Product Delivery

So i have just taken a new job in the company i work for, and i will be effectively a product delivery manager. I used to be a product manager at work, and i am interested to find out through teh transition from one role to the other what the difference is when you are essentially a satellite company for a US company.

I am guessing it will be dealing with QA , development and localisation teams, but the job description says that i will contribnute to the product roadmap creation and communicate with programming and marketing teams in eu countries. I thought the product manager was responsible for the last couple of things, so it will be interesting settling into this new role.

I have noticed though that there doesnt really happen to be any product delivery type books out there, whereas product management books are everywhere… maybe an opportunity to write about my experiences

Is it my Job?

So over the last few days I found myself writing lots of copy for a product in prepeartion for a product launch. As i am doing this i am really wondering if this is the best use for my time? Shouldn’t this really be the job of the marketing team, with input from me, not me writing copy that is then critiqued by marketing?

As a product manager in the company i work for, i am expected to work on business cases, prds, DRDs, QA reviews, bug scrubs, product presentations and demos, in life management, product delivery and copy writing! surely that means that i get to concerntrate a fraction on each and am therefore doing a partial job on all of them.

I think that to make my job easier, it needs a few processes with resource allocation incorporated, that way i can concentrate on the most crucial jobs that must happen to get a product into shape for launch.

Another grumble done….look forward to the next grumble!

Product ?=+!&

Working in product management over the past year after spending years in development management, there are a few thing that i have found that drive me insane. The biggest one being the fact that product management in some companies is a mystical position that no one really knows the point of. A lot of companies treat their product manager as delivery managers for the “mothership” that is usually based in the US. Now from personal experience i can say that being a delivery manager as well as a product manager is an extremely hard slog. Not only do you have to write business cases, write PRDs, concern yourself over the user experience, legal implications and marketing message, you have to spend half of your time on development /QA calls answering and querying strabge questions and answers.

I guess the quesion comes to how do you break down the tasks of a product manager to get the most out of them. I think that a product manager really should be a more commercial person who looks at the market, identifies a gap / opportunity, writes the business case and gets the product up and running, and then they should be coupled with a product delivery manager, that goes on QA and Dev calls to ensure things are running to schedule and to functional plan. While this work is happening the product manager should be working with marketing to position and promote the product. The delivery manager should then implement the launch.

As for in life management of the product – this is where i get unstuck. Can the product manager devote time to supporting and listening to their users – or should the delivery manager take over this responsibility and report back anything significant to the product manager?

I am open to suggestion on that one.

The Importance of Blogging

Blogging seems to be taking on a greater emphasis in successful businesses these days. With key players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft having corporate blogs. I think that this is definetly a great step forward in reaching out and understanding users. In the past the only way you could interact with users was from official research programmes, or via company message boards (if you were even allowed to), but now product people can interact with their audience (the users) over blogs, and discuss things like new features and product usage problems.

I guess the next step is to get the public at large onto these blogs to leave comments. I think to the average person this is the scary part, as blogs have somewhat inherited the forum type feel, where only techy “geeks” would contribute. How do we break down those barriers? that will take some thought…

The idea of community sharing on the web is not a new thing, comapnies like yahoo and AOL have been doing this for a long time, yahoo through its groups products, and AOL through its chat and message boards. The difference now is that now with corporate blogs, we are giving the users direct access to the movers and shakers in busnesses, and we are really giving them the ability to shape the future.

Blogs also allow companies to become humaised in the eyes of the public, and they really do get to see that, hey there is someone on the other side that is listening and responding to me! I guess humans crave for the attention of others and maybe blogging is a way around the “taking to a machine” rage that people get.

Positioning

If one thing history does teach us is that positioning is vital, and can either make or break a company. It is always said that it is better to be something to someone, instead of everything to everyone, but from what i can see this is certainly not the path that many companies are taking at the moment. For example Google is an example of a company that started out with the mission of organising the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, which it is doing successfully through its search product. Now though it is diversifying to online software, youtube annd products such as instant messenger. So my thinking is, is google now trying to be everything to everybody?

Has the web changed the positioning landscape? Personally i don’t think it has, i think the lessons of positioning are still extremely relevant on the web, but maybe we are starting to forget the reason for positioning? Are companies getting so big that they truly believe that they can become everything to everyone?

Many companies would aim to have internet users rely solely on their services, i.e. email, picture sharing, instant messenger, but i am not sure that users really mind using different services. In the physical world it would be like getting your credit card, bank account, and utilities from the same company.

Maybe these companies are seeing something that i am not.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is an amazing video, i think. Really investigates the history of the web in a fun way.

The Search

So, i am currently reading “The Search” by John Battelle, and it is a pretty good book. It gives you a key insight into the lost opportunities by companies like AltaVista and GoTo, and how the world has ended up either madly in love or slightly bemused by Google.

Google are of course the darling of the search business, but seem to have lost their key starting philosophy of not selling out to the ads business, especially when you see press releases on Google moving to video ads! Though i guess the money that they bring into the company is pretty hard to turn down, especially when you are a public company.

The book also has pretty amazing ideas on convergence of search to everything, pretty radical, but i can see it happening one day.

Search is such a part of life these days, and it is embedded in nearly everything we do as human beings – search for drivers license, search for somewhere to live, search for a place to go for a beer, etc. The limits of how technology can help us to these kind of things is only held back by the discovery of taking search away from the virtual world and into the physical.

What do people think of Google these days anyway? are they the savior of the web or the curse, are they to be trusted or not? I would be interested to get some comments on that actually.

Well i am signing off for another night, lets see if i can continue the ramblings soon.

But this is a priority

Priority is a wonderful thing, allows us to control what gets done first and therfore what is most important. The unfortunate part come when there are more than one “highest’ priority.

So here is how priority came into my day today. We have an extremely low number of resources available in QA (low meaning 1) and we have 3 super high priority items in the queue. So i though i would go back to the business owner to ask which was the most important out of the 3 activities only to be told that all 3 are! This does make me wonder if business owners misinterpret the meaning of product manager to miracle worker. This situation just ends up being a complete pain in the ass both for me and for the poor QA guy that is trying to keep up with all the work.

So here is how i thought i could handle this situation:

1) Draw up a priority table that determines the prioirity of each activity
2) Draw up the required timelines of the activities
3) Document the effects of slippage of the 3 activities

I would hope that this would give the true picture of what is really the highest priority. It would be great to graph these results and present them to the business owners, in some kind of time, cost , quality triangle structure.

Unfortunately with a constantly low QA resource this is something that i will have to do on a regular basis, so will have to give this some serious thought…..