Great Product Managers are on route to becoming tomorrows CEOs.

Mark Dance in his podcast for featureplan (Are Great Product Managers Born or Made) states that the first rule for hiring great product managers is to hire product managers that can grow to be CEOs because they are: the CEOs of tomorrow and are the CEOs for their products. Adam Bullied, in his blog post Not Being CEO, reviews the common aspects of the CEO and Product Manager role, he states that:

“The responsibility of the roles heavily intersect. A large part, in my estimation, is due to both positions having visibility company-wide, and the requirement of working with everyone in a company in order to get your job done.”

Mark Dance also compares the role of CEO and Product Manager: stating that both are strategic and operational in that they:
#1. Create value for customers
#2. Capture that value and
#3. Protect that value

The steps taken from moving from Product Management to becoming a Chief Executive

Barbara Tallent who progressed from Product Management to being a CEO via being a VP of a few departments’ notes in her blog post Product Manager to CEO in 10 short years says:

"In some ways, being a CEO is no different at all then being a product manager. You are responsible for everything and yet there are outside influences that are out of your control. Yet in some ways it is very different. As a product manager, you have all the responsibility, but none of the authority and you need to coax, cajole, or con people into what is best for the company. As CEO you have a level of authority that is easily misunderstood and even more easily misused. But you still have to build consensus and make people feel like they are part of the decision process so, from that perspective, product marketing prepares you well for the CEO role."

Barbara Tallent reviews her career and gives four attributes that all Product Managers need to embrace to prepare themselves for more senior positions in their organization:

#1. Start thinking like a CEO – think beyond the product, the next sprint, enhancements and bug lists. Think about the position of the product and the company in the market place. Bring people together to talk about the product road map.
#2. People skills: motivation, communication – telling people why products, features etc are or are not important. Be able to lead people.
#3. Live in the sales world for a while – understand the sales process – improve your sales skills because the CEO is always selling, either to customers, investors, or employees.
#4. Learn as much as possible about fund raising and its process. CEOs particularly of start-ups will need to raise funds. Also learn what venture capitalists look for when investing in a company.

Growing CEOs from with in the company

Joseph L. Bower in November’s issue of Harvard Business Review gives a number of pointers for those wishing to progress to the level of CEO. The article points out that:

#1.The most successful CEO’s, on balance are developed inside the company – but manage to retain an outside perspective: there is a need to maintain enough detachment from the local traditions and ideology to maintain the objectivity of an outsider.

#2. Build a track record of delivering in the short term while building for the long term.

#3. Take the opportunity, should it arise, to run a business unit, department or even a risky project that gives you the opportunity to be responsible for profit and loss (P/L).

Attributes needed for driving a company forward

Bower also lists four key skills that a new CEO needs to drive a company forward and produce the results that the board and shareholders are looking for:

#1. Anticipate where the world and the companies markets are heading and create a vision to position the company accordingly.

#2. Identify and recruit, if need be, the talent that can transform the vision into reality.

#3. Gain a real understanding for the problems and issues that the company faces.

#4. Understand how the company really works – who are the key players that make things happen.

Irrespective of whether you’re a Product Manager who wants to improve their Product Management skills and standing within their company or whether you are looking to climb the corporate ladder – the advice and tips, I’ve summarised, from the authors quoted in this blog post are applicable.

Final word from Tallent was that “There is a whole lot of good ‘fortune’ and timing that goes into anyone's career” including her own she adds.

I believe the key is to be striving to reach your full potential, at each step in your career, so should the doors of opportunity open (running a risky project, taking on P/L responsibility for a business unit or becoming a CEO) you are prepared to rise to the challenge and walk through the open door.

Read More

Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development

One of the key attributes that a Product Manager has to have in order to be successful is the ability to work in a collaborative way across teams and departments in order to bring new products to market or maintain and increase the profitability of existing products by adding innovative features and enhancements. Collaboration is one of those key requirements listed in the majority of job adverts for Product Managers. Collaboration is a key issue for CEOs because they know that bringing a group of people together from diverse backgrounds, skill-sets and professions to work as a team or virtual team is a challenging job.

