeing how Big Analytics turns out.

Are you a product professional working with Big Data?  Do you agree or think I’m completely missing the point?  Let me know in the comments.

I enjoy a good cookie, particularly the slightly squidgy ones with huge chunks of chocolate in.  Sadly, this isn’t about highly-calorific comestibles, but about information this site will store in your browser.

The Register published a rather helpful article on the impending deadline for UK sites to conform to the new EU ePrivacy Directive (a thoroughly riveting read), which prompted me to get with the programme.  You probably saw the notice pop up when you first visited the site.

This is what The Register has to say:

The ePrivacy Directive makes it clear that the storing and slurping of data on an individual web surfer’s computer is only lawful “on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information … about the purposes of the processing”.

Furthermore, that consent needs to be granted explicitly and must be unambiguous.

So I’m now using the WordPress plugin EU Cookie Directive to pop up a message requesting your consent to use cookies and I’ve prepared a little page to help you find out more about how this site uses cookies.

It is rather ironic that this opt-in preference is then itself stored in a cookie, but there you go.

Also, if you’re like me and clear your browser cookies automatically on browser shutdown, then that pop-up message may get annoying.  Sorry about that, feel free to vent your anger in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Cookies
2. About
3. Hello. I’m new.

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned as a product manager.

It took me a while to learn this one, but it’s genuinely helped me to sleep more soundly at night and avoid setting unrealistic expectations about how much I can get done in a given amount of time.

As a line manager, my role is to squeeze every last drop of productivity from my headcount have the best interests of my team at heart.  At the end of each working day, I make a habit of politely encouraging them to stop working and go home.  I know that if I don’t they’ll probably continue to make the place look untidy for at least another couple of hours.

It’s also really important for your peace of mind to switch off after work and get a good night’s rest, particularly when things are more hectic than usual.  So here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Set your BlackBerry to turn off automatically outside of working hours
2. Similarly, don’t log into work webmail or remote access
3. Resist the urge to take your laptop home and do some more work in the evening
4. Take some exercise after work

On the last point about exercise, after a hard day you may feel tired, but this is generally mental tiredness rather than physical tiredness.  Unless you’ve been overdoing the inter-departmental Nerf gun battles again, or you’ve been running away from the Office Linebacker:

I’m no sleep specialist, but I’ve found that being mentally tired can make it harder for me to switch off at night and get to sleep.  Going to the gym or similar will take your mind off things and unwind that mental tiredness as well as tiring you out, both of which will help you sleep more soundly.

If you have any good tips of your own, why not share them in the comments below?

Related posts:

1. 10: Give yourself time to think in a straight line
2. 14: There is always more work to do. Don’t burn yourself out
3. Book recommendation – The Case for Working with Your Hands

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned as a product manager.

Product managers just loooove solving problems and answering questions.  Emails present us with an enticing list of both, which is why we find it so hard to tear ourselves away from them.  I reveal three quick tips to show you how you can regain control of your inbox after the break!

The trick to regaining control over your emails is skim-read them and to use The Four Ds:

The numbers of emails should correspond roughly to the size of circles above, namely that the number of emails you actually need to respond to immediately yourself should be minimal.

When I surveyed my team to see how they spent their working day, we found that we were spending most of our time on email.  As an experiment we tried the following:

1. Block out two thirty-minute slots for reading and responding to emails, one in the morning, one in the afternoon
2. Don’t check emails outside of these two allocated slots
3. When checking the emails, use The Four Ds

See how much more time you have in the day when you follow these steps.

Why don’t you share how you got on, or some of your own tips for regaining control of your inbox, in the comments?

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.

As product managers, our workload intensity tends to be cyclical and sometimes these cycles can stack up.  Distractions can seriously dent your ability to Get Stuff Done™, so here are five things you can try out to manage distractions more effectively.

While this is usually a good thing, if you’re trying to concentrate on a single task that requires your full attention (say, writing a business case), these questions in person, via phone, email or instant messaging (IM) all serve to distract you from the task in hand.  Each distraction causes you to lose your train of thought and it typically takes you about five to ten minutes to get back into the groove.  A few of those per hour and it’s easy to see how this slows you down.

