Product Managers must balance their attention between product issues and people issues

Look, we are all under a great deal of pressure all of the time. Our budgets are too small to begin with and will get cut even further when the company runs into a tough quarter, people leave the project, other departments don’t want to work with us, and don’t even get me started on outside vendors and suppliers. Yet, still we are ultimately responsible for fixing problems and creating and delivering a successful product. I will confess that when I’ve been handed a new product to manage, I have the habit of quickly scoping my vision down to the product – what needs to be done to make it successful, people be damned.

Russell Eisenstat is a former Harvard Business School prof has been studying CEOs who do a good job of balancing the product / people scale correctly. There is a great deal that product managers can learn from Russell’s work. What would any effort be worth if there wasn’t a clever acronym and so Russell has come up with the term HCHP which refers to “High-Commitment and High-Performance” firms & leaders.

So here’s the question that we product managers need to find an answer to: how are successful leaders able to resolve the necessary tensions that exist between their quest for creating profitable products and their desire to build a sustainable team that has a high-commitment level? As a product manager I personally feel that I’m motivated by something much deeper than short term profits. I feel a sense of responsibility to leave the company in a better position than I found it. This means creating a successful product AND creating a successful team.

Russell has some suggestions and I have a bunch of things that have worked/not worked for me. Before we jump into the details on how best to achieve this balance, which side of the fence do you fall on: are you a product person or a people person? How has this worked out for you – do your products succeed and do your teams stick around? Leave a comment and let me know.

Tags: people, new products, product manager, product managing, CEO

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… leadership. Sorry in advance for this rant, but I’ve just about had it with product managers who spent their time whining and complaining that nobody listens to them. Pretty much across the board I’ve seem organizations where IT Product Managers get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield (on a good day!). In talking with these Product Managers, I think that I’ve heard just about every excuse that you could imagine: “it’s really an engineering company and I’m not an engineer”, “they don’t work well with women”, “most of the team is in India and they think differently”, “this is a low priority project”, etc. To which I say, just shut up already. The time for Product Mangers to feeling sorry for themselves is over – nobody has time to listen to them anymore.

What’s wrong with all of these complaints? The accusing finger of blame is pointing in the wrong direction: it’s not everyone else’s fault, it’s the Product Manager’s fault. Yes — I’m blaming the Product Manager, get over it. We really have done a lousy job of clearly defining who we are, what the qualifications to be Product Manager are, and just exactly what value we bring to the company. Who can blame everyone else for not respecting us?

What’s Wrong With Product Managers?
Most (98%) of Product Managers don’t understand the #1 rule of being a Product Manager: you are the CEO of your product. I really don’t care if anyone told you that you were (normally they don’t); however, they sure are going to hold you responsible if it fails so you may as well grab the reigns and start to drive that product wagon because if you don’t, then nobody will.

A good 75% of Product Managers then go on to mess up Rule #2 of being a Product Manager: it’s all about the people. Do you know what the difference between a project manager and a Product Manager is? Scope. A project manager has a clear start and finish to a project and gets to lose him/herself in tracking the progress of that project. A Product Manager operates on a higher plane and needs to ensure that the world is ready for the product once the project manager is done. Oh, and that the product that was created was the right product with the right features.

What To Do?
So what is a Product Manger to do? Let’s keep this nice and simple — show some leadership. A Product Manger can’t “manage” because nobody works for them. Instead, a Product Manger needs to inspire those that he/she works with in order to have them work on those items that the Product Manager needs to have done. IT staff, finance staff, marketing folks, etc. all need to come together and do work at the request of a Product Manager for whom they do not actually work. The only way that this can be done successfully is for the Product Manager to set an example of leadership by showing the team the correct way forward. This means that the Product Manager needs to have great interpersonal skills, lots of time and patience, and the ability to simplify complex product status in order to communicate it to many different parties.

How hard can this be? It turns out that it is very hard. There are lots of different Product Management courses out there; however, there is precious few courses on Product Management leadership. Maybe it’s time that Leadership becomes the new focus for all Product Mangers…

Tags: IT Product manager, leadership, project, CEO

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So what makes being an IT Product Manger any different from being a regular product manager? Hey, we’re better! Well, maybe not BETTER, but we do see ourselves as being part of a very special group: technical professionals who have also been invited to live in the business world.

What this boils down to is the simple fact that what sets IT Product Managers apart from all others is that they need to be good at doing three things (at the same time of course):

1. Think/Act/Breath Like a CEO: simply because you are. An IT Product Manger IS the CEO of his/her product. It is not a stretch to say that the product will succeed or fail based on it’s Product Manger’s abilities. How’s that for some pressure?
2. Understand the Bottom Line and Up Time: cut ‘em in half and you’ll find that IT Product Managers don’t just have a left brain / right brain thing going on, they’ve also got a tech / biz thing happening. As we move from meeting to call to meeting, we are constantly shifting gears in order to deal with both sides of the company. We are the bridge between to very different worlds.
3. Be A SME: this is the key. This is the one feature that distinguishes a Product Manager from a Program Manager. IT Product Managers have to be Subject Matter Experts. We have to truly know our products from the inside out as well as the technologies that they use and why they are needed. More than any other feature, this is what makes IT Product Managers so special — the immense amount of knowledge that we need to know in order to be able to do our jobs.

I think that it was Charles Dickens who said “… It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” For IT Product Managers it couldn’t be truer. There are times that we feel, move, and act with all of the power of a true CEO. However, then there are those times that we feel overwhelmed with the complexities of everything that we still have to accomplish.

No matter, now you have found this blog and together we shall find a way for you to overcome all problems. Exactly how you are going to do this is a topic for a future posting…

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