Scrum Gathering 2012 - Last Responsible Moment Post

I'm about to facilitate a dialog about how collaborative product roadmaps bridge the gap between vision statements and product backlogs. Since I'll be pointing people to the site to download the templates, here is the new Visio roadmap template and an updated product charter template.

The Gathering has been great so far. Terrific sessions and keynotes. Highly recommended if you haven't attended.

Measuring Product Managers (in Swedish or English)

I’m back from a week of product management workshops and seminars in Sweden, including a Product Leadership event hosted by Tolpagorni's Magnus Billgren. In a half-dozen discussions with the heads of product management groups, I was struck by how familiar their concerns are. We could have been in Sunnyvale rather than in Stockholm. Topics that came up repeatedly:

• What metrics do we use for evaluating product managers, and how can we tell if they are doing a good job? Are there PM KPIs*?
• Our agile development teams tell us that roadmaps are no longer needed, but our customers and sales teams still demand firm commitments.
• How should we organize our product teams? Senior/junior, technology vs. market segment, product owner vs. product manager?
• What do career paths look like?

These were discussions about how organizations and real people interact in a technical environment. They reflect what execs running product management groups worry about: boosting effectiveness, building relationships, and relating the business of product management to the company’s overarching business.

Some product geography

Sweden’s tech industry is heavily weighted toward B2B and telecom, with many firms clustered around Ericsson in Stockholm’s northern suburbs. Product managers stay with their companies (and in their current positions) much longer than we’re used to in Silicon Valley. And since telecom customers have long implementation cycles, product releases are methodically timed. Internally agile development teams are faced with un-agile, contract-driven shipment dates. In search of cost reduction and talent, most teams are split geographically. In other words, not very different from B2B tech firms back home. With limited time in each workshop, I used an old agilist technique of soliciting concerns, then having attendees rank them. Voila! A backlog of product management issues that we time-boxed and attacked in order. (And a handy topic list for my next few posts.) Here’s a summary of discussions about the first topic above - metrics for evaluating product managers, or "PM KPIs" - which drew heavily on an assessment tool and post that Scott Gilbert and I created in 2010.

What should we measure?

There's a lot of confusion between metrics about products, assessments of product management teams, and scorecards for individual PM job performance. Taking each in turn:   

[1] Product metrics are an embodiment of our market and financial goals, such as “units shipped” or “incremental revenue” or “gross margin in our reseller channel” or “market share in Asia Pacific.” Results depend by an infinite set of external and internal factors (sales compensation plans, competitive price shifts, PR, on-time release, weather) that are mostly out of a product manager’s control.

Product KPIs are surface indicators that should trigger deeper questions. Why are margins higher in Latin America than Europe? Can we see any impact from our competitor’s social/community efforts? Which segments should we target for next quarter’s whiz-bang features? What internal sales education techniques work the best? As problem solvers, we take these as challenges.

[2] Department-level assessments help us improve the business of getting great products shipped. Success is a cross-functional team sport, so these tend to be a mix of objective and subjective scores. “Are requirements complete and reflecting market needs?” is paired with “does engineering agree that PM is the primary proxy for customers?”. “Customers understand our core benefits/features” goes hand-in-hand with “Sales is eager for product management to meet prospects.”

Again, we use these metrics or assessments for a problem-solving approach. If messaging is lost in the handoff from product to marketing to sales to channel to customer, where are we getting confused? If late-arriving requirements are frustrating our developers, how can we anticipate better (or convince Engineering to relax a little, or keep Sales from promising futures)? KPIs should be weathervanes, not career bludgeons.

[3] Finally, the hard question that my Swedish colleagues wanted answers to: how to quantitatively evaluate individual product managers? Jag vet inte. (That's Swedish for "Honestly, I don’t know.")

In my experience, the best product managers throw themselves against unanticipated product-specific market and organizational issues. They practice higher-order problem solving, making progress fiendishly hard to measure. Great PMs fill the organizational gaps, work intramurally, and often hang back when credit is being awarded. Their success can be invisible: the absence of confusion and unhealthy politicking.

