Interview with a Pure Product Manager

In this audio interview I speak with the author of the blog Purist Product Management: Aziz Musa. I had the opportunity to work with Aziz for a year at Reed Business Information and found him to be an inspirational and focussed product manager. During the interview I review Aziz’s:

• academic and professional background before becoming a Product Manager;
• his experiences at Last Minute.com;
• the strategic element of the job;
• how best to interact with the customers;
• the optimum number of products a typical Product Manager should manage;
• how to keep up with the latest trends and technologies and
• the top 3 attributes needed to enter the Product Management arena.

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Presentation on the Agile PM framework

I wrote a blog post about an agile product management frame work that I had put together in order to give guidelines to the product team and help improve the quality and accuracy of the information on the product roadmap, backlog and release plans. The blog post dealt mainly with the creation of the roadmap. The presentation below gives a high level view of the other elements of the framework.

Framework For Agile Product Management

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Advice for up and coming Product Managers

I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows:

1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers?

Make sure that you deliver your tasks on time. If you have any doubts or are not sure on any task be sure to get clarification well before the deadline. Develop a thirst for understanding what drives the business and what the technical drivers are for the projects and/or products that you are assigned to. Be sure to ask for feedback, analyse it and immediately and act on your findings.

2. What's the best way to "sell" yourself and your abilities to higher-ups?

Ensure that you have a proven track record for delivering.

Read good website and blogs on topics that your line manager is interested in – participate in forum discussions – use tools like Yahoo answers and the Q&A sections of Linkedin. Use applications like google alerts or an RSS reader to automatically capture articles on relevant topics – then periodically send your line manager links to articles that they are interested in along with your analysis on the topic and how it can help the products and projects that you are both involved in. Be sure to be able to demonstrate that you can converse confidentially and in an informed way on the topics that matter to them and their career.

3. What should you look for in a mentor? Any downsides to being part of a mentor-mentee relationship?

Look for someone with good people skills and that has your interest in mind – someone who likes to help people. Be sure that they are an experienced professional and understand human nature. It’s also important that your mentor has a successful track record.

4. When is the right time to ask for new duties, more responsibility or even a promotion? How do you let them know you're ready?

Ask for new and additional duties once you have proved yourself with your current responsibilities. Be sure to let your line manager know that you are seeking for additional challenges that will stretch your abilities. Create you own personal roadmap (that clearly identifies your career aspirations) show it to your line manager at the beginning of the year and ask for their input and advice on how to progress. Most companies have periodic reviews – use this as a time to discuss where you see yourself in 2 to 3 years time and the steps you plan to take to get there. Based on this be sure to let them know where you see yourself in the next 12 months.

5. Under what circumstances is it wiser to be patient and wait for another time to seek greater opportunity?

When things are not going well – at times projects will not be going well and the reasons may be outside your sphere of influence – it’s best to get a number of wins under your belt first before seeking greater opportunities. Whatever the situation your request should not come as a surprise to your line manager.

6. If applicable to your situation, how do you handle being younger than people you're supervising or leading?

I think that capabilities and experience are more relevant than age. I manage those who are just as capable as me more as a peer as opposed to a subordinate – however I always reserve the right to make the final decision as and when need be.

7. What is the best way to "speak truth to power"? In other words, how do you tell your boss he or she is wrong?

A lot depends on the relationship you have with your boss and the type of character s/he is and the situation you find yourself in. In general people do not like to be told they are wrong – so try presenting the truth by pre-fixing it with something like “another way of doing XYZ is to…” or pose it as a question – “is there any merit in us taking such and such a course instead of XYZ”. However if your line manager will be making a decision based on the incorrect information and the facts are not subjective then it will be best to present the raw facts and evidence – be sure not to do it in a conceited or pompous way – nobody likes a smart alec.

8. What is the best way to find companies with the best career paths for you?

You could use social networking sites like LinkedIn and search for companies you have in mind and then people who have or are working for the company in question and see how their career path has developed.

9. What advice would you have for someone just entering the job market and wanting to chart a career path similar to yours?

Be sure to read good books on both business and technical topics. Take extra classes either correspondence courses or evening classes. Develop interests outside of your immediate career – do some community or charity work – it’s amazing what you will learn from doing this type of work. Keep your mind sharp by learning a musical instrument or a foreign language.

