After 25 years working for a number of software and hardware companies I’ve noticed that there has been seepage of the product management function into Sales and other parts of the company. Is there any way to change a culture that is deeply rooted on “we do what Sales says because we need to make the sale or we do what Development says because this is a technical organization”?

I encounter those organizations all the time: revenue or technology driven organizations who don’t value product management. These are often the very organizations we see in the news—in bankruptcy. Most companies only really understand product management when the company starts to fail. But getting senior management support for product management is often a huge challenge—with only one answer: use market facts to make all product decisions. Alas, it’s easier said than done.

tech-driven starts

There is a huge pretension on the part of engineers (and often the founder of your company, who was an engineer), who say, “I am brilliant. I have come up with a technology product and everybody will want it. All we need to do now is find customers.”

These companies quickly reach some level of success and they can’t push past it. They’ve been at ten million dollars for a decade, and they’ve had a bunch of new products and none of them have done well, and finally they think that maybe product management is the answer. It’s just too hard to build and maintain a company on technology alone. Product Management gets involved in saving the company when the other avenues have failed.

tech-driven ends

sales-driven starts

There are organizations where you watch their stock fall and if you interview any of their employees, they say “wow, we thought the sales people were the customer and now our stock has tumbled to $2 and we don’t know how it happened.” But the failure was easy to predict: sales people are not the customer and the more we listen to them the more likely it is we will bankrupt the company. Sales people are focused on the three deals they’re working—which is exactly what we want from them. But we don’t want to rely on these short-term focused employees for long-term product strategy. In fairness to sales people, their VP has encouraged this behavior. The VP of Sales doesn’t believe in all that tedious planning and ivory tower thinking that Product Management is doing; a “deal a day” is his success formula. It’s just the way sales people are wired and that’s why growth companies look elsewhere for strategy. Revenue driven companies focus on the quarter to the detriment of next year.

sales-driven ends

The solution is for Product Management to be representatives of markets and not deals. Find a problem in a market segment and ensure that the segment is big enough to generate a profit. Deliver this information to the senior executive team in a business case that combines personal customer experience with quantified market research.Sell the value of the long-term view.

Once a path is determined, keep up the communication. Don’t cover over the problems and hope you won’t miss the dates because you surely will. When the company accepts a deal that pulls developers from your project, make sure the senior executive team understands that they have delayed the delivery of your project. When a developer adds a “neat” feature while refusing to work one that we’ve agreed to, tell management. In effect, tell them that the company is deviating from their plan and make sure they’re happy about it. But they should be furious when either sales people or developers derail agreed-upon plans.