As product managers, our workload intensity tends to be cyclical and sometimes these cycles can stack up.  I’ve had a hectic couple of months, which explains the lack of new posts recently. I thought you might be interested in a few coping strategies I’ve used to keep my head above water.

For most of last year I disciplined myself to post an article about product management each week.  Naturally some were better than others, often in inverse proportion to the effort I’d put in to writing them (natch).  Towards the end of last year, the day job became rather more busy, what with planning and budgeting for next fiscal year, so to compensate I scaled down some extra-curricular activities (the blog, for instance) and put in place some coping strategies at work.

1. Managing distractions

Everyone seems to want a piece of a product manager.  I don’t know whether it’s down to our natural charisma or simply because we happen to know pretty much everything about our products and are helpful people (sadly, I suspect it’s the latter).  As a consequence, people soon figure out that the quickest way to answer a product question is to ask the product manager.

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:

• Set your phone to direct all calls to voicemail, or if you can’t, turn off the ringer
• Set an out of office message and close your email client, or if you can’t, discipline yourself only to check your emails for a set amount of time at specific points of the day
• Sign out of your IM client
• Stop people disturbing you at your desk by working from a different part of the office or at home
• 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.

2. Email discipline – the four Ds

We 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.  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, 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:

• Block out two thirty-minute slots for reading and responding to emails, one in the morning, one in the afternoon
• Don’t check emails outside of these two allocated slots
• When checking the emails, use the four Ds

3. Stop work when you’re meant to

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.

If your line manager doesn’t boot you out each night, bear in mind that there’s always more to do and that product managers are rarely paid overtime.  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:

• Set your BlackBerry to turn off automatically outside of working hours
• Similarly, don’t log into work webmail
• Resist the urge to take your laptop home and do some more work in the evening
• Take some exercise after work

On the last point about exercise, after a hard day you may feel tired, but this is often mental tiredness rather than physical tiredness.  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.

So when things get busy at work, give these three tips a try, they may help.  If you have any good tips of your own, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Ill communication
2. 10: Give yourself time to think in a straight line

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 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’ve 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 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. 13: You’ve got to start the race before you can finish it
2. 2: Find problems rather than guess solutions

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 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

Do you spend more time writing documents about your product than actually managing it?

Many companies with a product management function become all caught up in the process, drowning themselves in increasing numbers of documents. These rapidly become overwhelming to manage, contain duplicated detail and ultimately obscure the real goal of product management, namely to create successful products.

Every product has its own story, a narrative that takes it from idea to creation to update to end of life.  However, we have a tendency to obscure this story with a plethora of product concept documents, business cases, project briefs, market, product and commercial requirements documents, technical specifications and so on, many of which can duplicate information.  To compound the confusion, each organisation seems to use them in different ways!

So let’s get away from the labels for these documents and consider what purpose they serve by identifying the questions they answer and who needs to know the answers.  If you can answer the relevant questions on a single sheet of paper, great!  That is likely the right level of detail for your needs.

Concept stage: what’s the big idea?

Objective: to pass the ‘sniff test’
Audience: peers, potential customers

First of all, we need to describe what the big idea is.  This could be a whole new product or service, a new feature or even a different way of doing business.

At this stage we don’t necessarily have or need all the detail quite yet.  The reason for this is that it is fairly labour-intensive to research and work up a solid business case.  We don’t want to go to all that effort for every half-baked idea that comes in, so we want to filter out the concepts that don’t cut the mustard before we’ve spent too much time on them, so that we can devote time to the better ideas.

The ‘sniff test’ is pretty simple: if it smells bad, it probably is bad.

Questions to ask at the concept stage:

• What’s the back-story or context?
• What’s the problem, who’s got it and why is it a big deal?
• What’s the solution to the problem?

Fleshing out the detail: what else do we need to know?

Objective: to find the right solution to the problem
Audience: your boss and his or her peers

Okay, we’ve made a good start on describing what we want to do and why it’s worth doing.  Now we need some more detail to see if we’re missing something obvious.

We don’t want to go rushing into something unless we’ve got a reasonable idea that we’ve identified a real problem needing to be solved as opposed to creating a solution in search of a problem.  It’s also helpful to figure out early whether we stand a chance of being successful and to adapt our approach to increase that chance.

Questions to ask when fleshing out the detail:

• Who’s doing this already?
• If no-one is, why not (and are you sure)?
• If someone already is, why will the people with the problem think our way is any better or different?
• How’s it going to work? (very roughly – DO NOT start writing specifications)
• Do the people with the problem agree with your proposed solution? (tip: ask them)
• What skills / technologies / approaches do we need to do this?

Investment stage: why should we spend cash doing this?

