This is probably my last post of this decade so wanted to share with you 5 Technology Favorites from this decade that significantly influenced our lives (mine atleast) in a good way.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
5 Technology Favorites from this decade - 2009
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 2:23 PM
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
What do LinkedIn users do ;-) ... they're playing Farmville on Facebook
Just posted on my other blog CRM 2.0. Couldnt decide whether the topic was more 2.0 or product related so cross posting here as well.
I truly believe that LN is one of the most capital rich networks. In the sense that a network connection on LN is probably worth much more than connections on other networks. Maybe FB is the only other one.
One of the issues I've had with LinkedIn since its inception is its lack of ability to make a user comeback everyday and check on things. While I do swing by there every few days, ... Click here for entire post
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 3:23 PM
Thursday, October 22, 2009
What is Value?
Had an interesting discussion yesterday about "Value" and what is high vs low value and interestingly in that discussion we settled on the term lesser value.
I'm sure other PM's get into these discussions as well and often times the closing lines for those discussions if they are external customer focused are something like " ... value is all about perception, so if the customer thinks its valuable they'll pay for it ..." or if the conversation was more internal focused then something like " .. that's obviously more valuable to us because its core ..." This prompted me into writing a post about how PM's can define value.
First lets talk about the value your product or service will deliver to customers;
The very first version of defining value (usually from a sellers perspective) is associating it with all the benefits that a product or service would provide. So for example lets list all the benefits that our product offers and then convey that as the value we provide. Looks great on datasheets and in marketing glossies.
However the moment a purchaser or buyer enters it would look like a one-way street. Cause the buyer is obviously going to pay for this product or service. So it leads to the second version of value where its the differential that you would get once you've paid the cost for getting all the benefits from a product or service. Now to create the third version of it lets invite the tangibles and intangibles. They play on both sides of the equation (Benefit and Cost), however the more tangible benefits you have in there the better the value can be conveyed. On the cost side though they play out as direct costs and indirect costs or something that's not apparent upfront but will accrue over a period of time and could include the opportunity cost as well. Some would view it as the total cost of obtaining those benefits over the life of the product or service.
So in summary I would say that the PM's should look at product value as benefits being provided at a low cost. Now its still not a slam dunk as purchasers will not always go with the lowest cost option and neither the lowest price option. They will usually go with benefits that match well do your benefits match with the needs and wants. Now is it within their budget and can they afford it is a completely different discussion.
Now lets look at what value means to an organization. For simplicity we'll focus on for profit organizations. Whether you're a publicly traded or private organization the ultimate goal is to increase in shareholder value. All organizations have investors and are funded and that determines their share of the company and they are looking at maximizing that share.
There are many ways shareholder value can be increased. Top-line revenue growth, Bottom-line cost savings by operating better, better utilizing all your available assets I'm sure an accountant can come up with more. But from a PM's perspective I think these three are key. Each area has its own levers that need to be evaluated to identify what value a product brings to ultimately increase shareholder value.So in a long winded way I'd say that value can be identified to a large extent and PM's should use value models in making product decisions. Ultimately the two values discussed above are intertwined (some might say even the same) and as PM's one should look at how your product can provide value to customers and in turn increase shareholder value.
Top-line growth can obviously be increased through new customer growth, retaining existing customers and increasing wallet share, upselling and cross-selling. Driving product innovation and further investing in existing capabilities helps drive this.
Bottom-line can be improved by ensuring that there are streamlined, integrated processes in delivering the product, cost of selling to and servicing the customers is low. As PM's how can you do that? Look at rationalizing your product portfolio, better product quality, reusable and scalable designs, lower cost of development and most important focus on the right customer segments. Dont lose sight of this as in the larger scheme of things the CFO is looking at this and so should you.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 10:41 AM
Monday, October 5, 2009
Why dont we consolidate all our resources and focus on one thing?
"Why dont we consolidate all our resources and focus on one thing?"
is one of the questions that keeps coming up often in determining product priorities and resource allocations. Unless you're a startup in an early phase of product development or you're a company in dire straits and looking at one last "Hail Mary" the approach is often going to lead to disaster rather than focus.
Dont get me wrong all approaches work, its just a question of context. Applying the consolidate and focus on only one product area at a time approach in diversified or mature companies will lead to satisfaction issues and churn. Product Managers should look at their products (and others) as a portfolio and assess it like one.
