The 10-point product manager manifesto that will help you beat your competition to market and the next innovation.
For decades technology organizations have utilized, with varying degrees of success, a wide variety of techniques to “align to the business.” With digitization in every product and service – every customer experience we deliver, we are one enterprise with one goal. There is no front office or back office anymore. We need to get beyond the idea of disparate parts that need to be brought together.
Gartner agrees. In fact, in report titled “Words Matter: Use the Right Language When Developing Strategy,” Noah Rosenstein, Heather Colella, Richard Hunter propose, “This common interpretation of the term ‘IT strategy’ creates a mindset that IT is somehow separate from the business, and therefore needs its own strategy.”
In this age of digital transformation, when we are all obsessed with getting closer to the customer, breaking down distribution channels, making products more digital and smarter, product management is imperative. And while it’s not the typical role, it’s imperative that IT is part of product innovation and development.
According to McKinsey, the growing importance of data in decision making is responsible for the expanding role of the product manager. “The emergence of the mini-CEO product manager is driven by a number of changes in technology, development methodologies, and the ways in which consumers make purchases. Together, they make a strong case for a well-rounded product manager who is more externally oriented and spends less time overseeing day-to-day engineering execution, while still commanding the respect of engineering.”
Let’s get into it. What does it mean to have a product manager mentality?
I’ll share with you Planview’s product manager philosophy, distilled into a 10-point manifesto, with the first five shared with you today. This represents close to 100 years of collective product management experience by the leaders that put it together. It’s our top 10 list of what being a product manager should mean. It represents, in my opinion, a very good framework for product management and things that could be applied to any organization that’s going through a digital transformation initiative. Spoiler alert: that’s all of us.
1. You are the internal champion and external voice for your product/product area
You have ultimate responsibility for the success of your product with no direct authority over the resources required to create that success.
Every product manager has the ultimate responsibility for the success of the product with no direct authority over the resources required to create that success. Product management is inherently a virtual leadership position. It’s a tough job. You must be able to influence and lead the charge, rally organizations to your vision and drive success from concept all the way to the marketplace. There aren’t that many jobs like this in any organization where the scope of responsibility is so broad, but with so little direct organizational authority.
And product managers must work across a vast array of internal and external constituents. Internally is working with engineering and development, sales, manufacturing, and senior executives. Externally you are the voice to customers, prospects, and industry analysts and experts. And your interactions span the water cooler to the main stage at industry events and user conferences.
But, when you embrace this notion and see it successfully implemented, product managers become one of the most powerful and integral roles in your organization. They become organizational glue that brings strategy to life every day, that people come to rely on to move the organization forward.
2. You serve sales and development as primary customers
You should be a trusted resource to both organizations and if both need your assistance at the same time, sales wins the tie. Sales should view you as the defacto product expert.
A product manager needs to be viewed as the trusted resource to both sales organization and the technical/development organization at any moment in time. They understand the roadmap but more importantly, they understand the customer. They have the ability to rationalize and prioritize, but at any moment in time, should clarify and hold the vision for where the priorities sit and where the customer experience needs to be at any point in the future. You’re constantly in this battle of balancing revenue (sales) versus product (development). It’s endlessly iterating between the sales objectives of the company and optimizing the mid-to-long term for the product – ensuring one the company’s most precious resources, it’s development teams, are bringing the most value to the customer and creating competitive differentiation.
This nexus of forces again makes the job hard, but it has to happen. Insulating development teams from the market is never a good thing. I have met too many product owners (see Agile) that use product vision as an excuse for ignoring competition, sales teams, and sometimes even the customer. The product manager crosses all constituents which raises expectations but also potential for success.
For IT organizations going through digital transformation, it is about getting out in front and being closer to revenue and helping drive ultimately customer acquisition and customer experience and not just innovating for the sake of innovating. This is about innovating for the customer. Get closer to the customer and you’ll get closer to a great product the customer actually needs.
3. Your job is a combination of inbound (product management) and outbound (product marketing)
Expect to spend at least 30 percent of your time on outbound activities knowing that this percentage will increase with experience.
Product managers are predominantly inbound focused, i.e., they live very close to the development team, they protect their capacity to maintain stories of velocity and backlog for the product team.
Product managers need a balance, a healthy balance of inbound product development activity with outbound customer market competition and sales facing activity. Having that mix creates strong product managers that build great products that hit customer needs, drive revenue.
But it is equally important that early on for product managers to learn skills to engage the external world. Learn how to describe their product to a user, write blog posts and press releases, communicate the value and uniqueness of the product and team they represent. Champion is an important word and being out in front of your product is key to its success.
4. You are responsible for defining the positioning of any new capabilities delivered in your product/product area
Be able to tell the story, crush your competitors, demo your product, write first draft press releases and enable sales.
Core to being the champion for any product or service is the ability to be the fundamental source of the value of the product. No one knows why the product was built the way it was, who is was built for, and why it is so great (or flawed) than the product manager. Being able to articulate the essence of your products is a critical product management skill set. No one will share the same passion for product than a product manager that lived through the blood, sweat, and tears that went into bringing it to life.
Positioning is the art of translating that product essence into a message that resonates internally and externally. Great positioning inspires customers to use a product, motivates sales people to want to sell it, and strikes fear into the competition that your product is the market leader.
5. You are the expert on the competition for your product/product area
You are responsible for understanding industry trends and the competitive landscape today, next quarter and two years from now.
Clearly one of the themes of this manifesto is the required 360-degree view of the product manager across a broad range of constituents and factors. One of the most important facets of this 360-degree view is knowing the competition. We obviously live in a hyper-fast moving, technology-driven environment where new products and services, and hence competitors, are coming to life every day. The product manager must have their finger on the pulse of the competition at all times.
