There will be two opinions when I talk about people management with product management functions. One will say when did product managers bother about people issues. Are they not superhumans to resolve all people management issues? The second will say, yes! It is a critical function, but have we not got a director who has extensive people management experience to address all these scenarios. Unfortunately, the answer is neither or somewhere in between or ignored and pushed under the carpet. As the numbers are in percentage terms so low, it will not affect the attrition numbers. Hence, organizations ignore it. Here is a study by McKinsey on the Software Product Management function and its talent management. 

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-product-management-talent-dilemma

I leave people to review the study for themselves but let me talk about how much organizations understand product managers working with them.


PM Process: The People

Founding Director

If you are associated with the software industry, you must have experienced a cult following the agile process framework. So much so, organizations ramped up product management hiring and started designating them as product owners for various product development groups. I will not delve into the process in detail but would rather talk about the rationale of the agile framework and what does it achieve. Two decades back, agile programming was not quite popular. There were experimental pair programming or extreme programming efforts by some pioneers yet, that was not mainstream and looked down upon by some naysayers. About a decade and a half back, it suddenly started to see the light and pretty much became mainstream a decade ago. Excellent tracking tools for scrum and extreme programming were available. These gave the larger organizations the confidence to adopt the methodologies.

PM Process: Agile Framework

Compliance is an act of adherence to rules, regulations, environments, or even laws. When is product management so much involved in meeting compliance needs? Is it not the purview of the legal or engineering departments in the organization that drive the compliance needs? I guess most of you must be wondering the same. However, I have experienced compliance is a need that better be analyzed by product managers ahead of time before other parts of the organization invest any energy on it. In some businesses, compliance is the prime driver to the business and cannot be discounted. So your fundamental need to be in the market is decided by your ability to meet the compliance requirements.

PM Process: Compliance

Most organizations are innovative. They try to do things differently from their competition. Have something in them that is core to their DNA and different from others in the same business. But, how you express that to the world. A few years back, I read marketing collateral of two leading giants of the domain; call them A and B. A was relatively new in business and claimed B is old and not nimble as they were and A was more innovative. B had put up a marketing campaign around the same time showing a portfolio of patents they carried to showdown A in terms of their innovation capabilities. Who was telling the truth? Why is it so important for such high-profile organizations to claim one-upmanship on patent numbers?

PM Process: IPR

A few months back a student from a premium institute in India was put under the scanner of laws as he violated the laws of the Indian Railways in providing railway ticket booking services. Similarly, a much-awaited court case between Oracle and Google was reviewed by the US Supreme Court. What are the similarities in these cases? At a surface level, there is very little actually, but if you delve deeper they are kind of similar. Let’s take the first case, many sites provide railway booking services in coordination with IRCTC why was this student singled out. Similarly, many organizations build collaborative solutions but why should Google and Oracle get into a legal wrangle?

PM Process: Contracts

Many product managers focus on finding the best interface for easier user engagement with the product. While some insist on using design tools, mock-up tools, prototyping interactions, some insist such must be left to the UX designers to provide the best possible proposals. I will like to debate if we actually captured the requirement at the right level. A lot of that is to do with how you described your problem in the first place. If you are excited about writing user stories right, read on and let me know what you feel.

PM Process: User Interface

The marketing mix is composed of product, price, promotion, and place (Philip Kotler). While the product is clearly a Product Management function, most PMs get tired of discussing pricing. And more so discussing discounting, bundling, unbundling, creating suites, etc, special pricing options — looks familiar? No PM is immune to such demands in any organization. Many call these pricing strategies, for some they are outright winning formulas. Practically, there are only three components when deciding to price. They are absolutely driven by 3 principles stated in the book Business Market Management, by Anderson, Narus, Narayandas, and Seshadri. Lucky to be taught the principles by Prof Seshadri himself a decade and a half back. Why talk about such basic concepts in today’s market? Because the fundamentals are so significant that even today in B2B marketing they are the easiest benchmarks to compare against. Use them, you will not be disappointed.

PM Process: Pricing

To every organization or service provider, the claim is the customer comes first. But, I am writing the customer part in the Product Management process in the end. One primary reason is to ensure, your house is in order before you invite your guests. Some of you may agree, and some disagree. Feel free to provide your opinions. After all, discussions only build a better understanding of systems and processes.

PM Process: The Customer

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.

The above is the perfect description of the product called The One Ring of the JRR Tolkien fame. It is an almost perfect definition of a product; it describes the exact boundary and limitations of the product, yet not a product vision. There is no aspiration, no process to reach the goal, and no mention of competition.

PM Process: Product Vision

Whenever there is a discussion on strategy, there is always confusion; are we discussing organization strategy or competitive advantages? Invariably there is a lack of clarity. Organizations are perpetual entities; they will remain in existence for generations to come. While products have a limited life cycle, there is inception, growth, and eventual death. Such misunderstandings lead to discussions on strategy, delving into too much implementation or tactical details. I feel a qualitative outline is always well understood and appreciated over a detailed analysis paralysis for an organization. A larger organization will have full-time corporate strategy groups or strategic consultants addressing detail analytic needs. In such cases, a product manager may have to defend her product-related decisions or provide alternate viewpoints to the strategic decision-makers. Understanding some of the strategic management tools and their qualitative nuances is helpful for product managers. You may not need detailed quantitative assessments as a strategic consultant may use.

PM Process: Strategy

A few months back, when I started writing these articles on product management, some of you tried to find out what made me write those articles. Someone asked me if the concepts of product management are domain-specific. Or they are learnings that one can apply to other domains. Is the Product Management discipline a new paradigm, which is different from traditional management principles? While trying to mull over some of these thoughts, I felt at least the PM literature I have read or the activities I have exposure to in my 16 years of PM experience: can be broadly classified into ten broad processes. Aggregated, I will like to call them The Practice of Product Management. The practice is not entirely different. It’s centered around the Industry Analysis framework by Michael Porter. Though proposed in the 80s, the framework remains one of the most promising, researched, and often challenged frameworks. A generation of managers and MBA graduates grew up with it. The strategy consultants still vouch for it and use the tools as part of their analysis. Secondly, I intend to bring PM discipline within the purview of other management processes and have a reasonable understanding for all the managers to understand what PMs are supposed to do.

The Practice of Product Management

How Technical is Your Conversation?

Should Product Managers be Technical?

AI / Machine Learning

Data

Security

System

Crypto

Founder

Engineering

Cloud Services

Computer Software

Managing Expectations

Product

Remote

Conflict Solving

Delegate

Micromanagement

Convincing

Roadmap

Hiring

Coaching / Training / Mentorship

Fairness

Retention

Ethics

Strategy

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Changing Company

Prioritization

Agile / Scrum

B2B Expertise

• Product management leader experienced in early conceptualization to sunset of enterprise products with revenues up to 100 million USD.
• Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial mindset in bringing in innovation
• Hands-on technology enthusiast with 8 software patents and an active open source contributor.
• Strong academic credential in Tech, Management and Law from IITs, IIMB and NLSIU
• Authored Hands-On Julia Programming, released in Oct. 2021 (https://in.bpbonline.com/products/hands-on-julia-programming)

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