If you want to be a bad product manager, only worry about managing your product. You’re a “product manager,” after all, so that should be your single focus. Forget the other products produced by your company and the other products that customers might use. Don’t pay attention to any customers needs that don’t directly relate to your product. Just concentrate on managing your product and figuring out what new features you need to add to it. If you want to be a good product manager, investigate problems that exist outside your product. Looking beyond only your product and not having a singular focus simply “managing” your product can be beneficial in several ways: You will find ways to improve your product. Very few products exist on their own. Your product is most likely just one small piece of a myriad of products a customer will interact with in a given day. Products exist in an ecosystem which includes other products created by your company and other companies. A myopic view of the customer needs and usage behavior ignores these other aspects of customers’ lives and activities. These other products could seriously influence how your product is perceived and used, and…

If you want to be a bad product manager, come up with lots of excuses for not visiting customers. You are busy at the office — there are too many meetings and projects and can’t miss any of them. Your customers are located far away and travel budgets are tight. Your customers are too busy to talk to you. You don’t have any customers yet. Your sales staff doesn’t want you visiting customers. Sure, it would be nice to visit customers, but with all these impediments, it’s just not worth the effort. And besides, visiting customers isn’t that important anyways, right? If you want to be a good product manager, find ways around all of the excuses for not visiting customers. There is nothing more valuable that a product manager can do than to spend time understanding a customer’s needs and problems. One hour with a customer will provide more benefit to your product than dozens of hours of meetings at the office. There will always be reasons not to visit customers, though a good product manager will instead remember the myriad of benefits which come from customer visits. Here are some common roadblocks and how to address them: “But…

If you want to be a bad product manager, rely solely on quantitative research. Business is about numbers, after all, and there’s a reason you had to learn statistics in school. If you can’t prove something to a level of statistical significance, it must not be reliable. You would never make a decision about a product that’s used by millions of people by just getting input from a few dozen. What people say is not nearly as important as how many people say it. If you want to be a good product manager, utilize both quantitative and qualitative research for decision making. Numbers are good, though on their own they can not tell the whole story. Quantitative research is especially useful in product development as a way of confirming findings through qualitative research. For example, you may conduct customer visits or ethnographic research and uncover some unmet needs. You may want to conduct a survey of a wider group of customers to confirm your findings and get more input on specific aspects, such as how important this need is and the cost to the customer of not being able to currently solve this problem. Many inexperienced product managers have little…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure to only do “cool” and “viral” marketing to get your message out. You need those “whiz-bang” promotional ideas that will get people’s attention. Flashy stunts, guerrilla marketing, and social campaigns are the only way to get your word out. Print advertising, direct mail, trade shows — those “old media” techniques are just not appropriate in today’s world and any product marketing manager with any self-respect will avoid them at all costs. If you want to be a good product manager, put your efforts into promotional campaigns that will impact your key marketing metrics. Though there are plenty of ways to draw attention to your product, good product managers should instead focus on defining the key performance indicators for marketing initiatives and working with the product marketing manager to choose the most appropriate ways to meet those goals. In some cases, that may mean using newer and “innovative” promotional methods; in others, that may mean that more traditional approaches will be best. Just like other areas within product management, good product managers focus on “what” the marketing campaign needs to accomplish, not “how” to accomplish it. (See Take responsibility for…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t ever remove features. Why would you take something out of your product? More features just make the product better, so taking away features would obviously make the product worse. Sure, not everyone will use every feature, but that’s why you have so many of them. What if you take away something that even just a small portion of your customers use and you alienate them? Customers always ask for more features — not less — so in the end, the product with the most features win. If you want to be a good product manager, be smart about removing features. Having a lot of features will not make your product great. Great products come from having the right features to solve customer problems, and having those features designed in the right way. Removing features can and should be done to many products. Good product managers confront this difficult aspect of the job, even though it can be challenging and uncomfortable. Similarly, good product managers do not take this responsibility lightly and only remove features once they understand the implications of any changes to the product and the customer. The first…

If you want to be a bad product manager, distance yourself from your sales force. Your job is to get the product defined and built, after all, not to sell it. The company has levels of sales management focused on improving sales, so they don’t need you involved. If the product isn’t selling as much as it should, that’s a problem with the sales people, not with the product. Your success as a product manager is only defined on how good the product is, not how well it’s doing in the market. If you want to be a good product manager, engage your sales force. If you manage a product which is sold by direct sales representatives, good relationships with the sales organization is important to the success of your product. Most sales groups sell more than one product, so ensuring that your product has enough “mindshare” among the salespeople for them to keep selling it is key. There are a few key ways to engage your sales force: Develop good relationships with salespeople and sales management: At a most basic level, you need to get to know your sales force. A product manager should be developing good relationships with…

