From Product Management To Product Leadership: The Advanced Use Cases

By Wayne Greene

From Product Management to Product Leadership: The Advanced Use Cases takes on the critical organization role of Product Management with forwards by product and service leaders Flint Brenton, Rodrigo Flores and Dan Cohen. Building upon Silicon Valley lessons in leading Product Management organizations, the book’s narrative reveals the hidd

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Greene
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692088524

Wayne Greene

Wayne Greene is a Product Management and IT industry veteran with experience in the areas of semiconductors, digital circuits, IT Operations Management, and Cloud. In addition to his experience with both hardware and software technologies, he is a driven product manager and marketer. His experience spans large companies, venture, and private equity backed smaller firms. Since 2016, Wayne has spent his time consulting, staff augmenting, and advising. He has worked with a variety of enterprise software outfits, including Blue Medora, Sovlabs, Cherwell, Collabnet, ITapp, and RigD, among others. Prior to this, he was a Senior Director of Product Management at VMware for three years in the Cloud Management Business Unit, leading teams on three different products: Automation, Operations, and Log Insight. He was at Cisco Systems for four years serving as Director of Product Management in the Intelligent Automation Business Unit, driving product strategy for a variety of automation projects, including launching a new Cloud Automation product. At Tidal Software, a provider of industry leading IT automation products, Wayne served as VP of Products and Marketing, working with the team to sell the company to Cisco. His first venture into the software vendor space was at the Wily Technology Division of CA as a Director of Competitive and Market Intelligence. For the prior 18 years, Wayne called Hewlett Packard home and served in a variety of positions in four major areas: IT Outsourcing and Enterprise Management Tool sets, IA64 Chipset design, HP Labs, and the Integrated Circuits Business Division. During those years, Wayne honed the craft of research, architecture, engineering, test, and production deployment across many different hardware and software technologies. Wayne holds six patents, has a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and an S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Book preview

Preface

Product Management, as a recognized discipline, has come of age. There are too many blogs and too few books available on the subject, along with meetups, seminars, training sessions, and a wide variety of ongoing conversations on Twitter and other professionally themed social media outlets. #prodmgmt is the official hashtag of the subject. There is no Bachelors degree or MBA in Product Management. In a sense, it is a new career with which academia has yet to catch up. All of the knowledgeable professionals engaged in product management today entered the field as practitioners in any number of OTHER specialties, such as engineering, software architecture, marketing, or even business operations. It is one of those careers that requires a major in another field to provide the street credibility needed.

I have noticed that with the transformation from waterfall to agile in software development methodology, and from client-server to server-less computing, the role of the product manager hasn’t really changed. What is different is the pool in which they are swimming. Differentiating the responsibilities of the product owner from the product manager is simply the beginning of an entire set of conversations revolving around how the product manager relates to the technical teams that build the product.  The career progression of new product managers, from their origins in technology, science, and engineering, to the eventual  role of liaison with those fields, has received much attention in blogs and social media threads. This book, however, is not about that transformation and those interactions.

This book covers many topics that the top thinkers in product management talk about – the sticky, difficult, awkward, career changing transformation from a product manager to a product leader. You won’t find much about the details of running a scrum team or how to work through user story prioritization. Those are the basic blocking and tackling skills that I expect you already had when you opened this book. What you will read about is a philosophy of organizational leadership from the point of view of the product manager cum leader. It is a philosophy born out of stories and experiences gathered from over three decades of engineering, research and development  on semiconductor processing, and integrated circuit devices, along with building, growing, and sustaining new and existing businesses in the enterprise software and services space.

These sticky lessons for the product leader are applicable across hardware, software, and services based products and organizations. Many want to be product managers, but few take the time to think larger than the actual product in the shrink wrap. Be a product leader. Make a difference to customers, partners,  compatriots, stakeholders, and the shareholders.

