Category Archives: self improvement

Matt Anderson @ ‘The Three Questions for Product Manager’

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Matt Matt Andersonbroke into product management as a SME in library software, but has branched out into broader software categories. As a product manager, Matt has recent experience with B2B and B2G products, browser-based and mobile applications, and US and Canadian workforce regulations at several small companies in Salt Lake City. While working from Utah, Matt has worked extensively with offshore teams in India and Eastern Europe. Matt’s product management influences include Alicia Dixon, Rich Mironov, Roger Cauvin, Nils Davis, and the PM Dude. In his spare time, Matt tweets about product management best practices and broad technological trends.

We thank Matt for taking out time and be part of ‘Three Questions’ series for product managers.

Product Mantra: How do you see the role of product manager evolving in the world of Mobile Apps?

Matt Anderson: Mobile applications are often a new-ish product offering for companies that have established core products. In this sort of scenario, the mobile applications are often the most exciting area of development for the organization, while the core products are constantly focusing on the same things over the long-term: performance improvements, features, bug fixes, etc. Mobile products often have a shorter development cycle, a shorter testing process, and a smaller training and documentation effort. For someone who has been working as a product manager or engineer for non-mobile applications, it’s often a relief to move onto a mobile app project.

The learning curve, however, can be steep when you begin to work on mobile applications. Product managers working with mobile should look at and use applications regularly. They should look at mobile design patterns across the software industry. I’ve found it beneficial to carry multiple devices, with multiple brands, sizes, carriers, operating systems, etc. I’ve carried devices that were cheap or old when I thought the users may not use the latest and greatest. A product manager will have trouble balancing all of these conflicting concerns, so I’ve found it is good to rely on short release cycles, consistent beta releases, and constant feedback loops with users to release successful mobile products.

If I were to hire a product manager to work on a mobile application, I would look for a high-performer who was actively trying to understand (1) industry standards of UX design, (2) best practices for customer interviews, and (3) best practices for Agile. I’ve found that a solid background in product management and UX is a primary qualification for a mobile product management role, while experience in the mobile application space is a secondary qualification.

Product Mantra: How often do you conduct competitive analysis, and are there any methods that you can share with us?

Matt Anderson: I crawl the web daily for competitive insight in my industry by using Paper.li and Talkwalker Alerts. I think that establishing a constant flow of competitive data by using these tools is a great way to keep a constant dialog with your product management, marketing, and development teams. If I hear that my competitor’s Mobile App X is integrating with an API Y, I want to share that info with my team right away. That’s a daily competitive analysis, which may not be for everyone, but daily crawling is definitely my style. And if you use this strategy, don’t forget to pay attention also to your competitors’ major customers, because they drive your competitors’ strategy.

While I gather far more competitive insight from the web than from other means, the most valuable data is not always available on the web. I received one of the best pieces of competitive data in my career by attending an industry event and hearing that a government agency had worked with my competitors A, B, and C to draft legislation for my industry. Not all information is published to websites, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You need to be where your industry influences are, be where your customer base is, and be where your partners are. Visit your customers regularly, attend industry events, and you’ll work your way to the center of your industry.

I always find that the data that you gather from the competition over time needs to work its way into a higher-level analysis that compares your product offering with the competition. It could be a spreadsheet that shows feature quality for you and four competitors, or a spreadsheet with predictions of what each competitor’s feature offering will be in 2 years, or a pricing analysis in a spreadsheet that recommends dropping your price by 10% to improve your win-loss ratio. Take your competitive analysis and make it consumable by your executive team.

Product Mantra: What would be your suggestion for 3 Do’s and 3 Don’ts for Product Managers?

Matt Anderson:

Don’t just tell people what they want to hear; tell them what is going to happen. Don’t just say “yes” or “that’s a great idea” if you aren’t going to do it now. Tell them the real plan, and you’ll promote openness and trust.

Do work for your organization; not your department. As much as you can, be the best value to your organization. That means breaking down unnecessary interdepartmental silos and establishing a cooperative environment.