So as practical measures try the following:

1. Set your phone to direct all calls to voicemail, or if you can’t, turn off the ringer
2. Set an out of office message and close your email client, or if you really can’t, discipline yourself only to check your emails for a set amount of time at specific points of the day
3. Sign out of your instant messaging client
4. Stop people disturbing you at your desk by working from a different part of the office or at home
5. Block out time in your diary for your own tasks, don’t allow people to book you into meetings

Needless to say, you can’t hide from everyone for ever, but these temporary measures will at least allow you to focus on putting out the biggest fires.

Do you have your own ways to manage distractions?  Why not share them in the comments?

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.

My folks brought me up to remember my manners.  I consider I’ve perhaps taken this a little too far when I find myself apologising to people in London who have just shoulder-barged me into the path of an oncoming bus.  But manners are important, especially for a product manager, where your success relies on the help of many others.

Think of all the things that people do for you:

• Developers and engineers have to guess what you mean in your user stories because the relevant context is in your head, not written down, and YOU ARE NEVER AT YOUR DESK.
• Marketing have to take all the cool new things your product does and find the people who’ll give a crap.
• Sales have to penetrate all your technobabble and marketing fluff to find the thing that will part clients from their cash.
• Finance have to figure out how your clever multi-tiered pricing model works to ensure they’re chasing the right clients for the right amounts.
• Tech Support have to put up with dozens of confused customers because a small but crucial feature has changed without warning.

So be grateful for any help from others. Thank them sincerely whenever you can even if they’re ‘just’ doing their job.  You will most likely need to call on their help again, because you can’t do your job without them.

Related posts:

1. 16: You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone – Joni Mitchell
2. 9: Everything benefits from a good start in life

Hurray!  MindJet has made a free, cloud-based version of its mindmapping tool available and it’s lovely to use.  It’s now a much better alternative to FreeMind (sorry guys), and being browser-based, avoids any corporate IT restrictions on installing software.

I’d previously used their desktop software, MindManager.  I’m pleased to report that MindJet Connect looks just as polished and helpfully uses the same keyboard shortcuts as the desktop app, plus it still allows export to file, both in proprietary format (.mmap) and FreeMind’s format.

Native support for iOS is also available, though I’ve not had the opportunity to test that out yet.

On a related note, a couple of weeks ago, my copy of Thinking Space on Android upgraded itself to MindJet (presumably following acquisition), and the new, free Android app is a definite improvement.

You can find out more about MindJet Connect or take a look at the MindJet app for Android.

Related posts:

1. Link of the day: inspireUX
2. Pay attention to local requirements
3. Drowning in product documentation? Start swimming – Part 2
4. Link of the day: Thoughtwrestling blog

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.

People value something most when they’ve just lost it or come close to doing so.  If your product prevents this happening, you need to save your client this ball-ache by helping them remember how much they value what they have now so that they don’t take it for granted.

This was brought home to me recently in a couple of different ways:

• How much I valued my door keys when I remembered I’d left them on my desk at the office a three-hour round-trip away.
• How I now value even more highly my motorbike security lock after it prevented someone stealing my bike

(Yes, it’s been one of those weeks.)

What have I learned from this?  For starters, I’m not going to forget my keys again.  Or park my bike in that spot again.

Relevance to product management?

If you can remind your customers how valuable your product is to them just before asking them to pay their subscription fee, you’ll find the conversation much easier.  Better still, consider this: how could your product sell its own ongoing value to the customer on your behalf?

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned about being a product manager.

Contrary to what you may think, most of product management is actually selling.  You are continually selling new product concepts, ideas for improvement as well as pitches for projects.  What you may not realise is that what most people think is selling isn’t actually selling.  Selling is listening, understanding, empathy and only then does persuasion factor in.

Explain your reasoning and at best you’ll achieve consensus, at worst you’ll uncover new information that may cause you to rethink and improve your approach.

Related posts:

1. 8: Empathise, empathise, empathise
2. Why aren’t Sales selling my new product?
3. How to get your sales team selling value instead of discounting
4. Product Management & Marketing

Does this sound familiar?

• Write document ‘A’
• Copy most of its contents into template ‘B’
• Rework same content into slideshow ‘C’
• Copy slide images into document ‘D’
• PDF and circulate an executive summary of document ‘D’ for feedback from EVERYONE IN THE COMPANY
• File documents A-D in a folder no-one will ever inspect again

If so, read on…

We’re looking at the kinds of information that specific groups of people need to know during the lifecycle of your product and why they’re so interested in the first place.

