Product Managers Need To Work With Sales To Find Golden Customers

As the CEO of your product, at the end of the day you are the one who is responsible for it being a success. Not the sales team, not the developers, not the CEO. You. This is one of the HUGE differences between a project manger and a product manger. Project managers can complete their tasks, make sure that everything is checked off, and then have an immense feeling of satisfaction. A product manger doesn’t get to feel this way unless his/her product is a commercial (or internal) success. At too many companies, the process for making a product a success are way to complex and appear to have been designed by a project manger: they are littered with lots of steps and dozens of milestones. Making a product a success is actually a relatively simple process and a product manager can make it so if you follow the following three steps.

In a nutshell, making your product a success comes down to doing three things correctly: improving the quality of the prospects that your sales teams generate, improving the presentations about your product that are given to potential customers, and increasing the number of potential customers that your sales teams call on. In order to simplify the life of a product manger, improvements need to simultaneously be made in all three of these areas. Now here’s how to do that:

• Improve The Quality Of The Prospects That Your Sales Teams Generate: Help your sales teams out by getting existing customers to provide referrals to new customers. Hey, the job of selling any product let alone your product is a difficult task. When a salesperson shows up on a new customer’s doorstep, do you think that that potential customer is happy to see them? No. However, if you can get existing customers to open the door for your sales team then the prospect’s guard will be down and your salesperson will actually have a fighting chance of getting them interested in your product.
  Direct your sales teams to only meet with decision makers. You know better than anyone else what kind of job title is going to be required to shell out the cash needed to buy your product. Tell you sales teams what to look for. This will help your sales teams make the best use of their time - if they can’t get access to the right person, they’ll know to move on to the next prospect.
  Guide your sales team toward the big buyers and away from the little buyers. Every deal takes about the same amount of time to close and if it turns out that a prospect does not have much money to spend, then in reality they are a poor fit for your product. Remember that just a few big deals is much better than a whole bunch of little deals.
• Improve The Presentations About Your Product That Are Given To Potential Customers: Help your sales teams out by equipping them with the material that they need for multiple meetings with a potential customer. Rarely will a deal be closed on the first meeting so you are going to have to teach your sales teams about the flow of the conversation as it relates to your product. A key part of this is to help them identify goals for the first and second meetings. If possible, as a product manger you should practice with your sales teams in order to ensure that they aren’t repeating themselves due to nervousness nor are they bringing up objections before the customer does.
• Increasing The Number Of Potential Customers That Your Sales Teams Call On: You are the CEO of your product. It’s up to you to guide your sales teams towards the right potential customers and then let them work their magic. Ensure that your sales teams are only meeting with decision makers - meeting with anyone else will allow your team to be identified as a salesperson instead of potential business partners. Have your sales teams take charge of their schedules. Have them agree to meet with a prospective customer at whatever time works best for the customer and then call back later to move it to a time/date that works best for your sales team. This way they can pack more customer contact into a given day. This is how they will eventually end up selling more of your product.

Finally, make sure that the sales teams that are selling your products are out of the office during prime working hours. If they are in the office, then they are not in front of a customer selling your product and this is bad for both of you. All though this may seem like a lot of sales work for a product manger to do, remember that you are the only one in your company that will ultimately be judged by how successful your product is. You need to be able to do it all…!

How much interaction with your sales teams do you have today? Do you help them qualify leads so that they are only working with high potential customers? Have you spent time with them coaching them how to give presentations on your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customers, potential customers, presentations, product manager, prospects, qualifying, Sales

Dell Consumer Product Managers Are Having Problems Creating Christmas Gifts

Q: How can you tell when a Product Manger drops the ball?

A: When there is an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title “As Holidays Approach, Dell Lags In New Products”

Man, talk about having your failures broadcast to the whole world! In the consumer space in which Dell sells some of its PC and notebook computers, the end of the year Christmas holidays are the key to a company’s survival. The sales that occur during this time generally account for 30% - 50% of Dell’s annual consumer PC revenue. Miss this revenue train and you’re going to be standing around waiting for the next opportunity for quite some time!

Where did product managers let Dell down? One place is in an ambitious mini MP3 player that Dell was planning on introducing. Way back in 2007, Dell bought a company called Zing in order to get access to their entertainment software. However, now Dell has decided not to launch this product before the holidays. Ouch! What this means is that the folks who would have bought this product will now go out and buy iPods and, maybe, Zunes. Once they do that, Dell is probably flat out of luck - once you’ve loaded your iPod up with $200 worth of songs, you sure don’t want to change players.

