User Experience isn’t Everything

It seems the whole world has gone crazy for design lately. Engineers fancy themselves UXperts, Ad Sales is requesting PSDs to tweak, and Upper Management just doesn’t like that shade of blue.

Personally, I blame Pinterest.

Pinterest’s rapid ascent into mainstream lexicon* is enforcing the concept that the visual aspect is the only important piece of a product. Well, I’m here to tell you that that ain’t true.

Take the ‘To Do’ app Clear for example — it offers one of the most beautiful experiences available in the App Store. However, it’s also missing major features! It limits characters to an unusable minimum, there’s no indication of navigational hierarchy, the ‘down’ swipe intended to change screens constantly pulls down the iOS drop screen instead, and once you remove your completed tasks there’s no way to recover them (which is really annoying if you do it with an experimental swipe!!).

Path is another gorgeous app with insufficient use cases. The idea behind Path is that it’s the social network that limits your number of connections, thereby keeping your friend list to only your nearest and dearest. Well, that’s all well and good, but good luck trying to figure out how to post on another person’s Path! Instead of encouraging users to interact with one another, the featureset encourages them to fixate on their own Path. It quickly devolved into what Facebook began as — the pool into which Narcissus tumbled (complete with self-indulgent duckface photos to boot).

It’s been touted in the industry that 2013 is the ‘Year of Visual Web’ based on Pinterest’s continued success, redesigns by eBay that put imagery first, Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, and more. With the growing focus on aesthetics, let’s just hope people don’t forget about the features.

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*A bit of an aside, but according to the New York Times, young women are driving linguistic change more than any other demographic. And ~80% of Pinterest users in the US are female. Hmm…coincidence?

Deep Dive: Product Management Responsibilities

The goal of my basics of product management post was to help inform those who are new to product management (on a high level) what a PM is expected to deliver. Upon reflection, I realized that I should further address the issue of other departments not knowing or understanding the role of product manager, as that can deeply affect your job satisfaction. Sadly, this often results in product management being treated as a “catch-all” or an intellectual janitor — when one department makes a mess or gets in over their heads, PM is expected to come in and clean it up. This is a terrible state for any company to be in, namely because it hinders Product’s ability to be forward-thinking, and thorough in its market research.

You see, PM needs to be forward-thinking at all times — even when analyzing past and current releases, PM must be doing so in the context of the greater product strategy. When PM becomes subjugated in this manner, everyone loses. The more time the product manager is bogged down with jobs that other departments should be handling, the more future product releases will suffer. It may not be evident in the next quarter, or even the one after that…but mismanaged products tend to have far-reaching and long lasting consequences.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are not leading Product Management, then DO NOT circumvent your manager! It is their responsibility to effect this change in the organization, and bypassing them will most likely cause you to end up in hot water — or worse.

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Product Management (PM) – Those who listen to the market and articulate its problems and future needs in the form of requirements.

What does product management do?

Overview:

  • Researches customer need for the product.
  • Evaluates competitive situation.
  • Determines how product would be sold to customers, and develops a support plan to do so.
  • Sets prices for product.
  • Directs development process to ensure product will meet customer needs.
  • Works with sales, marketing, support, and engineering to ensure groups can meet customer needs.
  • Works with marketing on marketing plan; provides information and participates in discussions.
  • Post-launch, gathers intelligence about how product is being received by customers, continues to supply marketing with data, and conceptualizes new products to develop and sell.

