Take back that strategic product management job you thought you had.

Eileen Licitra
Proficientz

Take back that strategic product management job you thought you had.

productcampdc.liveupdates@blogger.com

Target may not continue to sell Kindle because of the showroom effect - can I look at the version on the floor and comparison shop at a bargain. This keeps CEOs up at night.

Problems are big and broad
personal devices (unmanaged) in the enterprise
education and health care costs rising
government regulation

Products are narrow
Workflow and activity - a few steps removed from the big problems?

Can one product solve a big, broad problem? No.
We organize product teams in silos.
Think about product, confined by narrow.
Most of our time is spent on day to day management, little time on strategy.

C-Suite says - product team - here's where we need to go - revenue/market share for next 3 years
BRing us a plan - we go back to silos and create our own product plans.
Incremental improvements.

Resources - can focus on small areas. but have to do lots of jobs - BD, engineering, marketing, etc - I was in control - I knew all that was going on - cohesive. I doubled profits in a year.
But...
Working for a big banks - billion dollar org - need to find a way to scale. lots of turn wars - marketing vs prod managers.
Inefficient to have too many people working on something.

How as the CEO can you get the team to the next level?
We have to effectively execute on a plan - need to undersrtand the big problem and the mmarkets to serve.

The person who wins is the one who best sells the idea for maximizing profits.

What if... here are the goals -
Markets we are serving include....
Who most values what we do?
Market perspective - big picture - what are the drivers/trends
This is the approach we are taking - this is not an engineering product management strategy
The engineering team does not like this. They want to create the future.
Must pull away from thinking about your product.
Engineers do not talk to customers and don't know what the customer wants.

Have some products - look at larger market and where it is going.
Set your market and portfolio strategy.
Think about where you want to go - sometimes you need to sacrifice in the short term to achieve long term objectives?
Apple has the whole ecosystem - and mindshare. How can you tackle this?

Takes a team approach - must have the data - there are some C-suite people who do not care.

What made us a 20 person company - will it get us there?
Sell smoke until there is fire. Don't build anything until we have a customer who wants that?
innovators dilemma - why do you throw away sommething that is working?
selling print works in newspapers....

HP - process to "eat your young"

When our product leads propose to build the sales and marketing materials that opens the door to create the products.

If you solve a problem that the customer is willing to pay for.

Find one customer. Must be 1x a big enough market.

What if on your product team you had product managers who do not own products?

Just in time development - late nights, red bull - agile in telecom space.
Started as owning products - recognized the need to think about strategy and where to go.
My company has never hada product management organization - came in to think about what is next.

Change management is hard - portfolio manager - not day to day product responsibility

Market segment - industry dynamics
Operational business practices
User processes and product expertise

Requires consistent orchestration.



showrooming effect - look at trends - how does that impact operational business practices.
advance your strategic agenda of customer

Understanding who is telegraphing your pain points and address that.
Enterprise anything - black box - customer is invisible...

You can figure out big needs in the market - broad aspects - probably what you're capable of making is only a little piece - what do you do?

You MUST understand your core competency. you cannot make all the products.
You can be better than others in your space.

Look at Intuit - broad understanding of small business - all they do is integrated, all is simple, work with partners. Their app marketplace is awful - but they offer payroll, books, smb website, mobile payment, payment processing - a part of high impact solutions.

Oracle - show the big picture problems - increase efficiencies, secure information, better insights - through a suite of solutions.

How are product managers rated?
Revenue by product line, company goals/performance, product delivery
What if we were measured differently? How are we gaining revenue and share in the markets?

Becoming a powerful influencer is the most important thing. Learn to influence people!

Typically the job description asks for breadth and depth, but pragmatically we generally are asked to focus on tactical priorities.

We accidentally did this right. My CMO is the portfolio manager - he listens to pain and what we could build and selling licenses - I was just talking to GE and Walgreens -
We spend too much time telling engineers what to do - but we need to focus on the why.
We will experiment - telling engineers - tell us what is interesting. What are the hard problems that apply to our business?
Engineers want to see success while they are building something cool. They do not focus on the finances.
Incentive - we will be able to hire more geeks.

"Because people matter, we must lead them well."
www.BrightHillGroup.com
240-668-4799
Sent from my mobile device. Typos courtesy of autocorrect.