Interestingly enough, Dell product managers are not just falling down in the cutting edge new product area, they also seem to be dropping the ball in their bread & butter areas such as notebooks. So far this season, Dell has only released two netbooks (low end laptops, good for web surfing and emails) and some new paint schemes for some existing notebooks. Remember, they are playing in a highly competitive market - Apple just cranked out that very cool all aluminum Macbook and even Acer has released a bunch of new notebooks computers that have fancy styling and built-in access to 3G networks. What’s going on with those Dell product managers?

Michael Tatelman is Dell’s retail chief. He has been forced to tell the press that “You’ll see some very sexy products coming out of Dell”, though they may come out after the holidays. Double ouch!

Way back in the Fall, Michael Dell had told investors that Dell would “focus on killer products…” and they they would have a “shorter development cycle” that would allow them to get products out “40% to 50% faster”. Hmm, missing the Christmas season sure makes it seem like that is not going to happen.

This isn’t the first time that the Consumer products division of Dell has missed a great opportunity. Back at the start of the school year they had to hold back on introducing their first netbook because of keyboard problems and so they missed most of the back-to-school selling window. That probably explains why the consumer products division failed to make a profit in the last quarter and why Dell just got done laying off 9,000 of its workers.

What’s going on here? As product managers we are all probably quite familiar with the problems that Dell is facing. It sure looks like their new product pipeline, which is the lifeblood of Dell’s consumer division, has a friction problem - products are not traveling through it quickly enough. A product manager can’t fix a problem like this by his / herself. However, it is our responsibility to get the various folks who can fix it together and knock some heads in order to get it solved. Since this problem has existed since the start of the school year, clearly there is a lingering sense of a lack of momentum at Dell.

What should the Dell product managers be doing? They need to start with a calendar and determine when they need to have new products in order to match up with their customer’s buying cycles. Once they have this, then they need to start with a with the finished product and work back. What should the next product look like and what features will it have? Once this is nailed down, they need to determine how that product can be available by that date. Very basic stuff, but it sure looks like this is not happening. If a product can’t meet a date, then you need to determine what functionally can be dropped to still meet the date. If too much would have to be dropped, then and only then should you start to move dates around.

Dell can recover from these blunders, but it’s going to require that their Product Mangers step up and take responsibility for fixing the system.

What do you think that Dell’s product managers should do next? Why do you think that they are having their current problems? Do you think that they should try to be more like Apple? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Dell, new product, product manager, product managment, Sales

Product Managers Need To Take Advantage Of The Current Recession

Psst - don’t look now, but it sorta looks like all of the economies in the world are all tanking at the same time. If you are a product manager, this sure does not look good for your career. I view a product manager as being the CEO of your product and so at the end of the day no matter what the economy is doing you are responsible for making sure that your  product is a success. Hmm, if only someone had 7 suggestions for what a product manager should be doing RIGHT NOW…!

Good news - I do. As the CEO of your product you are going to have stand up and take charge even as everyone else in your company may be ducking in order to avoid attracting attention and getting laid off. At this time you can’t afford to be quiet - if your product fails, you’ll be gone so you may as well go out swinging. If you are willing to work to make your product a success no matter what, then this list of 7 things that you should be doing is just what the economic doctor ordered:

