Is it possible to turn a bucket of fertilizer into a rose petal? Yes. It is. However, it requires time and effort. And progress is measured in small increments rather than large leaps. This, in a nutshell, is product management. It’s a process. It’s time consuming and most often measured in minor victories – hopefully steady ones. It’s rarely a home run let alone a consistent string of them. The earlier you realize this, the greater the brain damage you’ll save yourself.
How does one manage a lengthy process of tiny victories in order to achieve great success? Other than exercising a boat load of patience, that is? The key is to make good decisions consistently. While it’s true that you will, through your product management career, make many bad decisions you should continually work to reduce the number of bad decisions and increase the number of good ones you make in both quantity and quality.
While this is a worthy objective, it’s much easier said than done. Consequently, one must bear in mind that over time, the balance of favorable outcomes tips in your favor by making consistently good choices versus making a preponderance of poor choices. Also, for every decision you make, good or bad, you should learn something from it and apply it to the next decision point. This combination helps you replicate good decisions while reducing the poor ones, thus building your success.
By exercising the lessons learned from each decision, your judgment becomes more refined, helping you make better choices going forward. This process is cumulative. The more decisions you make, the more you learn and the deeper your experience becomes. The more of that experience you have at your command, the easier it is to make sound, future choices.
The more positive decisions you make, the greater the probability of successful outcomes and learning which can be built upon further. Truly, striving for consistent, sound decision making for your product or business is very much like compound interest. As Ben Franklin said, there is no greater force in nature than that of compound interest… paraphrased, of course.
The point is this; good decisions repeated improve your odds of success. Poor decisions repeated increase your odds of unemployment.
As a product manager, it’s imperative that you strive to make consistently good decisions by learning from all decisions previously made. Thus, it becomes a process of incremental improvement in your skill set much the same way in which a bucket of fertilizer, under the right conditions, is used to turn a seed into a plant bearing rose petals. It’s all incremental.
As previously stated, product management is slow, it’s incremental, and there are few home runs. But if you understand the basic premise behind the process and work to exercise the fundamentals – consistent good decision making and learning from each decision, then applying those lessons - you’ll see the results you hope for across time. Profitable products, happy customers, satisfied management, and bigger pay checks are yours for the taking – one incremental improvement at a time!
Friday, August 29, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Olympic Business
The Olympics are on TV and I’ve been watching sporadically during the evenings. The athleticism, stamina, strength, flexibility, and quality of the competitors is amazing. They’re fun to watch and they make their performances look easy - deceptively so. This, despite the world records which are falling in droves.
Now what on earth could any of this have to do with business in general or product management in particular? Simple. The effort and practice put in by the athletes over the years is the key. The repetition. The mechanics. The consistency.
Striving for perfection, not by dreaming up elegantly complex routines or wearing the trendiest uniforms, but by drilling their minds and bodies to act and react almost instinctively. Again and again, with great precision, upon each repetition they refine their motor skills, their strength, their agility, their stamina, their mental toughness to ever greater degrees.
In short, Olympic athletes work tremendously hard on the value chain of their individual performance characteristics to align them perfectly and consistently. In doing so, they maximize their odds of success in order to become the best athletes the world has seen.
As a product manager, you will have a value chain of performance components you must strive to align consistently and well. Driving a business or product line to success requires performing fundamental business skills and activities over and over with precision. Like the Olympians, doing so maximizes your odds of success.
If you believe that writing the best business plan, crafting the most elegant strategy, or dreaming up a great value prop are all that are required to succeed as a product manager, you will fail miserably. Despite watching Olympians make their complex activities look armchair easy, nearly everyone knows that 4 years or more of diligent, concentrated, and difficult effort have been invested to obtain the results we watch on television.
Unfortunately, too many product managers believe they can generate great success with their lines without engaging in the hard, time consuming work needed to make less-than-sexy value chain activities line up and function well. Building cool strategy decks, grand business plans, or mind share grabbing value propositions is sexy and fun. But at the end of the day, no matter how great those things are, they won’t be sufficient to overcome poor customer research, flawed pricing, inefficient manufacturing operations, or inadequate sales support and training any more than sleek uniforms or great sound bites will translate into Olympic gold.
To be a successful product manager, you have to behave like an Olympic athlete in training, day in and day out. Take care of the fundamentals. Develop reliably consistent performance across your value chain and you can achieve greatness. It may not be fun every day, but the result will be worth it!
Now what on earth could any of this have to do with business in general or product management in particular? Simple. The effort and practice put in by the athletes over the years is the key. The repetition. The mechanics. The consistency.
Striving for perfection, not by dreaming up elegantly complex routines or wearing the trendiest uniforms, but by drilling their minds and bodies to act and react almost instinctively. Again and again, with great precision, upon each repetition they refine their motor skills, their strength, their agility, their stamina, their mental toughness to ever greater degrees.