Here are my Top 5 tips for making product portfolio planning happen the right way.
1. Ensure business strategy alignment - Request that the business vision and strategy be conveyed clearly. Dont be afraid to ask questions. Remember that each PM or company resource interprets vision and strategy in their own way so alignment and constant alignment is the key to successful product portfolio planning. Also business strategy should not be created in vacuum and should be supplemented with backup data or assertions. Its critical to provide execs with this data for your product lines on a regular basis to ensure right decisions are enabled.
2. Get executive buyin/sponsorship - Suffice to say that your product portfolio planning will not go very far if its not bought into by execs.
3. Take a medium to long term view - Always take the medium to long term view of things. This means that look at growth opportunities even when the team is in the foxhole trying to battle a flurry of tactical issues.
4. Always have enough bandwidth to nurture wishlists/lateral ideas - Some of the best products, enhancements, customer issue resolutions have come from lateral ideas. Always nurture them and figure out a path for executing on them. Trust me, the product team will find you the time and bandwidth if they feel the idea is right. Now this often seems contradictory to create a priority list of backlog stories and keep knocking off the highest priority ones that keep bubbling to the top of the list. We'll I've seen that in reality you can do that with the lateral (20%) ideas.
5. Drive your product strategy in person and with passion - Never rely on someone else to drive your product strategy. Nothing works better than passion for a product or enhancement so ensure that you're personally represnt the product/feature in the planning meetings. Good management recognizes this and provides individual PM's the platform to present this.
Do send me your tips on what eases and enables product portfolio planning for you in your product organization.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:07 AM
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Product Management - Exec Alignment
Recently there was a really great post by Marty Cagan on the SVPG site about The Product Scorecard.
While there are a number of posts that gloss through this topic ... this post really gets into the guts of why this is critical, very much needed and how it should happen. Its also something I always advocate and that we're currently following so its good validation of our approach :-)
Marty has posted 3 very poignant questions for S/W company CEO's
- How does your CEO know that every product manager’s efforts are aligned with his business strategy?
- How does your CEO clearly communicate to your product managers the business priorities?
- How does your CEO know which product managers are making good decisions and making true progress in carrying out the business strategy?
- Do you feel that your committed features are always over ruled at the last minute by some executive input?
- Do you have a really long list of backlog items and feel that what's being currently worked on is not from the top of that list?
- When features are being prioritized or scoped smaller do you know what metrics matter to make those decisions?
As PM's its cool to think you're the CEO of the product (that's a great mindset to have for a PM), however there is a real CEO as well and usually they're the ones calling the shots. However its not a one way street as many might think and most CXO's are reasonable people and open to discussions if presented the data and right business justification. But ultimately the onus is on the PM to get buyin or prepare to be over ruled at the last minute by what might sound like an executive edict.
Here are the three key factors for creating and maintaining a successful Product scorecard;
- Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that each product manager, and the overall product organization, uses to make decisions and drive products.
- Ensure that there is Exec review and buyin so that each KPI is tied to the overall business strategy and desired outcome
- Review the KPI's on a regular basis as business strategy and product directions change regularly.
Ever heard sales feedback that goes something like "We have no idea what PM's upto and why they are not working on all these features that will help us sell more" ... reasons ... probably no product scorecard and definitely no socializing of it.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:41 AM
Friday, June 12, 2009
SaaS Companies do need PM's
One of the PM's forwarded this article "SaaS Company? Thinking of Sending Your Product Managers for Formal Product Management Training and Certification? Don't Waste Your Money." posted by someone at SaaS University.
It was brought up as a sidebar conversation one our weekly PM meeting and led to some animated conversations about how everyone's gonna be fired now ;-)
The post starts by taking some digs at PM training organizations like Pragmatic, Zigzag and AIPMM.
"If you're a SaaS company with product managers and are considering sending your PMs to one of these courses, I wouldn't bother. Save your money and spend it on some things I'll list out later in this piece."Then it refers to some 2008 Atlanta SaaS Conference comments about a very successful SaaS ERP firm running with no PM's.
So its not very clear from the title of the post or its initial content whether this is about PM Training firms and SaaS companies spending $$'s with them or about PM's not required at SaaS companies.
It characterizes PM's as Keepers of the Tick List, Scribes of the MRD, Voices of the Customer etc.
To make a long story short its all over the place and the message is not very clear and its just yet another article trying to gather some traffic by making outrageous product management related statements. Product Managers are very much needed for SaaS products just like many other products and there's tons of info out there on why, so I wont get into that.
