3.3 – Product Management & Product Road Mapping
As a company stabilizes and grows, it needs to put formalized processes in place for product development and product management. This module covers:
- Making product management decisions
- Prioritizing features and functions in the product road-map
- Building a complementary product / service portfolio
At the end of this module you will be able to:
- Recall traits of an effective Product Manager
- Extend the product / service development timeline by considering the value of team acquisitions
- Describe the importance of product-market fit
Section A: Role of a Product Manager
A Product Manager (PM) becomes the “CEO of the Product.” The PM owns the product / service road map, makes decisions, and determines the product / service strategy that meets the best interests of the customer. Traits of a good PM include the following:
- Has a deep understanding of the customer, their needs, and the problem the product or service aims to solve.
- Has the ability to manage tradeoffs between conflicting areas of the business. A PM may need to balance the engineering costs associated with newly added features
- with the business impact of increasing revenue to support these new costs.
- Works with cross functional teams that could include marketing, engineering, design, sales, and data science.
- Sets and manages timelines.
- Works with the sales and marketing teams to manage feature requests, determine sales goals of the product / service, and on product / service messaging.
- Lobbies for additional resources from other departments as needed.
The role of a Product Manager is part lobbyist, part politician, part CEO, and part project manager.
Traits to Look For in Hiring a PM:
- Customer mindset: They aim to solve the customers’ problems.
- Ability to prioritize: They determine the trade-offs among product features, revenue, engineering costs, timelines, etc.
- Ability to execute: They can work with teams to build and ship your product / service efficiently.
- Pulse on the landscape: They understand your particular industry and know what products / services competitors are launching.
- Data driven approach: They use data to make decisions regarding features to build and trade-offs to make.
Finding the right product manager is essential! Watch this video to learn what traits Sarah Butts, Sinan Mohsin, Boyd Reid, and Hanna Haponenko look for when hiring a product manager.
Hiring Managers & Executives
If you are running a fast growing company, your structure may change rapidly. When hiring senior people into management or executive level roles, hire people that would be a good fit for the role over the next 12 to 18 months.
Traits to Look For In Managers & Executives
- Do they have functional area expertise? Do they have credibility in their field and a deep understanding of their craft?
- Do they fit with the current state of the company size and sophistication?
- Do they have a strong network and can they recruit strong people alongside them?
- Do they have experience building and leading teams?
- Do they know what’s right for the company at this point in time, even if it’s not in their own best interests?
- Do they have an owner’s mentality? Can they own their team, department, products?
- Do they have the ability to communicate across, up and down the company? Can they engage with the Board of Directors, other functional teams, and other managers and executives?
Things to Watch Out For:
- Staff are circumventing them: If a manager’s direct reports or other team members are seen to be circumventing (or “end-running”) a specific manager it may suggest problems with the manager’s effectiveness, or could cause slowdowns in work flow or communication.
- They don’t take ownership of decisions: Either they are reluctant to decide or don’t own the outcome of decisions they made. The key to a manager’s role is to create ownership of their team, product and strategy.
- They are too senior for the role: This often shows up in senior sales management roles. It’s great that this manager worked for X number of Fortune 500 companies, but they often lack the tactical ability to execute tasks from scratch with few resources.
Optional Readings
Gil, Elad, and Chris Dixon. “a16z Podcast: Scaling Companies (and Tech Trends).” July 19, 2018.
Gil, Elad B. High Growth Handbook.
Section B: Expanding Project Offering – Product to Distribution Shift
Most companies start off launching one product or service into the market. Usually these startups survive on a single product / service by ensuring the product / service is so well developed that it fits the customer’s needs better than any other alternative on the market. This causes the startup’s competitive advantage to be one of product-market fit. The competitive advantage generated by this strong product-market fit leads to aggressive customer adoption and growth. Eventually the startup will realize that the customer growth is actually the primary asset of the business. This paves the way for future product or service launches and expanded product offerings.
When it comes to offering new products or services, there are often more products or services to build than resources available. As a company becomes more established, team acquisitions (acqui-hires) and product / service buys become more appropriate. Acqui-hires are a very common tool for expanding a team rapidly and on-boarding a high quality team. Things to think about regarding an acqui-hire or product buy:
- What is the quality of the team? Do they have a track record of building great products or services?
- Does this team bring a unique expertise or skill set that is missing from your current team?
- How much time will be saved buying the product / service over building it?
- How many customers can be acquired along with the product or service? What are the economics of the customer acquisition? How much did it cost to acquire the customers; are these costs in line with your other products or services? How much will this affect revenue?
- How will the strategic landscape change by buying this product or service?
Pause
Optional Readings
Theus, Andre. “7 Tips for Creating Your Customer Advisory Board.”
Juncal, Shaun. “Well-Balanced Priorities: Long-Term Roadmaps Vs. Short-Term Roadmaps.”
Juncal, Shaun. “How to Recruit Beta Testers.”
Newell, Sierra. “Sticking to Your Product Vision Means Saying ‘No.’”