Why Have A Strategy?

At the May meeting of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, Barbara Nelson presented an interactive session demonstrating the vital necessity of developing and executing on a product strategy even in a climate of rapidly changing market influences and survival mode conditions. Drawing upon more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, Ms. Nelson speaks as an evangelist for market-driven products. Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing as an instructor in 2000, Barbara served in product management and marketing positions for an enterprise accounting and finance software company. As vice president of product marketing, she worked closely with product managers, marketers and developers, showing the value of using market facts over opinions. She attributes her success to actively listening to the market in order to build products people want to buy.

Refreshingly, Barbara began with an allegory about a friend returning from their uncle’s funeral with boxes of pictures from his life. Her friend was in a quandary about what to do with the pictures. None of the pictures were labeled. The friend tossed all the boxes of pictures as they had no meaning to her and no one in the family could identify the people photographed.

Ms. Nelson suggested that the issue of organizing photographs from a lifetime has not gotten simpler with the availability of new software and technology – rather it has gotten easier to capture photos in an unwieldy fashion and store them in a myriad of digital locations. She suggested that solving the problem of organizing pictures is a real life dilemma requiring product management skills. Start with identifying themes in the pictures. You could take a waterfall approach to proceed in a sequential manner from the bigger “picture” assuming that all the pictures are quality and worth keeping, then break down the problem into smaller projects, identify the method for determining where the pictures will be filed, the file names, and then proceed to label and place the pictures appropriately. Or take an Agile approach by organically sorting pictures based on the themes and subject matter, quality, sentimental value, frequently adapting filenames and organization choices as more pictures are reviewed and recurring patterns are recognized.

Transitioning from this universal issue, Ms. Nelson inquired “What is your personal strategy?” Is it “I have a vision: our product is for anybody, anywhere, anytime.”? She stated emphatically that product management requires both strategies and tactics. But faced with deadlines, what is the need for strategy if progress is being made? The market changes so rapidly it’s impossible to execute on a strategy. We’re in survival mode. We take every deal that comes along. The executives don’t agree on a strategy so how can we execute one? Our developers think the strategy is flawed so they have stealth projects. Strategy takes time that we don’t have. Connecting the detailed tasks to the strategy slows down execution. We can’t afford to stop executing for a minute because we have limited time, money, and resources. During these tough economic times, our philosophy is to just do it!

Ms. Nelson’s overall message is that PMs don’t have the luxury of working on the wrong tactics. Good strategy helps you filter out bad tactics so you can focus on what is most important to your long-term viability in the market. The PM is the President of the Product, although in reality a PM may experience being the janitor of the product. A company’s original vision created income for the founders, who solved a problem that they experienced firsthand. The challenge is to figure out how to get to the next product, and the CEO has to transition to strategizing for the company and away from tactical details.

Strategy helps you figure out what NOT to do. Research into companies identifies that only 5% of employees are familiar with the company’s strategy. How do they know what to do to move the company forward? Things change when you move from strategy to execution. You must determine where you are trying to go, what mountain you are trying to climb. The work being done is the defacto strategy – does it connect to the vision? Every level of planning MUST connect to the strategy: Vision, Product, Release, Tasks. Find a problem in the market for which there is no solution and make sure it fits with the overall company direction.

A good PM is involved in the release and feature set of a product. Prioritizing backlog is tactical. Prioritizing themes is strategic and guides tactics. Do the detailed tasks connect all the way back to higher management? PM requires communication at the executive level and trust between layers of management. You must identify if there is a gap between strategy and execution, or worse between the executives and the sales, marketing and development functions. Product Management falls between strategy and execution and must provide simultaneous interpretation within that gap or risk becoming “demo boy”.

At this point, Ms. Nelson broke the audience into groups to do a “Force Field Analysis”. The instructions were to come up with two to three driving forces that have positive impact in closing the gap as a product manager, and two to three constraining forces that prevent product management from operating successfully. The product managers, product marketers, engineers, entrepreneurs and other interested parties in attendance were quite vocal and animated in this discussion. The small groups came back together to share results of the discussion.

A list of what works included:
1. Involving the team with users and use cases including UI and QA for buy-in from the beginning
2. Providing rewards and incentives to the developers to acknowledge and reinforce desired contributions
3. Ongoing market sensing activities
4. Clear goals and milestones that the entire team understands

Other positive driving forces were;
• a culture of honesty, integrity, transparency and trust
• good executive leadership, internal communication and technical skill set
• clear understanding of market trends and opportunities
• customer input without intermediaries

The list of Constraining forces included;
• Not having a common language in the vernacular of doing business
• Outsourcing challenges that don’t always save money – even if it appears that it does on paper
• Customer requirements confused between key customers versus markets of customers

Ms. Nelson was adept at reframing the constraints into the constructive opportunities for the product manager to provide given pervasive problems, such as:
• Identify patterns that are repeatable for customized features
• Distill down commonalities to figure out how to deal with nuances
• Challenge engineers to build tools, APIs

Regarding constraints on time:
• Cut features
• Present value calculations, tradeoffs
• Utilize conjoint analysis

Recognize that the product manager is the messenger for the market and must bring market data to enable the executives to make the right decisions. The PM must consistently stay on course and communicate often with management. “You can’t do everything. You can’t even do the compelling many.” Therefore the PM must focus on the vital few. The closer you are to the sales process, the more difficult it is to make product tradeoffs. Sales depend on individual deals and ultimately want products the market wants to buy, so the PM must provide a higher view of sales to many. The PM must assess the market as big enough and teach sales to recognize the right fits to stuff their pipeline.

