Product Mangers Can Do Things That Will Make A Layoff Less Likely

If you are a product manger at one of the big 3 car makers or even if you work for Motorola, times cannot be good for you right now. The rest of us are also looking over our shoulders trying to figure out if our jobs might be on the chopping block next.

Every Product Manger would like to think that he/she is so valuable to the company that there is NO WAY that their name would ever get put on the RIF list. However, I speak from experience when I say - it happens! So pehaps the big question is really, is there anything that you can do to get yourself spared the axe? Well, it turns out that the answer is maybe…

Look, if the company is shutting down, then you are out of a job no matter what. However, if they are going to keep going, then you have a chance to hold on to your job. Now, there are no guarantees, but you can improve your odds by doing the following things:

• Look Like You Are A Survivor: Interestingly enough, you want to do this because it’s much easier to can someone who looks like they have already been canned. This means that you’ve got to lighten up - don’t drag around all moody like. Research has shown that if you are fun to be around, people will want to be around you especially in bad times. Good natured colleagues are chosen over ones in a bad mood and that’s always a good thing.
• Become A Beacon Of Hope: People often survive when they do things that others don’t do. You need to realize that upper management is feeling the downturn just as much as anyone else, and maybe even more if a large part of their salary is based on their bonus. If you become upbeat and don’t fight the changes that come your way, then you will be seen as a leader and as an advocate that upper management can rely on. Once again, this is a very good thing.
• Practice Good Citizenship: In good times, we hate to go to those big meetings, all hands meetings, etc. Who needs the pep rally, I’ve got real work to do. However, when times are tough, you need to start attending all of these meetings. Become visible - make sure that everyone knows that you are going, that you are there, and that you are a supporter of the message that is being delivered.

You don’t have control over the future of you company nor do you really have control over your career’s future - you’re pretty much just along for the ride. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to tip the odds in your favor.

Sometimes just buying yourself just a bit more time can make all the difference in the world. Hanging on until the bad times are just about over will make finding that next product manager gig that much easier!

Have you ever been let go from a product manger job during a down cycle? Had you tried to do anything to hold on to your job? Did it seem to help for awhile? What should you have done differently? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: career, fired, job, job search, layoff, motivation, planning, product manager jobs, product manger, recession

Product Managers Need To Know Where To Dig To Discover Breakthrough Features

As a product manager, you are ultimately responsible for your product’s features. If you’ve guessed well, then you should have a successful product. If you’ve guessed badly, then you may be sitting on a stinker of a product right now. No matter which situation you find yourself in, you are facing one of the greatest challenges that a product manager ever faces - what next?

So just how do we go about picking features to work into the next version(s) of our product? Pick correctly and your career could take off like a rocket. Pick poorly, and your career won’t even get off the launch pad. Dang, why are there no classes for doing this type of thing?

I can only speak from my experience, but I generally kept a “pool” of features (”list” if  you must) and when it came time to start to plan out the next version of the product, we would revisit the list and re-prioritize what was on it. Important customer complaints, features that competing products already had, things that the development team wanted to add, and features that were not too expensive to add all sorta got jumbled together and that’s what made it into the next release. Not the best process.

Some companies do extensive interviews with their customers in order to determine what they would like to see added to the product. I’ve participated in more focus groups than I care to remember and I fully admit that it takes a very special type of person to run such a meeting - this is not my calling in life. However, even with this scientific approach, all too often companies really don’t end up getting any good product direction from their customers - they are still guessing what features to add to their products.

Lance Bettencourt and Tony Ulwick have spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and they’ve come up with a different approach to uncovering breakthrough product features that they call “job mapping”. Job Mapping breaks down a customer’s task into a series of steps that together make up the entire process. By looking at the process that a customer goes though from start to finish, a company can discover all of the points at which a customer would be interested in having the product or service provide them with additional help.

Additionally, once you have a job map for your product, you can also identify where the biggest hangups and drawbacks to using your product is for your customers. Sometimes the best new feature is not something that your product does, but rather something that it no longer does!

Job mapping requires you to look at your product differently than you do today. As product managers we generally like to think about our products as being “tools” that our customers buy and use to solve problems and become more successful. Throw that thinking out the window.

Instead, you need to start to think about your product / service as something that your customer “hires” to get something done. Yeah, yeah, I realize that you’d like to think that your customer has a closer relationship with your baby than that, but they probably don’t.

One key advantage that job mapping brings to the table is that by mapping the entire customer process, you will also be able to identify the metrics that your customers use to measure their own success as they complete each task in the process.

For all of you engineers out there, take off your engineering hat right now. Something that everyone needs to clearly understand is that job mapping IS NOT the same thing as process mapping. The ultimate goal of creating a job map is to determine what your customers are TRYING to accomplish at each and every step of their process. This differs from process mapping that merely documents WHAT they are doing at every step of the process.

Lance & Tony believe that by taking the time to map out each and every step of your customer’s job, a prouduct manager can find breakthrough product features that will allow your products to become even more successful.

Hopefully I’ve got your attention by now. If so, then you’ll want to stay tuned for my next posting in which we’ll dive into just what a customer job is and how we can start building a job map…

How do you determine what features will go into the next version of your product? Who drives this process - your customers or internal forces? How has it been working out - are your customers happy with what features they have been getting? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: benefits, features, focus group, job map, metrics, new products, product, product manger, release, Sales, tool, version

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