Product Mangers Can Create New Products Using Company Data - But Beware Of Having Them Multiply Like Tribbles!

All too often when we think about the products or services that we are product managers for, we get hung up on the need to be able to touch something. Many of us like boxes with lights on them, CD jewel boxes that snap shut with CDs with nicely printed product labels on them, etc. If I can touch it, then it must be a real product. Hmm, but maybe we’ve been missing an alternate universe of products that could boost not only our company’s bottom line but also our careers…

Your company’s most valuable resource is NOT its people. At least according to your accounting department. Instead the most valuable resource that your company owns is all of the data that it has collected since the day that it opened its doors.

Thomas Redman is the author of a book called Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset. He has studied the information that companies have stored up and he’s got some suggestions for us product mangers.

There is a good chance that within all of this data lies a new product that you could bring to market. I’m not saying that this would be easy to do, but it would have a far better chance of succeeding than dreaming up some other risky new product.

Let’s take a look at just what you would / could do to in order to turn this potential pile of gold into a product that you could successfully manage:

1. Create New Content: How the data that you currently have is organized and formatted may not be of any value to your potential customers. Instead, think about ways to reformat it to create new, richer or more targeted data.
2. Repackage, Repackage, Repackage: Even the oldest information can take on a shiny new look if you reformat, synthesize, or filter it. Doing this can also open the door to adding data created by others to the data that you already have to create something new.
3. Informationalize It: Perhaps a new information product could be created by simply adding monitoring functionality to your existing products. Once you collect data about how your products are being used, perhaps this data can then be sold back to the customers who were using it!
4. Got To Keep ‘Em Separated: Take a look at the products that you are managing right now. Are you bundling a product and data together when you sell it? Try separating the data from the product and selling it separately. Hey, it worked wonders for the Xbox!
5. Make The Most Of Asymmetries: Use your data to gain a better understanding of your products and your market in order to leverage any perceived differences in the value of your products or services. Things that your data tells you that nobody else knows can be key to boosting your bottom line.
6. Sell Asymmetries: If your data would provide insights to another firm that they can’t get any other way, then consider selling it to them. Even if the data is not valuable to you, look for other firms to whom it would be valuable.
7. Sometimes Labels Are Good: take the time to classify your data by adding unique labels to customer types in order to help other users of your data to more easily find what and whom they are looking for.
8. Access Has Value: Just by making it easier for consumers to find the data that they are looking for can create a valuable information product.
9. Start Mining: Often the raw data is useless. You need to mine the data and start to conduct analysis of it. Your goal should be to gain an understanding of customer behavior and spot marketplace trends earlier than anyone else.

Have you ever considered selling your company’s data as another product? Do you currently sell data along with your existing products? Would you consider selling data that is “useless” to you to other firms in order to help them compete? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: information, IT Product manager, new product, new product development, new products, product, product design, product development, product management, product manager, products

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

Product Managers Need To Prepare To Meet With Customers

So much has been written about how important it is to get in front of your (potential) customer that I am almost hesitant to add to the pile. However, in reviewing what’s out there, nobody really seems to have spent the time to lay out step-by-step what a product manger needs to do before and during a meeting with a customer. Well good news, today that changes!

In my world, a product manager would never be able to meet with a customer without having a sales rep along for the ride. This is actually quite ok. I consider the sales rep to be my wingman and look forward to meeting with customers. Since we live in busy times I always expect the customer to be busy and for us to end up having less time with them than was planned. What this all leads to is that the key to a successful customer meeting is to prepare, prepare, prepare.

The best way to prepare to meet with a customer is to get your questions in order. By this I mean that you need to come up with roughly 10 different questions that if you can get the customer to answer during your time together then you’ll have the opportunity to collect the real type of product information that you need to improve your product. One of the reasons that you need to have a list of questions is that it will help you to shut up. Yes, you heard me right - the reason that a product manager visits a customer is to learn more about the customer’s needs. The more talking that you do, the less opportunity the customer will have to tell you what they want. Having good questions means that you can be actively listening to see if the customer is answering one of your questions instead of talking too much.

The world of sales has been doing this for a long time and they are actually quite good at it. One trick that they use is to come up with two different ways to ask each question. This allows them to re-ask the question if the customer really does not provide an answer the first time around.

Finally, you need to understand that you are not the only product manager in the world. There are a lot of them out there and they are also probably trying to get in to see your customer. If you were able to get an appointment, then they will probably be able to do the same. This means that you need to come up with a way to make your time together more memorable than anyone else’s.

The best way that I’ve found to do this is to provide the customer with information that they can’t get anywhere else. This can include late-breaking info about their competition or their customers that you pulled out of today’s paper or off of the web. Alternatively, it could be some obscure feature of your product that would appeal to them or maybe even an update on your release schedule. Just make sure that it is important information to them.

When was the last time that you got to meet with one of your customers? Who did the talking while you were there: you, them, or your sales rep? Did you come away from the meeting with new product information that you could use? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, IT Product manager, new product development, new products, product development, product development process, product manager, product managers jobs, product managing, Sales, software product manager

RFPs have to be carefully evaluated before you spend time on them

One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, one of the jobs that keeps coming up over and over is how best to deal with a Request For Proposal (RFP) from a customer.

Responding to an RFP can take a great deal of time, energy, and effort. That’s why it is so maddening when you find out weeks or even months later that some other company won the opportunity or that your proposal was never seriously considered because the customer just used it to drive down the other guy’s prices. Arrrgh!

So look, as excited as all of us generally are when we first see an RFP, we really need to understand its background. Your company’s sales rep for that account needs to have asked some critical questions. Is this RFP just being issued so that the customer can do some price shopping before going back to their current vendor and beating them up on price? Or (even worse) is this just a company process that they need to go through and they really have no intention of leaving their current vendor? These are the types of questions that you need answers to BEFORE you start pulling all-nighters to create a response.