Objective: to avoid a costly error
Audience: whoever holds the purse-strings

At this point, we need to go cap-in-hand to the people with the cash.  Depending on whether you’re speaking to a Managing Director (read: Sales guy) or a Financial Director, it all boils down to:

“If I give you £10,000, I want you to make me or save me £50,000 in return”

Questions to ask at the investment stage:

• All of the previous questions, plus
• How much will this cost to build?
• How long is it going to take?
• How much is it going to cost to tell the people with the problem that we’ve solved it?
• How much is it going to cost to keep the product going (support and maintain)?
• How many are we going to sell and how often?
• How quickly will we sell the first one?
• How much will the customer agree to pay for them?
• How much do other companies charge for the same thing?
• How quickly will we cover our costs?
• How many do we have to keep selling to keep turning a profit?
• How much is it going to save us or make us?

That’s a good place to leave things for now.  Next time we’ll look at the information you need to gather to build and launch successfully.

Related posts:

1. Drowning in documentation? Start swimming – Part 2

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

Product managers hate saying ‘no’. It’s not in our nature to disappoint people. We want everyone to be happy with our products. We’d much rather say a nice, cooperative ‘yes’ that makes everyone happy and leaves us feeling warm and fuzzy.

The problem is that saying yes to everything creates manifest chaos. Whatever passed for a roadmap is effectively torn up and thrown out. You’ve made a commitment to deliver everyone’s conflicting and baseless requests, something which is now a logical impossibility.

The correct response in both cases is to reach for the proverbial shotgun and suggest politely that this is in fact not something you’re willing to consider.

Being responsible for a product’s strategy means that you have to make choices simply because attempting to do everything results in an unfocused mess. Just look at Facebook. Or eBay. Or Spotify. This means you are duty-bound to say no from time to time and to justify why.

The justification piece is important. Sadly, few of us are in the exalted position where saying ‘no’ is justification enough. Expect that you will have to point out what other things will have to be traded out or how much additional resource you need to do the new thing in addition to everything else.

You may be lucky enough to be in a company which has set out its long-term strategy allowing you to demonstrate that this new thing is a distraction from or directly at odds with what needs to be done. Push comes to shove, you may even have to put a small set of delivery estimates together with some forecasts to show why the proposal is not going to pay for itself.

So if… when you have to say ‘no’ to someone, do so firmly, politely and unambiguously. Repeat yourself if the message doesn’t get through the first couple of times.

Postscript

…until you’re ordered to do it irrespective by the HiPPO (highest-paid person in the organisation), that is.  Natch.

Further reading:

1. How Saying “No” Strengthens Your Strategy, ThoughtLeaders: http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2011/07/how-saying-no-strengthens-your-strategy
2. The Gentle Art of Saying No, Lifehack: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/the-gentle-art-of-saying-no.html
3. 7 Simple Ways to Say “No”, zenhabits: http://zenhabits.net/say-no/

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

One of the many personal challenges I’ve faced in my working life was to overcome my natural tendency towards being erratic. I’m not talking about endearing (to me at least) eccentricities, more about practical things such as a rubbish memory for dates and poor time management.  Throw in a crisis and I could generally be found running around with my head on fire.

Time management was a trickier one to solve as my other half declines to accompany me to work to remind me what I’m meant to be doing.  Nor am I privileged / well-paid / important enough to have an executive assistant, so here are a few practical tips I’ve used to manage my time more effectively.

1. Form good habits.  Assign regular slots in your diary for specific tasks, such as reading and responding to emails.  The trick is then to be sufficiently self-disciplined to ensure that you use this time for that specific task and no more.  It also takes a reasonable effort to stick to a routine for a while before it becomes habitual, but once it is after a few days, it will be much easier to follow. Reinforce this with your company calendar system, namely by ensuring Outlook shows you as ‘busy’, and this will have the benefit of training other people to respect your routine.
2. Have a ‘no meetings’ day each week. For a product manager, this sounds impossible, but think of it this way: when you’re on vacation, you don’t attend meetings and yet the business still manages without you, so it’s clearly not impossible.  If you really can’t stop people booking you into meetings, fake some leave to remove all distractions: set an out-of-office message, close Outlook, redirect all your calls to voicemail, sign out of instant messaging and, if needs be, work from home.  It’s a good idea to tell your manager you’re doing this, but reassure them that you’ll get far more done this way.  Then you can concentrate on all your work in peace.
3. Habitually working early, late, at weekends is cheating and counter-productive. Not only do you wear yourself down when you should be having some time to yourself / your family, but you also set an unrealistically high expectation with your colleagues about how much work you do from week to week.  If you then stop working extra hours, guess what?  You’ll start looking like you’re not trying as hard.  So it’s best to avoid that by working the hours you’re meant to.  If you can’t get everything done in the time available, it’s going to have to wait.

I’ve just been reading a great book, Time: A User’s Guide, by Stefan Klein, which has much more advice to offer on making time management techniques work not just in the week or two after you’ve received training, but on  an ongoing basis.  More on this later.

Related posts:

1. 14: There is always more work to do. Don’t burn yourself out

The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford (Amazon)

I appreciate that it is somewhat perverse to recommend a book to you that ostensibly advocates ditching the desk job in favour of more creative and rewarding manual labour.  Bear with its author, though, because this is a fine and entertaining read.