According to Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson:

“The most productive, innovative teams were led by people who were both task and relationship-oriented.”

As such it’s the responsibility of Product Management to be able to work with and co-ordinate stakeholders with different skill sets and from a variety of backgrounds and at different levels.

Three factors that help Product Managers successfully collaborate are:

#1. Work closely with your teams on a daily basis – sit among the engineers and if possible have a hot desk in departments and/or the officers of other stakeholders – spread yourself around.

#2. The Product Manager has to be a universal translator: understanding the commercial and business world and yet have the appropriate technical understanding of the technologies that underpin the products so that they can understand and explain both sides of the equation. This will ensure that business and technical sense is maintianed.

#3. Be clear on your role (what is expected of you) and ensure that other stakeholders know the boundaries of your role. This will aid in dispelling ambiguity and ensure that tasks aren’t inadvertently left undone.

In short the successful Product Managers will understand the issues, technical and business pains of their stakeholders and be able to communicate and help resolve these pains for the common good of the success of the product.

Read More

Profit-Driven Innovation with Hugh Richards

Product Management View blog and webinar series has a webinar by Hugh Richards entitled " Profit-Driven Innovation". This webinar covers key issues companies face when innovating:

#1. Why we innovate.
#2. Key drivers of successful innovation.
#3. Understaning company operations.
#4. Innovation impact across the company.
#5. Necessity for strong leadershp.

Read More

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps Part#1 touched on two innovative traps that ProductManagers may encounter:

#1. Strategy: the misconception that every innovative idea has to be a blockbuster – where as a number of small incremental innovations could lead to over all product success. And
#2. Process: subjecting innovative efforts and projects to the same rigor, reviews and filters as standard business as usual (BAU) will stifle innovative growth.

Part #2 will now deal with the innovative traps of Structure and Skills.

Structure
The wrong company structure could easily hinder innovation. However a key part of the Product Management function is to collaborate with stakeholders from across the company in order to collate possible ideas for future product development and product enhancement as well as to smooth the way for the implementation of such ideas.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter gives example of companies that setup innovative projects that included individuals from across various functions [sales, marketing, production…] with in an organization. These individuals worked apart from the traditional company structure in order to avoid a company culture that would hinder innovation. The ideas that were most innovative and promising from the various areas [sales, customer support, marketing…] would be introduced back into the main company. However Kanter reports that the projects failed to integrate the new ideas back into the mainstream part of the firms. The key reason, for failure, was put down to a poor connection between the experimenting innovative team and the mainstream company. Product Management by its very nature seeks buy-in from across various cross functional areas and acts as the oil to smooth the way for such changes in order to ensure products experience constant improvement at each point their life cycle.

The Product Management function also needs to be able to review activity from various divisions across an organization – divisions that will probably be working with various technologies and/or operating in different markets. Kanter gives examples of CBS and Gillette who failed to bring various technologies together from its various divisions in order to come up with cutting edge products.

CBS was once the world’s largest broadcaster and owned the world’s largest record company, yet it failed to invent music video, losing this opportunity to MTV. In the late 1990s, Gillette had a toothbrush unit (Oral B), an appliance unit (Braun), and a battery unit (Duracell), but lagged in introducing a battery-powered toothbrush. The likelihood that companies will miss or stifle innovations increases when the potential innovations involve expertise from different industries or knowledge of different technologies. Managers at established organizations may both fail to understand the nature of a new idea and feel threatened by it.

Possible lessons learnt for CBS and Gillette would be enable Product Management to operate horizontally across the enterprises various divisions in order come up with innovative ideas. This means that the Product Manager would need to have at least an appreciation of the various markets and technology from across the enterprise.