If you know your product’s competition well, than you can save yourself a great deal of grief. If the customer has already effectively selected one of your competitors and this proposal is just for show, then there is a good chance that the proposal was written with your competition’s products in mind and it will quickly show through in the questions that they are asking. Don’t forget your old friend Uncle Google: do a scan of past customer press releases and see if they’ve awarded contracts to your competition in the past. If so, then re-read the proposal to see if it is slanted towards that competitor.

The best way to make sure that you only spend your time working on RFPs that represent real opportunities is to develop a “Go / No-Go” checklist. This is a checklist that you fill out for each RFP before you start working on it. The checklist can contain questions like “Does the RFP align with my product offering or my competition’s product offering?”, “What is the dollar value of this opportunity?”, “What is our relationship with this customer?”, etc. Once you have all of the answers to these questions, then you can decide if it’s worthwhile to respond to an RFP.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Life is strange and sometimes RFPs arrive in the mail (postal and “e”) out of the blue. STOP! Before you spend even a minute working on that RFP you or your sales team need to do some digging and find out why your firm got a copy of it. Make some calls to the company that sent it to you and find out why. Trust me on this - responding to blind RFPs rarely ever results in a sale of your product.  Good questions to ask include “How did you hear about my company?”, “How many vendors have you asked to respond to this RFP?”, “What is the decision making process that you will use to evaluate responses?”, “How will you narrow down the list of potential vendors?”, and “What are your next steps?”.

If you decided to go ahead and respond to an RFP, then it’s time for you to do some research. After all of the product information has been provided, there is one final critical section that too many product mangers skip over: the request for references. You need to understand why that request is there: the customer is trying to validate their decision. The more closely matched to the customer that your references are, then the better position your response will be in. Simple things like providing a CIO as a reference if it’s the CIO that is driving the RFP, or providing a firm that is as large or larger as the customer as a reference in order to show that your product works well with companies that are the customer’s size.

One last thing: if you don’t win the RFP, then by all means call the customer and ask why. The selection process is all over and done with by now and so often times their defensive shields are down at this point and you might get an honest answer if you ask the question nicely.

Have you ever spent a great deal of time responding to an RFP that turned out to be a waste of time? Looking back, was there a red flag that should have told you that this wasn’t going to work out? Have you ever decided to not reply to an RFP - why did you make that decision? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, IT Product manager, new products, product manager, request for proposal, RFP, Sales

What's In YOUR wallet, Product Manger?

So here’s a minor topic that might have some real significance for all product managers: what do you put on your business card? Yeah, yeah, I know that we’re living in the age of FaceBook and LinkedIn but business cards are still what we exchange when we meet people face-to-face. What this means is that business cards still matter. What’s on your business card?

At this point in my career I must have had no less than 20 different business cards. Every once in awhile I’ll see a collection of them huddled together in the bottom of some drawer somewhere and I’ll have to smile as I realize just how much my description of myself and what I do has changed over time. I’ll never forget when I got my first opportunity to sign up for business cards. This was it, I had made the big time. Despite being a lowly software engineer now I was finally going to have an “adult” way to communicate to others just how important I was. As with all large firms, most of the format of the business card was pre-established. However, I was given free rein to add my job title just under my name. Hmm, what to put? The first time out of the gate I put what the company listed for me in the corporate directory: “Software Engineer IV” or whatever.

It turns out that this was a big mistake. Outside of people who worked for my company, nobody else in the real world knew what a Software Engineer IV was! I’d get polite smiles and then the card would quickly disapper into someone’s pocket to probably be thrown away when it came time to do laundry.

A few business card iterations later, I started to get smarter. By this time I had moved over into the world of Product Management and so I changed my job title to “Product Manger”. This was much better. I don’t think very many people knew what a Product Manger was or did, but they sure thought that they knew what a manager did and so upon receiving my card they slotted me as a mid-level manager and left it at that.

The promotions came over time and whereas I was not yet a Vice President or a CIO yet, I had become a Senior Product Manger. At the next opportunity I updated the business card title to read “Senior Product Manger”. This seemed to garner me just a little bit more respect when I handed the card out. Once again, I don’t think that very many people knew what I did; however, they seemed to believe that I was now in the upper echelons of mid-level managers.

I was still finding that since folks didn’t actually know what a Product Manger does, they were struggling to pigeonhole me based on my title. The trick here is that if people can’t figure out quickly where you fit in the totem pole of responsibility, then they will end up not even bothering to try. I felt that one more evolution was required. I ended up dropping the “Product” and so today my business card reads simply “Senior Manger”. Although less descriptive, I’ve found this title to be of great use at trade shows and when meeting with vendors. No, they still really don’t seem to know what I do for the company; however, they are easily able to realize that a “Senior Manager” is someone who must be very important. This means that they treat me as being someone important because they don’t have any reason not to.

One final note, with my obtuse title the very first question that I get asked is “what do you do?” This is a make-or-break question. If I identify myself as a Product Manager, this will get me classified as a low-level worker bee because nobody really knows what a Product Manager does. Over countless encounters like this I have honed my response to reply with a quick “I make problems go away.” In most cases, this generates quiet respect and there are no more probing questions.

How does your business card currently describe you? Did you get to pick your title or did the company pick it for you? Do people that you give your busienss card to understand what you do? If you could change your title, what would you change it to? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: business card, IT Product manager, job description, job title, product management, product manager, product manager jobs, product managing, software product manager

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…

Technorati Tags: Bottom Line, CEO, IT Product manager, SME