10. What is the best advice you've received in the workplace that you'll someday pass down to someone else?

Never be afraid of a challenge – if possible do not stay with an organisation that does not offer you a good career path or an opportunity to grow and learn.

11. Is there anything else you think it would be important for our readers to know?
Every set back is an opportunity for a come back – calm seas have never made a good sailor. There will be times when things will go wrong – ensure you do a personal lessons learnt (preferably at the end of each day). Be robust ensure you have a vision for yourself (a wise man once said: without a vision the people perish) and the vision will drive you on to succeed in your career.

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Agile Product Management Framework

There are many good product management frameworks available - however, I thought I would create an agile product management framework that is broad enough to be applicable to any product management groups that is practising agile/scrum. Each activity has an associated document that is vital for communicating to the various stakeholders. The first activity in the frame work is:

Product Road Mapping

I recently did a presentation on roadmaps at our monthly product manager’s forum and highlighted the following regarding product road maps:


A Roadmap is not:

1) A random list of features handed down to the product manager to document.
2) A roadmap is not a static document that stays at version 1.0 all year.
3) A secret hid away on SharePoint or some other document management system.

A road map is according to Marty Cagan of SVPG (product strategy in an agile world):
“A product roadmap is what describes your current plan of how you will get from where you are today, to the vision described in your product strategy.” Marty goes on , in the same article, and states that “The product strategy analyzes the market opportunity and the technology and describes a vision of what the product can be.” Therefore “The product roadmap describes the sequence of product releases to make the product strategy a reality” (the article goes on to say). The product strategy feeds into and delivers on the company’s business strategy.

Taking the above into account means that product managers need to have a firm understanding of the over all strategy of the businesses that they work in. The involvement in the business strategy will vary depending upon the company that you work for, but overall every product manager needs to have a clear understanding of the businesses they are operating in.

How to Create a Product Roadmap

• Understand the business strategy.
• Collaborate with commercial owners, sales, marketing, engineering and business development on developing product strategies to fulfil the business strategy.
• Research and come up with ideas and present to stakeholders and arrange a brain storming sessions.
• Collate the ideas and work up a strategic roadmap.
• Show the roadmap around and get buy-in from budget holders.

Using the roadmap as a communication tool.
It is absolutely necessary that product managers constantly communicate – the roadmap can be used as a good communication tool to commnunicate to:
– Developers, Test Analyst and the wider technical team.
– Your line manager and heads of departments
– Managing Directors and Chief Executives

Communicating the product roadmap demonstrates that the product has a clear vision of where it is planning to go and therefore goes a long way to building confidence at all levels.

Related Articles:

Implementing an Agiles Sales Framework

Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum

What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?
What’s Product Management is like a Year after Implementing Agile

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What causes Product Managers to become disorientated?

Agile development gives the software product manager a good sense of orientation. Therefore it’s no surprise that when the development team steps away from using scrum or their preferred agile techniques things get a little disorientated.  I've observed this on two occasions over the past few years.

Totally moving away from scrum/agile
The first time was in the summer of 2007 when we where planning a major redesign of a B2B website. It was decided to take advantage of the redesign and upgrade our technology at the same time – in fact it was deemed pretty much a 'must have'. The development team had to carry out a number of research tasks and experiments on moving from .Net 1.1 to 3.5 and also on how to best build a reclassifying engine to automatically reclassify all the legacy content (some 50,000 articles) and then every new article that the editorial team would create from that point onwards. In hindsight it was a big mistake to allow the research to go ahead with out formally sizing and scoping it in pre-sprint planning. I had no way of knowing how things where progressing and when the research would come to an end.  XP identifies time boxed research as spikes .   

Partially moving away from scrum/agile
The second deviation from scrum occurred this year. At the beginning of 2008 we implemented a radical restructure that effected product management, test analyst and developers. The newly formed team had inherited a newly implemented platform, moved to a new floor and adopted new tools. Initially the new floor did not have the multitude of white boards that our previous floor had. This brought about a lack of visibility. Previously I could walk past half a dozen white boards and get a really good idea on the progress of four scrum teams with in my portfolio of products by looking at the list of impediments, the location of sprint tasks on the white boards and most of all the updated burn down charts.

Lesson Learnt
Irrespective of the work being carried out ensure you stick to your scrum cycle, estimate each task and keep track of progress using burn down charts. Failure to do so could cause you to become disorientated.

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