1. Get Offensive: No, I’m not talking about working (more) four-letter words into your everyday vocabulary. Rather, I’m suggesting that you realize that during a recession other product mangers are going to be playing defense. They are going to be trying to hang on to the customers that they have because they fear losing them and they’re going to not be spending enough time pursuing new customer opportunities. That means that that this recession is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you to build market share for your product. Work with your sales team and make sure that they are leaving no rock unturned right now in order to find new potential customers.
2. Incent Your Customers: Once again, no - don’t get them angry; instead, get them motivated to try/buy your product. If ever there was a time to roll out a marketing program that is designed to get those customers who might be sitting on the fence eager to use your product, then this is the time to do it.
3. Don’t Travel: Within your company, the bean counters are going to be keeping their beady little eyes posted in order to find ways to reduce costs. If you are hopping on a plane every week to go “gather requirements” from customers, all of a sudden you are going to find yourself wearing a nice bright set of concentric circles on you back when it comes time to reduce staff. Instead, use the full power of the 21st Century to reach out and contact both existing customers and new ones that your sales team has found. Although we are often tempted to use email for everything, don’t forget to pick up the phone and start calling!
4. Get Creative: … with your marketing. One of my favorite quotes from the master marketeer, P.T. Barnum is “Without promotion, something terrible happens … NOTHING!” We’re not talking about a big iPhone launch ad campaign here, but rather a whole series of small marketing efforts that can have a big combined effect. Things like free trials of your product, special discounts, or even using the web to set up a customer portal to provide access to special information and support. Doing an online survey can be a great way to collect valuable customer information while reminding your customers that you are still here.
5. Talk To Me Baby: How many times have you been told that an existing customer is 5x cheaper to sell to than getting a new customer? Well, now is the time to put that knowledge into action. Use your existing customers to help drive your product’s innovation direction. Collecting this type of information from customers who have already selected your product will allow you to make the product even better which will help capture more market share during the recession.
6. Retrain Sales: We product managers know our products inside and out. How well does your sales team know your product? Probably not as well as you do. Use the recession to take the time to bring your sales teams up to speed on what they need to know: new features, planned features, competative info, etc. Once you’ve got them pumped up, there will be no stopping them from selling more of your product.
7. Work Smarter: When times are good, we all have a tendency to focus on ourselves and try to meet our own objectives. During hard times, we need to instead look at our customers and try to figure out what we need to do to better met their objectives. This may be as simple as adjusting the hours that you work in order to better match your customer and to ensure that you’ll be there if they need to call you directly. Little things like this can make all the difference in ensuring that your product is a success even during a recession.

How is your product doing during this recession? Do you feel that your sales teams are out working hard enough to sell it? Have you done anything creative to help the company sell more of your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: brand management, discount, marketing, marketing management, product manager, product marketing, promotion, recession, Sales

Product Managers Need To Be Involved In Making Complex Sales Happen

As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the middle of a complex sale. Hopefully you’ve got a great sales team working at your company; however, even the best sales team is going to have to reach out to the Product Manger to handle a complex sale. Let’s talk about what you are going to have to do to help “land the big one”…

I guess the first thing that we should all agree on is the simple fact that a complex sale is much different than a normal sale of your product. This type of sale is going to require extra preparation on your part, it will probably require a longer selling cycle, and will, of course, require more effort on your part to make it happen. I’ve found that complex sales are pretty easy to identify. There is never just one decision maker, rather the product selection process is often spread across multiple departments and may  require several levels of executive authority in order to get the deal approved. Nobody said that this was going to be easy!

Making a complex sale happen is really the responsibility of your sales team. However, as the CEO of your product, you care and you have a critical role to play. Here are the three things that a Product Manger needs to do in order to help make a complex sale happen:

1. Understand What The Real Business Issues Are: Since you are the Product Manger, you should fully understand what business problems your product can solve. Using this knowledge  you need to learn what the customer’s current situation is and determine if there is a match. If there is, then you’re going to have to explain this to the sales team in words that they can then use when they are talking with the customer.
2. Find Out Who ALL The Decision Makers Are: Every company is different and so this question will have a different answer every time. Your sales team may get too wrapped up and focus too much on their point of contact within the company. We all know that, especially for IT products, the ultimate decision maker may have had very little input to the product discussion; however, they are the go-to person that the buyer will double check with before making a decision. It is ultimately your responsibility to keep your eyes open and guide your sales team to talk with ALL of the decision makers.
3. Determine What Criteria Will Be Used To Make A Product Selection: Is there a specific business result that the customer is hoping that your product will create? If you can figure out what criteria will be driving the customer’s decision making process, then that is where you can equip your sales teams to spend their time showing how your product is better than all of the competition.

Remember, one of the things that the customer is going to want you to really, really understand is just exactly what he is trying to accomplish. If you and your sales teams can do this then you’ll be able to win more complex sales than the other Product Mangers out there.

Would you say that most of your sales are complex or not complex sales? When they are complex sales, does your sales team come looking for help from you? Do you find that the customer has a whole collection of people on their side who will make the final product selection? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: complex sales, customer, deal, deals, IT Product manager, new product, new products, product manager, Sales

Coke Product Managers Have Over 450 Different Products To Manage

So I just happened to be leafing through an issue of Information Week and I ran across an article that was talking about how IT is run over at Coke. In a nutshell, the article was a glowing review of the changes that Jean-Michel Ares has been making. However, what really caught my eye was a discussion about how Coke is running their product manager activities. It turns out that Coke currently has over 450 separate brands including Coke, Diet Coke, Minute Maid, Dasani, etc. Just how can product managers at Coke possibly manage so many different products globally?