If you want to be a bad product manager, plan for far advance into the future. Your product will of course be a success, so you need to have every possible detail figured out now to ensure it will continue to be a success for years to come. It’s just as important to plan for an issue that will likely come up tomorrow as it is to plan for an issue that could possibly come up a few years from now. If things go really well — or really poorly — you want to be prepared “just in case,” no matter how unlikely that may be. If you want to be a good product manager, plan for now and the likely future. Understanding the long-term implications of decisions is important, though possibilities well into the future should not overshadow more pressing short-term decisions. Too often, good ideas are rejected because they will not hold true “if” lots of things happen. For example, a good design for a database holding 10,000 records may be overruled because it will not scale to 1 million records — despite the fact that only one in a million potential customers would ever have that many…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure you stay within your comfort zone. There are many different responsibilities in product management, and some of them might not be things in which you are experienced or even competent. Stay away from doing anything that will make you look bad or make you feel uncomfortable. There are plenty of activities you can do within your comfort zone, and either ignore or get someone else to do the things that make you sweat. If you want to be a good product manager, be comfortable being uncomfortable. Product management is tough work. Some aspects of it are fantastic, and some aspects of it may be dreadful. Just because you may not like one part of the job does not mean you can avoid it. No matter how experienced or skilled you may be, there are some parts of the job you will like better and be better at than others. A good product manager can not avoid the less favored parts of the job just because they are challenging or painful to address. What might make a product manager uncomfortable? There are some things that probably most would agree are…

If you want to be a bad product manager, do everything yourself. You’re the product manager, after all, so you should be the final authority on everything related to the product. You should be the one answering questions from salespeople, drafting press releases for marketing, defining all of the processes for suppliers, and poring over every detail with engineering. Sure it takes a lot of your time, but that’s what a product manager should be spending time on. What other more important things are there to do? If you want to be a good product manager, delegate tactical activities to allow you to spend time on the strategic aspects of the job. Effective product managers pass on product knowledge and responsibility for tactical decision-making as much as possible to others on the product development team. By leveraging the rest of the team, the product manager can focus on the strategic role of product management. It is difficult for many product managers — especially new product managers — to effectively balance the strategic and tactical priorities of product management. With so many competing priorities, the minutia and day-to-day tends to take over. To extend a common metaphor, it’s not just that…

If you want to be a bad product manager, gather requirements. How else will you know about what to put in to the product if you don’t ask others? Interview current customers, ask them what their requirements are, and make sure to capture them. That’s what being “customer-focused” is all about, after all — responding to any customer request. Make sure to gather requirements from internal stakeholders too. Get a list of features from customer support, marketing, sales, and senior executives. If you just gather all of the requirements from all of the right people, you’re bound to have a successful product — right? If you want to be a good product manager, understand unmet needs and use that insight to drive requirements. A product manager who just “gathers requirements” is doing nothing more than taking orders or documenting requests. Good product managers add value to their product by understanding the problems and needs behind requests. Requirements gathering is an activity often thought to be the cornerstone of any project. The mentality comes from traditional information technology projects, where “the Customer” who was funding the project appeared to know exactly what was needed, and an “analyst” would document the requirements….

If you want to be a bad product manager, try to deliver as many features as possible. The more features you have, the more likely you are to have the things that any individual customer cares about. Customers expect products to keep getting better, and the way a product keeps getting better is by adding more features. Plus, adding a whole bunch of smaller features will be just as good — if not better — than adding that one big important enhancement. More is always better, right? If you want to be a good product manager, try to deliver the fewest features which will provide the most value. Customers buy products because of the needs that the product fulfills and the problems the product solves. Features in and of themselves are useless — they exist to fill a need. Customers will find product features valuable only if those features satisfy a need and if the act of filling that need is something which is valuable to the customer. Unfortunately, product managers often approach this problem the wrong way. They will create a long list of desired features and then get estimates from engineering on how much effort each requires. The…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t bother measuring the results of product development work. Just put new features in there and don’t see whether they make a difference. If a customer asked for it, it must be worth doing. If people really don’t like it or if it’s hurting the product, you’ll probably hear about it pretty quickly. Plus, the market and competition is changing so quickly that you don’t have time to think about measuring the impact of new features after they are implemented. Once the work is done, you need to focus all your attention on the next set of features to add. If you want to be a good product manager, measure the impact of the product changes you implement. Product managers need to be constantly evaluating the changes being made to a product and measuring whether they were successful. Too often, product managers implement new features, functionality, or make other changes to a product without a true understanding of why these changes are being made. The product manager may think he or she has a logical reason for requesting the change — a specific customer asked for the feature, an engineer suggested…