However the one valuable nugget that's embedded in that post which is worth mentioning is the fact that SaaS PM's often do not even scratch the surface when it comes to analyzing all of the data that's available to them on usage, user experience, adoption and enhancements.
Coming from the on-premise world I know that PM's would've killed to get the kind of insights that SaaS products offer in terms of how customers are using/not-using and experiencing the products.
SaaS offers more accurate realtime data for these areas that can be analyzed across customers (where legal or privacy issues are not impacted). The golden rule for anything SaaS should be build a scalable framework that allows you to monitor and measure anything you put out there. This coupled with some newer web2.0 and social tools like rating and instant feedback available now (compared to 10 yrs ago) are invaluable and as a SaaS PM when it comes to decision time my favorite evaluation phrase is "can we query this data and run some analysis on it ..."
Now its easier said than done cause once you've crossed that bridge you're in the territory of what's the right metric and how do we measure it etc. But that's another conversation for a later date.
Update: There is a great post today by Tom Grant from Forrester and its a great article on why SaaS Companies need PM's
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 4:45 PM
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Best book I've ever read for Product Management and Marketing
Lateral Thinking is undeniably the best book I've ever read on product management and marketing.
- what do we build?
- how do we build and market the product?
- knowing what we know how do we get further down the product "todo/feature/wish" list with the scarce and competing resource demands in the organization.
Lateral Thinking Techniques
- Alternatives: Use concepts to breed new ideas
- Focus: Sharpen or change your focus to improve your creative efforts
- Challenge: Break free from the limits of accepted ways of operating
- Random Entry: Use unconnected input to open new lines of thinking
- Provocation: Move from a provocative statement to useful ideas
- Harvesting: Select the best of early ideas and shape them into useable approaches
- Treatment of Ideas: Develop ideas and shape them to fit an organization or situation
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 3:48 PM
Monday, April 27, 2009
Models - Not the ones your're thinking about
As product managers and marketers have you ever been in situations where you're starting to draw graphs or tables, using analogies, trying to visualize something that cannot be directly seen, trying to infer patterns from data? Well chances are if you dug a little deeper on Google for what you were discussing there's most likely someone who's done a study around it and come up with a model for it. So why reinvent the wheel?
There are obviously some caveats to this,
- There should be a good enough usable model around what you're looking for not a model someone just threw together one night in a highly caffeinated state (well then again maybe you do)
- In general they are from reputed sources, vetted and widely accepted (this ones not necessary though)
- That they are extensible without rendering them useless
- Also need to watch out that it really applies to the problem space or statement that you're trying to make, and it does not overly complicate things.
- BCG Matrix
- Kano Model
- Technology Adoption Model
- Hype Cycle
- SWOT Analysis
- PEST Analysis
- McKinsey Matrix
- Value Chain Analysis
- SPIN Model
- Kotlers 4 P's Model
Now a lot of these can be used readily and presented on in meetings while others are more for hashing out your own thoughts or getting a convincing case going where you see a pattern and are looking to guess the outcome. Models or frameworks fit right in that sweet spot, where someone's spent serious time and effort (sometimes their entire life) researching and building that model. So the next time you get the urge to create your own model to describe something check online there might be a model out there ready to use and extend.
Newbie PM hint, models help you become more informed. So you dont walk into meetings and throw out ideas like wouldn't it be cool if we identify our customers by market share and market growth. Wonder if anyone else is doing that ... well ever heard of the BCG Matrix :-)
Needs to be complemented with .. Brainstorming alternatives .. Experience and learning .. but you can rarely beat a good proven model.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 12:17 AM
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Product Management Manifesto
Recently got forwarded this link to a product management manifesto that has been drafted by Brain Lawley, CEO & Founder of the 280 Group LLC.
- Im dedicated to bringing great products to market. Products that delight my customers. Products that are massively profitable for my company. Products that help change the way people work and live.
- I have a strong vision for my products and develop winning strategies that align with my companys goals and ensure that our investments of time, money and energy are well-spent.
- Iam the voice of my customers and represent them in every critical decision that is made.
- I refuse to settle for mediocrity ...
- I believe that Product Management is one of the toughest, yet most rewarding jobs ...
- Though I have all of the responsibility ...