Introduction

This book builds upon a core philosophy of product management that takes on a variety of subjects, some of which were first explored on my blog, From Chemistry to Clouds. The first chapter on Advanced Thinking about Product Management brings together many perspectives about product management and the leadership angle. This is designed to ensure the reader is in a frame of mind to begin the enlightenment to look at advanced use cases. Think of this chapter as the first thirty minutes in the beginning of a century cycling race. Here you are just stretching out your muscles, raising your internal temperature, and both raising your cadence and increasing power generation. Once you have warmed up with the advanced use cases, you will be ready for that first hard climb to the ridge line.

The Leadership Challenge in External Interactions, the second chapter, was co-written with Laurent Gharda, and focuses on the  interaction between the product manager and the critical functions that surround him or her: the Product Leadership Team, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and the Board of the Directors. In this chapter, the emphasis is on some of the hard-earned lessons and scars obtained by taking a simple idea, envisioning a great product, and getting it to market to delight customers. As with climbing on a cycle, there are faux summits, and exhilarating descents, only to be presented with a steep leg numbing climb that appears out of nowhere. Having a disciplined internal practice and philosophy around external interactions will garner the energy and support needed to get great products with the right value to your customers – without alienating the people around you. It will also get you to the top of the hill and back onto level ground.

Next up, in chapter three, are the discussions around technology and channel partners, co-written with Justin Griffin and Bill Petro. Once you have the clear vision of the product – and which customers will pay real money for its capabilities, you will need to consider how to work with Technology partners to expand your ecosystem of applicability. This is no different than the cyclist who needs to have an intimate understanding of the curves in the road on the route he is taking across the mountains and valleys. Knowing the environment around you can help in many ways for a more successful ride. No product lives by itself in your customer’s environment. You must be able to co-exist as part of the integrated ecosystem. Amazon’s Alexa is a great example of this. You also cannot solely rely on your salesforce to get the product to market and implement it. This is where channel partners play a role. You may part with some of your margin, but you, in return, you expand your market access.

Any road cyclist eventually wants an upgrade – perhaps brakes, a chain or a derailleur. She may even want a new bike [after a few years] to upgrade the entire system to the latest technology and, of course, the over the top promises of a better riding experience.  This tension between the comfortable old, durable solution and the promise of better with upgrades or new technologies is an itch that bigger companies have. After you have gotten your product, ecosystem, and channel humming along, you might find yourself in the enviable position of another company wanting to buy your company. This is where chapter four enters the discussion. Seeing how the product leader can impact so many functions clearly shows that the PM is not the CEO of his product (contrary to conventional wisdom), but her role is an oversized and overloaded one. Exploring the merger and acquisition from the product angle, as well as the acquiring company’s point of view, highlights where the product manager [in a leader role] really starts to have broader impact on the product, his organization, and the market.

The final section of the book, chapter five, takes on portfolio management and secrets of long term success. But what is long term in this realm? It used to be a decade-plus time frame. Now, long term can mean five years, as staff tend to migrate every two years. Taking a multi-year point of a view as a product leader can mean balancing risks and development across multiple products, in multiple time horizons. There is no app in the app store to solve this problem for you. Cyclists often subscribe to the belief that the same exercise or training strategy can work from their 30’s to their 70’s. However, this is simply not the case. Having one plan for the short term and another for the long term can be key to sustaining success. 

1

Advanced Thinking about Product Management

This chapter is an amalgam of blogs and new pieces on some of the more thorny aspects of product management. A note of caution: the chapter will not discuss how to groom your backlog and other such key blocking and tackling of product management. Rather, it will address some of core existential PM beliefs, tradeoffs and holistic product management. These issues are highlighted for you because it is so rare to discuss these topics. To do so requires an evolved product manager who thinks beyond building the product right, but, rather, to build the right product. The sections that follow include key philosophies such as: doing no harm and being truthful to your product line,  understanding your personal view and your view of the work and its impact on your PM-ness, tradeoffs between go-to-market and feature sets, managing the whole product, roadmaps and killing zombie products.