If you want to be a bad product manager, solve a problem as soon as it becomes apparent. Why let something linger when you can take care of it? A product manager needs to be seen as someone who will “do” things, not just “think” about them. When a problem comes along, you must fix it as soon as possible. Sure, you may spend a lot of your time in this way, and it may distract you from other things, though this is really the best use of your time, isn’t it? If you want to be a good product manager, do not immediately solve every problem which presents itself. It is often tempting to fix an issue as soon as it appears, though there are many good reasons to not rush to address problems: If you fix the problem right away, you may not be addressing the underlying issue that caused the problem in the first place. In fact, in most cases, there is a root cause which is likely not visible on first glance. This applies to many areas in product management, most notably in addressing requests from customers. This has been discussed here in several different posts,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, jump into partnerships without considering all of your options. Maybe your customers are clamoring for a certain feature and a partner comes to you telling you they can help solve that need quickly. Sure, there may be other vendors who can solve it too, but then you would have to go out and spend time finding and evaluating other vendors. That would take too much time and you’re better off just going with whomever was first to your door. Or, what if there’s a company with cool technology that seems really impressive — you probably would want that in your product, wouldn’t you? True, you’re not sure how many customers really need it, but it would look great in a demo, and plus you’re afraid that if you pass them up, they’ll just go to one of your competitors. If you want to be a good product manager, properly analyze and choose the right partners and strategic alliances. Product managers put so much thought into many important areas of their product, yet often the decision about whether a product or an aspect of it should be built, bought, or developed using…

If you want to be a bad product manager, market the technical superiority of your product. Customers want innovative products, and since you are using the latest technology innovations in your product, you are bound to succeed. This shows you are progressive and ahead of the curve, so there is no danger of your customers being left behind with obsolete technology. People may not realize how the technology makes your solution is better than your competitors, but that’s just because the marketing people don’t understand it and can’t explain it well enough. If you want to be a good product manager, realize that technical superiority only matters if it provides value to your customers. Whether your solution is “better” than the status quo or the competition is a judgment made by the market, not by your engineers. Technological innovation is worthwhile when it can be translated into benefits for the customer. New technologies always have benefits, and they almost always have side effects as well. Technologists often only focus on the benefits of the technology, and either do not consider or do not understand the importance of the consequences. For example: A company may have a new technology that preserves…

If you want to be a bad product manager, dogmatically follow product management rules. Learn a product management framework and abide by it it no matter what. Product managers need to “stick to their guns” and never give in. Thought leaders, authors, and consultants are experts and you should follow their advice without question. If you want to be a good product manager, adapt your practices to the organization and situation. Product management is not (yet) an advanced science. Instead of laws and rules, we have guidelines and experiences to guide us. While it is in the best interest of a product manager to identify and follow best practices whenever possible, these are not absolute rules. What works effectively in one organization may not work for another, and a good product manager needs to identify what will make him or her most effective and change tactics accordingly. Marty Cagan argues that the “product management model” which may work best in a company depends on several factors, including the type of product, the product development process, the role of product management, the size of the organization, and the company culture. Beyond that, it is important to realize that these elements are…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that lack of complaints means your product is successful. There are lots of customers using your product, so when you add a new feature or make a change and don’t hear complaints, that must mean that everything is working fine. If something was really unusable or broken or didn’t meet your customers’ needs, they would let you know. It’s much easier to just make a change or add something to the product and wait to hear feedback than to do a whole bunch of research and testing first — that’s just a waste of time, right? If you want to be a good product manager, proactively seek out feedback rather than wait for complaints. Lack of complaints does not mean that you have a fantastic product — it just means that you are not getting any complaints. Waiting for customers to complain is problematic for several reasons: Not all customers complain. Think about all of the products you use on a daily basis, and the problems you encounter with all of them. There may be a confusing button on your cell phone, a strange error message on your online banking…