I’m hesitant to assign numeric goals to my individual product managers. If I give bonuses for perfect requirements, I’ll get 100-page MRDs (instead of time spent with customers). If I reward pure revenue performance, my folks might spend all of their time on the road (and neglect next quarter’s planning). Etc. My best indicators of a product manager’s success are subjective:

• Does she have a roadmap agreed to by Engineering and Marketing (as a proxy for consensus building)?
• Does Engineering consider her a core part of their team (and not a technical lightweight)?
• Do Marketing and Sales see her as the source of product facts, strategy, and market intelligence?
• Do I trust her judgment, objectivity, whole product thinking, and personal integrity?
• Does the team show more focus (and less panic) over time?
• Are other departments trying to recruit or borrow her?

Not as scientific an answer as I'd like, but the basis for discussion here and in Stockholm. If you have more quantitative approaches, please share.

Sound Byte

Measuring product success is easy; gauging departmental success a little harder. I’m still stumped for general, quantitative metrics for individual product managers.  

* Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantitative definitions of success, which are then used to measure progress or score results.

- Rich Mironov

What's Up with this Blog and a New Roadmap Template, from Jason Tanner

Since Luke founded Enthiosys, he has written the majority of posts in this blog bringing his unique view of Agile and Product Management to the blogosphere. As Luke has focused his attention on The Innovation Games Company, he has also focused his blogging on www.innovationgames.com. As a result, we decided to transition the majority of Enthiosys blogging to me and this is my first official post. Luke may return to write a post from time to time and our newest team member, Jeff Brantley, may also write a post when he gets inspired. My goals for this blog are to continue the Enthiosys tradition of providing useful Agile Product Management content, write engaging posts, and share information that I believe can help the Agile community, product managers and maybe even the world. If something in the blog helps one person, I will have accomplished at least one of those goals.

  

This first post shares information for the Agile community…a new roadmap template. We have provided downloadable Visio and Excel roadmaps for a long time on our Tools page. Over the past few years, I have expanded and improved those basic templates to a more robust model that is now my new starting point for my own roadmapping and for roadmapping with clients. I have uploaded the Excel version to get started. The Visio version will follow soon.

What's New with the Template

I have added several rows that pertain to any roadmap including cumulative costs and cumulative benefits. I have found that clearly estimating both costs and benefits over the long term provokes conversation about what we plan to do and, more importantly, what we expect from the investments that we're making. If you have seen our webinars, presentations or training on roadmaps, you may remember that we suggested adding sketches or notation to the roadmap. For example, a curve drawn on the roadmap to indicate expected customer growth. This template explicitly reminds you to add the comments to the benefits row.

  

Note: We have not changed our position that the template can and must change depending on the context of the product, project or initiative. If the labels on the rows don't work for you, change them to what does work for you!

  

I also added several new sheets to the template. Again, we refer to items like a legend, a decision record, recording the names of people who created the roadmap and other items in our in-person and online events, however they have not previously been part of our template. Now they are and for an important reason. The best roadmapping happens in-person with a cross-functional team with the space and time to engage in thoughtful, constructive dialog. People build the big, visible roadmap - typically a sheet of paper 8-12 feet long and 3-6 feet wide. We place several sheets of flip chart paper on the walls next to the roadmap - the legend, decisions, assumptions, trade-offs, action items. In the past, we didn't really provide any guidance about what to do with those artifacts. We now suggest using this template to capture that information in the template for future reference.

What's Next

We'll add the Visio version soon, and potentially other formats. We'll also post more information about how to roadmap and use the template. I'll also be posting more about why I coach all of our clients to adopt collaborative roadmapping as a good habit. As always, we welcome your feedback and requests.

  

What's A Vice President of Product Management?

My last two posts were about getting into product management and the climb to Director. This third post asks how Vice Presidents of Product Management (VP PMs) are different from Directors, why they are so rare, and where else Directors can look for organizational advancement.

Product groups vary widely and are not rationally designed. (Sorry.) So let’s imagine a pure VP PM position generalized from my own tours of duty plus a half-dozen interim/acting VP PM roles.  Your organizational mileage may vary.IMHO, line product managers fundamentally look after individual products/services: shepherding the short-term development efforts and long-term strategy work to keep a 3-12 month roadmap that’s coherent.  Directors look after the business of product management. They provide some order and structure and process to a chaotic situation, and keep things directionally on track.