Perhaps because of the IT focus of the article, there was a lot of discussion about an application that Coke has implemented to help it track all of it’s ongoing projects. They selected an application called Clarity from CA (are they still in business?) It appears as though they have mated this app with an Oracle DB and now use it to track all of their development projects. What was interesting is that Coke appears to use a gate process as their project management process that most companies use as a way to remind themselves to kill a project if market conditions have changed - just getting the green light for a project does not mean that it will ever see the light of day.

Coke is in the process of moving to a new way of managing their products (product managers pay attention!) They are getting ready to implement a new application called the Common Innovation Framework. The reason that Coke gives for doing this is that they want to provide a global view into their product pipeline. It appears as though they are trying to set up a form of knowledge sharing in the hopes that product managers in different countries will search for brand or beverage ideas that worked well in other countires. Oh yeah, they are also hoping that if they have duplicate efforts going on at the same time, this application will allow those to be spotted and combined.

It appears as though the future that Coke’s Product Managers are working towards will allow them to quickly identify customer’s changing tastes, rapidly introduce new products, and kill off products that are no longer meeting customer’s needs. Interestingly enough, Coke views Japan as being the leading market for new products because their consumers quickly get bored with existing products and are always looking for something new. As products die in Japan, they get pulled there and can be introduced in new markets.

It sure looks like there is no shortage of information available to Product Managers at Coke. The entire company has standardized on SAP’s ERP application and they have even been able to extend it down into parts of their bottler and distributor network. The big challenges at Coke appear to be that the costs of raw materials are rising at the same time that consumption of their flagship product, Coke, is declining due to changing consumer tastes. What this all means is that Product Mangers at Coke need to move quickly. Coke has a number of competitors: Pepsi, of course, but also 100’s of local brands that have been fine tuned to meet local tasts.

We all know that relations between departments are never perfect, no matter what people tell magazine reporters. I suspect that the 450+ Product Managers at Coke had their own thoughts about the new product tracking applications that were put in. However, Coke is a successful company that has very deep pockets. One can only hope that at least some of their Product Managers have been able to build bridges to the IT, bottling, and regional teams in order to simplify and smooth out the challenges associated with trying to “… teach the world to sing…”

What do you think that it would be like to be a Product Manager at Coke? Do you think that Product Managers have an easier or harder job to do than Product Managers at other companies? Do you think that things will move even faster for Coke Product Managers as they move into the future? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: Coke, IT Product manager, new products, product development, product life cycle, product management, product manager, Sales

When Product Managers Run Out Of Juice They Need A Jump Start

Ugh! It’s the 4th quarter, the financial world seems to be going to hell-in-a-hand-basket, a global recession appears to either be here or be looming, Microsoft’s Vista is still a dog, and all of those political TV commercials have now officially become annoying. Being a product manager is a tough job on the best of days, but it sure seems like right now it can be a real challenge to even get out of bed let alone be the #1 cheerleader for your product. What’s a product manger to do?

If you were a car sitting in the parking lot at work, your dome light wouldn’t even turn on when a door was opened - that’s how low your energy level is right now. What you need is a good, swift kick in the … , oh wait, that’s for a later post. Right now what you need is a jump-start. What you need is guidance from the world famous Brian Tracy to get you pointed in the right direction in order to get you off of your butt and back on track:

1. Everyone Needs An Action Plan: Come on and admit it - you love plans. Write down everything that you need to be doing and then go back and put an A (high priority), B, or C (low priority) next to each one of them. Brian says that “… a written plan leads you into action.” How’s that for getting started?
2. Get Yourself Clean: No, we’re not talking about drugs (but you probably should do something about that also), rather we’re talking about your work area. What would your mom say if she saw it right now? This is busy work that won’t take too much of your gray matter to quickly make better - do it and then feel happy about it.
3. Two Buckets: Urgent vs. Important: You’ve probably heard this one before, but you can’t hear it too many times. The urgent stuff needs your attention right now - get on it. The important stuff will need your attention, but it can wait just a bit.
4. Go For The Big Value: Those big projects scare all of us - where to start? It really doesn’t matter, just start. You need to tackle the big important tasks that will have a long term payoff for you first. Yeah, yeah, I know that you’d like to get some quick wins by starting with some little tasks, but don’t. Time will fly by and the big boys will still be there and you’ll be even farther behind.
5. Procrastinate!: Yes, you really should do this! The trick is making sure that you procrastinate on the the tasks that will contribute little or nothing to accomplishing your really big goals. Keep pushing them off and I’ll bet that you’ll find that they end up fading away…

We all get burned out, run down, or just simply run out of gas. The key point is to quickly realize that this has happened and to do something about it. Even the best product managers have their off days. The next time that you find yourself staring at the ceiling, whip out this list and get back to work!