Last time we covered the steps from idea through to convincing people to part with some cash to build it. Now we’re going to look at building it and onwards through launch to review.

Build stage: what do we need to make?

Objective: to build the solution to the problem we originally identified
Audience: the build team, developers, engineers, quality assurance

You’ve managed to convince those holding the purse-strings to part with the cash, now you need to turn that vision into reality.  Bear in mind that it’s rare that your idea will make it to production precisely as you envisaged it.  On the plus side, you have the benefit of a group of great minds – your developers and engineers – whose job it is to build great products from great ideas.

You are not a designer so the important role you play here is to ensure the project team understands the problem and its context as well as your idea for solving it.  While you must not be overly prescriptive, you do need to let them know of any constraints or quirks that make certain design choices for you, for example “must work on Android and iPhone web browsers”.  Clarity of communication is key here; talk things through with your team to resolve ambiguities and document your collective design decisions so that you’re all working to the same plan.

Questions to ask at the build stage

• In what context will the product be used?
• How does the product need to work for the customer?
• What do Development / Engineering need to know to ensure they build the right thing?
• How will they know it’s good enough to finish the project?
• What’s the bare minimum set of features you need for a commercially viable launch?
• What else would do if you had more time or budget?
• How will the customer ‘unpack’ and start using the product?

Promotion stage: what the story (morning glory)?

Objective: to get the word out before during and after launch
Audience: marketing, PR, potential customers, journalists, analysts

Here is a situation where you can rework some of the material you’ve already produced at the concept stage. Right back at the beginning of the process, you identified the problem, who it affected and how much of an impact it made on them. You also described how your solution to that problem was unique or differentiated itself.

You can use all this raw information with your marketing and PR people to weave an engaging story about your product. You can also ensure you tell it to the ones who will be most interested in listening, namely those with the original problem, and journalists and analysts who have similarly identified and examined the same problem. And because you understand the different types of people with the problem, you can help your marketing team tailor the story to use the audience’s language.

Launch stage: how do we get the product out there?

Objective: to ensure all activities are coordinated
Audience: anyone directly involved

This is arguably one of the trickier stages in the process because you need to draw together several threads of parallel activity and tie them together.  Much has been written about effective launches (see Launch Clinic for example).  At its simplest, a good product launch ensures that the people most likely to be interested in your product understand what it is, what it does, how it solves their problem and that it is available. Similarly, a good launch ensures that everyone in your organisation touched by your product understands the role they need to play to achieve that.

Questions to ask at the launch stage

• What do sales need to know to sell this?
• What do your partners and resellers need to know?
• Elevator pitch
• Benefits and features
• Pricing
• Discounting rules
• Commission structure
• Licensing model
• Competitive strengths
• Objection handling
• Who should sales and partners contact for help when selling the product?
• How do we take orders for it?
• How do we deliver the product to the customer?
• How will Tech Support / Customer Services need to prepare to support it?
• What information do you need to publish and to which audiences?

Review stage: what did we do well and where can we improve?

Objective: to check we did what we set out to do
Audience: senior management, peers

There are two main areas of review: how well you executed the launch (process) and how well your product performed financially after launch.

The first you should do pretty soon after launch while memories are still fresh.  Get the main people involved in the launch to fill out a quick survey to score how well each of the launch activities went.  Get them around a table for an hour or so and share with them the scores.  Pick out the ones that went really well or really badly and understand why.  Discuss how to ensure the really good aspects can be repeated for future launches, and figure out how to rectify the bits that went badly for next time.  Finally, make sure that the product manager coordinating the next launch learns from these lessons.

Now, you know how there’s no such thing as a free lunch?  Well, there’s no such thing as a free launch either – you’re going to have to demonstrate at some point how successful you were in converting the money you were given originally into a larger sum of money.  To do this, you’re going to need to dig out the business case and compare it with what actually happened.

Now it’s not necessarily a good thing, but the majority of business cases I’ve seen tend to be over-optimistic on how quickly the capital investment returns meeeeeelions of dollars.  However, if there is a larger than usual discrepancy between what you were expecting and what actually happened, then it will be important to investigate why.  Because someone’s going to ask you.  Another way of assessing project success is how long it takes for it to break even.  This is a great fall-back position as it demonstrates that you’ve at least not wasted the money.

