If you want to be a bad product manager, hoard information. This is a competitive field, and you can’t let others know your secrets. Don’t share any lessons learned, as they can only be used by others to create products that will compete with yours. Refuse to talk shop with other product managers — it’s a waste of time, after all, since it takes your focus off your product. Telling others how you do your job or what your experience is with product management is just a bad idea. If you want to be a good product manager, share your knowledge. Realize that you have lessons to share but even more to learn. Know that you improve your own skills and expertise when you teach others. The vast majority of other product managers are not competing with you, so everyone benefits when knowledge is shared. Communicating your perspective helps you explicitly formulate your own beliefs, affirming good practices and making you question bad ones. It overall raises the level of discourse about product management and ultimately helps product managers and product development professionals do their jobs better and create better products, in turn helping any consumers of those products. So…

If you want to be a bad product manager, provide as many ways as possible for customers to buy your product. Different customers have different needs, after all, and you need to meet the needs of your customers. The more choices you have, the more people will buy/use your product, right? For subscription products, offer hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, and bi-annually subscription options. Of course, you have to offer each level of access — at least ten based on usage, features, security, and any other options you can provide. Let people choose whether they want software download or web-based access. Naturally you need a different version for Mac, PC, Linux, Blackberry, PocketPC, Palm, Newton, and ColecoVision. With all these different options, how could anyone not purchase your product? If you want to be a good product manager, provide a reasonable but limited set of ways for customers to buy your product. While it’s admirable to try to meet every possible customer need with a seemingly unlimited set of purchasing options, the benefits will not outweigh the cost. As described nicely in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the more choices a person has, the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, dictate solutions. You’re the product manager, after all, and you know what’s best for the product. How are other people going to know what to create if you don’t tell them what the solution should be? If you don’t tell them explicitly, then they’ll probably end up creating something that’s not even close to what you were asking for. And when you tell others that the search results page has to use AJAX or that the possible choices for registration should be listed in a dropdown box, don’t waste time explaining why you want those solutions. It’s your job to know why, it’s their job to build it. If you want to be a good product manager, clearly articulate market problems and needs and the associated requirements. As a product manager, your job is not to come up with solutions — there are plenty of others who are devoted to that. Your responsibility is to understand the market, identify customer needs, and describe the aspects of the product that will solve those needs. Any solution that fills those needs should suffice, and it’s the responsiblity of others on the product development…

If you want to be a bad product manager, create a strategy based only on beating your competition. You want to have the best product possible, and the way to do that is to focus intently on what your competition is doing and to it better than them. The most successful product in a category wins and you want that to be your product. You’re in the category/industry you’re in for a reason — there’s obviously profits to be made there — and the best product in that category will grab the most market share and be most profitable. If you want to be a good product manager, create a strategy based on defining your own place in the market. By focusing everything on the competition, you’re resorting yourself to a slug-fest between your product and theirs. It means that you’re only concerned with splitting up the pie of the potential market with your competition. By creating a strategy based on unmet needs, you can identify new markets and opportunities that you wouldn’t see if you were just trying to just out-do your competition. Tom Chappell, Cofounder and President of Tom’s of Maine, said that “Success means never letting the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t let other people developing products talk with actual customers. It’s your product, after all, and it’s your job to collect requirements and then pass them on to development. Why would they need to talk to people using the product? That’s time they could be spending enhancing the product and adding new features. They don’t need to know where the requirements are coming from — why customers are requesting certain things — they just need to know what to do. If they have any questions you can provide answers, or if they really need to know more you can give them a summary of your interviews and discussions. If you want to be a good product manager, encourage others within your organization to learn about customers and users through first-hand interaction and help facilitate it. As a product manager, it’s your responsibility not just to document what the product needs to do but also to make sure others understand why the product needs to do that. In fact, it’s probably more important to communicate the market problems than anything else. If your product development team has a good solid understanding of the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, never think of discontinuing a product. As long as it’s making money, why would you want to stop it? Sure, revenue may be a bit off its peak, but as long as its profitable there’s no reason to change. Plus, what does it say about you as a product manager if you are supposed to “manage” a product and you’re talking about getting rid of it — then what do you manage? Your job is to keep that product in the market for as long as possible and do whatever you need to do to make that happen. If you want to be a good product manager, phase out products when appropriate. Discontinuing products isn’t a sign of an inept product manager; in fact, it’s the sign of a responsible one who understands the economics involved. Yes, the product may be profitable on paper, but that often isn’t the only factor. A product could be taking revenue away from other products. There may be hidden costs or overhead that aren’t factored into the financial analysis. Even though the product is profitable, there may be other products or projects to which resources…