When was the last time that you felt that you had stalled? How did you realize this? What did you do about it? How long did it take you to get back on track? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: action plan, burnout, important, IT Product manager, motivation, product management, product manager, product manager jobs, product managing, urgent

Microsoft Distributed A Patch To Catch Users Of Illegal Copies Of Windows

So here’s a little story that caught my attention in the Wall Street Journal the other day. The article was entitled “Microsoft Tries Blackening Screens To Fight Software Piracy In China”. The gist of the article went on to say that Microsoft had distributed a Windows XP patch to users who have elected to get automatic updates over the Internet that turns their backgrounds black and then nags them to switch to a legitimate copy of Windows. What do you think about this tactic - a sound business move or a product management disaster?

Perhaps a few more details on this update are in order. The update does not prevent users from using their PCs. You can change your computer’s background from the black setting to whatever you want (like a photo); however, every 60 minutes it will revert back to black. Additionally, messages are posted every so often to the screen that warn the user about using counterfeit software products.

In China, a number of potentially unsuspecting folks are getting zapped by this warning. People who may have purchased a computer that was built by someone who used a counterfeit copy of Windows XP are now being notified that their computers are running counterfeit copies of Windows. Microsoft has done two things to minimize the fallout from all of this. They’ve lowered the cost of a legit copy of Windows XP to $30 and they will send people a free copy of Windows XP if they send them the physical copy of the counterfeit copy that they were using.

From a product manager’s point-of-view, I can understand both sides of this story. Microsoft has a massive problem with counterfeiting. Since they have the most popular operating system out there, everyone wants to have a copy of it. However, at the same point in time, Microsoft generates a great deal of money from other vendors because there are so many copies of its operating system out there. The more people who use Windows, the more valuable Microsoft training and documentation becomes to others. All that being said, Microsoft is working on the next version of Windows, Windows 7, and it’s sure to be an instant hit the day that it is released simply because so many people are already using Windows.

Every product manager wants their product to be a success. However, we also want our company to get paid for the product otherwise the company may not realize just how successful our product has been. If we give away demo or free copies, it’s very tempting to add some sort of “kill switch” that can or will disable the product at some point in the future in order to motivate the customer to go out and purchase the real product. The challenge that we have here, is that we can’t really control what the customer is going to be doing with our product when this happens. I’m going to guess that more often than not, our product will stop working at just about the worst time imaginable. No matter how much the customer likes our product, they are going to be angry with us because we inconvenienced them.

Additionally, no security solution is going to be perfect. We’re going to end up cutting off some legitimate users. Can you imagine how angry they are going to be? Microsoft has not released any statistics; however, you know that they must have gotten hundreds of complaints from legitimate users who’s computers started incorrectly telling them that they were using counterfeit copies of Windows XP.

When dealing with a software product, it’s always been my feeling that once the product is out there it would be a fool’s quest to try to hunt down and stop any counterfeit copies that might have found their way in to use. Instead, I’ve always felt that making each and every user WANT to be a legitimate user was the way to go. What this meant is that I couldn’t just launch a software product, have people purchase it, and then forget about them.  Instead, I needed to make the purchase of the product just the start of the relationship. It was my job as a product manager to make my customers want to have a closer relationship with my company.

The real trick to being a successful product manager is to create an ecosystem that your customers want to belong to. What this system consists of will be different for each product; however, some common components may include a user group community and the ongoing discussions that occur there, access to developers / technical experts who can answer even the most detailed questions, access to planned new release schedules and a description of enhancements / new features, invitations to user gatherings, etc.

Ultimately, I think that Microsoft has gotten it wrong again. If they made owning a legitimate version of Windows the passkey into a world of access to previlidged information and exceptional customer service, then almost everyone would insist on having a non-counterfeit copy. Having your customers actively avoid counterfit copies and actually requesting legit copies is the way to go.

