Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products

By David Fradin

This is the second in a series of three books dedicated to the goal of building, managing, marketing and selling insanely great (successful) products. The first covers “Building Insanely Great Products: The Six Keys to Success”. The third is “Marketing and Selling Insanely Great (Successful) Products”. This book covers the key factors in Organizing and Managing Insanely Great (Successful) Products.Worldwide, in every size company there is an urgent need to align product management success approaches with modern product enterprise trends. As a result, there are changes that are driving the need to reconsider product success management paradigms. This book covers these changes and much more from a 360 degree perspective.This book discusses these teams and their effect on organizing and managing product pain points; Leadership team and enterprise, Innovation team, Strategic IT team and technology adoption, the Infosec team and information security, Partner focused teams and partners, Performance management teams and enterprise performance, Business process teams and Core and support business processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spice Catalyst Media
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 1704201683

Book preview

Process

Foreword

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I and David Fradin have worked on different types of Product Success Management related consulting engagements in multiple geographies and are convinced that we are now in a ‘Experience Era’ that is driven by digital technologies.

While the core principles that govern product success management is relevant even today, there is an urgent need to align the product management success approaches with the modern product enterprise trends. There are several changes that are driving the need to reconsider some of the product success management paradigms such as:

Product enterprises manage a portfolio of products that are in different life cycle stages

Product teams are globally distributed and need to collaborate in virtual environments

Product enterprises also leverage digital technologies such as cloud computing (SaaS), analytics & Machine learning, social media and mobile computing to transform the product management processes

Entire product success teams need to become tech savvy as the markets need to support digital natives

Product enterprises have access to global talent, elastic IT infrastructure and IP that help them innovate customer experience, automate core processes as well as make fact-based decisions- enterprise wide.

Information security is becoming a vital focus area as any data breach can even result in shutting-down the enterprise itself.

Product enterprises need to more agile than ever to quickly realign with markets and changing customer requirements.

Businesses goals of product enterprises will continue be in the areas of understanding market requirements, innovating product/ service solutions, marketing in different markets and supporting product until end-of-life and continuously make money.

I met David Fradin nearly ten years ago while working on a consulting engagement and discussed the common patterns that are visible in the startups and established product enterprises. We continued our quest and came to the interesting conclusion that product enterprises struggle in two main areas viz. How to organize teams and How to execute the strategy (Manage execution). The former one is the static model while the other is the dynamic model involving collaboration and effective decision making.

We ended-up identifying several focus areas for the product enterprise and also noted that all these areas need not be the challenges for specific product enterprise. Here are the pain points that we could consolidate:

How does the product enterprise organize the leadership team and how do they manage the enterprise?

How does the product enterprise organize Innovation team and how do they manage Innovation?

How does the product enterprise organize strategic IT team and how do they manage technology adoption?

How does the product enterprise organize InfoSec team and how do they manage Information security?

How does the product enterprise organize talent and how do they manage talent at different levels?

How does the product enterprise organize partner focused team and how do they manage partners?

How does the product enterprise organize performance management team and how do they manage the enterprise performance?

How does the product enterprise organize business process team and how do they manage the core and support business processes?

I was immensely benefited from continuous discussions with David and we decided to consolidate our thoughts in the form of this book.

Today, I am pleased to see that the book ‘Organizing and Managing Product Enterprises: Organizing and Managing Insanely Successful (Great) Products’ is available to the community of management, human resources management, product managers and their managers as a compass.

Here is a success story where the approach we have outlined in our book provided significant savings to a SaaS based microfinance platform provider. This platform provider was spending disproportionate amount of money on product support expenses but still unable to enhance client satisfaction. We applied the principles described in this book to organize their support network and evolve support satisfaction KPIs for dynamic management of day-to-day platform support operations.

We also suggested to leverage AI technology for multi-lingual support and the product enterprise implemented several self-help initiatives. The synergy of organizing and effectively and efficiently managing the support function could bring the expenses under control as well as achieve high client satisfaction.

This book is an attempt at providing focused information on the topics listed above. It has basic and holistic coverage of the topics needed to implement next practices in product enterprises.

This book aims to provide a good coverage of all the critical concepts including:

The role of leadership team in continuously providing strategic direction for the enterprise

The role of transformational IT to provide the necessary competitive edge

The critical role of continuous innovation, IP creation to be the market leader

The role of end-to-end business processes that create great customer experience and provide the benefits like agility, repeatability, consistency and predictability

The performance management approach leading to transparency of business performance and the foundation of team empowerment

The critical role played by the product enterprise supply chain partners

The strategic role of product analytics that drives fact-based decisioning across the enterprise

The timing of David’s book on product management is perfect to avoid wasted money invested in products that fail particularly in startups.

