Product Management

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The Product Champion

Nearly every successful project has a Product Champion who: Develops the Vision Document. Manages customer expectations. Negotiates with the development team, the

customer, the marketing department, the project manager, and the company executives.

Adjudicates the inevitable conflicts that arise over scope and budget.

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Role of the Product Champion

Manage the elicitation process and determine when enough requirements are discovered.

Manage the conflicting inputs from all stakeholders.

Make the trade-offs necessary to find the set of features that delivers the highest value to the greatest number of stakeholders.

Own the product vision. Advocate for the product. Negotiate with management, users, and

developers. Defend against feature creep.

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Role of the Product Champion (Cont’d) Maintain a “healthy tension” between what the

customer desires and what the development team can deliver in the release time frame.

Be the representative of the official channel between the customer and the development team.

Manage the expectations of customers, executive management, and the marketing and engineering teams.

Communicate the features of the release to all stakeholders.

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Role of the Product Champion (Cont’d)

Review the use cases and requirements to ensure that they conform to the true vision represented by the features.

Manage the changing priorities and the addition and deletion of features.

And never give up, never surrender.

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The Product Manager’s Recipe for Success

Take 2 parts requirements management 1 part development experience 1 part commercial practices 1 part marketing (measure dose carefully!)

Mix with plain common sense Bake in user’s oven until done

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Primary Activities for a Product Manager

Keep focus almost exclusively on the success of the product in the marketplace.

Major activities: Driving the Vision Maintaining the Product Road Map Defining the Whole Product Plan Sponsoring the Use-Case Model and Supplementary

Requirements Testing the Product Concept Completing the User Experience Defining Commercial Terms Positioning and Messaging

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Driving the Vision

The product manager must facilitate the elicitation and analysis of inputs regarding requirements and ensure that the proper conclusions are reached.

When there are conflicting constraints the product manager must “make the call”.

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Sources of Input for the Visioning Process Customers: stakeholders and end users Product authors and inventors Operating systems and platforms Company objectives Development team insights Competitive products Other resident systems and applications Analysts and subject matter experts Technological constraints and breakthroughs

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Maintaining the Road Map

The product manager’s role is to gain agreement on what should be done and what can be done and to then use this information to synthesize and optimum path to market, based on constraints in the internal and external environment and the allocation of specific features to successive releases.

He/she represents the results of this in a simple timeline chart

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Defining the Whole Product Plan Aside from the Vision Document the product

manager must develop a complete product plan that answers questions like: What specific services will be provided to help

customers succeed with the product? What role does the customer support organization

play in assuring customer success? What different configurations of the product are

available? What third-party products, if any, are needed to

make this product usable?

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Defining the Whole Product Plan (Cont’d)

What special hardware, significant bandwidth, secure access, or other computing resources are needed?

How is the user supported with respect to installation, upgrades, maintenance, or usage problems?

What licensing provisions will be applied for commercial sale and use?

What price are customers willing to pay for the product, and over what period?

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Defining the Whole Product Plan (Cont’d) The Whole Product Plan should cover

the four dimensions of a successful customer solution:

1. The product itself2. Accompanying services and support3. The commercial terms that define the

business relationship between you and your customer

4. The documentation you provide to help assure your customers’ success

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Sponsoring the Use-Case Model and Supplementary Requirements

The Product Manager helps the development team to define the use-case model for the product to ensure that all prospective users’ needs are met in the implementation and reflected in specific use cases.

In addition, he/she will leads the team to an understanding of the key nonfunctional requirements.

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Testing the Product Concept

The Product Manager will ensure that the product concepts will be tested at every opportunity with the customer.

Specifically, the PM will work with the sales organization to identify and engage customers to assist with beta testing.

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Completing the User Experience

The Product Manager must attend to a variety of additional artifacts that directly affect the user experience. For example: User documentation Online help systems Tool tips Embedded copyright notices Corporate and third-party component logo

compliance

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Defining Commercial Terms

The PM must facilitate or define licensing and licensing enforcement policies.

The PM must facilitate or define product pricing and discount schedule

The PM must facilitate or define support policies, including access mechanisms, support levels, service-level agreements, upgrade policies, and pricing for same.

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Positioning and Messaging

The PM may be responsible for product positioning and the generation of a message platform.

The product positioning highlights your product’s strengths, minimizes its weaknesses, and ultimately causes customers to select your software over the competition.

Use specific words and phrases in specific sequence.

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Statement of Purpose for Product PositioningFor (target customer)

Who (statement of the need or opportunity)

The (product name) is a (product category)

That (statement of key benefit, that is, compelling reason to buy/use)

Unlike (primary competitive alternative)

Our product (statement of primary differentiation)

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Statement of Purpose for Product Positioning

This product is for (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity). The (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit, that is, compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).

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Supporting Activities

Other activities that the Product Manager should be involved with include: Branding and Product Labeling (naming

the product and product features) End User Training Materials (providing or

finding requisite subject matter expertise) Product Demo (providing demo script and

supporting data) Sales and Marketing Collateral (developing

and delivering sales training material)

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The Product Champion in an IS/IT Shop

There is no marketing department. Your customers work with you. It’s difficult to find a PM who can

represent all users. The best solution is to establish a PM

and a Change Control Board (CCB). The PM can manage the project and the

CCB can make the difficult decisions.

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