If you want to be a bad product manager, only worry about what gets added to your product, not how customers will take advantage of it. There may be some features that you don’t want everyone to see, or that may require some setup. Just put them in the product but don’t worry too much about how they’ll get set up — that’s for some other group within your organization to care about. Your job as a product manager is just to get the feature in the product, not to figure out all the details of how customers will enable the feature. Sure, it might be possible to make the process smoother, and customers may have to jump through some hoops, but if they really want it they won’t mind taking the extra effort. If you want to be a good product manager, consider all aspects related to any add-on features. A product manager is not only responsible for identifying what needs there are in the market. The product manager must also figure out how those needs should be filled by new or existing products. There are many valid reasons to include something as an add-on to an existing product,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make your product everything for everyone. Who wouldn’t want an “all-in-one” solution? Since different types of customers may have different priorities, rather than trying to decide which customers and which priorities are most important, just meet them all. Sure, there might be a lot of stuff in your product, but that just means that customers will think that it does everything great. If you want to be a good product manager, make your product solve a specific problem for a specific type of customer. It may sound appealing to make your product attempt to solve every problem for every type of customer, though in most cases, trying to make it everything for everyone usually results in a product that does nothing for no one. For complex technology products, many options provided are rarely — if ever — used. Additional complexity added to attempt to appeal to different types of users usually just makes the product more difficult to use for those core consumers. Also, when the product does not focus on solving a specific problem for a specific user, it becomes difficult to communicate the benefits to the market. Either the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that once is enough to communicate anything important. If people attend a meeting or read their email, they should be paying attention to what is communicated and understand what it means to them. Why would you need to say anything more than once? If people hear it or read it and still don’t know, it’s their own fault for not paying enough attention. If you want to be a good product manager, reinforce your communication though multiple avenues. Sure, it would be nice if you would only have to mention something once and have everyone in your organization understand, accept, and be able to re-communicate it. Unfortunately, that just is not possible. As John Kotter writes in the classic Leading Change: The most carefully crafted messages rarely sink deeply into the recipient’s consciousness after only one pronouncement. Our minds are too cluttered, and any communication has to fight hundreds of other ideas for attention. In addition, a single airing won’t address all the questions we have. As a result, effective information transferal almost always relies on repetition. Inconsistent and infrequent communication leads to confusion and frustration. Product managers need to…

If you want to be a bad product manager, rush an undifferentiated product to market in order to grab market share. Sure, a competitor may have beat you to the market, but now that they are out there creating demand for an innovative offering, you don’t have time to waste. Your version may not be terribly unique and it may be a bit less than what the competition offers. Still, there may be customers who don’t like what the competitor has so you’ll get their business, or you can skim on advertising and sell yours a bit cheaper to create more demand. Either way, it should be pretty easy to get a successful product out of it, right? If you want to be a good product manager, look to differentiate your product and avoid being a “me too.” Speed to market is certainly important, though it is almost always better to be later to the market with a better product than slightly quicker with something that does not stand out. Being first is good, though no guarantee. (Amazon.com was not the first online bookseller; the iPod was not the first portable MP3 player; Google was not the first search engine;…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make your decision about whether to buy, build, or partner on a product one in the same with your decision about whether to create the product at all. Maybe the market isn’t particularly attractive, but you can get into it pretty easily by partnering with a company. Or maybe you have a good idea for a product and you think it will be to difficult to build it, so the idea should get “shelved.” After all, you have to figure out how the product will get created at some point, so you might as well figure that out before you decide to go forward with it at all. If you want to be a good product manager, do not let your buy vs. build vs. partner decision unduly influence your go / no-go decision. Ultimately, the decision about whether to launch a product is a serious one, and the build / buy / partner decision is just one that needs to be taken into consideration. Unfortunately, sometimes good product ideas can get stopped in their tracks because of a feeling that it will be too hard to build or partner for…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t worry as much about defining the problem as quickly finding the solution. Problems are usually very obvious and clear, and any time you spend dwelling on it is wasted time that could be spent on solving it. The sooner you start solving the problem, the soon you’ll have it figured out. How hard is it to define a problem, anyway? If you want to be a good product manager, get a good understanding of the problem before you try and solve it. Product managers and many others unfortunately assume the problem is evident and jump right to solving it. However, ill-defined problems lead to ill-defined solutions. Albert Einstein purportedly said that, given one hour to save the world, he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution. One of the most important aspects of defining the problem is to “size” the problem properly. If you define the problem too narrowly, your possible solutions may be very limited and uncreative. If you define the problem too broadly, your solutions may be out of scope and irrelevant to the business context. For example, pretend you are a…