In short, Olympic athletes work tremendously hard on the value chain of their individual performance characteristics to align them perfectly and consistently. In doing so, they maximize their odds of success in order to become the best athletes the world has seen.
As a product manager, you will have a value chain of performance components you must strive to align consistently and well. Driving a business or product line to success requires performing fundamental business skills and activities over and over with precision. Like the Olympians, doing so maximizes your odds of success.
If you believe that writing the best business plan, crafting the most elegant strategy, or dreaming up a great value prop are all that are required to succeed as a product manager, you will fail miserably. Despite watching Olympians make their complex activities look armchair easy, nearly everyone knows that 4 years or more of diligent, concentrated, and difficult effort have been invested to obtain the results we watch on television.
Unfortunately, too many product managers believe they can generate great success with their lines without engaging in the hard, time consuming work needed to make less-than-sexy value chain activities line up and function well. Building cool strategy decks, grand business plans, or mind share grabbing value propositions is sexy and fun. But at the end of the day, no matter how great those things are, they won’t be sufficient to overcome poor customer research, flawed pricing, inefficient manufacturing operations, or inadequate sales support and training any more than sleek uniforms or great sound bites will translate into Olympic gold.
To be a successful product manager, you have to behave like an Olympic athlete in training, day in and day out. Take care of the fundamentals. Develop reliably consistent performance across your value chain and you can achieve greatness. It may not be fun every day, but the result will be worth it!
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Process This!
Product Managers are often called upon to be process managers. Getting a concept from idea to dollars requires multiple steps, in the appropriate sequence, in order to ensure success. Consequently, a product manager must work to align the steps and help guide and propel the idea through those steps in a systematic fashion i.e., a process. This is a requirement. Nay, even a necessary evil it seems at times.
To the great joy (read consternation) of product managers everywhere, there frequently exists an internal functionary otherwise known as a busy-body, whose sole role is to impart additional process to the, ah…. process. These are the folks for whom process is the end-all, be-all of their existence. Or at least it should be from their blinder addled perspective.
These people believe that more process equates to heightened success and greater performance. This is similar to stating that market share exactly equals profits (Ask the airline industry or dot bombers how well this equation works!). But I digress.
The process police will put formula and propriety before the actual objective of you as a product manager. To them, checking the boxes is more important than generating revenue and profit. This is called, no value add. In less polite society, it’s also referred to as “Revenue Prevention.”
What’s the anti-dote to such an inane stance? Education. Facts. Persistence. In combination and large doses. And bribes - little ones, of course e.g., coffee, bagels, schmooze, etc. Those help – sometimes. If you can prove to the process police, via profligate fact that their desires stand in the way of great riches, rather than enabling them, you may have a chance of getting beyond their insidious clutches and extricate your product from the evil (not necessary evil, mind you) of undesirable process activities.
Remember, KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Your facts must be numerous, well organized, and simple to communicate / understand. Your delivery needs to be calm and reasoned. And above all, you must be persistent. For without these things, the unthinking, unblinking process will overwhelm all who stand in opposition. Your product will be left in the dust and those promising dollars will gladly head to your competitors, at which point in time even the, “I told you so’s” and the “process this, will ya!” won’t do you or your product any good.
Thus should be your mantra… KISS. Simple facts to educate in a persistent manner. Because at the end of the day, cash is fact, profit is theory, and process should be nothing more than a means to those ends, not the end itself.
To the great joy (read consternation) of product managers everywhere, there frequently exists an internal functionary otherwise known as a busy-body, whose sole role is to impart additional process to the, ah…. process. These are the folks for whom process is the end-all, be-all of their existence. Or at least it should be from their blinder addled perspective.
These people believe that more process equates to heightened success and greater performance. This is similar to stating that market share exactly equals profits (Ask the airline industry or dot bombers how well this equation works!). But I digress.
The process police will put formula and propriety before the actual objective of you as a product manager. To them, checking the boxes is more important than generating revenue and profit. This is called, no value add. In less polite society, it’s also referred to as “Revenue Prevention.”
What’s the anti-dote to such an inane stance? Education. Facts. Persistence. In combination and large doses. And bribes - little ones, of course e.g., coffee, bagels, schmooze, etc. Those help – sometimes. If you can prove to the process police, via profligate fact that their desires stand in the way of great riches, rather than enabling them, you may have a chance of getting beyond their insidious clutches and extricate your product from the evil (not necessary evil, mind you) of undesirable process activities.
Remember, KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Your facts must be numerous, well organized, and simple to communicate / understand. Your delivery needs to be calm and reasoned. And above all, you must be persistent. For without these things, the unthinking, unblinking process will overwhelm all who stand in opposition. Your product will be left in the dust and those promising dollars will gladly head to your competitors, at which point in time even the, “I told you so’s” and the “process this, will ya!” won’t do you or your product any good.
Thus should be your mantra… KISS. Simple facts to educate in a persistent manner. Because at the end of the day, cash is fact, profit is theory, and process should be nothing more than a means to those ends, not the end itself.
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