The book is authored by David with over 49 years of product leadership experience across 75+ products and 11+ start-ups covering vast experience areas of product management, product marketing management, product engineering management, product support management and consulting. It’s worth mentioning about his experience of working for HP and Apple. His style of narration of practical, on-the-job experiences in the field of product success management in simple language is really amazing.

This book promises to provide practical approaches to organizing and managing teams that collaborate to achieve product success. A variety of target audience including aspiring software engineering managers, project/ program managers, marketing managers as well as entrepreneurs will benefit from studying these books. Product company partners will also benefit from the practical approaches provided by the topics covered in the books.

I strongly urge individuals, product teams and organizations to leverage the organizing and managing concepts in this book to achieve both individual and product portfolio success.

Happy Reading.

R Nagendra Prasad

Chief Practice Officer

Confluence Consulting Circle

PREFACE

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Organizing and managing insanely great products has evolved over the years.

When it evolves out of Procter & Gamble's brand management starting in 1931 at Into Hewlett-Packard's product management in the late 1930s transition from being essentially a business unit manager with full authority over the success of product two more of a staffing role with all the responsibility and authority

Product management at HP was located in the marketing department but most other Technology companies since, like Cisco, has product management in engineering

This focus for Vice presidential level product management whether that is the VP of product management or for the VP of engineering or marketing depending upon where the function currently reports

I'm strong advocate of having a vice president of project management or as I prefer vice president a product success which I believe more aptly describes what a product manager does that is they have responsible for product success

Companies like Apple Google Tesla and others have the vice president of product management at the most senior level possible reporting directly to the president the case of Tesla however along mosque depicts yourself as the CEO of the product worksheet project architect

About

About this Book

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Figure 1: World Wastes over $1/2 Trillion

Yet our schools, and in particular our Master of Business schools, do not teach what it takes to organize, manage and build insanely successful products.

They focus on such things as finance, marketing, operations, economics, analytics and more.

Finance is to count the earnings that others have done. Moreover, perhaps, in the words of Warren Buffet when he describes financial derivatives which was ground zero of the great recession, as Weapons of financial destruction. In other words, all the finance in the world will not teach any of the keys to product success.

Marketing is how to coerce people to buy stuff that may or may not help them do what they want to do. If a product does not do what people and organizations want to do, then no amount of marketing will do.

Figure 2: 1984 Macintosh

For example, as John Sculley said when the Apple Macintosh was introduced to the employees of Apple… We will market with mirrors.

I was there, in a first-floor conference room on DeAnza Boulevard in Cupertino, California across the street from Apple’s headquarters.

An Apple engineer, most of which were not known as meek, confronted and challenged John Sculley, the fairly new former sugar water salesman from Pepsi and Steve Jobs the arrogant, self-absorbed and fantastic visionary that lived seven years in the future but couldn’t comprehend the status of the market today.

Steve was peddling his beloved Macintosh for the first time to the rest of the company. Which, unknown to me at the time, my product line, the Apple /// was providing sufficient profits to fund its development after he unceremoniously shoved aside the Mac’s first father and chief architect Jef Raskin. Steve wanted the business market all to himself. He wanted the Apple /// and the Apple // gone. Also, Lisa of course too.

However, there were many Apple /// engineers in the audience, and one of them with guts stood up and said, "How can you say that the Mac is a business computer? The most extensive program the Mac can run is 10K because you wanted to keep the price below $2K and memory only at 128K and you insisted on a pixel driven display which uses half of the available memory. What business programs can you run with just 10K memory?

"The Mac does not have word processing, and there is no way to print a letter quality document.

"There is no big spreadsheet for financial things. The Mac lacks a hard disk drive so there is no way any business accounting can be done, which is why businesses buy computers by the way.

"Then, if a customer wants to make a copy of the data on the Mac’s floppy drive, there is no second drive. It takes multiple dozens of floppy disk ejections and inserts to copy the drive. Like 40 times.

How can you bring such a product to market and call it a business computer? We already have one, and it’s called the Apple ///.

Many in the audience of about 100 and pretty smart engineers applauded.

John said, We will market with mirrors.

That encounter took place in the fall of 1983. I was in the back of the room, aghast. I had just become the Apple /// Group Product Manager responsible for one-sixth of the company’s profits.

That engineer’s questions were exactly what I had found out after taking over the product line. The product line that had as its first product manager no other than Steve Jobs. In fact, Steve’s first patent was the all-aluminum heat sink case for the Apple /// since he hated fans and the noise it made.

I went on to End of Life the Apple /// product line.

