Let’s face it. Managing products is hard work. Personally, I always marvel at the people who just nail product management jobs and make it look effortless. There is something alluring about product management. It is the chance to take concepts from the abstract to the concrete and see the impact in the market. The opportunity to own a product and make it successful is alluring, too.

For all the goodness of product management, there are the challenges too. This article offers some of the lessons I learned through a career that includes product management roles at several high-tech companies. Few jobs will keep you humble more than product management, and I hope my experiences both good and bad are useful for surviving product management.

Essentials of product management

Passion for your products and their success matters more than organizational power. The role of a product manager is full of opportunities to find passion for the product today, its future roadmap, sales strategies, finding and growing a sales champion, and working with and supporting service. In short, the best product managers have a passion for their products’ success. They rarely coerce cooperation through formal power by invoking a VP or C-level executives’ name or position, but their passion and intensity earn them respect. Passion is the fuel of the best product managers; it propels them beyond doing “just enough to get by” to delivering exceptional work, projects and results.

Aggressively manage expectations. In some companies product managers are considered the final authority on future product enhancements, current and future pricing, launch dates, PR and lead generation efforts to which even analyst firms subscribe. With this much authority, Sales, Channel Management, Operations, and Production—in short every affected group in a company—looks to Product Management to make product commitments, to respond to competitive pressure, and to capitalize on market opportunities. If your company has an intranet, post the product roadmap and product management plans, in detail by product, for everyone to view. Deviating from the product roadmap for special orders needs to be aggressively communicated to Sales, Channel Managers, Operations, Engineering, Finance, Services and many other organizations affected by the product introduction, as do pricing moves and product direction.

Resolve to know your competitors better than the industry analysts. Become an expert in every aspect of their business.

• Get 10Qs and other filings from the SEC for publicly available companies.
• Run a D&B report of all competitors every three months to see how their business is going.
• Take the hardest-hitting competitive points and publish them to your direct sales force, including inside Sales.
• Distribute the trending data to your indirect partners and keep the best competitive analysis for your direct sales force.
• Publish how-to-sell-against papers on each competitor every six months to capture the current knowledge for both direct and indirect channels.

Pricing competitive analysis deserves its own effort. When managing high-volume products, such as PCs, laptops or accessories, it is easy to have a constant view of how your pricing measures up relative to competitors by simply checking competitors’ and their channel partners’ websites. Tracking your competitor’s price relative to your own on a daily basis delivers the data necessary to fight for price moves and lower per unit costs from Purchasing, Procurement or Operations. Consider hiring a few interns from a local university to do the daily analysis and to establish trending graphs and presentations. I recommend the interns work twenty hours a week, the first half of each weekday. Pricing from competitors is typically re-vamped nightly with website refreshes, so having interns capture this data during the first hours of the day gives you immediate visibility into pricing moves.

The first 90 days in a product management role is critical. This is the time the best product managers get their reputations established, start delivering on projects, show their strengths and weaknesses, develop alliances, and set expectations for the next year or two. It is critical during this time to avoid being isolated and getting buried in emails and distractions. The best product managers are those who interact with the departments they will need to work with in the future, build alliances, start to earn trust, and get to know the true role of Product Management and where it is positioned within the company. During interview cycles, you get the organizational chart view, but now is the time to get the real view—by reaching out to departments you will work with includes Sales, Marketing, Service, Engineering, Production, Operations and the customer base. If you can, get out and see at least three to five customers, coordinating this with Sales, and also spend time with your internal “customers,” going as far as to publish your project list for everyone who relies on you. Work to deliver projects before their deadlines, and ask frequently for feedback. The goal during this first 90 days is to become part of the fabric of the company and to spend as much time as possible learning the organization and its most pressing needs before going after huge projects.

Grow sales champions, even if it means you do pre-sales support. Sales and Product Management often have a cordial yet distant relationship because Product Management needs Sales to raise the most critical metrics there are, and Sales needs Product Management for market and product information. Many product management groups avoid pre-sales support because it becomes all-consuming. But structuring pre-sales support in terms of escalation of the best opportunities coming to Product Management for face-time with product experts is critical to fostering a relationship with Sales and to eventually grow a sales champion. Just manage your time to ensure this does not become an all-consuming job.

Look for as many ways to connect with the outside world as possible. There is a tendency in Product Management just to live inside the company’s four walls and only occasionally go outside for channel partners, resellers, salespeople, and customers. A big part of what makes a great product manager is the reverse; They know the world of their salespeople, channel partners and customers better than anyone else because they work very hard to break down the barriers that separate them from what is really happening. Consider doing a blog to bounce ideas around and learn about what is going on outside your company.

