In recent years, we’ve seen new definitions for old titles and many new titles being created. We’ve got product managers, product marketing managers, product owners, business analysts, product strategists, product line managers, and portfolio managers.

Let’s keep it simple. There are four types of skills needed to define and deliver products to market. Product leaders (by whatever title) attempt to support the team with all four types of knowledge but it’s rare to find all of these capabilities in a single person.

Technology expertise

Technology expertise is about how the product works. From their daily interactions, product managers pick up a deep understanding of product and technical capabilities; they achieve this by playing with the product, by discussing it with customers and developers, by reading and reading and reading. For a technology expert, the product almost becomes their personal hobby. They think of themselves as product experts.

Typical titles: product manager, product owner, technical product manager, business analyst

Market expertise

Market expertise is a focus on geographic or vertical markets, either by country or by industry. They know how business is done in that market. They know the major players, and the jargon or colloquialisms of the market. Market experts define themselves by the market they serve: “I’m a banker” or “I support BRIC.”

Typical titles: industry manager, product marketing manager, field marketing manager

Domain expertise

Domain expertise is about the discipline your product supports, such as security, fraud detection, or education. Domain experts know (and often define) the standards for the discipline and can explain the latest thinking in that area. They understand the problems that your product endeavors to solve, regardless of the market or industry. And for a domain expert, your product is merely one way of addressing the problems of their specialty. Domain experts define themselves not by the product but by their topic area.

Typical titles: product scientist, principal product manager

Business expertise

Business expertise is where your traditional business leader or MBA graduate brings strength. These experts know the mechanics of business and can apply that knowledge to your product. A business-oriented expert knows how to use research to determine product feasibility, can determine how the product generates profit with lots of financial analysis to back it up. Ideally these business skills need to be combined with one of the other skills or provided as a support role for the other areas of expertise.

Typical titles: product strategist, product leader, portfolio manager

You can see why product leaders struggle in some areas and breeze through others. Most of us understand these four product management skill sets inherently and we also realize that it’s difficult to find one person with all four skills.

And it explains the difficulty you and your colleagues sometimes have when connecting with customers. The sales people who don’t know the industry jargon or the marketers who seem insensitive to the customs of different countries or the developers who don’t understand why a capability is critical to customers.

Think about the skills you have and the skills you need for your organization. Consider the requests you’re getting from development, marketing, sales, customer support, partners, and so on. Determine which expertise is needed to accurately support these requests.

Need help? I can help you define a world-class marketing team with all four types of expertise. Contact me to learn more. Or check out my free ebook, Product Management Expertise.

So what is innovation? Is it building crazy stuff that you hope people will want? (Can you think of some products that fit this category?)

One CTO told me, “We’re creating products to solve problems that people don’t even have!” (I think—I hope—he meant to add ‘yet’ to that sentence.)

From Wikipedia:

Innovation is the development of new values through solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding new ways.

Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself.

Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different rather than doing the same thing better.

Source: Wikipedia

It’s great when companies challenge their teams to develop innovations. Unfortunately the challenge for many teams is they already have 110% of their time allocated for existing projects, so it’s hard to find the time to focus on anything else.

Is innovation unfocused development time?

Or is innovation solving problems in a new and unique way.

MAILBOX redefined the mailbox problem. It’s not about reading and replying—you do that from your desktop. It’s about curating and triaging to reach Inbox Zero. The metaphor is this: you don’t really read email from your phone; you really curate it. You decide to file it, trash it, or be reminded later when you’re working on email from a better work environment. And of course, you can reply to messages but I rarely do. My favorite option is the coffee cup: “bring this message back tomorrow morning.”

Did Apple innovate with iPod? There were already some MP3 players on the market albeit not from the top names in consumer electronics. And yes, 5,000 songs—or 15,000 in my case—in your pocket is a great idea. And yes, they invented another file format. But was it the iPod—or was it iTunes that was the innovation?

Didn’t Apple create the first complete product? An iPod plus great iTunes software plus the iTunes store plus agreements with the major music labels.

The innovation is they solved the problem from media to hardware to software.

What about NEST? (I love this thing!! You gotta get one!)