If you want to be a bad product manager, start developing a product and release it as soon as possible. If you’ve got a good idea for a product, why wait? You need to get it defined, get it developed as quickly as you can, and then release it right away, without any delay. Everyone knows that the first product to market usually wins, and the sooner it’s released, the quicker you’ll be profitable. If you want to be a good product manager, consider your market window as part of your product strategy. Often companies come up with what they believe to be a fantastic idea for a new product and there is a tremendous push to release it as soon as possible. There are usually two main reasons for this push: The hope that the sooner the product is in the market, the sooner it will recoup its costs. The belief that a competitor may also be trying to get a similar product to market, and you would like to have first-mover advantage. To address these sometimes mistaken beliefs: While a product obviously can not start recouping its costs until it is available for sale, simply releasing a product…

If you want to be a bad product manager, copy everything that Apple does. Everyone knows that Apple has some of the best products in the world, so you’d be a fool not to copy what they do. If you want to create a product as successful as the iPhone or the iPod, then just follow their lead. If you want to be a good product manager, learn from the mistakes of Apple, including those related to the iPhone 3G S. Apple has produced some legendary products which have been wildly and there are many aspects of their product development process which product managers would be wise to understand and emulate. However, they are not perfect, as evidenced by less-than-stellar ideas like the Mac Mini and Apple TV, and slip-ups around launches of products like MobileMe. Their recently announced iPhone 3G S provides a few examples of why not to blindly follow Apple, and how to learn from their mistakes: Product naming: The name for the original iPhone made sense — a phone + iPod, from Apple = iPhone. The iPhone 3G was a good extension; while 3G is more of a technical term, it is common enough parlance for…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just focus on prioritizing features. That’s what product managers do, after all — just collect features from customers and decide which are the most important ones to add to the product. Plus, now with all these great tools that let you collect features directly online and have customers vote on them, it’s even easier since your customers are doing all of your work for you! If you want to be a good product manager, realize that your job is much more than prioritizing features. Sure, a product manager needs to understand what features need to be added to a product to meet customer needs, though just focusing on collecting and prioritizing features is an extremely narrow view of product management. Product managers need to have a much broader view, seeing and understanding everything from the underlying customer needs to the business model to the product roadmap to the go-to-market strategy. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for product managers to fall in to feature-focused development mode, especially for online products and those developed using Agile methods. Why does this happen? A few possible reasons: It is perceived as a relatively “safe”…

If you want to be a bad product manager, release all of your features at once. If you have some cool functionality, why would you wait to show it to the world? You need to get as much out as you can right away — if users don’t see everything that you have to offer the first time they use the product, there’s a chance you might lose them. Sure, there may be some features that they don’t care about, but customers will gladly sift through extra functionality to find the few pieces which might be really worthwhile. If you want to be a good product manager, save some features for later. It’s important to include enough functionality when a product is first released, though there are legitimate reasons to delay the addition of some non-essential features for future releases, including: Customers have difficulty processing too many features at once. With new products, it is too easy to get into “feature overload” and make it hard for users to focus on the most important functionality. Extra features may divert attention from the truly differentiating elements of the product, so much so that some customers may get distracted by the less…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume your product is the center of your customers’ world. After all, you’ve created the most amazing product ever, so who wouldn’t want to use it all day? Sure, you’re spending 40+ hours a week thinking about your product, though you’re sure that customers and users are just as enthralled by it. If you want to be a good product manager, realize that your product is likely one of a multitude which your customers use in the course of a day. Only in very unique cases is a product truly the center of someone’s universe.  Product development teams need to recognize that they are thinking about their product much more than anyone else outside their organization, and make decisions about design and communication accordingly. Overestimating the importance and focus your customers place on your product can have negative implications — here are a few examples: You come up with a fancy new user interface, which you think is “better” than anything else out there, though it’s so different than the other programs your customers interact with that they can’t figure out how to use it. You add features that users would…

If you want to be a bad product manager, build the “best” product and assume that the customers will come. That’s all that matters to customers, right? Sure, it might seem like a bit of a hassle at first to switch over, but once people will realize how great your product is, they won’t mind at all. If you want to be a good product manager, understand relevant switching costs and attempt to reduce them as much as possible to improve customer acquisition and perceived value. Every product has a cost, whether implicit or explicit. Even “free” products have a cost, most notably the time a consumer spends learning and using it. People will buy and use products where the value and benefit they get from the product is higher than the cost to them. In most cases, the main cost is explicit — the price of the product to purchase. However, in many cases, the cost to someone is beyond just what they have to spend and takes into account other factors. These switching costs take multiple different forms: Learning cost: A new product might have improved functionality or capability which requires an investment of time and training to…