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:21 PM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Product Management, Scrum
Monday, April 13, 2009
A healthy living breathing Product Roadmap
Having recently gone through a major Product Roadmap definition exercise I thought it would be cool to share some thoughts on product roadmaps and get feedback. While there are tons of great posts out there on how to create product roadmaps it's unbelievable how many Product Managers are developing products with no roadmaps!!
Agile products and teams need roadmaps too. Just cause you're developing in iterations does not mean you become a backlog factory and lose sight of the big picture.
Mature products with very little new feature velocity need roadmaps as well. Little velocity means you have only so many resources and shots to fire in each release, imagine spending those on activities that are not aligned with your long term product roadmap.
Knowing our stack ranked list of 300 product enhancements does not mean you know your roadmap. A stack ranked list of Enh. is a very good place to start, but a roadmap is so much more than that and should be more strategic. It should be able to tell you how you will be navigating the course towards your product vision.
Use roadmaps to build consensus and get key stakeholder buyin. It's useless complaining that half-way through a release my roadmap always gets over ridden by one of the Execs. What that tells me is that your roadmap is not aligned with the overall corporate or business strategy and was not bought into by the stakeholders.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:06 PM
Labels: Product Management, Product Roadmap
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Does a SW Product Managers job change with Agile/Scrum?
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 12:15 PM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
What is an Agile PM?
To me an Agile PM is quite simply an individual that understands and possesses fundamental PM skills and is aware of Agile principles, frameworks and tools and can be applied to his/her domain.
There is a very interesting conversation going on around this that I stumbled into and wanted to write a quick post about. I'll use my comments to those posts to convey my POV.
It started when I stumbled into the Enthiosys blog (which I've now bookmarked ;-)
How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) About Dramatic Changes in Technology
Randomly stumbled into this blog, so writing this comment without complete context of your other posts. I disagree with the assumptions in this post or the industrial designer, assembly lang programmer, cook analogy.
The job of an industrial engineer hasnt changed. The tools have. An industrial engineer with good fundamental skills would be just as effective in the 1950’s as today. A good cook will be just as effective regardless of the tools, cause cooking is all about understand the fundamentals of how ingredients mix/blend/cook at various temperatures rather than the hi-tech gas range and ovens.A good analogy might be an architect, has the job of an architect changed ever since man has been building wonderful structures? No, but the tools sure have.
Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That’s why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.
I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I’d take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.
So now to tie it back to your post, I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying you don’t have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.
However to me it’s a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.
Then I went to the "Are agile PMs Baloney?" blog post they were referring to and here's what I think about it.
Came here from a on the Enthiosys site "How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) ..." Loving the conversation here. I think the job of a PM is somewhere in the middle, not as skewed towards tools/frameworks as indicated on the Enthiosys blog and not as insulated from newer tools/frameworks as this post is trying to suggest. But I do agree with the gist of this post that the core of the PM job has not really changed, the tools have.
Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That's why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.
I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I'd take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.
I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and good tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying you don't have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.
However to me it's a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.
Very interested in your thoughts.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:26 AM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
This is not "pure" Scrum
Just some background. I've been doing traditional Product Mgmt and Marketing for some time now. Over the last few years I've transitioned to Agile Product Management and my posts here will mostly reflect my journey from traditional to Agile.
We are currently Scrumming, but not in its purest sense and keep hearing comments like "thats not pure Scrum".
Well from what I've seen Scrum is very contextual and a framework that leaves a lot of the details for the team to decide on how they want to do things. So there is nothing like pure Scrum.
And by the way saying that User Stories not written in the now famous Mike Cohn format of "As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason" is not Scrum .. is ridiculous at best.
I respect Mike and his writing a lot, especially his "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" book that's kinda like a bible for Product Owners. However I do believe that some stories have to be contorted to meet this format and sometimes there is a lot of redundancy in this format as well. Imagine 40 stories starting with "As a Sales Rep ...". So well written user stories in any format (user stories, use cases etc) should do for Scrum. Tyner Blain has a wonderful blog posted on this that I would recommend to any team transitioning from WF to Agile.
I'd like to hear more from people who are doing "pure" Scrum .. have large product lines in the enterprise software space with legacy code, bug fixes and globally distributed teams.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:32 AM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
3 .. 2 .. 1 We have liftoff
Hello and welcome to this blog. This is my attempt that sharing thoughts, having conversations and reflecting on all things that are product related.
Posted by Darayush Mistry at 11:00 AM