The VP Product Management functions as senior staff (a/k/a consigliere) to the rest of the executive team - making sure that the company as a whole is building and shipping and supporting the right products. S/he is the product manager of the organization itself and its internal people-process conflicts. The VP PM should be an honest broker at the executive level who represents product/market/company success rather than any one specific function. Thinking more broadly than Engineering, Marketing, Sales or Support. The one most likely to say "yes, but the right thing for our long-term business and the markets we serve is…"

WHICH BOILS DOWN TO...

This is not a command position, but an executive-level influencer role. The VP PM shapes how work gets done, rather than making individual product decisions.

Viewed from the executive level...

• Product Management has a very small staff and budget versus Engineering and Marketing and Sales. This gives the VP PM some implied neutrality in the great budgetary and reorganization battles that tear companies apart. You get to ask "how should we be organized for success?" without being accused of empire building. Ideally, the CEO (or business unit manager) wants your unbiased opinion.
• You sweat the business’ overall success. Are you missing key segments, or being outflanked by new competitors, or stuck in an old business model? What are the important (cross-product) decisions that will drive longer-term revenue?
• You live cross-functionally, constantly getting PM-level feedback about individuals and teams. Your ideas for improvements are non-denominational. You’ve built up peer credibility with lots of “Jesse in QA is doing a terrific job” and the occasional “Gordon is creating problems in Marketing that we need to solve.” You understand what each functional group does, praise in public, and privately raise issues with department heads.
• You know that functional teams naturally think first about their own needs. (“What’s good for Engineering must be good for the company.”) You and your PMs spot inconsistencies among goals, schedules and incentives. Maybe Sales is targeting prospects that don’t fit the current product, or Engineering is stealing Tech Support’s best talent. Marketing’s plan to move all customer emails to a cloud solution will create privacy issues and tons of DBA work. You thoughtfully facilitate executive-level conflicts, often identified by your Directors and line PMs.
• You’re part of the Corporate Strategy team (if it exists), since you know these often lack detailed, real-world customer input and the urgency of current-quarter sales quotas. You bring in your line PMs as subject matter experts to reduce buzz-word bloat. Your try to keep strategy relevant.

In other words, you’re working broad structural and human issues in order to enable delivery of great products.  Business focus trumping personal politics.

YES, BUT I’M A DIRECTOR RIGHT NOW

If I’ve described what you’re already doing at the director level, you’re due for a promotion. (Forward this post to your boss…)  Otherwise, consider the shape of your current organization:

• VP PMs are mostly found in the largest PM organizations. If you're a Director here, help your current boss succeed and loyally follow her up the ladder.
• At medium-sized companies, PM Directors work for Engineering, Marketing or the CEO/business unit manager. With only a handful of PMs to manage, justifying a bigger title (and salary and options) is tough. VP opportunities can be found laterally in less-glorified functional groups: Customer Support, Sales Engineering or new business units.
• At start-ups, cash burn is much more important than job title.  During your hiring process, offer to take less money in return for a VP title (and a bit more stock).  It's a great trade, whether you stay a long time or parlay this into a VP PM role elsewhere.
• Regardless, the power roles at your company may be in Engineering and Sales (B2B) or Marketing (B2C). Consider stepping into a wider role and learning some new skills.

Note that the VP PM job takes a heap of humble and patience. Achievement through others. You’ll never be singled out as THE reason for your company’s success. It’s the pride of your kid in the school play or your mentees going to the hot new startup.  Not the big ego trip.

Finally, my fine grained-distinctions are lost on most non-product executives. They don’t think (or care that much) about product management levels and titles. Bigger fish to fry, bigger organizations to run. If you have a mentor among your company’s execs, buy him lunch and ask for advice.

SOUND BYTE

Vice Presidents of Product Management have a unique, strategic, cross-functional role - and need a rare mix of talents / personality. They bring cohesion and coordination to the top of the company, allowing product managers to drive individually successful products.  You should take your own measure before setting that as your next job goal.  And then think big, because you'll become a CMO/CEO candidate.