Through personal experience of hands-on jobs, academia  and desk-bound drudgery, Matthew Crawford has found enlightenment and nourishment for his soul through diagnosis and repair of shonky motorcycles.  He writes in an easy-going, conversational style, which ensures that the book remains light-hearted and amusing throughout.

Loosely autobiographical, Crawford’s dissertation draws on both the Arts and Sciences to illustrate his point.  As product managers (ALERT: tenuous link to subject of this blog), we appreciate both the artistic and scientific challenges of our roles, whether it’s crafting that launch presentation at the last minute or trying to explain to Development why feature X may be a cool science project, but is utterly devoid of any commercial value.  Coupled with our propensity to have a hobby that in most cases could in itself become a self-sustaining day job, this book should strike a chord with you as it did for me.

Without spoiling the book for you, but to reassure your respective other halves, I don’t think that it will convince you to ditch the desk job in favour of scraped knuckles, dirty fingernails and mugs of tea in a freezing workshop.  In some ways, I was mildly disappointed that I didn’t reach for the laptop to write my letter of resignation immediately on closing the book, however I did appreciate how it led me to re-evaluate my work-life balance and refresh my perspective on the absurdities of office life.

I commend this book to you; enjoy it and pass it on to other, like-minded desk jockeys.

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1. Hello. I’m new.

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

Don’t you find that it is always so hard to recover something that started badly?  Whether it’s a development project, a product launch, or a new starter in your team, you can be reasonably certain that each will benefit from a good start.

So if you’re preparing for a development project, get your business case and requirements sorted out in advance. Run your proposal past a few different people and challenge them to find the holes in your case.  Make sure your new starter has what they need to do their job available to them on day one and share with them your clear plan for what you need them to achieve over the coming weeks and months and how you’ll measure their success.

In other words, use The Seven Ps to ensure everything you do starts out well.

Related posts:

1. Hello. I’m new.
2. 6: Good presentation skills are not the same as good PowerPoint skills
3. 13: You’ve got to start the race before you can finish it
4. Drowning in documentation? Start swimming – Part 1

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

“Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares?… He’s a mile away and you’ve got his shoes.”
Billy Connolly

Empathy is something every product manager needs to be able to do their job well. Without it, it’s impossible to be sure what matters most to your target market and how valuable a solution to their problems will be.

So put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re speaking with. Just don’t walk off with them.

Related posts:

1. 15: Product management is selling
2. 9: Everything benefits from a good start in life
3. 3: Know your subject matter
4. Context is everything

Love them or hate them, you won’t have a successful product without your sales force.  So if you’re at a loose end on Monday night, come join me to discuss the relationship between Product Management and Sales on @ProdMgmtTalk.

• In the UK, if you want to share your views, you’ll need to stay up past your bedtime on a school night.  The tweet chat is early Tuesday 26 July, midnight – 1:00 AM BST.
• For the US, it will be Monday 25 July, between 4:00 – 5:00 PM PT
• And for Australia it will be Tuesday 26 July 9:00 – 10:00 AM ET

I hope you can join me – I look forward to seeing you there.  Detail on the discussion and background reading is available after the break.

The Global Product Management Talk on Product Management and the Sales Force

Full press release

RSVP: http://busuttil-estw.eventbrite.com

The effectiveness of your organisation’s sales force ultimately determines whether your carefully-crafted product is a roaring success or an abject failure.  As product managers and marketers, you play a pivotal role in helping your sales teams realise the potential of your products.  We’ll be exploring what you can and should be doing.

Some articles to stimulate thought on the discussion:

• CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs
• Discount gambit | A Smart Bear
• How to get your sales team selling value instead of discounting | I Manage Products
• Why aren’t Sales selling my new product? | I Manage Products
• Work effectively with Sales | How To Be A Good Product Manager

Questions to be discussed:

1. What are your personal top 3 challenges when engaging with your sales force?
2. What information does a sales person need to know about your product to sell it?
3. What would a product manager’s perfect sales person look like?
4. What have you learned from sales that has made you a better product manager?
5. What creative methods have you employed to focus the attention of your sales people on your product?
6. How does your approach change when working with indirect sales teams versus direct?
7. In the end, what is it that sales people really need from product management?

About ProdMgmtTalk:

The Global Product Management Talk brings international product managers together with experts in the field weekly in a twitter chat format on Mondays, 4:00 – 5:00 PM PST Co-hosted by Cindy F. Solomon and Adrienne Tan, who interview a Product Management expert that leads the discussion about a particular topic. The Product Management speaker tweets answers to pre-posted questions during the hour, while everyone chimes in on the tweet stream. After the event, the transcript is made available and participants are encouraged to expand upon their statements and insights by blogging to continue the conversation.

How to Participate:

• twebevent – http://bit.ly/dTTbk8
• tweetchat – http://bit.ly/eC3D09
• Automatically add #prodmgmttalk to your tweets to show up in twitter stream

Related posts:

1. How to get your sales team selling value instead of discounting
2. Why aren’t Sales selling my new product?