Product Management for Corporate Glue AND Lubricating Oil

Product Managers have a fascinating, all-encompassing role. They can be called many things, CEO of the product, Janitor, Super User. See Product Manager is a janitor basically.

All other business functions are well understood: 

• Engineering develops the product
• QA assures that the product 
• Sales converts a product into justifiable business value for each customer
• Marketing communicates the product proposition to a market of similar users / buyers

etc

But what do Product Managers do? 

• Product managers are frequently the glue that keeps the rest of the business functions inside a technology organisation stuck together. They fill in the cracks in between all these business functions.
• And they are the corporate 'oil' that lubricates other business functions within the company, making each function more efficient and in better harmony with each other.

Example

The next version of the product is coming. It's in Engineering. Product Management has defined the requirements of the product and during the build cycle, it assists with dilemmas and issue resolution.

QA is shaping up to receive the product, but this new version is more sophisticated than the previous version. The QA team need to understand the common use cases / user flows in order to write system / regression tests. They rely on Product Management for guidance.

Marketing is familiar with existing positioning, but this latest release opens up new markets and positioning. They rely on Product Management for guidance: what are the USPs? what are the best use cases? how should it be positioned and to whom? 

Sales may not be able to help for lots of reasons - they want to sell the existing products, not ones that aren't on the price list yet. The rest of the company is dependent on the Sales team selling the existing product in suitable volumes in order to pay the salary bill each month - you really want them sticking to the knitting and selling what's in the warehouse now, not yet-to-be-proven products still on the production line.

Additionally, they have had limited exposure to it: feature and functions aren't well understood yet, positioning isn't developed, use cases and case studies are embryonic at best

Account Management and Support want to know what's different about the new product and how can it be positioned to existing customers and how can they benefit most from it. Is it as good as the existing product? Can existing customers try it before they buy it etc? What the known limitations?

So, often it is the product manager / marketer that goes prospecting for beta customers and manages the beta programme(s) to their successful (hopefully!) conclusions. See the The challenge of beta programmes and Product Launch vs Release vs General Availability vs Deployment.

As a result, it is Product Management who is at the heart of technology product company, acting as its glue and the oil - and that's not contradictory!

See also How everyone else views the first-in-post product manager

Product Metrics Spikes

A friend pointed me to How to crack product metric questions in PM interviews. In essence, it discusses how does a service provider respond to a change in a metric or KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

A definition from the article:

Metric interview questions test if candidates can perform data analysis and select key metrics that matter most to the success of a product. Employers like Facebook and Google use these questions to evaluate critical thinking and communication skills.

There are two types of metric questions - one builds on the other

Metric definition questions	Metric change questions
What are the metrics that provide clarity on the health of a product or feature? What metrics matter??	Do you know what to do when a key product metric (e.g. traffic, revenue, engagement, etc.) is going up or down for no apparent reason.

Solving the Metric definition question

The article recommends the use the GAME method

Goals	Make sure you understand how the functionality helps the commercial goals of the company. 80/20 rule - make sure you're measuring the 80% - the stuff that matters!
Actions	What are key activities that indicate the functionality is achieving those goals? This requires good understanding of the product functionality. Make sure that DevOps doesn't define and implement these unsupervised!!
Metrics	Where in the value chain is a good place to position a measurement? Yes or No evaluation is a starting point, but is there another metric that is a precursor to the switch toggling from one condition to another? In web performance management ie website availability and uptime, then "What goes slow, goes down." (see the Webmetrics case study)
Evaluation	What is normal, good or bad about a metric reading? And are the trade-offs and limitations in having this figure? For example, seeing a drop in shopping basket conversions over a 24 hour period might be useless without understanding that there was 60 minute outage from your payment provider.

Solving the Metric Change question

The article provides its own methodology.

Define the metric change	Make sure you fully understand the metric that is being presented to you: What is it and what is it not? You may have to get into the weeds about how the metric is measured. See Actions above For example is 'Page Views' the total number of views or page views by unique users? What happens if the same user logs in and views the page on two devices or two different sessions, how is that logged?
Explore possible root-causes of the change	Use the MECE framework Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive = Identify cause(s) that is independent of all others OR understand what the cause is definitely NOT (*). For a metric incident, the root-cause of the problem has to be internal OR external, as there is no other option. If you think there is an internal AND an external cause, then you need to do more research. Did one external condition cascade to an internal condition? Unfortunately, these can be super hard to run down!
Conclude	Make sure there aren't any horrible assumptions that you haven't validated / eliminated.