The unique perspective of the product manager makes it imperative that they are the source of competitive analysis. Understand how to compete today, in three months, six months, and a year from now. Know your competition as well as you know yourself.
Digital transformation is about the convergence of product innovation and technology. Product managers at the center of this transformation. It’s a unique role that needs to go beyond developmental aspects to drive that next big thing, to drive creative development, to deliver and anticipate what the customer will need.
If IT organizations can embrace a product management approach, focusing on customers as well as technology, they will be able to define and drive business strategy, not just support it.
6. You are the “Voice of the Customer” for your product/product area. This includes managing VoC programs for your product/product area
Building great products is all about the customer – the actual users and the people that derive value from the solution and ideally “love” your product. The product manager has the ultimate responsibility for understanding the needs of customer, whether that represents current or prospective customers.
Oftentimes, no other member of a product team is truly chartered with knowing the customer as deeply as a product manager.
Without the product manager, customers could end up with the product-equivalent of the Winchester Mystery House – essentially all features, no purpose. Developers and engineers like to crank out feature enhancements to make customers happy, but without the vital product manager intermediary, this customer-to-developer pipeline can result in something more similar to the legendary house of endless and random additions. Put simply, product managers balance strategy and tactical enhancements.
The product manager must play “architect” for the product. Sure, not the technical architect (brilliant developers will handle that part), instead as a designer of sorts with a sense of direction for where the product is going. As with building a great house, the ability to balance strategy and tactical enhancements is core to the product manager role.
7. You build product roadmaps with a 12+ month time horizon that explicitly support and drive Bookings (new ACV) and Retention (reduced churn).
Target weighting of 60 percent innovation and competitive differentiation drives new bookings versus 40 percent customer-driven enhancements that support retention.
Another core responsibility of the product manager is defining the product roadmap – the living artifact that defines what we are building. Many details are required to get to the actual product, but the roadmap is the guidepost and the product manager is its owner.
You’ll note that “balance” is a word that we continue to come back to in this manifesto, and the product roadmap again demands that the product manager balance factors that include vision, customer, internal stakeholder, and analysts, with each of these groups having their own granularity. In addition, the roadmap must balance growth and retention targets while accounting for competitors. All of these competing factors come together in the product roadmap.
The time horizon for the product roadmap needs to be in the six- to twelve-month range, with the idea of a three-year roadmap essentially dying out given the many swift changes in today’s markets. However, it is equally important to not fall into the sprint-to-sprint roadmap hiding behind the Agile moniker. Though that degree of short-term planning can seem easy, it lacks visions and can fuel the “Mystery House” effect.
8. You ruthlessly focus on minimal viable product (MVP), particularly when delivering innovation or competitive differentiation
Leverage MVP to establish first-mover advantage and let customer adoption drive incremental enhancements.
Product development cycles, customer expectations, and competitive market dynamics are demanding that we move faster all the time. The days of long-term roadmaps and major delivery projects are rapidly disappearing. Rapid iteration is the hallmark of agile development and has been a boon for customers as well as product teams. The”fast fail” concept minimizes risks in product decision making, allowing teams to move fast, get feedback, and iterate.
MVP is about knowing enough scope to deliver value without falling into the trap of over-engineering the initial solution. Product managers and developers instinctively strive to build something right the first time. MVP forces us to keep feature creep and architectural creep in check, and helps organizations move fast while demonstrating innovation and creating a virtuous cycle to build great products.
9. You deliver great products that bring together use cases, analytics, and user experience.
Your product should engage users, meet their requirements, and enable them to make better business decisions every day.
At the center of building great software products is the principle of automating activities and processes to simplify jobs, increase productivity, and make organizations more effective. In short, to make people’s job’s easier. Historically, the design of software products has focused on the automation vector – if we effectively automate, organizations will deploy. For many years, especially in enterprise software applications, this formula sufficed, but that is no longer the case.
Automating the process is the easy part. Today’s organizations and millennial workforces simply will not use products because they are mandated. Driving value requires merging automation with great user experiences, combined with insightful analytics and visualizations that accelerate better decision making for leaders, all the way from the team to the organizational level. Never build a feature without defining the decision-making analytic that it will enable. This will ensure that every feature has value beyond just automation.
Build a great UX that engages users and that engagement will translate into high quality data. Surround that data with analytics that fuel new insights and smarter decisions. This model of engagement and analytics creates a circle that brings users tremendous value.
10. You must be comfortable making tradeoffs, being the decider, and defending your positions
Making decisions and tradeoffs, often with incomplete information and competing interests, is core to the role of a “product manager.”
Product managers can mobilize organizations to build great products and have a multitude of dimensions and priorities. Many days, the role feels like juggling all of these factors; however, there will always be too many things to do and too little time. Product managers should remember that as the center point where all of these competing priorities come together, they must be equipped to balance and make decisions.
The key to managing this environment and creating balance is the ability to make and defend decisions with imperfect information. It is always better to make a decision and move forward than it is to fret and overanalyze. I can assure you that as you languish, a competitor is moving faster or a customer is getting frustrated. Make decisions every day, stand behind them, and iterate as you learn more. No other skills are more critical to becoming a successful product manager.
And there you have it – a 10-point Product Manager Manifesto. Follow it and you’ll be on your way to beating your competition to market, and to the next innovation. Although no product manager is perfect, I can assure you that introducing this mindset into your technology organization will go a long way in getting to the other side of your digital transformation.