Making cross-functional teams work

Credibility is the capital you trade with, start with humility. Passion and credibility go hand-in-hand. Building credibility starts with a focus on earning respect from Engineering, Product Marketing, Sales and other departments you regularly interact with. Building credibility starts by building trust. Trust comes from being transparent. Building credibility takes time, and so often product managers feel they must be the instant expert for their products, when building credibility is much better accomplished by admitting what you do not know and asking for help. Humility and honesty gain respect, as does asking for help and being reciprocal about sharing thanks for getting it. Be sure to serve up plenty of recognition to those that help you too, copying their managers on thank-you e-mails when members of other departments go out of their way to help you reach your goals. Start laying the foundation for positive relationships where you get the reputation for sharing credit and thank you early and often.

Replace the frequency of cross-functional meetings with an intranet site. Respect the time of cross-functional team members by distributing marketing, sales and business plans, specifications, and documents via an Intranet site. Distribute links and ask for feedback, and only have cross-functional meetings when there is enough to discuss and it warrants everyone’s time. You can also use an intranet site for managing the approval cycles for documents as well, and if you have an organization that is comprised of team members across a wide geographic region, use meetings and conference calls for exceptions and have the workflows on the intranet site handle the routine tasks.

Create a buzz around new product introductions by creating Champion Awards. In one PC company that had to rely on engineering resources from another project to get its product line built, tested and ready for launch, Product Management created Champion Awards signed by the Directors of Engineering, Marketing, General Manager for the Division and CEO. These were personalized and framed by product managers, then presented the same week a member of Engineering completed a task that was above and beyond their primary job in support of the product launch. These were presented at cross-functional meetings by Directors of Engineering and Marketing.

Under-commit on launch dates and over-deliver on them. Product introductions are when companies signal to the outside world just how coordinated they are—or not. There is major pressure to move launch dates up from Sales, Channel Management, Marketing, and at times from Operations and Production as well. With as much pressure as there is to move up a launch date, build at least 20% of extra time into schedules because delays inevitably occur.

Lessons learned from working with Engineering

There is the roadmap, and then there is the schedule. If there is one painful lesson I learned when I was a product manager, it is that there is a major difference between a product roadmap and a launch schedule for new products. Price adjustments are made based on existing products’ current pricing levels, margins and discounts in addition to product cancel dates, or discontinue dates. In short, even the best companies have trouble meeting launch dates, holding to commitment dates for product enhancements, and even product discontinuance dates. This is not a criticism of Engineering because delays in product introduction, pricing, and product retirements happen for a multitude of reasons. Staying as connected as possible to Manufacturing, Engineering, and pricing managers can make your product launch more effective by orders of magnitude.

Share product ownership with your products’ engineers. Partner and team with Engineering, and specifically spend much time understanding their perspective on your products. Share ownership for the product and its future, and work to create a cooperative environment with Engineering.

Relentlessly pursue product expertise. Becoming a product expert starts by realizing that there is no such thing as an “instant expert.” Working with Engineering to appreciate which decisions they made on your product and why goes a long way towards giving you a solid foundation to manage your products as effectively as possible.

Be a de facto leader of development via customer and competitive intelligence. This takes much effort, and it is worth it for any product manager to establish their role as delivering in-depth customer and competitive intelligence. Often when the next generation of a product is being developed, Engineering needs input on what customers are looking for. By committing to be the leader in terms of customer and competitive intelligence, you can that much more effectively guide product development.

Lessons learned from working with Product Marketing

Get on top of lead generation performance for your products. Marketing may not have this data, but actively get this information from the sales department for all product managers so you can start building your products’ sales funnel and how many leads are needed at the wide end of the funnel to result in closed sales. Then work with Marketing to understand the sales funnel for your products. See if you can create the sales funnel for your products using their data, and see why some leads drop out of the pipeline.

Create a Google™ AdWords strategy for your products. This is very economical as a lead generation strategy, so push to get AdWords created for your products. Define the specific keywords to include competitors and their products, as well. The cost per click can be well under $1 and the leads finely tuned.

Have a constant stream of white papers and knowledge going to prospects. This is doubly true in emerging markets where prospects are looking for guidance and insight into which new technologies are reliably working. Prospects want to understand what new technologies mean to them; they do not want messages slammed at them. Educate and be the trusted advisor in new markets, and you will sell more.