THE TWO CORE PHILOSOPHIES OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Within the realm of product management, we like to think of ourselves as CEO of our product. We tend to become slightly obsessed with the success of each product, and we own it like the fate of the company depends upon it.

The discipline of product management is based on a few key philosophies. My favorite of these is Pragmatic Marketing. The framework of the philosophy resonates with me. It helps to identify and focus the product manager’s activities on strategy and execution, product marketing and product management.  It also provides the necessary structure to do a top to bottom assessment of both marketing and product management activities.  In this way, product managers avoid spending too much time on some areas and not enough on others.

During two recent yoga classes, my instructor focused on the following two concepts: do no harm and be truthful with yourself. Rather than applying these concepts to yoga, however, I had an epiphany about product management and pragmatic marketing.

While it is probably easy to grasp how these concepts can be applied to learning a new, difficult yoga pose, it may be more challenging to internalize how they relate to product management and pragmatic marketing. I won’t bother explaining how my mind works, but I will say that it drifted far from learning the actual poses and onto how I could apply the concepts to product management and product marketing. Here are a few revelations I uncovered.

Do No Harm To Your Product Line

Don’t get so creative with pricing and packaging that you royally damage your revenues or aggravate your customers. Use data to analyze scenarios and determine which customer segments will be winners and which will be losers in a new mode.  Proactively plan to engage the losers and identify what you need to do to help them.

Don’t be so amorphous in your distinctive differentiation and value proposition that your sales team cannot speak intelligently with technical users or economic buyers. My suggestion is to leverage user groups or customer councils to hone the right message.

Don’t design end-of-life or end-of-support models that completely disenfranchise your customers. Err on the side of helping customers with the time necessary to move to your new release.

Be Truthful With Your Product Line

Are you meeting and exceeding your numbers because of a great product and go-to-market, or are you just the beneficiary of forces beyond your control? I have been a part of product management teams that were so enamored with their list of features, attributing that to their success, that they didn’t realize that revenue was being driven primarily from pricing and packaging.

We all like to think we are investing in innovation, but are we really?  After you analyze your engineering investments [down to specific modules and user stories], are you surprised to find that most of the money is going into retiring technical debt, rounding out partial features, or working down a list of micro-features to accommodate dozens of enhancement requests for your noisy customer list?

Products have life-cycles and lifetimes. Has your product entered the maturity or the decline stage, though management thinks it is still in the growth phase? If your product is already 3-5 years old, it is time to look at the next wave of functionality and features/modules you can leave behind. Perhaps it is time to build the next new thing and cannibalize your old product space.  It will be by far better if your product management team comes up with the next new thing rather than the competitor.

This list offers insight into a pragmatic approach to getting closer to the product’s customer interaction. This will ensure the leadership team treats the product line as a first class citizen and not just as a mechanism to achieve revenue goals or individual promotional opportunities.

Seek out Better Product Management Teams

Beware the product team that believes their own narrative. Seek out the product teams that have pragmatic assertions in their game plan that are rooted in facts and analysis.

SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS DEPEND ON TWO THINGS

There seems to be a big uptick in Product Management-centric blog posts and advice. Each article tells and extends the group experience of the PM community. As a colleague mentioned to me, the domain of the PM has extended from managing the hardware or physical product, to firmware and software. You have both consumer-focused software (i.e. Microsoft Office and Windows) and Enterprise software for corporations (i.e. Enterprise Resource Planning), IT Operational Management and Business Intelligence and Reporting to name a few. There are many companies out there from the bricks and mortar group that now realize that software products are needed and, in fact, required to augment their products and services. Further, their traditional hardware product may now be offered through software only and delivered in to the cloud as a service.

Every Leader Wants Their PM Function to Be Like What They Do in Silicon Valley!

I don’t want to wade into the politics and demographics of Silicon Valley, but it is, indeed, a different world here and, by extension, the Bay Area in general. The key to what makes Silicon Valley PMs different is their focus on two vital concepts: how you view yourself and howyou view the world. While this may seem very much like what one would do during a personal offsite, it is, indeed,