What do you think would be Microsoft’s best move to reduce piracy of their products? Do you agree with using the patch to hassle people who may be using counterfeit copies? Can you think of a better way to get these folks to buy a legit copy? Should Microsoft even bother going after them? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: counterfeit, IT Product manager, Microsoft, product development, product manager, product manager jobs, Windows XP

Product Mangers Can Turn Time Into Their Friend

Dang - just where does the time seem to go? I don’t know about you but as of late I seem to be running out of time or just simply running behind more often than in the past. I’d like to blame the current turmoil in the financial markets; however, that’s not the problem. There are many, many more people who are better qualified than I talk about time management (I’m sorta a fan of GTD myself), but I do have one secret that I’d like to share with you. No promises, but if you believe what I’m going to share with you and if you take the time to implement it, then there is a pretty good chance that you’ll become the best product manager in the world. Sound interesting? Then read on…

Forget having enough time to do everything that you have to get done. Instead, think for just a moment about projecting an image of being in control of your time. What do you think would happen if everyone who encountered you was left with the impression that you had it all under control? Would your boss be impressed? Would your team be more willing to do what you tell them to do? Could you run meeting more efficiently? Would you just get more respect from everyone? You may be laughing right now and saying that a thin veneer of control put over your normal out-of-control personality is not going to accomplish anything. However, that’s where I think that you would be wrong…

If you think back a bit, you might remember that there was a book called The Secret that was very popular awhile ago. In a nutshell, the secret was that if you can imagine something, then you can make it happen. This applies to making others believe that you have control over your time. However, I’m going get just a bit more specific here and give you one single change that if you implement it will have a dramatic and positive impact on your life: start showing up early.

What this means in the day-to-day life of a product manager is that you need to start to show up for meeting early (5-10 minutes will do) and even more importantly, you need to start to jump on call bridges early (5 minutes will do here). I don’t know about you, but up until just recently I was a constantly late shower-upper. I would slide into calls 5 minutes late and hope that whoever was running the meeting would not stop the call and ask who had just joined when they heard the “beep” that announced my arrival. I’d slug through the call and then slink off when it was over no better or worse for the time spent on the call.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally showed up for a call early. You can imagine how surprised I was when there was nobody on the bridge when I joined (there was that moment where I felt that I needed to check to make sure that I had the right call-in numbers). What happened next really caught my attention: other people started to join. These just happened to be people that I had been trying with no luck to get in touch with. I had very quick, very short conversations with three of them as they joined and got commitments from them to send me answers and materials that I desperately needed. As others joined I exchanged small talk with them and reconnected with people that I knew but had not seen in a long time. When the call’s leader joined he fumbled around for a bit and this gave me time to ask a very good, penetrating question about what he wanted to accomplish on this call and that got everyone involved in a discussion. Man, it was almost like I was running the show!

Based on the success of this accidental event, I started showing up early for all of my meetings that week and found that the same sequence of events repeated itself. Others looked at me as though I was in charge, I connected with other people who were in the meeting, and I was able to make face-to-face requests for support and materials that were never turned down. Wow - who knew that getting what you wanted could be so easy?

Yes, I realize that showing up early for meetings and calls won’t solve all of life’s problems. However, it sure seems to make a lot of little things run much easier. When you couple that with the fact that it’s so very easy to do, why not give it a try and see what it does for you?

When do you show up for meetings & calls - early or late? When you are the one who is running the meeting do you show up early or do you still come late? Have you always been this way or did something cause you to be an early/late person? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: calls, IT Product manager, meetings, product development management, product management, product manager, product manager jobs, product managing, time management

King Solomon Had The #1 Skill That Product Managers Need

Yes, I will tell you what this skill is; however, do you think that you can guess it before I do? I’m sure that you can come up with the standard list of leadership skills that every product manager has (or at least should have): able to deal with pressure, able to lead people, vision, positive attitude, creativity, etc. However, those would all be good to have, but none of them would be the #1 skill that a product manager needs to have. Give up? The answer is … judgment.

The ability to make good decisions is the #1 skill that any product manager needs to have because making decisions is such a large part of what we do each and every day. Two well known business thinkers / authors also agree with me: Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis. Noel and Warren say that judgment can be broken up into three different sets of skills: picking who will be on your team (people), picking what challenges you take on (strategy), and picking what to do when tough times hit (crisis decisions).