Don’t be the primary tester for your product. Sure, there are reasons why it can be a good thing. First and foremost, it is a great way for a product manager to understand the product and how it is used. However, a few of the consequences that arise from having product managers as the primary testers are impacts on the development process, conflicts of interest, and impacts on the performance of the product manager.

Do put your executive hat on. It’s not only the dev team and the user that matters…make sure that your product strategy is in line with your executive team’s expectations. Do it on a monthly basis, if possible.

Don’t gather the stakeholders and let them duke it out over what the priorities for the product are. You are being paid to make decisions about the product, not facilitate others to do so.

Do participate in the #prodmgmt community. I’ve learned so much from my colleagues in the product management community. I’ve met dozens of product management folks through my use of Twitter who have made my career and my life more fulfilling.

Thanks Matt.

Matt Anderson on web:

  1. Matt Anderson blog www.mattanderson.org/blog
  2. Twitter http://twitter.com/MattAndersonUT
  3. Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-anderson/23/888/879

@mathurabhay

Jeff Lash @ ‘The Three Questions for Product Manager’

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Jeff-Lash

Twitter: @jefflash

Jeff Lash is a product management adviser, researcher and a blogger. He is the Service Director of the Product Management advisory service at SiriusDecisions, the leading global b-to-b research and advisory firm. Jeff plays vibraphone along with several other instruments. We thank Jeff for taking out time and be part of ‘Three Questions’ series for product managers.

Product Mantra: Is “data driven decision-making” killing the innovative thinking among product owners?

Jeff Lash: Quite the contrary – at SiriusDecisions, we still encounter product management teams that base a lot of their decision-making on anecdotes and gut instinct rather than objective data. Innovation and evidence-based decision-making aren’t in conflict – in fact, they work well together and in many cases you need them both.

For example, it’s okay to think about innovative ideas for new products or product enhancements. However, instead of just running off and building them, product managers should look to conduct concept testing to see whether these ideas have merit and, if they do, to help iterate and improve upon them. Similarly, data can be extremely helpful in identifying opportunities to innovate. Quantitative data – from a variety of sources, including everything from market overviews to web analytics – can help identify needs, pain points and trends, and that can inspire innovative ideas that wouldn’t have been identified otherwise.

It feels as though people take a position on either end of the spectrum. On the one side, there are people who quote (or, more likely, misquote) Steve Jobs or Henry Ford and believe that customers don’t know what they want and you should just come up with innovative ideas and try and move the market. On the other side, there are people who believe every question in life can be answered through an A/B test. The reality is that there is a happy medium in the middle.

Product Mantra: What are three things that you don’t want a product manager to spend his or her time on?

Jeff Lash:

  • User experience design. This is a topic that is coming up more often, especially for SaaS products, as the lines between product management and user experience are sometimes unclear. Product managers certainly should care about user experience and work closely with UX practitioners. However, if they’re getting into the details of design, that’s a problem, since often they don’t have the skills or experience to do good UX work, and it means that’s taking time away from other important activities they should be doing. I wrote more about this in my blog post Product Management is Not User Experience.
  • Detailed specifications. It’s very easy for product managers to slip into specifying the details of how a capability can be implemented. For those product managers who were former developers or engineers especially, they often know the product or the underlying technology so well they could specify how it should be built. That’s not the job of the product manager, though. And in Agile, even though functional specifications aren’t produced as a formal deliverable, the same sort of detail is being created for each story – often in the form of detailed acceptance criteria. There are plenty of other roles that can handle the specifications – and often do a much better job – but there’s only one product manager. When product managers can provide guidance and context to those doing the detailed work, not only are they themselves not spending time on those sort of tactical elements, but the end result will also likely be much better as well.
  • Anything for just one customer. One fundamental difference between product management and bespoke product development is that product management is focused on creating a product that can sell to multiple customers in a market or segment. Especially in startups, situations where one customer represents a large percentage of the revenue, or even when one customer represents a large percentage of the total addressable market, product managers can get drawn in to focusing on just fulfilling requests from specific customers. Product managers should listen to customers and understand what they want and why, but rather than simply following orders, they need to evaluate whether the feature or capability or change would be valuable to the target market as a whole.

