Why should you read this blog
I am in the process of producing a series of blogs capturing Product Management job function aspects. All the information presented in these blogs is based on my own learnings and experiences executing as a Product Manager (PM) and PM lead, from the year 2008 to date. These blogs should be of help to:
- Professionals who are aspiring to plan a career as a PM and want to understand what would it take to successfully execute and excel in this role.
- Existing PMs who can use this information to validate what aspects of Product Management they have not been firsthand exposed to, so far, and can plan forthcoming career moves accordingly.
- Others who may not currently plan to work as PMs but, out of curiosity, want to understand the work-life of their PM colleagues, friends, or family.
The current blog is the first in the relevant series and provides a 100ft level Outline of all the aspects of PM job function. Subsequently, each of these individual aspects will be covered in a detailed manner in respective dedicated blogs.
Product Manager vs the CEO
An ideal Product Manager is the CEO of her product. What it actually means is the PM must take ownership of executing on a mission to continuously keep increasing the product’s market share and revenue, and ensures that the product offers an Industry-Leading solution. PM should be the “Face of the Product” to customers worldwide and the “Voice of the Customer” to internal company staff who create the product. In order to succeed with these missions and objectives, a PM usually “Manages” product company-internal and external stakeholders by using her “Influence”, while the company’s real CEO has the liberty to “Manage” People by using “Authority”. And “Influence” only engenders for professionals with a respectable persona, which is what a PM should ideally strive to persistently grow. And it will only happen when a PM clearly understands all the aspects of their job to perform those in the best possible manner, which these series of blogs can help with.
Interestingly, a lot of successful CEOs whom we get inspired from, actually have a profound Product Management mindset.
Take a Sneak Peek into Product Management Execution Model
All aspects of the Product Management job function are captured in Figure 1. Explanation of this figure below highlights at a 100ft level, how PMs should ideally execute. Each of these topics will be explained in a detailed manner in forthcoming parts of this blog, where one blog will be focused on one topic dedicatedly, like — Identify Business Objective, Build Customer Empathy, Formulate Product Strategy, and so forth.
1. Identify Business Objective
Either launching a new product in the market or enhancing an existing one, PM needs to work with the executive management to very clearly identify the chief business objectives. Very well-known frameworks like Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix, Porter’s 5 forces, Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) Analysis, and a few others can be used in combination to create the right thought process for identifying business objectives.
A simple example of a Business Objective is presented below, which demonstrates well planned “Customer Acquisition”, “existing Customers Retention”, specific “Target User Population” and “Increased revenue”.
A big product company like Oracle decides to Launch a new Mobile Application:
- that will offer basic employee actions like Expense Report approval, Timecard entries creation and approval, training enrolment, etc.
- will be offered free of cost (App Store Download) to 1000s of customers using Human Resource Management Solutions (HRMS) in the form of Oracle eBusiness Suite, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and JDEdwards HCM products. The app will connect to the backend instances of these services.
- 1000s of such customers will start introducing this app to millions of their end-user employees.
- Once these customers would get accustomed to the mobile app, they would want to extend and customize based on their specific needs. They would get to use the same mobile development framework and backend which has been leveraged to build the same app, and this will lead to an opportunity for these companies investing in Oracle Mobile App development framework.
2. Build Customer Empathy
While established Business Objectives guide us through the strategic direction that needs to be followed by the concerned product/solution, profound Customer Empathy highlights the exact features and functions that should be built within the planned product.
While planning the features of a new product, it is very important to understand the concerned customer user persona, their pain points, and specific needs. Though the same factors are also important for planning the future enhancements for already existing products, a few more aspects are also required in this case — like proper understanding of Customer Perception of the existing product they have used, what is Customer Satisfaction level, how much are Customers Engaged in utilizing the solution for their specific needs. Not only this Voice of Customer but also from various important sources of information, PM needs to intelligently derive Customer Insights, which may involve features that customers may get benefitted from but are not asking directly at that point in time. E.g. Oracle innovated the Database product to be significantly Autonomous though customers did not ask for it explicitly. Currently, it is one of the most successful product offerings by the company. Customers love to witness that in their database instances — patches and fixes automatically get applied, without the need to shut down the service, in order to maximize efficiency, performance, and security.