Specific activities:

  • Listens to the market and creates roadmap and future product needs in the form of requirements.
  • Works hand-in-hand with product development to ensure product requirements are delivered to spec and on-time.
  • Communicates roadmap to customers/market.
  • Establishes overall product portfolio vision/direction, including Technology Assessment and Architecture.
  • Creates and maintains business case for each product and overall portfolio.
  • Initiates market research and sizes markets.
  • Specifies market requirements for current and future products by conducting market research supported by on-going visits to customers and non-customers.
  • Writes detailed product specifications for use by Product Development.
  • Prioritizes product requirements/specifications based on business case and PD capacity.
  • Maintains product family roadmap and monitors Product Development schedules.
  • Serves as solution/technical expert when dealing with thought leaders, analysts, and press.
  • Provides content/copy for promotional materials and sales training.
  • Provides competitive product analysis.
  • Monitors industry innovations and technology.
  • Analyzes product performance.
  • Documents product profitability and operational metrics by tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
  • Maintains key industry associations, preferably participating in relevant consortiums or standards committees (or by overseeing/coordinating other company personnel that participate).
  • Provides support in development of marketing communications, including sales collateral public relations, industry publications, customer correspondence, trade shows & analyst tours.
  • Writes white papers and technical communiqués as needed.
  • Provides content for product collateral and presentations.

Ownership:

Product Roadmap

  • Product portfolio vision/direction.
  • Roadmap defines:
    • What we build.
    • When we build it.
    • Why we are building it.
    • Who will be buying it.
    • Why they will buy it.

Operational Metrics (Key Performance Indicators)

  • Product financial performance
    • Product profitability.
    • Acceptance Testing
      • Are product requirements meeting goals?
      • Delivery
        • Is product available in a timely, high quality manner after release with availability well-communicated?
      • Support
        • Is Product Support meeting the needs of our customers?
        • Customer satisfaction (based on Net Promoter Score).
        • Not responsibility of PM, but should be asking for this info on a regular basis.

Thought Leadership

  • Product Management are the product champions.
    • Part of their responsibility is to be looking forward.
    • Out-of-the-box thinking
      • Thought leaders challenge the status quo.
      • Always looking for a better way.
      • Maybe disruptive.
      • New market opportunities
        • Discuss with analysts, editors, researchers.
        • Bring technical view to discussions with analysts, editors, researchers.

Technology Assessment

  • Technology Assessment is both responsibility of Product  Management and Product Development / Engineering
  • Product Management performs Technology Assessment in order to:
    • Evaluate potential acquisition.
    • Relevance to market acceptance/adoption.
    • New trends and opportunities.
    • Product Development / Engineering performs Technology  Assessment to deliver required functionality.

#Rewind2011

I remember telling myself that 2011 would be my best year yet last January 1st, and I’m looking toward 2012 with the same optimism and enthusiasm! 2010 had been a rather placid year for me, and I was ready for some action. Here are my 2011 monthly highlights:

January: Social uprising hits home — literally — as friends and family are evacuated from my hometown of el Ma’adi, Egypt. On a more positive note, I obtained a certificate in Practical Product Management from Pragmatic Marketing, Inc., and launched the Mindjet Developer Network website, as well as revamped the Developer Program. My efforts led to a 300%+ increase in membership and the development of over 15 new software add-ins.

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February: Flew out to DC to interview with a “deal-of-the-day” website giant, and ended up turning down their offer. Sometimes even when the money and the role are right, the company culture just feels wrong. In the end, I’m very glad I didn’t take the position.

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March: What can I say? March is always awesome because it’s my birthday month! This year was especially special because I drove down to Pasadena to celebrate my pal LM’s bridal shower.

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April: Drove down to LA with my BF to pick up his two best friends, and then onto Vegas for some gamblin’ and the Hoover Dam for some history to make for an epic birthday trip! [Sorry, no Vegas pics allowed! ;)]

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May: Ran Bay2Breakers and attended LM’s absolutely amazing wedding. Definitely one of the major highlights of the year.

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June: Two major product launches in one month — you can believe I hadn’t slept for at least a month. Version 1.0 of Mindjet for iOS launched on the 14th, and MindManager for Mac launched on the 23rd!

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July: Smat’s goodbye party as they head off to Germany.

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August: Traveled to the Big Apple for an interview; spent a couple of weeks exploring New England with the BF and reacquainting myself with the Atlantic.