If you want to be a bad product manager, define the scope of your product as how you see it. After all, you’re a product manager, right? You’re not a supplier manager, or a vendor manager, or a promotion manager. You can’t be held responsible if the free gift you offer with your product breaks within the first week. It’s not your fault if your program won’t install correctly on computers with certain virus software. How are you supposed to know when a partner website changes their design without notifying you so that all your links to them break. In cases like this the best only thing you can do is just let customers know it’s not your fault and tell them to whom they should be complaining. If you want to be a good product manager, define the scope of your product as how the market sees it. You know where the internal boundaries are; you know who is responsible for what within the company and probably who dropped the ball on something outside of the “official” scope of your product. You need to forget all of that. What really matters is the scope of your product from the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, listen to customers only through surrogates. Why should you personally spend time listening to customers when you’ve got marketing research staff, sales reps, and customer service staff who do that all the time? You’ve got much more important things to do then to get out in the field and visit customers yourself. Make sure to read any feedback that’s coming in, skim the executive summaries of research reports, and you’ll be fine. And if your current resources aren’t telling you enough about your customers, there’s always consultants for that, right? If you want to be a good product manager, listen to customers in person. There is no substitute for meeting customers face-to-face. Listening to customers where they use your product is most ideal, but even meeting at a neutral location like a coffee house is worthwhile. (Heck, even phone calls can be useful.) When you only get information on your customers through “filtered” sources, you miss out on a lot of the nuances that are important to learning about customer needs. Meeting customers in person gives you a chance to see how they use your product, see the environment in which…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t make any decisions until you’ve fully researched every possible angle and discussed its implications with all relevant stakeholders. Without that legwork up front, you risk making a bad decision, which would diminish how you as a product manager are viewed. For most decisions there isn’t a big rush, and you want to make sure you are positive that you’re making the right decision. You also need to make sure that everyone who could possibly be impacted by the change — internal and external — is consulted and has the opportunity to provide feedback. These sorts of things take time to research and discuss, but that’s okay, since everyone else can just sit back and wait for you — the product manager — to make the decision. If you want to be a good product manager, be informed and decisive. Rather than waiting until an issue arises to research all of its angles, constantly keep your eyes on the ground and ears to the pulse. (I think I just mixed metaphors there, but go with me.) It’s never going to be possible to consider every facet and talk with everyone who…

If you want to be a bad product manager, insist that everything be done the best possible way as soon as possible. Quality is important, and if you start tolerating less than optimal solutions, that just sets the precedent that it’s appropriate to not always do things the best possible way. You shouldn’t have to choose between speed and quality for developing products — you need them both! When people give you estimates for how long things will take — always inflated, of course — it’s probably just cover for something they don’t know how to do or don’t want to. Keep a hard line on this and eventually they’ll come around. If you want to be a good product manager, be clear about whether you want something done “right” or “right now.” In almost every case these two options exist (as well as potentially others). There are certain aspects of your product where you will want things to be done the “right” way — billing, auditing, and security are some possible examples. In other cases, there may be a quick solution to a problem that will work in the short-term but not be optimal in the long-term. Good product…

If you want to be a bad product manager, only focus on the short-term. Spend all of your time working on the next release and the sales goals for this quarter. After all, if you can’t get through this release/quarter, everything beyond that won’t matter. A 3-year plan? You might not even be around in 3 years! You need to hit your short-term targets, because that’s what your bonus is tied to, and everything else can wait until later. If you want to be a good product manager, think in context of the long-term. Yes, the next release and sales goals are important, but there are other people focusing on the next release (developers, project manager) and sales goals (sales, marketing). Most likely no one else is thinking about the future of the product. Only looking a few weeks or months ahead leads to habitual fire-fighting. You can never get ahead of the curve and become a market leader. By taking a step back and looking at your product with a longer timeframe in mind, it will be much easier to plan your near future. It’s always difficult to pull yourself out of the day-to-day and think about long-term strategy,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, you need to always be actively managing your product and available to answer any questions. You’re in charge of the product, and you really can’t afford to relax. Emails from customers need responses, salespeople need answers to questions, developers need clarifications on requirements, and management needs regular reports. If those things come up at night, on the weekend, on holidays, or while you’re on vacation, what choice do you have? Some may see it as a downside of being a product manager — never getting a break — but that’s just what comes with the territory and you need to do it to keep your product running successfully. If you want to be a good product manager, work to get your product and the supporting organization stabilized so you are able to take time off. Yes, product managers have a lot of responsibilities, and of course there are times when you’ll have to work outside of the standard work week. Your product should be able to survive for a few hours or a few days without your intervention; if it can’t, you need to ask yourself, “why not”? Are there not…

