Product Management Challenges - I

Coming in early , working relentlessly until late nights , day after day , week after week but still not satisfied and happy ; packed days with back-to-back meetings , burst of emails piling up , the changing customer dynamics, the race to catch up with emerging trends & technologies and the various stakeholders’ pressure for that one magic product expected out of your team – Welcome to the world of Product Management !

The thrill of getting a successful product being used by the whole world comes with its own set of challenges to be faced by the product managers.  This article discusses a few of these challenges:

Lack of Role Clarity

Great software products come from the collaboration of product management, product design, engineering, and marketing team. One important aspect to the organizational design is that these teams should be equals but invariably we see one getting buried within another. The organisations have a tendency to mix/overlap the Product Management with the Product Marketing roles and responsibilities. Hence , many times we might see Product Managers striving to create their own niche space and acceptance within the organization, proving subconsciously that yes they are required and needed. My short product management stint made me notice a sort of humorous role confusion : The business team thinking that the product management guys are from the engineering side while the engineering team having a notion that they are from the business side ! So the role clarity itself becomes a challenge.

In a nutshell , we can have a very high level distinction:

Product Management	Product Marketing
Responsible for defining – in detail – the product that the engineering team will build.	Responsible for telling the world about this product
Defines Product Requirements	Defines Marketing Requirements
Activities include Product discovery, idea generation , ensuring that the product is useful, usable and feasible,  optimizing the end-user experience.	Activities involve : Pricing, Positioning and messaging, Promotions, Launching, Online marketing , Customer Acquisition Strategies.
Both should collaborate effectively for the product to succeed

Stakeholder Management , Buy-ins , trade-offs and Consensus Tendency

One of the biggest challenges is convincing others like the top management about any innovation's utility. Selling the product idea and concept to the internal customers who will fund the project for product development is not an easy nut to crack. Lack of required upfront support and funding increases the time-to-market.

A very effective way the product discovery team can handle this scenario is by creating a prototype which can be shown to the stakeholders. The nature of the discussion will be more productive when stakeholders can see a clickable prototype versus something just talked about in air or in some form of paper/powerpoint specification.

Within the organization , Product Managers need to aliase/interact with many parties : product marketeers , project managers, interaction designers, visual designers, usability engineers, prototypers, engineers, architects, QAs , cross-functional teams, etc. The decisions are being taken in concensus and become more of a group activity. The product objective shufts from coming up with something great, to coming up with something that keeps everyone happy and doesn’t get you fired which actually negatively impacts the product innovation. Seth Godin said: “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.” While consensus is something nice to have, we basically need more of collaboration wherein the teams can work together closely and provide a fusion of customer value/functionality, usability, and technology.

High Expectations

Yes, the customers would expect your product to solve all of their problems and your CEO would want to roll out the new release at a breathnecking speed. And if you are an engineer plus MBA breed , don’t get surprised if you are being considered superhuman. The best way to tackle is to communicate a very realistic picture to your internal and external customers. If the expected deadline is too tight , break the work to be done in chunks and modules ,  identify the actual achievable roadmap and convey the same assertively. Using numbers, some sort of data crunching to prove your point helps invariably.

Product’s Success Metric

There is a lack on clarity on how exactly a Product Manager’s performance can be articulated except the fact that it naturally should be linked to the Product’s Success. But again , there is no best way to measure a product’s success. Should it be through the revenue generated? Or Profit? Or the number of end-users? All of these parameters can be useful but they don’t really provide the exact picture.

One simple business metric coming up recently (and adopted by the likes of Apple, eBay and Amazon ) is called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The customers are asked how likely they would recommend the  product, on a scale of 0 to 10. Those rating 9 or 10 are called “promoters” (they’re out there telling others to adopt the product); those rating 7 or 8 are called lukewarm or neutral; and those giving 0-6 are called the “detractors,” which are not likely to recommend the product to others, and may even be actively warning against the product.

NPS = The percentage of promoters - The percentage of detractors 

Balance between Domain and Technological Expertise

Product Management requires skills like assessing opportunities, defining product principles, product discovery, and prototype testing. The whole idea is to discover a product-market fit and this requires a deep understanding of both the market needs and the technology’s capabilities. The challenge is how to keep pace with the domain/market trends and rapidly changing technlogies when the job requires your day-in and day-out effort. This is very critical while you interact with various teams and plan for product/feature feasibility. Even the product lifecycle is also getting shorter putting on you those extra worries to speed up in order to monetarily benefit from the existing product as fast as possible.