I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
I’ve gained a bit of experience in building up teams for Product development and noticed that the equivalent jobs don’t normally exist in a Services based model.
As we don’t have a lot of Product development experience in New Zealand we need to think about where the people will come from to fill these new roles. Conversely that means that new opportunities open up for people with good Service model experience.
I put this diagram together to make the point …
This model highlights that Business Analysis skills are very useful in the Product development world. BA’s have a lot of the skills required for Product Management, mapping Sales Operations and even pre-sales. For up and coming technology people developing those BA skills gives you a great foundation to take your career in many directions.
Product Management could be an exciting move for BA’s and Project Managers that want to get more involved in the commercial side of business.
What’s also cool about Product development is you bring in a lot of non technical people. Customer care, marketing, sales, subject matter experts, trainers, designers, writers - even the odd accountant - to name a few. It is really stimulating to have those broader skills in the team.
blog
I think Product Management is one of those great roles for people who can easily relate to both the technical and business side of the operations. It seems to give you the opportunity to shape the direction and future of a product/service. Exciting indeed! Something I would love to do at some point.
Glen
Let me get this straight. Are you saying there is no ‘Architect’ role in a Product team?
While I agree you need things like Interaction Design, Product Management and Development Management, I can’t believe you don’t need an architect.
Far from it in fact I think it is probably more important.
The Interaction Designer role is all about Form. The Architect is all about function. While I think we all agree you can’t get noticed without good form, we should also agree you won’t stay noticed if your product doesn’t have a good foundation for delivering function, and more importantly changes in function.
PS the reason I bring this up is I see myself as an Architect/Product Manager and according to you there is no place for me!
No I’m not saying there is no Architect. Was just speaking generally.
We have a nice desk waiting for you anytime you like.
I think there Rod’s saying that your skills map across a lot of areas.
I’d probably generalize Interaction Design into “User experience”, which Interaction Design is part of, but also feeds into the product as a whole (support, manuals, usability testing, interaction design, graphic design, branding, etc)
You don’t have to have architects to have architecture, odd as that may sound. What you do need is a highly collaborative team over all the areas Rods outlined with the right skills, then things like architecture, user experience, product concept, will come together a lot easier. The appropriate people with the appropriate skills will then contribute at the right time. So, you don’t need a labeled architect, but you do need someone who understands architecture. But that same person might also be involved with many different things within the team as Rod points out.
Also for a great blog on being a “product manager”, this blog is cool ( http://www.goodproductmanager.com/ )
I don’t get why you say we don’t have a lot of product development experience here? It seems to me that most of the large technology companies are product based. For sure, there’s a lot of IT places doing service based software, but there’s still a fair amount of people creating products. It’d be interesting to see some stats on this.
If a Product Manager does his job right .. everyone in the company hates his guts. He will push Dev for more features and faster, will tell Sales that they can’t have the deal of the week feature and support tells him that he needs to fix quality. Having been in the role for a while now a Product Manager needs to wear tons of different hats and needs to be very political. He relies heavily upon a group of people to work as a team .. this involves representatives from each department that he touches; Sales, Support, Dev and QC.
I reckon that in a smallish team like most startups people need to be multicapable - both across the traditional technical boundaries (like having an architect who can still code) and being technical/business literate. (That cuts both ways - sales and business people need to understand the technology and not be scared of it!)
A service background is actually quite good for that because technical people are intrinsically customer facing. In my old firm (London based) we reckoned the ideal profile for a techie was to have been working on a RAD team in an investment bank - people who worked with traders on a daily basis were unlikely to be fazed by anything.
I get the impression, however, that too many Kiwi programmers are actively seeking a job with minimal human contact?
Great diagram. You did a nice job of simplifying the complexities of shifting roles. If I had drawn the same thing, it would have been a big mess of lines, all with an arrow from every box to another.
