Product Managers Are A Lot Like Music Conductors, But ...

So what do product mangers mange? Generally I’d agree with you if you answered “products“; however, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think that we’re missing the mark if that’s our answer.

If you think about it, what we really spend our time doing is managing people and hoping that they will help us to make our products successful. That being said, did you ever get any training on how to mange people?

Product Managers Don’t Make Beautiful Music

One of the more popular ways to think about the how product mangers do their job is to picture them as being orchestra conductors. You can almost imagine yourself standing in front of everyone who works for your company, tapping your conductor’s wand on the sheet music stand in front of you, and then with a flourish you begin.

First up is the requirements team, before they are done the product developers step in followed by marketing and sales softly at first and then louder as time moves on. Nice mental picture, eh?

Too bad life doesn’t really work out this way. Dr. Henry Mintzberg at McGill University says that in reality what you’d be hearing is what a pre-concert warm-up sounds like – everyone out of tune and playing over the top of each other. Now that’s what I am familiar with!

Dr. Mintzberg points out that each and every one of us is flawed - there is no such thing as a perfect product manager. However, the really good product managers are less screwed-up and that is something that we can shoot for.

It’s All About The Interruptions

Think about how your yesterday went. Did you start the day with a plan and then were you able to accomplish that plan? I’m willing to bet that the answer is probably not.  It’s a fact of life for the modern product manager that every day is basically a stream of interruptions – one after another.

Don’t even get me started on what Blackberrys and email have done to compound the interruption problem. One top of this madness we need to find a way to mange the people that we work with – and it sure looks like we’re doing it the wrong way.

The Three Planes Of Product Management

Product managers are never taught how to manage people to get results. This means that too many of us end up hiding behind emails and sticky notes when we are trying to get our virtual teams to accomplish tasks.

Dr. Mintzberg has identified three different “planes” of how we can mange people. We need to use all three, but we are currently not balancing how we use them.

• The Direct Plane – this is where product managers “get their hands dirty” and jump right in and manage actions directly. You know what this looks like – we mange projects, we negotiate contracts. In all honesty this is the easiest way to do things because we don’t have to go through the effort of getting others to do work for us.

• The Manage People Plane – this is the tricky one. If product managers can find the time, then they can work with the people that they need to take action in order to make their product a success and motivate them, train them, build teams, etc. In other words, make it so that they can take action and be more effective. Easy to say, hard to do.

• The Manage Information Plane – all too often this is where product managers choose to hide out. Here we can mange information in order to drive people. We use budgets, objectives, we delegate tasks, set organizational structures, etc. All very powerful stuff, but note that we don’t necessarily have to deal with real people and all of the messy issues that that might entail.

Final Thoughts

Nobody ever taught you how to manage the people that you need to convince to do what you need them to do in order to make your product a success. You’ve probably discovered by now that you’ve got a lot of different ways to make things happen.

The worst kind of product manager manages only by using information. Sure this is a comfortable way of doing things and seems to be the simplest way to get things accomplished. However, it’s always better to spend the time working with the people that you need on your side. In the end you’ll be glad that you did.

Product managers who can do this will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When a product manger’s birthday rolls around and before he / she gets a chance to blow out the candles on their birthday cake, it is customary that they make a wish. Guess what just about all product mangers wish for every year?

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Last time we spent some time talking about high-commitment, high-performance (HCHP) companies and alluded to the fact that their IT leaders had found a way to balance between managing products and managing people. I want to be able to do that! Perhaps they can teach us Product Managers something…

As a product manager, we are really under incredible daily pressure to meet the performance demands of our investors. All too often we don’t view our upper managers as investors; however, at the end of the day that is really what they are: they have decided to spend money on our product and not something else so clearly they expect a return on that investment that is larger than the other options could have provided. If you don’t meet this need, then give it up – nothing else really matters.

How can you push for the superior performance that will be required in order to meet your management’s expectations? In many cases you’ll be called on to make extraordinary decisions and even implement unconventional ideas. One example of this would be recommending that your product be killed if you came to realize that it had no hope of being successful. How many product mangers that you know would have the guts to do that?

Having the courage to make big decisions is great; however, it means nothing if you take the commitment of your team for granted and end up having your decisions destroy the delicate social fabric that holds your organization together. Really good Product Mangers find a way to personally create a link between the people who are doing the work and the results that they must deliver.

I can hear you now saying “great words, but how do I do that…?” You do it by simultaneously combining four different strategies that will allow you to hold the center and not stray off course:

1. Earn Trust: Product Managers need to earn the trust of everyone who is working on their product. The ONLY way to do this is to be open with your team and to always share the truth with them – get caught in one lie or half-truth and the game is over.

2. Engage Deeply: Build a close connection with everyone on your team so that when you interact with them it can be direct and personal.
3. Create a Focused Agenda: In order to mobilize a group of people, a Product Manger needs to have a very clearly defined and focused agenda that can be communicated and bought into by the entire team.
4. Build Leadership: a Product Manager can not be everywhere at all times nor can he/she do everything. This means that the Product Manager needs to be building a leadership team within the product team so that progress can continue even when the Product Manger is not available.

Assuming that you can pull this off, you still have not achieved everything that HCHP IT leaders can do. Next comes the challenge of creating a sense of shared purpose for your team…

So do you have what it takes to be a HCHP Product Manager? If you were in charge of a product that had no hope of success, would you have the courage to kill it? Have you ever managed a product that should have been killed early on? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: trust, engagement, agenda, focus, leadership, product manager

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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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