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September: Accepted a new job in a new city; resigned for the second time in my life.

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October: Moved to NYC on the 2nd, and managed to find, sign for, and move into my new apartment on the Upper East Side within 6 days. That was intense (and quite possibly some kind of record). I also founded the very first ProductCamp San Francisco, an annual educational and networking unconference for local product management and marketing professionals, on 10/22.

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November & December: A few visits from friends and family in the area, and a LOT of exploring in my new city!

  


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I hope you all had just as epic of a story to tell for #Rewind2011! If not, there’s always 2012 to make up for it.

The Basics of Product Management

Many people don’t realize that product management is a relatively new role in organizations. Until quite recently, different aspects of product management were performed by a myriad of functions across organizations. Business analysts, project managers, program managers, quality assurance engineers, and customer support all pulled together to fill the void and carry a product from inception to launch. But even now that “Product Manager” has become a common position in many industries (and quite the commodity for recruiters), the role remains unclear to even those who fill it. Many product managers still seem to think of product management’s role as a glorified Project Manager, or some amalgamation of User Experience, Quality Assurance and Customer Support. That’s why I’ve compiled a short-list of product management basics below as a guideline.

An effective product manager is responsible for accomplishing the following things:

Identifying Market Opportunity

We’re the folks who determine whether anyone actually wants to buy what the company’s selling. We determine market problems, investigate the competitive space, and thoroughly analyze industry trends. We are the folks who should be up-to-date on every single detail that could affect what our customer base wants or how it behaves.

We’re also supposed to do customer visits, prospect visits and attend industry events; generally speaking, this is where product management is least successful. Although PMs prefer to send out surveys, pore through customer emails and occasionally take a customer phone call, it’s not only their fault the profession is largely lacking in this area. Many companies are not willing to invest in gathering this (the best) kind of data. Product Managers need to attend events and spend time with current and prospective customers to find out what does and doesn’t work about the product. This is where VPs of Product need to step up and fight for the budget to allow their team to accomplish these tasks, as well as to push their team to do these visits and events on a regular basis. It’s best to set a quarterly quota of visits the team must make — it keeps ’em honest.

Defining the Product Roadmap

Product Managers must define exactly what goes into the product and at what times. We don’t technically decide when each new featureset will be released, considering Engineering determines the product RTM date and Marketing is responsible for deciding the exact GA, but we can heavily influence those dates, if need be.

We define each release to include some business and strategic opportunities, a few customer suggestions and as many bug fixes as we can squeeze in. The only problem when gathering market feedback is that everyone thinks they’re an expert, and each person’s pet peeve becomes a PRIORITY 1 MUST HAVE from their point of view, and the release is a disaster if it’s not included. Product managers must learn to hear the noise, and see the trend. And slap a few wrists.

Gathering Requirements

This is the most well-understood portion of a product manager’s role. Most people would identify writing requirements as the product manager’s domain. What they don’t see is the backend of the PM’s effort. We not only gather requirements, but we define use cases and user flows, argue business cases, and become masters in the black art of pricing.

Monitoring Product Performance

Even after release, the product manager’s job is not done. We spend a big chunk of our time tracking released products, because it gives us better insight into the subsequent releases. We follow market and customer KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to help with forecasting future releases. KPIs consist of various performance metrics, such as regional market performance, market segment consumption, % revenue from new products, % revenue from new customers, ASP (average selling price), customer usage, number of trials and subsequent rate of conversion, and renewals. All the KPIs help inform the Win/Loss analysis, which marks the beginning of another product lifecyle. And then we do it all over again. 🙂

Of course, I recognize that I am leaving out key components of product management, such as interpersonal and communication skills, leading without direct authority, managing up, growing feature backlogs, technical aptitude, and a great many other things, but I’ve touched on the four basic activities an effective product manager must perform in order to launch successful products.