To add to Keith’s comment, and not just because he said my blog was “great” and “cool” (though that does help), the area of User Experience is a great springboard into product management, especially in the new world of web-based products. Prior to being a product manager, I was a user-centered designer / usability specialist / information architect, and the broad range of experiences I had has served me well. Most importantly, UX stresses the importance of designing products with the customer/market in mind, which is the most important thing for product managers to focus on.
Agree 100% that Business Analysts are very useful in the product development world. I didn’t realize the value of a BA until I worked with a very good one — now the role is an essential part of any project I work on, and they can do so much to help in so many ways.
I do have to take issue a bit with Martin’s comment: “If a Product Manager does his job right .. everyone in the company hates his guts.” Yes, PMs may seem to be at odds with all the stakeholders, but I think it’s possible to be respected and successful at the same time. As Martin mentions, PMs have to wear many different hats and rely on others over whom they may have no actual authority — I can’t imagine doing that in a situation where everyone hates you. (I wrote more about this at http://www.goodproductmanager.com/2007/01/10/understanding-leadership-and-authority/)
Yes, there are times when you may have to play “bad cop,” but I would think that a PM whom everyone hates (or, for that matter, anyone within a company whom everyone hates) would not be with the company for too long.
I think I should have put the ‘hates’ between brackets. It is definately a very challenging role where as trying to retain a fine balance is probably very tricky.
Interesting - we are just re-engineering our product management skills here. A couple of things that i would add / agree with..
1. Product Managers are almost like mini-CEO’s. They need leadership skills, the ability to corral and influence lots of people and a really strong fact base. The last point cannot be under-estimated. The best product managers that I have worked with know what their cost base is, what margin their products create and what their customers like/dislike. In 13 years in the industry I have not come across any formally trained product managers in NZ in the technology industry - the top performers have primarily come from offshore and have a background in managing consumer electronics where these skills are crucial for survival. I have started looking at other FMCG organisations for these types of skills.
2. In the absence of a design function, the product manager must be responsible for the end to end customer experience of using their product. Customer Experience design skills are becoming more readily available here in NZ and there are some great little companies cropping up which can get Product Managers up to speed with tools and techniques for designing these experiences - we’ve just spent 2 months drawing customer experience flows for new products which we can prove will save us heaps of $ in calls to call centres as well as delivering a kick-ass expereince for the customer
3. If you are going to have a product centric organisation in a FMCG world it must be architected (not sure you need to have a full time architect though). This allows you to knit together product elements in different combinations - gives you long term competitiveness and agility. Not doing this means that your life as a Product Manager will be a long trip through hell as you try and respond to the market and are continually told that will take 12 months and $5million to achieve
I’ve worked for numerous service-based IT companies for over 10years and in every case they’ve had at least one UI and/or UX designer - why is this essential role missing from your diagram?
OK. Not in my experience. But I’m not going to argue.
I think this diagram is great for people like me who are constantly confused about the role we play whether we are in a service-based or product company.
In my experience in service-based companies, BAs demonstrate skills and methods in analysing flows and processes that are pretty detailed and essential to good interaction design. Would you say that interaction designers need to brush up on their business analysis skills?
You can’t have form without function and function does not sell without form. It seems to me we just need more people who can see the big picture and can then cut it up again and communicate how the pieces fit together.
Yes. Drilling into that point, Interaction Design is not just about form. Great Interaction Designers will be great Business Analysts as well
Very interesting post, my thoughts on services vs products here:
http://www.kiwibohemian.com/2007/02/11/Product+Versus+Services+Work.aspx
From a service person who has consulted to product companies :)
There is absolutely no reason why service businesses should not embrace the product management discipline as well. Services are products too, with function, form, fulfilment, promotion and value propositions.
Unfortunately, too many service businesses are really just labour or equipment hire businesses, and ignore the opportunities for differentiation and adding value. Even these could do with better product/service management, rather than contininuing in the death spiral of hourly rates with the added (often unpaid) cost/risk of implied service warranties because they are a branded business.