It takes a certain maturity to professionalize technology product commercialization. Goodwill and good intentions simply aren’t enough for a technology company to succeed in implementing a product management function or to reliably target its development resources on the most promising market segments. For Vocollect, a rapidly growing producer of hardware and software for shop-floor computer interface, transitioning to professionally managed product commercialization from a seat-of-the-pants model took place only after several abrupt growing up experiences including sharp about-faces in the marketplace and misunderstandings within its own workforce. Company co-founder and Board Chairman Roger Byford explains.

Compared to most leading-edge technology companies, Pittsburgh, PA-based Vocollect, Inc. is a venerable institution. Founded in 1987 by three veterans of the nearby Westinghouse Corporate Research Center, the company was formed to exploit what had by then become the stuff of urban legend—the prodigious ability of Westinghouse scientists to produce great inventions coupled with the chronic inability of Westinghouse commercial managers to exploit those inventions in the emerging technology marketplace.

In the case of Vocollect’s founders, that technology involved voice-directed computer interfaces for applications where the user’s need for continuous hands-on and eyes-on contact with the work environment made more conventional methods of user interface clumsy, error-prone, and even dangerous. By replacing clipboards, handheld scanners, portable keyboards, and other mobile record-keeping systems with a voice-based command system linked to remote computers, Vocollect’s technology enabled workers to make significant increases in their speed, accuracy, and productivity.

But over time, even though the system’s core technologies evolved in a more or less linear fashion, its marketplace applications did not. Board Chairman Roger Byford, one of the company’s three original founders, recalls one pivotal re-orientation. “The initial target market for the company was for folks inspecting manufactured products, particularly automobiles,” he said. But while its products worked well, Vocollect’s business model did not. “In the mid-90’s, we shifted our focus to the distribution market where the typical application is someone who is essentially running around a warehouse, picking product off the shelves, building pallets or putting products into totes, and getting it to the door to be shipped. But instead of doing that with a paper list, for example, they’re being talked through the process by the unit on their belt.”

Transitions

Today, Vocollect employs more than 250 in the U.S. and Europe who serve over 75,000 workers in hundreds of companies on five continents in the warehousing, manufacturing, beverage distribution, and forest product industries. But the company’s transition into those markets came at a time when it employed only about 20 people. “The concept of product management was foreign to us at that stage in the company’s evolution,” he said. “When a company’s very small, everybody wears a lot of hats. And to have somebody who’s permanently wearing a hat that says ‘Product Manager’ on it is probably a little premature at that stage.”

Over time, however, the concept became less foreign. “As the company began to grow, it became clear that we needed to put in place a formal way of managing our product beyond just having the techies say, ‘Oh, boy! That looks like something we could build!’,” he said. “There was a growing realization that the world for us was getting more complex. We wanted to turn product development projects faster. We had more going on. And we had a need to be thinking a lot harder about how we were managing our product life cycles. We had about 50 people at that time.”

Today, using a stage-gate development process, Vocollect has formalized its product development function. At its earliest stage, a screening committee largely made up of product managers, evaluates the concept to determine whether the idea merits the resources needed to turn it into a prototype suitable for beta testing and evaluation by the company’s customers and development partners. Throughout the remaining stages, project teams whose makeup varies with the nature of the project, are led by a steering committee which always includes the product manager as well as the project manager and an executive sponsor. The company also maintains a marketing and business development organization whose mission is to grow Vocollect’s indirect channels and outbound marketing efforts.

Just below the CEO

But it wasn’t until 2001, when both the company’s current CEO and its Marketing Vice President were recruited to join after years with a highly successful maker of industrial printers, that Vocollect’s current model of product management began taking shape. “I think it’s a fairly traditional model,” Byford observed. But then, with what may be the understatement emblematic of his native Britain, he noted that Vocollect’s model may not be all that traditional after all. “We recently put Product Management and Product Development under the same roof, in Product Operations, instead of having them reporting through separate chains all the way up to the CEO,” he said. “The intention was to further improve the communications across the Product Management and Product Development boundary.