NEST is a programmable thermostat that programs itself from your usage. If you tend to prefer a cool room when you’re sleeping, you turn the NEST down as you head off to bed. Do that a few times and it’ll always do it. I have it set to cool during sleep time, warmer when I wake up, cooler during the afternoon, and warmer during dinner. Sure, you can do that with your office thermostat… or can you? I saw a great picture showing a brand-name thermostat with a 1-1/2 page “how-to” sheet taped next to it. It really hurts the esthetic.

And to make it even better, the NEST confirms that you connected your wiring correctly, it hops on the internet and coordinates your thermostat with the weather forecast in your area, and it sends you an email once a month with details on your usage and tips for improvement. And they even included a screwdriver in the box! Nice.

I define innovation as solving a problem in a new way. Developers and designers often know about technical capabilities but product managers need to focus their creativity on a persona with a problem.

Find a problem. Solve it. That’s innovation.

Need help bring innovation to product management? Contact me about Pragmatic Marketing implementations. 

Excellent post by Natalie Yan Chatonsky of Brainmates. She writes,

In this environment, Product Management is one function that can offer organisations significant benefits. Product Management brings with it good, solid business principles. No fancy acronyms, no catchy themes that fade with time. It essentially marries business objectives and target markets needs to deliver measurable, lasting benefits for organisations.

When practiced well, Product Management improves the product’s rate of success in the market, reducing costly product development efforts.

Here are some of other ways that Product Management can assist organisations.

The benefits include:

1. Product Management Articulates the Customer Value That Sales Sell
2. Product Management Reduces Risk of Product Failure
3. Aligning Market Needs with Key Organisational Objectives
4. Product Management Future-Proofs Organisations

Read the full post in Business Benefits of Product Management on the One Desk blog.

What benefits would you add to this list?

Have you heard this one?

A machine breaks, the assembly line is idle, and nobody can fix it. Finally they call the old guy who retired and he agrees to come fix it. When he arrived, he listened to the machine for a moment, and then hit the machine with a mallet. Machine fixed; assembly line working again.

He sent the client a bill for $5000. The bill was even itemized:

hitting the machine with a mallet - $50.00
knowing where to hit it — $4950.00

Sometimes you need an old guy who knows how things really work.

Let me share my expertise with you! Learn more about my implementation assistance. 

Product managers perform a quality assurance process during each step of the product’s development. A product cannot be shipped to the first customer until the product manager releases it. Some companies use checkpoints or “gates” that the product must pass before the next step can begin. No matter what technique is used, a product cannot leave one area until the product manager approves it. This ensures that the product still meets the requirements of the market and allows the manager to give status reports to all affected areas of the company.

While not directly the responsibility of marketing, processes in other areas of the company that affect the customer—and they all do—should be reviewed by marketers. How is the customer (and potential customer) greeted when he calls? How easy or hard is it to obtain information?

In his book, The Macintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki proposes that you call your own company to request product information; it’s often a humbling experience.

“What do you think is the most important quality of promotional material?” he asks. “Content? Beauty? Message? None of these. The most important quality of promotional material is that people can easily obtain it so that they don’t get frustrated trying to join your cause.”

A researcher called organizations to evaluate how they handled inquiries. In three of the eight cases, the requested literature was never received. In five organizations, the person answering the call had no idea what to send.

In a similar story, a friend related this story about calling a major software firm. He called the 800 number printed in an advertisement and reached the main headquarters in Virginia. He requested more information about the product. The operator suggested he call the New York office since that was where the product was developed. New York told him to call back to the main office and gave him the same 800 number. This operator suggested he call the local sales office, asking “Where are you located?” He told her that he was “across the parking lot from you.” She gave him the number for the local sales office, located in Maryland. This receptionist had heard about the product but said that no sales people were available to speak to him. Again requesting information, he was put through to a technical support person, who unfortunately didn’t know much about the product either. She did however know where the literature was stored and sent him what she could find.

Would your customers have been so persistent?

Effective product managers evaluate the company’s procedures in all areas—billing, customer support, training, and so on—to determine if the customers and prospects are getting the service they need to buy our products.