The PM articulates the distinctive competence of the company’s unique, sustainable value. PMs figure out drivers in market segments using data, not opinions. “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” PMs identify the market segment that values what you do that the competitors don’t do well. Delight user personas by solving their problems – figure out why the customer wants to buy. Regularly use Win/Loss Analysis to validate why your product is winning and losing. Continuously connect strategy to execution with post mortem corrections and quarterly road map reviews.

Perform Agile retrospectives by questioning:
• What did we say we would do?
• What did we do?
• What’s next?
• What are the barriers?

Ms. Nelson’s bottom line education for a PM is to be consistently immersed in high value activities that
• Provide market feedback to help you adapt and improve along the way
• Drive alignment between executives and workers
• Communicate the strategic vision to marketing, sales, development
• Show leadership by bringing market expertise to the strategic planning process.
• Align your team around a strategic vision to drive execution towards building products people want to buy.

“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker

Silicon Valley Product Managers Association News

I reported on two recent product management events:

Google Scholar

An important part of product management is culling data and research about industries and products to identify market opportunities to develop product line swot, conjoint or competitive market analysis and road map presentations.  One of the tools I use to keep updated is Google Alerts, which sends me an email every time something is added to the web about my identified interests.


Thank you Panos Ipeirotis, A Computer Scientist in Business School, for your most recent posting that Google Scholar now Supports Email Alerts  
Google Scholar is a search on scholarly literature and research.  

Features of Google Scholar

• Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research

Google acknowledges that much of scholarly research involves building on what others have already discovered. It's taken from Sir Isaac Newton's famous quote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Try it here: 

Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend

Thanks to Chapin Hansen for reporting on the Startup weekend.  Following is a copy of  his blog posting at:
Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend

Nic and I (the menuvore guys) have been working to get ourselves involved in the startup community, so we headed down to San Jose to attend 'Startup Weekend'. In short,  you pitch an idea, try to form a team and then work your ass off for 2 days in an attempt to have the product up and running by Sunday night to demo for a panel of well known startup judges. 

With that being said, here is what I learned from this event.

1) Pitch an idea - it takes you out of your comfort zone and who knows, it might be something someone else wants to be a part of. Lots of ideas were pitched, some good, some not so good. I pitched one and it didn't go anywhere, but I'm glad I threw it out there.

2) Find Fun/Competent People - You're spending 2 straight days with these people, you might as well pick a group you like. On top of that, look for people that have complimentary skills and are competent. Working with fun, smart people makes everything easier.

3) Outline/Explain the project immediately - It's important to talk about the idea because everyone needs to understand it. If a few people don't get it, the team becomes weaker. Making sure everyone understands it means that they will be able to contribute in a positive way.

4) Throw out new ideas - Especially in this 2 day adventure, throw out ideas that make the product stand out. You have 2 days, don't be conservative. Come up with ideas that are wacky and that will get people's attention. You can always change it later.

5) Everyone needs to constantly Talk - I know it's only 2 days and everyone is cranking it out, but marketers need to talk to coders/designers and vice versa. Everyone needs to moving along together or else people aren't working on the right stuff or being as helpful as they can be. When programmers finish something, marketers should test it. When marketers write something or come up with an idea, they should mention it so it can be implemented before it's too late.

Overall, it was an awesome experience and one that I would recommend to everyone who is interested in startups.  Thanks to Franck and the Startup weekend team for putting the event on. (and filling us with lots of Pizza Hut)
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I developed and presented this product at the weekend, working with Catherine on Friday and Saturday, and with help from Project Team 42, Justin and Adina on Sunday.

mTasR

View more presentations from Cindy Solomon.

Everything you wanted to KNOL about Software Manifestos!

I collected over 25 different software development related manifestos and placed them into Google's Knol platform to encourage discussion between developers, designers, product managers, and marketers. 

My process was first to capture their relationships in a mindmap and try to standardize the format to make it easier to compare them.  It was similar to researching a competitive space for a product and then attempting to organize the information in order to make valid observations and identify challenges and opportunities.  The information, since it was text based with more than 7 levels of detail, became too unwieldy to share in a graphical form.  Google Knol provided a great platform to share all of the manifestos and encourage discussion.  A cross between a blog and wiki, Knol was very easy to set up and use.