   
* For info on MECE:

Escalation and Communication

The article hardly touches on the critical, critical point of issue escalation and communication.

After you have done your initial assessment, you need to answer the question: Do I ring the alarm bell and to whom?

Judgement call: Let's assume that (a) the metric isn't a false positive and you've validated to some significant extent (b) the metric matters. So, how high do you escalate the issue?

Factors to consider:

• How many other business functions are impacted by the incident?
• Is that metric important to them?
• Can they do something about it, either to resolve it (eg some root-cause analysis) or to reconfigure their business function to accommodate the impact of the incident?

I recommend using this yard stick:

Level of concern	Action
Not a concern or quickly solved and implemented	If you are sure that impact is minimal and contained, then I recommend concentrating on solving the issue. You can report that the problem was resolved with minimal impact. Warning: if you get stuck in the resolution, then you quickly have to over-escalate the issue eg to 'Very concerning'
Somewhat concerning, but impact is contained	Keep researching until either you hit a brick wall or an unreasonable amount of time has elapsed
Very concerning	More business functions are required to investigate and you need to escalate it to a suitably high level to get resources devoted to it. When communicating, be clear to separate known symptoms vs known conclusions to date vs guestimates as to possible causes, articulate mitigating factors and (partial) resolutions that have been applied to date.
Ridiculously high	This is a hard one to call. You most probably know that something basic has gone wrong and that others have spotted it and are working on a solution (and may have even resolved it). However, that is a dangerous assumption. It's best to escalate it - even if it is likely to be a false positive.

The importance of communicating - and re-communicating

As soon as you communicate outside of your team, make sure that someone is knowingly and consistently appointed as Incident Manager (ie it could be you!). Note that if the problem rattles on, then you may need to appoint a Communications Manager in front of the Incident Manager to protect the Incident Manager from simply responding to communication enquiries rather than actually working on the resolution.

It's best also to alert other business functions how you will update them on progress and frequency of updates (even if there is no progress).

Use of incident support tools

There is a great danger in over-engineering the use of incident support tools. Over-engineering = it is too clumsy or laborious at the point of the crisis. If others aren't familiar with the tools, then they will still ask for email / telephone / instant messenger updates anyway!

Next step: Deep Dive into Root-Cause Analysis

Once you have done your initial assessment and then communicated your initial findings to relevant business function, it's time to dive deep to separate symptoms from root-cause. You may need access to multiple test and near-production systems(*) to validate theories.So do make sure these are functional before the crisis hits.

Do ask around your team (DevOps, Release Management, Testing, Engineering) for their input into symptoms and route cause. In many circumstances, something similar has been seen before.

Cycle back with colleagues and partners based on status and resolution - instant messenger is fab here!

(*) Near-production = an environment that mostly closely replicates your live or production environment

Multiple resolutions

There may be several resolutions available: there's a matrix of time horizon vs cost-benefit.

Multiple resolutions might be appropriate - and that's absolutely appropriate to pursue several simultaneously. eg roll-back recent enhancement; test proposed partial fix; kick back to engineering for a rework with new testing scenarios etc.

How everyone else views the first-in-post product manager

CEO mutters that maybe it is time to hire a product manager.

Everyone else wonders, "Err, and how will they help?" And they get that uneasy feeling that the company is going to be less fun and more restrictive and more "NO!" Perhaps the first publication of the Employee Handbook had the same reaction - mildly menacing, but necessary for some (other) slightly dysfunctional part of the business, but not for me.

Below I augment the great story that Product Focus (a well-regarded provider of product management training) tell in their Product Leadership Workshops and, to some extent, is outlined in their publication, "What is the point of Product Management?"

Here's the history of a B2B software company and the welcome emergence of product management.

The small company was founded on technical innovation and good customer service to its early customers. Initial Product Management is executed by the CEO. The company continues to thrive, and the CEO's time gets further and further sub-divided, but the technology and the product remain his/her passion.