Product Mantra: What traits should one look for in a candidate while hiring for a product manager position in a b-to-b market?

Jeff Lash: I like that you specifically asked about traits rather than skills or experience. Clearly, having a certain set of experience is important, but things like competencies can be developed in an individual, while traits are harder to learn or adapt. There are a number of traits that I think are important, but here are four I’d suggest looking for:

  • Passion. Product managers need to be passionate about the role and the subject matter in which he or she is working. You need passion to build great products, and you need passion to inspire others to build great products. Ask candidates what gets them out of bed in the morning and try to determine their level of passion for the role and the industry/customers/product.
  • Empathy. Product managers need to be able to empathize with buyers and customers and users in order to fulfill their needs and empathize with colleagues to create effective and high-performing teams. Ask candidates to tell an example of when they empathized with a customer or colleague and what they learned from it.
  • Humility. Humility will help product managers empathize with customers and enable them to relate better to your internal colleagues. It also enforces the idea of being part of a team – arrogance is a difficult trait to make work in a collaborative environment. Ask about successes and listen to whether the candidate only talks about his or her own role or gives credit to the others who contributed.
  • Tenacity. There will be challenges along the way, whether it’s trying to get management to fund a new product, resolving some technical issues or taking on a major competitor. People who have a low tolerance for overcoming challenges will struggle in the role. Ask about a time when the candidate faced an obstacle that seemed insurmountable and how he or she overcame it.

Thanks Jeff.

Jeff Lash on Social Media

  1. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jefflash.
  2. Blog about product management at How To Be A Good Product Manager 
  3. Official blog post on the SiriusDecisions blog,

About SiriusDecisions
SiriusDecisions, the leading global b-to-b research and advisory firm. SiriusDecisions empowers the world’s leading marketing, product and sales leaders to make better decisions, execute with precision and accelerate growth.

@mathurabhay

Questions to Answer before you take on a Problem

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Problems are solved to make something easier for the user and financially beneficial to the organization. While it is challenging to quantify and thus measure user benefits (easy to communicate with friends), financial benefits are relatively easily measured in terms of impact on top and/or bottom line.

But before we talk of measuring output let us exclusively talk about the problem. Before you decide to put in efforts and money in solving a problem, let us be sure that the problem has undergone set of quality analysis and is proven worth addressing beyond any doubts.

Am I the right person to solve the problem? (Introspection)

So you have a problem in hand or you are given a problem to solve. The first parameter in the quality analysis metrics of a problem is that “am I the guy who solves this problem?” let us put down an example here.

The technology head who designed an in-flight entertainment system was called to solve a problem of many passengers not viewing the movies while flying. More and more passengers are shutting down the movie in less than 20 minutes. A primary survey results show that flyers did not enjoy the movie.

Airline is worried that these passengers may jump on to competition for simple reason that they do not like our entertainment system and get bored in our flight. So this problem must be addressed before it starts impacting business in serious manner.

The problem here could be related to poor collection of movies, streaming challenges, user interface of entertainment system, sound clarity, related to display quality of the screen or may be something else. Here it is important to appreciate the business challenge but at the same time if you are not the right guy you better make a case and pass it on. For example, what if the poor collection is the cause of this problem? Or even for that matter display screen which might have to be sourced from a vendor. Those being the case, get the screens replaced with better quality screens. Now if there are issues related to poor audio experience, user experience or streaming than the head of technology has a job in hand.

A passionate problem solver often gets carried away in such situations, consequences of which will cause further damage to the business. Here it is important to be wise than good. Identify the root cause, let the problem go to the right person (this is not passing on the buck). You may also end up finding more than one root cause on why passengers do not like the in-flight entertainment system. In such scenarios you may have a part of problem to solve and part may fall elsewhere.