The 4^th and final innovation traps that Kanter list is Communication and leadership Skills:

Being able to innovate is one thing but having the ability to convince others of your innovative idea is another. Failure to be able to sell your idea to internal stakeholders will probably result your innovative ideas not making itto market - and by chance they do they are in danger of being a commercial failure. I worked for a company where the engineers came up with a fabulous idea – it was designed – manufactured – was displayed at exhibitions but was not a commercial success, simply because the Sales Director did not understand or believe in it. I’ve also worked for a different company where a particular engineering team continuously produced competitive products that earned the company substantial revenue. However the team failed (for one reason or another) to gel with the rest of the company. The result was that the team was dismantled by senior management. Strong management including Product Management is required to complement innovation.

• Relationships need to be built and maintained,
• People need to buy-in to the ideas,
• Colleagues need to speak up for your innovative ideas at meeting that you don’t attend,
• Unhealthy competition between R&D teams needs to be put to rest.

Micheal in his blog High tech Product Management who owns innovation in your company writes:

"In most high-tech companies, the Product Management/Marketing team has the best view of the cross-functional processes of the organization - across Development, Marketing, Distribution, Operations, Sales and Support."

In short Product Management needs to drive innovation through various stages by using their soft ‘people skills’. Chief being the ability to communicate at all levels through out the organization.

Read also:

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1
The innovation value chain and Product Management
Innovation the classic traps

Read More

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1

Product Managers often need to collaborate, co-ordinate, drive, release and launch innovative ideas into the market place. However there are pitfalls that product management need to avoid if success is be to secured. This is a two part series based on Rosabeth Moss Kanter article in Harvard Business Review entitled Innovation: The Classic Traps. The article focuses on four areas: Strategy, Process, Structure and Skills.

Strategy Mistakes
It is not possible for every innovative idea to be a huge success such as the new iPod - therefore Product Managers, Business and Product Owners should be careful not to reject opportunities that at first appear too small because they do not have the inherent promise of being the next killer app. A number of small incremental wins to a product feature set could ultimately result in overall product success - especially with online products.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter states that:
Not every offering [feature, enhancement or new product] will be a blockbuster, but 'Time Incorporated' had learned what successful innovators know. To get more success you have to be willing to risk more failures, Rosabeth quotes the following example from the traditional media business as a case in point:

"Time Incorporated, the magazine wing of Time Warner, for a long time was slow to develop new publications because managers wanted any start-up to have the potential to grow into another People or Sports Illustrated, two of the company’s legendary successes. During the period before Don Logan took the helm in 1992, almost no new magazines were launched. After Logan brought a different innovation strategy to the magazine group, Time developed (or bought) about 100 magazines, which dramatically increased the company’s revenues, cash flow, and profits."

The same would naturally be true for on-line media companies aiming to increase revenue by innovation– whether it’s adding new enhancements, functionality or widgets to an existing website or launching a new on-line product in a new or related market area. The balance will be the risk and reward of innovative ventures versus the risk of the traditional and status quo which could result in the risk of loosing market share to a number of younger meaner online publishing machines.

Process Mistakes
There is a risk of stifling innovation by subjecting it to tight controls and procedures of existing businesses. Again Rosabeth Moss Kanter gives us a practical example:

"AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) in 2000 sought new Internet-based products and services using established strategic-planning and budgeting processes through existing business units. The CEO asked the divisions to bring their best ideas for Internet-related innovations to the quarterly budget reviews. Although designated as a priority, these innovation projects were subjected to the same financial metrics the established businesses were. Budgets contained no additional funds for investment; managers working on innovations had to find their own sources of funding through savings or internal transfers. What emerged were often retrofitted versions of ideas that had been in the pipeline anyway."

Product Managers would do well to justify time for engineering teams to carry out research and therefore help secure budget for both pure and applied research. It would also be advantageous to map the areas of applied research to future product functionality in order to demonstrate transparency..
See also
Innovation the classic trap
The Innovation Value Chain and Product Management
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

Read More