People, people, people. Decisions about which people a product manger is going to interact with and have on his / her team are THE most important decisions that they will ever make. Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe Jack Welsh who said that the thing that he failed at the most during his storied career was moving too slowly in making people judgments even when he had all of the data that he needed. Tichy reports that when he’s giving speeches he’ll ask the audience what the worse judgment that they every made was and invariably about 75% of the people will say that they were about people. If a product manager can get the right people on his / her team, then they have solved more than half of the problem.

Next comes what product strategy a product manger wants to pursue. In our world, more often than not this comes down to picking what types of customers we want to go after with our products. Our sales teams are all too often filled with salespeople who will happily go after every customer that they can get a meeting with. However, this is a great way to waste time until all of the money is gone. Picking the right customers from the get-go and going after them aggressively is what a good product manager makes happen.

Bad things happen and a product manager who is ready for them is a product manager who has real-world survival skills. When the whole world seems to have flipped upside down (like when the stock market drops 700 points in a single day!), a product manager who can remain calm and still make good decisions is worth his/her weight in gold. Now this ability is probably as much an art as it is a science; however, at the end of the day it always requires that the product manger know all of the available facts about the situation. To put it simply, the ability to collect the facts is one of the simple secrets behind a product manager’s ability to make good judgments.

How good of a job of making judgements do you think that you do? Do you feel that people, strategy, or crisis decision making is your strongest skill? Have you ever made a bad people judgement? What was the result of this judgement? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: marketing management, product management, product manager, product manager jobs, product marketing, Sales

Being A Product Manger For A Service Requires Different Skills

It’s hard enough to be a product manager for a “real” product, just imagine how hard this job gets when your company decides to switch over and start to offer service products. You’d think that a flexible product manager could just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products and “service” products. Umm, you’d be wrong.

When your company makes the big decision to move over and start offering service products, your life as a product manager will change big time. There are four key success factors that you will need to make sure that you take care of in order to ensure that you will be a successful product manager for services:

1. Make The Company Understand That It’s Already A Service Company: Once your company has decided to start offering service products, you may find that you are already doing this. Instead of inventing new products, perhaps all you have to do is to start charging for things that you are already doing. As a product manager, your first step here will be to work with your customers to make sure that they are aware of the value of your existing services. You’ve got to be careful here: when you suddenly switch a service from being free to now charging for it, you’ve got to make sure that you clearly define the value of the service to both the customer and your internal management. The larger your company is, the better the chances are that you already have services hidden somewhere in how you are currently doing business. One of the best ways to uncover what you already have is to take a look at customer bills - often different parts of the company bill for different items and some may already be billing for services.
2. Transform Your Back Office To Support Services: Product managers know just how important stable internal processes are to  your ability to deliver products consistently. Bad news: when you start to offer service products you are going to find that customer requests to have the service customized to meet their particular needs will have a dramatically bad impact on your cost of delivering the product. In order to solve this problem, there are three things that you can do: (1) build a flexible platform for delivering your services and meeting customer needs, (2) monitor the cost of each of your delivery processes in order to spot the most costly, (3) use new technology to implement process improvements as soon as possible. What all of this means is that the product manger needs to stay on top of how service products are being delivered.
3. Update Your Sales Teams: This may be the most important thing that you do - find a way to transform your sales force that is comfortable selling “real” products into one that can sell service products. One of the most difficult points to get across will be the simple fact that service products take a lot longer to sell and the actual process of selling them is both more complex and strategic. As a product manager it’s not your responsibility to make the sales teams change; however, how well they manage the transformation will determine how successful your product is. Understand that more often than not, a significant number of your current sales teams will end up leaving the company and will be replaced by new salespeople who better understand how to sell services.
4. Focus On How Your Customers Do Their Work: Since a service product is really designed to be used by a customer to make their business run more smoothly, a good product manager now needs to shift his/her focus away from how he/she is delivering the service and start to think about how the customer is going to use the service. This is an important difference from how “hard” product companies operate - they normally focus on things like how much the product is used and how many of a given product a customer is using. A service product is really designed to solve a problem for your customer. This means that the correct way to measure it’s value is to see if it is really solving that problem.  Be careful, as a product manger you may find that you have a lack of expertise to determine how to use your product to solve the customer’s problems better. This may be a great time to bring in a consultant.

Is your company thinking about starting to offer service products? Do you feel that you are ready as a product manger to take charge of these products? Is your sales team up to the task of switching over to selling services from “hard” products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, new product development, new products, product management, product manager, product managing, project management, Sales