But a new Sales Director joins the company and complains, "We’re a technical-led company. We need to become customer-driven." And that sounded fine except every new contract required custom work. Contracts were signed with a dozen clients from a dozen market segments. Soon the costs to support all these different products started to escalate. The latest customer’s voice always dominated the product plans. The CEO concludes that “customer-driven” meant “being driven by the latest customer”, and this created short-termism to the frustration of Engineering with the creation of massive technical debt and the sense of favouritism towards particular Sales team(s) creating lots of subversive backdoors to decision-makers. The price list becomes a joke, as the Sales team somehow manages to get colossal discounts on big deals using the mantra of 'a strategic customer deal,' without regard to profit margin. 

When a board member declares, “We’ve become a sales-led company. We really need to start being market-driven,” a brand specialist is head-hunted away from a big consumer product company to be your VP of Marketing. As part of a re-branding initiative, she designs a new corporate logo with a new colour scheme for the web site, new collateral, and an updated trade show booth and a big expense budget for conferences. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent without any change in revenue.

Soon the CFO whispers to the CEO, “Don’t you think it’s time we started controlling costs?” So, the company becomes cost-driven and started cutting out all the luxuries like travel, technical support, bonuses, and employee appreciation. Everything had to be justified with a business case and the CFO was tough on any assumptions – the only things that got past him were small evolutions of existing products. Account management was lauded for winning incremental business, usually with small but exotic customisations which started to build technical debt and make upgrades to new product releases more and more painful. And, innovation stalls, engineering resignations escalates!

At this point, when Finance has gone too far, margins have suffered, and the future product pipeline looks thin and also-ran. The CEO steps back in and is sorely tempted to take the company back to its technology roots but he/she knows that this needs to be tempered with supporting existing customers and protecting existing revenue streams. So, a new, hybrid approach is required – so the company recruits a product manager.

The CTO and the Head of Engineering welcome the idea. Finally, the Product Manager is the go-to person to make sure his/her team build the right stuff and have a solid, defensible product strategy. This prevents his team/technology from being yanked around all the time OR working on the latest, crazy C-suite initiatives OR brainless product customisations for the big customers, that don't make sense and will become a mill stone around the neck of Customer Support in the future.

But the Head of Sales is also keen. Her team can’t answer the tough questions customers are asking. Finally, someone with lots of product expertise can answer technical questions without murdering customers currently in pre-sales with infinite complexities and CLOSE SALES! The perfect PM should answer customer RFPs (Request for Proposals); AND come out on sales trips whenever they’re needed; AND be the demo jockey; AND talk authoritatively about future product releases and when they will occur. They should also be able to write some technical whitepapers and do some decent competitive analysis.

Marketing, who if you’ll remember lost a lot of credibility with their splurge on branding, are also having problems with their collateral. Their vague product brochures and website content don’t seem to hold customers' interest and come in for a lot of criticism from prospects and internally. The Product Manager can explain the product once and for all, providing decent product messaging and propositions for the collateral. A product roadmap with some realistic dates would allow her to plan marketing spend, rather than a knee-jerk reaction to product releases or to cancel events sponsorship at the last minute due to another slippage in the product release date.

Finance is relieved to hear about Product Management arriving. Finally, there’ll be someone to hold accountable for whether each product is making any money. The CFO immediately starts working on a new, complex, business case spreadsheet that the Product Manager will be tasked with completing and comes up with detailed KPIs that the new product managers will measure for him!

By this stage, Account Management & Customer Support have almost lost the will to live. Every day, they writhe in agony trying to solve exotic customer problems which Testing and Engineering struggle to recreate, never mind solve. They see the new Product Management team as the last hope to solve the Sales madness of selling solutions that are further away from the core product offering and hanging Customer Support out to dry AGAIN. Otherwise, they are definitely throwing in the towel and quitting.

Conclusion

Everyone has their view of what the perfect product manager should be doing – it’s helping them do their job! In truth, Product Management should be greasing the wheels of all these business functions because they put the product's holistic success at the centre of what they do..

About Arthur
A Product Manager who enjoys taking new technologies and concepts to market. Fascinated by software, internet and mobile sectors. Start-up and scale-up specialist. Based in Cambridge, UK. For more information, see www.stream121.com.