Bad Press Can Kill A Product If A Product Manager Does Not React Quickly

There is a saying that goes “Any publicity is good publicity”. It turns out that this is wrong. In fact, after having given birth to or adopting a product, a Product Manger can see the good name of their product  vanish almost overnight if they aren’t careful.

A good example of this, on a very large scale, is what happened to United Airlines back in September. Way back in 2002 United’s parent company, UAL, had been forced to file bankruptcy. They had worked their way out of this and it was old news. Until an old article talking about the bankruptcy filing showed up on Google’s news service as apparently new news.

What had happened is that Google’s information gathering technology which cruises the web each evening found a new link on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper’s web site. The article didn’t carry a date but it had been originally published by the Chicago Tribune back in December of 2002. The article had not been there the last time Google’s crawler had visited the Sun-Sentinel’s site and so it was flagged this time as new news.

How this old story had appeared on the Sun-Sentinel’s business news section was originally unclear. However, it is now believed that because of bad weather in south Florida, people had been checking the news about travel delays and enough of them may have stumbled onto the old UAL story by mistake to cause it to be promoted to a high position on the Sun-Sentinel’s list of news stories.

As you can well imagine there are a lot of people who subscribe to services that automatically alert them to any news about UAL. When this new/old story hit Google’s wire, lots of people got an email that told them that UAL had just filed for bankruptcy (remember, there had been no date associated with the original story). Next, stock market research firms picked up the story and finally it hit the Bloomberg financial news service whose stories are treated as gospel. In 15 minutes UAL shares dropped down to $3/share.  Poof - there went UAL’s product.

What does all of this mean to a product manger? In the bold new world of the 21st Century your product’s reputation can be lost litterly overnight if you are not careful. Rightly or wrongly the Internet and the army of automated news collectors and automatic stock trading programs can work together to pummel your product and your firm quicker than you can catch your breath. This is the time for all of us to become good Boy Scouts and “Be Prepared”.

Realizing that an event like this can happen to your product is the first step in preparing a reaction plan. The next step is to assume the worst has happened: bad press about your product has hit the wire. What would you do? The correct response is probably to create a press release, post something prominately on your firm’s web site, and make senior executives available for interviews with the press in order to provide the company’s view on whatever event is being reported.

Instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off when a bad press event like this happens, why not prepare right now? How much of that press release could you write today? Who would have to review and approve it before it could be released? Do you have their contact info? If you needed to have your web site updated in a hurry, who would do that and would they be available no matter what time of day the update was needed? What members of the press could you get your senior executives in contact with quickly? What have you already done to make them friendly (or at least neutral) towards your company?

All of these are activities that can save your skin and your product in the event of bad press poisoning the well of potential customers that you hope to drink from. Do some work now and you just might save your job later…!

Have you ever had an incorrect story circulate about your product? How did this story start? What did you do to correct the wrong information? Were you able to clear things up? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: bankruptcy, brand management, product management, product managing, product manger, UAL, United

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

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

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

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

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