 -- Rich Mironov

Moving Up To Director

In the second of three posts about the product management hierarchy, we'll focus on technology product managers (PMs) who’ve been in their jobs long enough to consider what comes next.  (User story: “As a Senior Product Manager, I want to be promoted to Director so that I get more money and respect and glory.”)

Let's break this problem into a few parts: likely candidates for promotion; how the Director job differs from line Product Management; and ways to show that you're ready for a bigger role.

PERSONA

You’re a promotional candidate if you're already a seasoned PM, with 4+ years on a few different products, and are the “go to” person for competitive and technical info. You make time for long-term planning and bits of mentoring.  You’ve been through the release cycle (and emotional roller coaster) several times.  Other departments ask to work with you.

BTW, I’m assuming that you’re in a large enough organization to have “real” directors, with 3+ PMs reporting to them and overseeing whole product lines. Generically...

WHAT DO DIRECTORS DO, ANYWAY?

In my experience, PM Directors work on a different set of problems than their individual product managers. Rather than being super PMs, they worry about the process of product management: building launch teams, balancing staff assignments, standardizing reporting, fostering cross-functional cooperation, setting product-line-level strategy and resource allocation. Directors encourage risk-taking and dismantle organizational roadblocks. They keep the trains running and the products flowing. A good director makes product-level decisions only to settle disputes or demonstrate technique.

Directors also focus on people issues: coaxing cooperation, aligning incentives, mentoring, cooling down egos.  They relentlessly present product strategy and roadmaps to other departments boost understanding of what PM does.

The best directors provide informal HR feedback to other directors. They look for under-appreciated talent across the company.  ("Gee, I hear that Sarah, your new QA lead on Project Orange, made some great improvements in the test automation process. My PM says the team loves her…”) Directors do this to identify great contributors, encourage cooperation within teams, and model good behavior for their peers. It also builds credibility for unpleasant discussions.  (“Manager to manager, Larry's refusal to participate in roadmap meetings is frustrating the other architects…”)

SO HOW DO I GET TO BE ONE?

Like the individual PM role, Director of Product Management isn’t all glitz and glamour. It’s middle management of opinionated people and imperfect processes.  My advice is to devote part of your energy toward being more “director-like.” Look for activities that both improve your management skills and make them more visible.

• Before you do anything else, have a humble but unambiguous chat with your own Director. (“I really enjoy working for you, and am learning a lot. I think I’ll be ready soon to be a PM Director, if a slot opens up, so want your advice. What’s your feedback on my skills, organizational style, or areas of improvement? How do you see the staffing map changing over the next year?”)  Moving up requires your boss’s active support – or her empty chair. Don’t get caught sneaking around her for a promotion.
• Find a product-line-level issue where you can advocate for another PM’s product.
• Think about how development staff should be allocated across products. Kick it around with your director.
• Up-level some competitive analysis from individual widgets to market positioning.
• Take on some cross-functional projects or task forces. Yuck? That’s how directors get things done. You’ll be freeing your director from one more committee and boosting your visibility.
• Identify your best non-PM coworkers, and thank their bosses.
• Start mentoring one of the junior PMs. You’ll learn a lot, improve the team, and show that you’re management material.

A few disclaimers:

• The promotional funnel for director-level jobs is very narrow. Slots rarely come open, and there are probably five PMs for each director.  Watch for other organizations that need leadership
• Front-line experience makes you a better product manager, and boosts your value to the organization. Your company has an incentive to keep you in your current job for years and years.

BUT MY COMPANY HAS A FLAT ORGANIZATION

In some companies, there’s little difference in work content between Senior Product Managers and Directors. Instead, it’s mostly about respect and money and who negotiated a better hire-on package. Don’t be a whiner (“But I’m a better PM than Johnny, and he’s a director…”). Figure out who is making the decisions, and have a frank discussion about how to show your worthiness.

SOUND BYTE

Directors of Product Management wrestle with different issues than individual PMs. If you want to become a Director, find ways to demonstrate next-level-up skills.

 -- Rich Mironov