“Hire product managers when you want to sell to someone who is not just like you” – hard earned experience by NetApp’s David Hitz. I’ve worked with many tech companies that, sadly for their customers and for their business, don’t want to invest in marketing and product management isn’t even on their radar.
Product Managers keep the product development process focused on the KISS principle. Product Managers tell engineers and programmers things like “we don’t need that one button to do 100 things just because it can”. They keep “The Design of Everyday Things” in mind. They are the wardens of Alan Cooper’s Asylum, in charge of keeping all users sane (and happy) when using your products.
For product management to be effective, you have to give it some teeth. When I first joined Intel, Andy Grove was CEO and Intel was essentially a one product company with Andy as Product Manager. Everybody marched to Andy’s beat. I described it at the time as an ant hill, and I meant it as a compliment. That’s what I call teeth because the company followed the product.
Don’t defang product management by muddling it up with marketing. Product management needs to be “the hub of many other activities around the product“, not just promotion. As the company and product line grows, effective product managers need to own the product P&L
Product Management gets you well on your way to product excellence. But you also need to rethink the development process. “6 degrees of separation between developers and end-users is 3 too many. It’s hard to keep users happy with that disconnect” (via @dhague ). @jamet123 even counted the steps and sure enough, 6 degrees of separation:
1.Users tell an analyst what they want
2.The analyst writes a requirement document or a high-level specification
3.A technical design gets developed
4.Code gets written to implement this design
5.Testing finds flaws and issues and these get resolved
6.The user gets to try and use the resulting application
There are a whole lot smarter technology options out there now to build or rebuild your systems. Business rules breaks the language barrier between the business and IT. SaaS and web platforms allow for rapid iterations. Think about what’s right and smart for your business, hire those product managers and snuggle up much closer to your customer.