Figure 3: Apple ///, ProFile Hard Disk, Apple /// Monitor

My independent business unit team of seventeen kamikaze warriors sold 23,000 Apple ///s, generated one-sixth of the company’s profits, funded Mac development, transferred 500 third-party hardware and software developers to Guy Kawasaki, and kept employed somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 best of the best MBA credentialed employees. Best of the best because Apple recruited and paid 40% above the salary curve for Silicon Valley people.

Meanwhile, Steve’s and John’s marketing with mirrors progressed with the October 15, 1983 introduction of the Mac to the worldwide Apple sales organization at the Hilton Hotel in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii. Steve spent $1 Million at that sales meeting to entice the sales folks to peddle his Mac.

I just had my little group of 17 people but my marketing communications manager and perhaps one of the best guerrilla marketing types around then and since, Maxine Graham, suggested we print up rolls of little Apple /// stickers. She instructed the team to greet every sales person as they came to check in at the Hilton and plant the sticker on the sales person’s name tag. Then, for the next four days as salesperson after sales person said hi to each other the first or last thing they saw was an Apple /// sticker on the name tags.

I heard later that Steve was pissed. A few hundred dollars of stickers upstaged his million.

However, our KPI or Key Performance Indicator was to sell Apple ///s and damn the torpedoes or dive bombers Steve sent out even though Pearl Harbor was just a few miles away.

I spoke second that Monday morning introduction day after David Larson, the Apple // Group Product Marketing Manager and before John Couch the Lisa Division Manager and then Job’s himself. I saw in the back of the audience Fred Gibbons the founder of Software Publishing and today a Stanford professor and the guy I learned most from about product management. Fred was the HP 3000 marketing manager, and he had recorded at HP TV a series of videos about product management that I saw when I became a product marketing manager in the Office Systems Group of the HP Networks Division. He is whom I learned much about product management and product marketing management contained in this book and my other books.

Also standing next to Fred was Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus 123 which had over 80% market share for spreadsheets on personal computers in the later ‘80s. For two years Lotus dominated. Forever, MBA’s were and still are taught…go for market share.

Market share did not work for Lotus. Why. High tech changes so rapidly that if the players are not agile, they are dinosaurs. I believe market share is not as crucial in emerging markets like high tech vs. more mature markets.

Then there was Bill Gates standing next to Steve, Fred, and Mitch. Bill heard my impassioned speech driving the sales force to sell Apple ///s. It did word processing, now. It did accounting, now. It did large databases, now. It can print letter-quality printers, now. It can do electronic mail, now. It had slots so third-party vendors could make the computer do what anything they want it to do, now.

Gates turned to Jobs, I was told later, and said that…that guy, me, should be running the Lisa Division. That and twenty-five cents still won’t buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks even if I own a few shares of its stock. Which, in the interest of full disclosure, I do. I also own stock in Apple and Amazon whose values of focus on customer satisfaction I agree with and hence invested.

At the time, Gates and Jobs pretty much did not have any values. Gates predatory Microsoft practices did more than discourage any venture capital investments in innovative word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, databases, and other office applications. I know because in the ‘80s no venture capitalist would invest in any products that would compete with Microsoft.

Jobs business practices at the time were badgering and cajoling.

Then early 1985 hit Jobs. He had taken over the Lisa division named after his daughter. (Lisa, by the way, wrote one of the most beautiful eulogies after Steve passed. She said that just before her Dad passed away, he said, Wow, Wow, Wow. Lisa thinks he was talking about Wow where he has been; Wow was Steve was now surrounded by people who love him and Wow where he is going. Being the visionary of his ability to see the future of what people want to do, I think Steve, on his death bed, could see the past, the present and the future.

When Steve came back to Apple in the late 1990s, he was asked what happened to the company he co-founded. He said, It lost its values.

Which is quite ironic since, between 1985 and Steve's Mac failure and the failure of his NEXT computer and when he then returned to Apple, he learned about the importance of company values. I found some indications that Steve was mentored a bit by David Packard in 1989. Perhaps David told Steve about the importance of values to the success of the company.

The first Steve Jobs had no or few values as I and others observed. At a small reunion of Apple employees from my era, I said that there were two Steve Jobs. The evil Steve Jobs and the good Steve Jobs. It is the latter Steve Jobs that we all celebrate today. However, I said, "If there were just a good Steve Jobs Apple would be three times as big as it is today.

Sorry to burst the Steve Job’s bubble. However, it is the truth. Apple is more than three times bigger than the day Steve passed. Under Tim Cook who emphasizes Values, it is.

Apple had and has a fantastic PR machine. I know. I have been in PR including corporate PR for Hewlett-Packard. Also, I ran a nationwide organization in support of technology, the space shuttle, energy independence all with PR. So I know a bit about public relations.

Likewise, the first Bill Gates lacked in values. Now Bill and Warren Buffet