You may find it makes more sense to review the business case perhaps three, six, nine and twelve months after launch so that you can separate the blips from the trends.

Questions to ask at the review stage

• How does our actual financial performance compare with our business case forecast?
• How effective was our launch?
• How satisfied are customers with the product?
• How many support tickets have been raised?
• How many bugs have been logged after we released?
• How could we improve the product and process for next time?

I hope this little two-parter is helpful.  As always if you have any questions or would like some more detail, feel free to ask in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Drowning in product documentation? Start swimming – Part 1
2. 4 key ways to spot a successful product manager
3. 13: You’ve got to start the race before you can finish it
4. 9: Everything benefits from a good start in life

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned as a product manager.

One of the easiest ways to spot a product manager in the wild is to look for the slightly frazzled person with the longest to-do list and a determined look in their eye.

While I think we generally enjoy keeping ourselves busy, I’ve often noticed over a beer with colleagues that we (myself included) also quite enjoy having a bit of a moan over how much there is to do and that the work is never-ending.  You remember?  It’s usually second on the conversational agenda just after the obligatory “aren’t Sales exasperating” whinge.

On my to-do list there are always three categories of things on it at any given time:

1. Things I have to do right now, and ideally yesterday
2. Things I need to do as part of ‘business as usual’
3. All the other things I would do if time permitted

The thing about the to-do list is that third category.  Because we product managers are generally motivated, diligent types, there’s always a heap of things we’d like to do if we had the time.  In effect, we’re to blame for our to-do lists being so long.  If that’s what’s been stressing you out, think about how many of those tasks you actually need to do.

As a way of tackling this, with the blessing of your manager, stop doing a selection of the ever-present ‘business as usual’ tasks for a month and see if anybody notices.  Chances are that nobody will, which usually means those tasks are no longer necessary, so you can probably ditch four out of five of them straightaway.  This will free you up to tackle a few more items on your wish list.

Related posts:

1. 20: Leave work when you’re meant to
2. 19: How to regain control of your inbox
3. 13: You’ve got to start the race before you can finish it

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned as a product manager.

Sometimes the role of product management can be a little overwhelming.  There’s often so much to do that you can feel at a loss for where to begin.  But did you know that ancient Greek philosophers contended with the same problem?

A great example of a typical product management activity is launching a new product.  Once you start to think about what’s involved, you realise that there are so many things to do, it’s difficult to even start.  Strangely, this is very much like a problem explored by a philosopher called Zeno in one of his paradoxes.

Zeno lived in the fifth century BC, an elder contemporary of the more famously inquisitive Socrates.  His paradox concerned a runner called Atalanta.  To complete the race, he reasoned, Atalanta must reach the half-way point, but then she had to get half-way to there, (1/4 distance) then half-way again (1/8) and so on, dividing to infinity. With an infinite set of distances to cover, Atalanta can never actually get started.

While Zeno was trying to explore (and refute) the concept that infinite division is the same as infinite extent, this overwhelming feeling of not being able to get started that Atalanta experiences is familiar to us.  We often find a task becomes progressively more complex as we get into the detail.

The trick to coping with this overwhelming feeling is to break up large or complex tasks such as a product launch.  You can then group together tasks by area: Sales, Marketing, PR, Finance and so on.  The next step is to categorise whether you need to complete the task now, next week or later.  This should create a much more manageable to-do list.

You can then spend a few minutes each day skimming through the list to see what you need to do today, then ignore the rest.  At the beginning of each week, recheck whether you need to do the tasks now, next week or later and repeat.

This way, you’re concerning yourself with a small set of immediate tasks rather worrying about the large number of remaining tasks.  Before you know it, you’ll be finishing the race.

References

1. Huggett, Nick, “Zeno’s Paradoxes”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) – http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/

Related posts:

1. 14: There is always more work to do. Don’t burn yourself out
2. Drowning in product documentation? Start swimming – Part 2

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned as a product manager.

Don’t make things any more complicated than they need to be.  Keep it simple.

(That is all)

Related posts:

1. 11: You are allowed to say ‘no’ – it’s strategic
2. 16: You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone – Joni Mitchell
3. 14: There is always more work to do. Don’t burn yourself out
4. 4: Don’t focus on what’s stopping you