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Software Product Management
Rahul Chouda
Are you facing difficulties in coordinating with development, marketing and the
sales channel?
Is your marketing team understanding product features/trends apart from competitive
trends?
Is your product feature and functionality evolution late or confused?
Its time for product management. It's time for a re-organization and recognition
of product culture.
Product Management was created in the 40s at Proctor and Gamble for managing the
business of a specific product. Through the years, product managers (and brand managers)
have served as "chieftains of the product" in consumer goods companies. Here the
product management was relatively easier for no need of technical knowledge. But
in technology market, the three corners of the functional triangle are sales, marketing
and development. Each of these function interact with each other but in an highly
inefficient and stressful manner. This is because of the little understanding of
each other's needs. Interaction with development and clients required technical
knowledge, which pure sales and marketing people miss. Hence, came the Product Management
at the interface of sales, marketing and development with technical, business and
domain knowledge.
World's biggest software products company- Microsoft's careers section has listed
numerous posting for the requirements of a 'Product Manager'. It demands business/domain
knowledge along with technological expertise and indicates the emphasis it places
on the 'product management' function and its skills. If today any IT company has
global ambitions and is talking about moving up the software value chain, then it
would be a folly, if it does not adopt a 'product management' culture. So what exactly
is the product management and how it leads to successful product profit management?
'Cross-functional' challenge :
Developers know technology. Sales people know about the deals they're working. Marketing
Communications knows how to communicate. Then where does Product Manager fit in?
The Product Manager is the interface of all the three functions and hence 'cross-functional'
in true sense. In technology companies, product management often plays a support
role:
- supporting the channel with demos and product information,
- supporting developers with user requirements, project scheduling and prioritizing
customer and sales requests for features
- supporting marketing communications with product and technical collaterals
As demands increase for more product management time, the product management role
exceeds what can be done by a single person. Market-savvy executives rely on product
management to identify and quantify market problems and bringing market information
for product planning.
Knowledge warehouse
Good product decisions don't happen by accident. To make good product decisions,
one must first understand the prospect, and the prospects problems, better than
the prospect knows himself. Product management interacts with the market, observes
customer problems that company can solve, and then tell the development team about
the problem. For example, if one's customers are bank employees, one must understand
at least: their education levels, what is their every day role, what their bosses
expect from them, their purchase authority, what motivates them, specifically what
problems one is trying to solve for them - in great detail and what alternatives
exist to ones solution.
The more detail Product Manager has on his customers problems, the better chances
of designing a solution that customers will purchase and use. This information is
called domain knowledge. It often takes years to obtain this kind of knowledge,
but without it, PM will feel blind when making decisions. One must also understand
how those problems can be solved. This information is technical knowledge.
A high-tech product marketing, PM will find it hard to design good products without
specific high-tech knowledge. But there's more. Good business decisions also require
business knowledge. Business knowledge includes strategic understanding,
marketing techniques, management understanding, financial savvy, and just plain
experience. Its easy to find product managers who have only one or two of these,
the value is commanded by people who offer the triage of domain, technical and business
knowledge.
Beyond titles:
Titles evolve as a company grows. In a small company, everyone does anything and
everything. Product planning is done by the president and the developers. With a
product in hand, company then hires sales people to find customers for it. Company
then soon realizes that it cannot do all that it wants to do without adding some
marketing professionals. Startups typically hire marketing communications (marcom)
people to create promotional materials. But because marcom typically knows little
about technology and the technology buyer, they struggle with messaging. Here comes
product management to the rescue of the company by supporting marcom with content.
And since they're the product experts, the sales channel starts requesting more
and more support from product managers for "special" deals, or whenever a sales
support rep is unavailable. The product management person takes on the role of market
sensing: listening for market requirements, prioritizing them and analyzing the
product roadmap with corresponding business/technical documents. The product marketing
person is tasked to take the resulting product and appropriate communications to
the market. Understanding technology is still key but now the role becomes one of
"telling" rather than "listening."
Product managers serve as the CEOs eyes and ears in the market, and hence serve
the business interests of the company by reducing the risk associated with building
new products and product releases. In today's turbulent technology market if any
company wished to develop product of global standards, it should adopt product management
as corner-stone of its products strategy.
About Author: Rahul Choudaha Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics & Telecom),
MBA (NITIE). Product Manager with Kale Consultants Ltd. Responsible for product
management of airlines revenue accounting products and is involved in Pre-Sales
consulting. Worked with Airtel and ITC Ltd. Articles published :
� Reinventing Marketing' , Industry 2.O, Jasubhai Publications, Sept'01
� 'Technology Marketing' , Marketing Mastermind, ICFAI Publications, Nov'01 � 'm-commerce:
are we ready?, indiainfoline.com
� 'Bioinformatics: Convergence revisited' in 'Vista' of IIM, Bangalore
The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views or policies of his organization .
Written by Rahul Choudaha.
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