Use industry analysts often. In certain software segments, industry analysts are relied on for guidance by IT buyers, and as a result they have insights into what is being purchased and why. Get industry analysts to visit your company and present competitive updates once every three to six months. Also get their insights into your product roadmap and direction. Ensure a non-disclosure agreement is in place as part of your company’s overall relationship with them.

Managing new product development and introductions

Managing new product introductions is the most strategically important task product managers undertake. According to research completed by the Corporate Executive Board, 20-25% of companies rely on new product introductions for the majority of their revenue during every 36 months of operations. Corporate Executive Board also reported that in a recent survey, 43% of executives said that new product introductions are the single most important strategic tool with the highest impact on total company performance. Product managers are often called on to be the project leads for their product’s introductions. This role takes the most amount of coordination, effort and time investment.

The steps required for launching a new product vary significantly by company and industry. The Corporate Executive Board defined a generic product development and launch process, which includes the following steps. Keep in mind many companies tailor these steps for their specific needs, yet the progression is a good indication of what needs to be done to develop and launch products:

Idea Creation

• Teamwork with R&D, Marketing, Product Management and Engineering
• Voice of the Customer Programs are also included in this step, which focuses on bringingin insights from customersthat potentially re-define the direction of the product and service strategies.
• New product ideas are prioritized during this phase and a decision is made about which products to monetize.

Concept Definition

• Feasibility analysis completed (technical requirements; detailed financial analysis; materials, human resources and production requirements; post-company support)
• Detailed market study(market definition, assessment of competition)
• Identification of legal/patent/copyright issues
• Key deliverables from this phase include the initial business case, technical specifications of the product, and a project management plan that includes roles and responsibilities.

Design and Development

• Physical design of product or definition of service
• Prototyping (physical or computer representation of the product)
• Alpha testing (batch testing to confirm product requirements, trial production to confirm assembly and manufacturing suitability)
• Detailed marketing and operations plans
• Updated financial analysis
• Key deliverables from this phase include extensive testing of the product concept against market, financial, technical, and physical criteria.

Product & Service Validation

• Beta/gamma testing with existing and potential customers
• Trial production run
• Resolution and negotiation of legal/patent/copyright issues
• The key deliverables from this step include validated, pre-production products available for the market

Production and Distribution

• Final assembly line tooling and in the case of software products, feature freeze and gold master CD created
• Securing distribution channels including value-added reseller recruitment and selection.

Product Launch

• Development and implementation of marketing launch plan (product positioning, advertising/promotional strategy, final pricing)
• Sales force training
• Development of sales and product support materials

For a great drill-down on this step, consider these following books. Catherine Kitcho’s book High Tech Product Launch has good insights into launching software applications and high-tech products in general. The book New Product Launch: 10 Proven Strategies by Joan Schneider and Jeanne Yocumis also a must-read for any product manager having to do a product launch.

The above is meant only as a high-level overview of the steps involved in new product development and product introductions—clearly each of these steps could be drilled into with much greater granularity and depth.

One of the most popular approaches to managing new product development and introductions is the stage gate process. Dr. Robert G. Cooper’s book, Winning at New Products: Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch, is a must-read for any product manager who works in an organization that has standardized on stage gate steps for launching new products. Even if your company is not using the stage gate process, this book has some great pointers on developing and launching products.

Summary and wrap-up

Product managers, through their efforts, have great potential to make a lasting impact on companies and entire industries. Exceptional product managers are marked by a passion to make their products, engineering staffs, and sales persons the stars of their companies. They are content to be the enablers of accomplishment and the “backstops” of products, so to speak. A great product manager is like a terrific coach; they orchestrate people, resources, and strategies to make their teams successful first and always.

There are literally hundreds of blogs written by product managers, but these few stand out as both entertaining and insightful:

AlwaysOn™ http://www.alwayson-network.com/

Creating Passionate Users http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

Guy Kawasaki’s Let the Good Times Roll http://blog.guykawasaki.com/

Seth Godin’s blog is full of great marketing ideas http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

Geoffrey Moore’s blog on innovation http://geoffmoore.blogs.com/my_weblog/

Of course, www.pragmaticmarketing.com is also a great resource devoted specifically for product managers.

Louis Columbus is Senior Business Development Manager, Cincom Solutions. Formerly a Senior Analyst at AMR Research, his career has included senior management positions where he served as Vice President, Marketing and Business Development. Louis has published fifteen books on a variety of technology areas including Microsoft operating systems, peripherals and the application service provider arena. You can reach Louis at lcolumbus@cincom.com