As highlighted in Fig 1, important sources of Customer Empathy information need to be leveraged effectively by PMs. For B2B products, customer-requested items in the Support portal, feedback from Pre-sales/deals, Customer Advisory Board proceedings, Competitive Vendor actions, etc. are very useful. For B2C products, important sources of such information could be — customer feedback survey responses (e.g. for Net Promoter Scores), feedback posted by users on the company’s Twitter wall (Slack is one example, the dedicated focus on product feedback received on Twitter).
3. Formulate Product Strategy
Understanding Business Objective, and getting all possible bits about Customer needs, PMs can easily build a comprehensive product backlog. However, considering the available funded resources (people/skills/software etc.) PMs have to now convert the proposed solution into an actionable feasible implementation plan, ensuring the most suitable items get picked up and delivered in the earliest release (as a Minimal Viable Plan). Items which are most business-critical and least complex to build, are the primary candidates for MVP. The rest of the items should be included in future releases.
4. Shepherding Engineering Execution
With the planned scope of a release, the next steps for the PM include a clear definition of individual Epics and Stories, so that the product development staff gets sufficient information about what exact feature needs to build and how should it be quality-tested. PM should help the engineering manager and/or scrum owner to include a relevant set of items in the 15 days Sprints planned during the release. In the Daily standup meeting, PM should participate as a Product Owner to not only answer relevant questions from the development and QA teams but also intermediately review progress, make relevant suggestions as required.
Close to the release, PMs should leverage effective assistance from engineering staff to successfully run Beta testing by selective customers. Even in other cases like managing the setup of A/B testing by offering alternate forms of the same product solution, PMs have to influence the execution plan of engineering teams, to accomplish the needful objective.
5. Product Pricing
Usually, the exact product price and many more details are framed by the very senior executives of a product company. It is ensured that all the costs incurred by the product company are covered plus the targeted profit rate is also included. As a PM, one should:
- ensure the pricing model is rightly structured so that details sound logical and clear to sales staff and customers. E.g. If a product SKU is not end-user facing, works on top of heavy data ingested from disparate sources, its pricing metric should definitely be based on the size of ingested data/month or so (subscription model).
- work with the engineering team to get the right features implemented so that product usage can be determined, in case the customers are using it in a subscription-based pay-as-you-go model, like in Cloud-based products. The usage data would be used to bill the customer, say monthly.
- ensure that the price is adjusted to an extent so that customers who are investing in the product should be able to get sufficient Return on Investment (ROI).
- ensure competitive pricing is adopted.
- provide a lot of careful consideration in the case of B2C products, where the price is extremely important. End-users may not evaluate B2C products entirely on features but could end up comparing the cost with their other day to day expenses.
6. Product Marketing
Most of the companies have dedicated teams for product marketing initiatives, in which, PMs contribution and guidance is needed as follows:
- PMs should drive the plan, priority, and content for strategic and technical blogs, whitepapers, datasheets, brochures, videos, etc.
- They should lead the sessions, presentations, and demos at conferences and other events
- Continuously monitor the leads collection process by marketing staff, using the data pertaining to product website visits, document downloads, etc. and ensure this input is getting utilized well by the Sales staff for identifying the right opportunities for deal conversions.
- Generate intuitive frameworks and documents which help customers clearly estimate the ROI that they will get, after adopting the concerned product.
- Team up with a research analyst firm to influence them for releasing a neutral review report of the concerned product, that could appear more authentic to customers as compared to whitepapers etc. from PMs themselves.
- Sincerely work on participating in Analyst review engagements where reputed vendors from the same market space are reviewed and analyzed and then presented worldwide in a common report, with comparative ratings. e.g. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant evaluation.