“In the traditional structure, you have Product Management reporting up through Marketing,” he noted. “Product Development reports up through Engineering, and the two don’t meet until you get to the boss’s office. That’s probably not the optimal structure. The ideal thing to do, I hope, is what we’ve done fairly recently, which is to look for somebody who can run both the

functions of Product Management and Product Development. In our case, or in the case of a company our size, we do that one level below the CEO’s office.”

Why? “There are inevitably conflicts between Product Management and Product Development; you would expect that as part of the process. But you surely don’t want to have to take too many of those issues as far as the CEO level,” he said. “Giving one individual full responsibility for doing that—both creating and then implementing the product life cycle—is a good thing.

Absolute clarity

Regardless of the reporting arrangements, successfully adding a formal Product Management function to an already up and running enterprise requires high levels of tact, diplomacy, and clarity of communications. That doesn’t always happen. “One of the things we learned was that as with adding other functions to a growing organization, it’s important to be as clear as possible about understanding what the new role is and does, not only for the person or persons who are going to fill that role, but for all the people who have contact with that function,” Byford said.

“Almost inevitably, somebody or some group of bodies, is going to be giving up a piece of what they do today—whether formally or informally. And we certainly found from experience that not being absolutely clear about what you’re doing and why and how you’re not losing a piece of your job, can be a mistake. ‘Your job is growing, so this piece is going to be more than enough to keep you busy. But take this other piece and give it to somebody else’,” Byford said, paraphrasing a line manager’s speech.

“Getting that straightened out ahead of time is valuable. However, we added the Product Management function early enough that we didn’t do as good a job of that as we could have done—defining new roles and making sure everybody understood what a product manager was and what they did, and defining how the interfaces should work between the various parties.”

Today, Vocollect’s product management group includes ten full-time employees, organized primarily along product lines. “You have a division of responsibilities within that single function, and therefore more specialization, so you have the need to make sure you’re creating mechanisms that generate communication sideways within that function as well as across to the other functions,” he said.

“We tend to have a product manager and a less senior product specialist in each segment. So those roles differ somewhat in scope of authority. It’s a little more complicated here because almost all of our products interact. So that requires strong communication across product managers as well as everywhere else. And in some development projects, we may have multiple product managers involved in a single development project. Because more than one product line, as we currently have them defined, may be affected by a single project.”

When to flex

As a corporation, Vocollect likes to develop leadership from within its own staff, according to Byford. About half of the company’s product management staff is home grown. “But there has to be some body of experience, or else you’re going to be grubbing around in the dark way too much,” he said. Beyond that, however, are certain qualities of character that anyone considered for the position has to have.

The most important? “An ability to lead without having the line authority to do so,” he answered. “The product manager has no direct line responsibility over most folks on the product development team. Nor typically does the project manager. Those two have to be able to work very effectively together. And they have to be able to influence the rest of the team on the project and convey their convictions. There’s a blend of flexibility and knowing when not to flex–when to insist–and having the ability to insist when necessary without getting people all riled up,” Byford noted.

“The function that Product Management can clearly perform is to make sure a company’s product development efforts are not only well-intentioned, but well-directed,” he said. “For a company like ours, and I suspect for any rapidly growing high technology company, the investment in product development is huge—about 15 percent of revenue in our case. If you’re not making sufficient use of that large bucket of dollars, you’re not likely to be able to stay ahead of the competition. Products that miss the mark, or are not what the customer is really looking for, that don’t address the competitive issues, that don’t get launched effectively into the marketplace—can result in a huge waste of time and effort.”

Peter Longini is the Managing Editor of Inside Product Strategy™ published by the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network (www.productstrategynetwork.org). The PPSN is a not-for-profit organization serving technology and life sciences product commercialization managers in the Pittsburgh region. Contact Peter at plongini@productstrategynetwork.org

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