 Do we have the right set of skills? If not can we acquire them? (Feasibility)

If there is a problem that it must be solved. And we you are the one who is expected to do so than it is important that you assess the feasibility aspect as well. In above case of in-flight entertainment system, suppose the root cause identified is “poor collection of movies” and you as a product manager is expected to solve the issue. It is important to understand that the solution here is non-technical (better collection of movies). Answer simple set of questions,

  1. What is preferred set of movies?
  2. Who are my typical customers (professionals, family on vacation, religious people etc)
  3. What will motivate my customers to watch a movie to its full length?
  4. Do I need to have more language options?

And many more such questions need to be answered. Typically a Behavioral science professional may be a better person to solve this puzzle (of collection of movies). So you as a product manager may end up hiring an expert of behavioral science or outsource this puzzle to agency. This is your contribution in solving this problem. Remember every issue is not a technical issue but most issues will have a solution related to human aspect. It is recommended not to stretch your-self to unknown territories but get someone who is familiar with such situations.

 Potential of the problem (scalability and profitability)

So how about measuring the impact of not solving or impact if the problem gets solved? So what if I get some games instead sourcing movies, may be getting games might be easier and cost effective alternate? And even if I source good movies considering the variety in taste is this a viable solution to implement in all the routers. Also, if it is movies the solution may say that we need to regularly update our collection. Can we think of alternates? Will my flyer pay for premium entertainment services like in-flight internet? What entertainment services are offered by my competitors?

The scalability and profitability aspect of a problem will talk about;

  1. Competing and complimentary services
  2. Market size and target market sizing
  3. Pocket size of buyer and their ability and willingness to make payments that suits your pricing
  4. Economics, solving this problem will help me enhance my top-line and / or my bottom line

To judge quality of problem it is important to assess all the four aspects (mentioned in bullet points above) of problem potential. Assess scalability and profitability critically. Challenge every aspect of possible solution, identify impact on top-line and bottom-line and never ever ignore assessing alternate approaches.

 Life cycle, available window of ROI

Well all sounds good, we a have problem for which we have right skill set, is definitely scalable and profitable, but this not where it ends. How about life of the problem? To make healthy returns out of your investment it becomes important that the problem stays for a longer duration and your investment in solution fetches you returns for a longer duration.

In our case study of in-flight entertainment system, what if root cause is seasonal turbulence which might ease out in next 15 days or so. Passengers may not be enjoying movie when the flight experiences turbulence. Or it may be a season where most of the passengers are business travelers who may not want to watch a movie but instead focus on intellectual reading or discussions, could it be season where foreign tourist occupies most seats that are not so keen to watch a movie.

So the point is, if the life of a problem is short it may not be a good idea (on most occasions) to invest (time and money) on such problems. Instead figure out problems that here to stay for long and you have market for longer duration.

To add, here is one more example, a software company was struggling to upgrade their software in a particular geography due to poor connectivity in that region. Company invested heavily on engineering and research activity to solve the problem and figure out light weight upgrades that would work even in low bandwidth conditions. Company took its time solve this puzzle, however in a very short time telecom companies upgraded their infrastructure in the region and bandwidth was at par with other regions in the geography. Now here, if the software company had done some research or if they had got in touch with service providers in the region they would have learned that this problem of low bandwidth is short lived and it is not wise to put our engineering resources in solving a puzzle that would eventually be solved by someone else.

So ensure to have answer to following question

  1. Do I have enough time to recover my investment and make profit? Problem should not get outdated or obsolete in short time.

 Conclusion 

A good problem is the problems that will help my business fetch more money by keeping my customers happy. A happy customer is one who believes (is convinced) that he/ she is getting what is they are paying for or are getting more than what they are paying for. A happy business owner is one who believes (is convinced) that he is selling his product or services at a better profit margins than competitors. And a good problem solver is one who makes both (customer and business owner) convince that they have a reason to be happy.

Hence it is of paramount importance for a problem solver to put the problem through a comprehensive quality analysis before jumping onto solving the problem. So when it comes to solving a problem, this is probably the only way to make both business owner and customer happy.

@mathurabhay