Join the conversation, contribute your insights - what do manifestos reveal about the nature of software product development?

What do you KNOL about Software Manifestos? Contribute your perspective http://bit.ly/bepUOT

I will return to develop a taxonomy to further the discussion of the manifestos.

What is XAuth?

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Note: the acronymns should be capitalized as follows: XAuth, OAuth, OpenID

What is XAuth?

View more presentations from Cindy Solomon.

Who Cares? Guiding Products to Greatness: SVPMA April meeting report

On April 7, 2010, roughly 50 Silicon Valley Product Management Association members were treated to a presentation entitled Who Cares? Guiding Products to Greatness with Kimberly Wiefling of Wiefling Consulting. I was not prepared to be entertained, to learn how to ROAR with laughter, and to have things tossed out into the audience, both figuratively and literally.

Weifling is a physicist by education, who spent 10 years at Hewlett Packard in product development program management and engineering leadership. She served as VP of Program Management at a Xerox Parc spinoff. Kimberly has helped to start, run and grow a dozen small businesses. She’s the co-founder of the Open Kilowatt Institute (OKI) and the co-chair of the SDForum Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group (EL SIG). She currently spends about half of her time traveling in Japan facilitating leadership, innovation and execution workshops to help Japanese companies solve global problems profitably. She is the author of “Scrappy Project Management - The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces”, recently published in Japanese. Explaining Japanese companies’ appreciation of her emphatic personal style and approach, she pointed to Japanese popular culture that embraces game shows that are “wild, messy, noisy and too energetic.”

Wiefling is a walking resource regarding customer-centric project leadership, timeline risk analysis, portfolio management, risk assessment and mitigation, and all the tools necessary to develop products more predictably, which she doesn’t hesitate to share. What is uniquely delightful is how Wiefling communicates the essential aspects of successful product management leadership – with humor and audience involvement, memorable sayings and acronymns. She doesn’t just talk about great leadership tactics, she demonstrates every communication skill from using powerful visuals, to intriguing the audience with questions designed to draw upon relevant experiences, involving the audience in small groups to interact in response to a challenge, rewarding the teams with pertinent giveaways (buttons & stretch toys), and generously sharing her own business and personal experiences.

Wiefling demonstrated techniques for effective meetings that ROAR – Roles are clear, Objectives are clarified and kept foremost in the minds of the participants throughout the event, Agendas serve as a flexible framework for the creativity of the group and are used to keep the group on track and build momentum for achieving the required results, Rules of engagement enable everyone to participate in a respectful and productive way that builds commitment to results beyond the event conclusion.

Wiefling is clearly passionate about business leadership via product and project management. She discussed the benefits of concurrent engineering and integrated product development that results in less development time, fewer engineering changes, less time to market, higher quality and worker productivity. She identified key product engineering difficulties and dismantled the root causes of project failures. She touched on how email is the illusion of communication, and discussed the PRONG way to managing and influencing stakeholders. (Prioritize stakeholder interests, Relationship building, Open two-way feedback mechanisms, Needs and wants – know them, Goals – establish shared goals.)

She repeatedly emphasized her essential point – recognizing who cares – who is going to use it, what are their needs, who are the stakeholders and how do they measure success. The persistent question is, “who is majoring it?” She implored product managers to be completely and unrepentantly obsessed with the customer – and to determine who the customer is in every situation. She shared an example of a stakeholder analysis using a communication map that portrays each of the stakeholders, how they relate to other members of the team, what they need from you and what you need from them, how they could enable or hinder success, and how you will manage communication with each. This provides a helicopter view of the team relationships, dynamics, resource needs, requirements and feedback and enables you to tune into the “WIIFM” channel for each stakeholder. (What’s In It For Me)

She talked at length about managing and influencing stakeholders’ expectations for a product from the beginning by setting expectations using a one-page document. Identify what the product is AND isn’t, the definition of success, how success will be measured, who will work on it, critical success factors, assumptions, major risks and mitigation plans, relative priority of schedule, scope, budget, quality and other factors, target audience, distribution channels, roadmap of business driven milestones, rough budget and anything else that you recognize must not be left to chance. She suggested that if you can’t fit the intent of the product on one page, then it’s probably too complicated. Create a visual indicator of the route to success that indicates progress to inspire the team.

Wiefling insists that “impossible is in the eye of the beholders”. The root cause of project failures is a failure to include the perspectives of the critical stakeholders at the appropriate times. Recognize that smart people love complicated solutions even when a simple solution would work better. Smart people learn from experience, wise people learn from the experience of others. Common sense is not common practice. Product management is a high risk profession – you have to do the right thing for your customer and product and some days you’ll be a hero, some days you’ll be a zero. If you’re going to be a great product manager, you’d better keep your backbone intact, be prepared to be respected but not necessarily liked, and keep your resume updated!