- In a B2C product, PMs must understand the AdTech intricacies and how performance marketing works, and how could be optimally used to reach out to a relevant audience. E.g. If you are navigating an e-commerce portal or a product website for exploring to purchase T-shirts, the next thing to naturally observe is the advertisement of similar products on your Facebook wall or the YouTube videos you are watching.
7. Sales and Technical enablement
Prior to the release of a product (or its new version), PMs need to ensure that:
- Sales staff has all possible ammunition to reach out to the right prospects in the most effective manner. They need to be righty and timely enabled. Any Salesperson should ideally feel positive and well informed about what they are selling, which could significantly boost their confidence and performance.
- Technical field folks like Solution Architects, Consultants, System Integrators, Pre-Sales engineers have the right expertise to guide customers for implementing the product in best practices manner to successfully Go Live. These folks need to be enabled with relevant technical information about design and implementation.
PMs should cover the following aspects in Sales Enablement
- Use the product release’s initial business objectives and key drivers to convert those into Sales plays. E.g. Considering the Mobile App example used earlier in this blog, concerning PM should make the Sales staff understand how the App could lead to significant sales for Oracle Mobile App Development form.
- Establish confidence in Sales staff by sharing positive updates — the latest product revenue and customer wins/references and acknowledge their good work.
- Explain to them the rationale of new product/new features — leveraging research output and market opportunity projections from reputed research analysts.
- Provide them with an action plan for identifying places to hunt relevant opportunities for deal conversion — the right industry segments to look for, to pitch the product, other important criteria for qualifying leads which should be further worked upon.
- While working on a particular deal, how to identify the relevant user persona at the customer site, start a conversation with the right tone focusing on the customer problems, and then tying those back to the solution which is being offered via the product.
- Typical stages and duration of a sales cycle
- How to handle conversations related to Pricing, Licensing, Procurement and GO LIVE implementation planning
- Objection handling against already identified factors (e.g. negative Analyst reviews), handling questions against benefits offered by strong competitive vendors.
- How to present past customer success stories and deliver demos
For Technical Enablement of presales consultants and solution architects, PMs should cover deep dive technical information about conducting successful POCs and architectural best practices for successful product implementations.
8. Customer Success
Once customers have invested in the product, PMs need to ensure the adoption is successful and worthy. The following should be monitored carefully and any challenges observed should be immediately investigated and remediated:
- The overall functioning and performance of Solution Architects and Customer Success Managers (CSMs) in how well are they managing the journey of product adoption, by relevant customers.
- Same guidance and assistance to System Integrator (SI) Partners if they are working on customer engagements, leveraging the concerned product.
- How effectively and satisfactorily Product Support is resolving customer tickets.
- What would it take to make a particular customer Referenceable, so that from their success story, publicly shareable case studies can be generated, or they could be used as a customer reference in an analyst review, e.g. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant evaluation.
An interesting part is (also shown in Fig 1) when PMs sincerely and closely get involved in Customer Success activities, it helps them to significantly overhaul the two primary aspects of further product strategy formation:
- Revisit Business Objective — There are certain Business Objectives identified initially based on which product was built or enhanced. Now based on the customer adoption and usage patterns observed during the Customer Success engagements, PMs can clearly identify whether the set objectives are being met? Any gaps are identified and the objectives and consequent strategy are reset before any further product releases.
- Acquire Customer Empathy — Customer Success engagements generate more detailed feedback on the product, based on adoption, and should provide valuable VOC and Customer Insight to PMs to be considered for future releases.
What do we conclude
With complete ownership of its success, PMs control each and every aspect of a product, as highlighted through an overall Outline of Product Management, in this blog. As a PM, it would be phenomenal to plan a career in a way as to significantly experience each of these aspects of PM job function, and that too in a big product company as well as a startup.
More parts of this blog series will focus on the details of individual aspects, and the URLs for those will be provided here shortly.