I’m interviewed this week by Tom Cooper of BrightHill Group for his leadership coaching. We discussed the the four types of product management expertise and the importance of brevity in artifacts and process.

Tom writes:

I’m excited about this interview. We’ve got a fantastic interview with a leader in Product Management who will uncover some key secrets tech CEOs need to know about product management.

Listen to it here.

A vice president at a bank created a method for detecting fraud. He was recruited by a vendor to develop a product based around his domain expertise. But because he also had market expertise of the industry—he’d been a bank vice president after all—the sales team hounded him for sales calls. The sales people said, “I need you to come talk about banking issues with my buyers.” For nine months he was the darling of the sales people… until the day he resigned. His goal was not to be the guy who could “talk bank” to help generate sales of other products; his goal was to protect banks from fraud using his algorithm.

When organizing teams, you want to align the different areas of expertise with the needs of your business. Rather than organizing teams around products, I recommend a product management team organized around a portfolio of products, ideally with staffing in four areas of expertise.

We’ll want one domain expert for your specialized discipline and at least one business expert. We’ll also need one or more technology experts devoted to each product or major component in your portfolio. The person with the most management experience, often the business expert, should lead the team. Seems logical enough.

And now it gets tricky. For the ideal product management team, you’ll want to supplement this core set of experts with an expert for each of the markets you serve. That’s right: a product marketing manager or market expert for each major geographic area and for each vertical industry—at least the ones you care about.

At first this seems to be a large group of people but don’t worry; you’ll find many product managers have more than one area of expertise. What’s scary isn’t the number of skills described; what’s really scary is how many teams are attempting to build products without the expertise.

The confusion of titles and roles is a problem for most organizations. We all have pre-conceived notions of what a product manager should do. Instead of thinking “do whatever it takes,” let’s identify the activities and artifacts that are the responsibility of your team members. And make sure your team has the skills necessary to succeed in the job.

Create a team of experts designed to serve your product and company needs.

Read more on this topic in my free ebook: Product Management Expertise. Need help designing your ideal organization? Contact me to learn more.

In the old days, a product manager would start a new job and tell the team, “I’m in charge now. I’m the CEO of the product.”

You can almost hear developers around the world shouting, “Shields up!”

In my discussions with executive teams, it’s clear that company leaders expect the product manager to be responsible for requirements. Communicating customer problems to development in some form, using artifacts known as stories, problems, features, or requirements.

Rarely does a company leader advocate a product manager’s role in determining the company’s strategic direction or defining new products for the portfolio. When pressed, execs often add some business aspects for the product: financial plan, roadmap, maybe a business case.

Furthermore, many companies have adopted some form of agile development—such as Lean or Scrum or Kanban—for product creation. Agile methods require the team to have a subject matter expert available at all times. This market-expert role is typically called a product owner. The product owner is expected to be a member of the team (and by the way, a member of only one team). As product owners, they’re responsible for answering any questions that developers have about customers and markets.

In some cases, product owners are valued members of the team; in others, they’re more like the team secretary, fetching market data or typing up meeting notes or managing the team schedule.

The role of product owner is to be the real-time product, market, and company expert.

Sales and marketing people need subject matter expertise as well. Someone who can explain the product to the sales team. Someone who can explain the product features and futures to a client. Someone who can provide content for marketing programs. Many companies have created a role—the product marketing manager—to serve this function. After all, the product managers or product owners are too busy with development to help them. And probably too close to the technology to explain the features and benefits to regular people.

While most product marketing managers attempt to anticipate the needs of sales and marketing folks, oftentimes, the product marketing manager is more of a janitor—rushing content to marketing for a campaign that’s on deadline, walking back a commitment a sales guy made, cleaning up mistakes made by others.

Development organizations have hired product owners and business analysts. Marketing groups have hired product marketing managers. The sales team has staffed up a sales engineering group. Each department now has their own subject matter experts.

Are these supplements to the product manager? or are they duplicated staffing?

Is it time to rethink our expectations of the role of the product manager?

Read more on this topic in my free ebook: Product Management Expertise. Need help designing your ideal organization? Contact me to learn more.