If you want to be a bad product manager, surprise users with major changes to your product. Unveiling changes at launch is a great way to build buzz and create excitement around the changes. There’s really no reason to tell people ahead of time — what if something goes wrong and you don’t launch as planned, or your competition sees the changes and is able to make the same changes to their product first? Telling people ahead of time can only cause problems, so just focus on making a big splash at launch and sit back and enjoy the good PR. If you want to be a good product manager, make sure customers and regular users are well-informed about major changes to your product. You certainly don’t need to notify customers about every minor change — in fact, with online products, it may be a good strategy to make lots of small changes rather than a few big changes — and you don’t need to notify infrequent users, since they won’t notice the changes anyway. For large customers and frequent users, major changes are an opportunity to get customer input and build buzz if you approach them correctly. In a…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure your product has lots of options. Some users might want to use keyboard shortcuts, others might want to use just the mouse, and some might want a command line interface. How can you possibly pick one that works best for everyone? You can’t! So, put all of those options in your product. Better to give customers choices than to possibly leave out someone an important customer might request. If you want to be a good product manager, make decisions for your users rather than giving them too many choices. As much as you want to be focused on the needs of your users, there’s a point where it’s just going too far. Is your target market really going to want a command line interface? How many options do users really need for personalizing their account? Do you really need 15 different ways to turn your computer off? Every additional choice you push to the user is one additional feature that needs to be developed — requirements written, specifications created, designs produced, code engineered, testing completed. Choices are often added not because they are deemed appropriate based on knowledge of…

If you want to be a bad product manager, let the politics of working in an organization get you down. Get frustrated easily at any roadblock and complain like mad. Talk about how things would be so much easier at a smaller/bigger company, how they way things work within your organization are backwards, and especially how that’s causing problems for your product. Use “bureaucracy” as the excuse for not accomplishing objectives. Let organizational politics suck out of you any remaining passion for your product and your work. If you want to be a good product manager, be tenacious about leading your product through the organizational minefields. Rather than getting frustrated and making excuses, use your clear vision and strategy to push forward. In this interview with Business 2.0, Stewart Butterfield of Flickr comments that one of the keys to Flickr’s success now that they are within the bureaucracy of Yahoo! is to “have a wellspring of spiritual energy to call on to surmount any obstacle.” You need to truly have passion for your product and believe in what you’re doing. That energy and passion is contagious and can be your most effective weapon against forces working against you.

If you want to be a bad product manager, provide lots of answers. Make sure you immediately and fully answer all questions from others within the organization and from customers. Don’t bother clarifying, since it should be clear from the question what you’re being asked. Product management is all about talking, right? — talking to the market, talking to your internal stakeholders, talking to customers. If a customer asks if your product has a certain capability, and it doesn’t, make sure to provide a through accounting of why your product doesn’t, why it doesn’t need it, but why you’re planning on adding it in the future. If you want to be a good product manager, ask lots of questions. Sometimes the question you hear being asked isn’t the question you’re actually asked. Rather than assuming and jumping right in to provide a response, take some time to clarify not only the question but the intent of the question. A customer asking about capability is often just asking for clarification, not because the capability is a make-or-break factor in their purchase decision. Assuming it is and providing too detailed an answer sends a signal that you really weren’t listening to the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, say yes to everything. Say yes to every customer feature request. Say yes to every modification that sales asks for that they ensure you is “necessary” to close a sale. Say yes to every whim of every executive and stakeholder. Say yes to every suggestion that sounds like a good idea. After all, the more features, the more options, and the more stuff you can add in to the product, the better the product will be. There are potential customers and users out there — if you don’t have exactly the capabilities they need, they will turn to a competitor. The only way to ensure that they choose your product is by making the product as full-featured as possible. If you want to be a good product manager, learn how to say no. This is one of the most difficult aspects of product management, but one of the most important. Learning to say no will prevent unnecessary features from being added to the product, limit the amount of customization that is included for specific customers, and allow you to focus your product development efforts on specific objectives. Saying no may be…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make customers and users learn your lingo. Use internal acronyms and come up with unique names for common features. Menu names like “File,” “Edit,” and “View” are so passe and are missed opportunities for branding your product. Marketing materials should have lots of references to important-sounding words, preferably followed by a trademark symbol — that’s how customers will know that your product is unique and better than the competition. If an internal code names for a project was good enough for use inside your organization, it’s good enough to use it to market to customers. If you want to be a good product manager, talk in the language of your users and customers. Users are accustomed to seeing links to Help on a web site, not Questions? Acronyms are only useful when customers know what they stand for. Terminology you use within your organization to communicate within and across departments may be only known to those of you within your organization. To ensure you are communicating properly, leverage common industry terminology when available and appropriate. Where standards exist, don’t attempt to reinvent the wheel; rather than uniquely branding your product, it…

If you want to be a bad product manager, complain about your lack of authority and attempt to gain authority over necessary resources. How can you be expected to “manage” a product if you don’t “manage” anyone working on your product? You need control over developers, engineers, marketers, designers, and all of the other members of the product development team. If you don’t manage any of those folks, make sure to spend a good amount of effort complaining to anyone who will listen, describing how things would be so much better and easier if you managed those resources. Spend your time making a play for moving those resources into the product management group — after all, that will solve all of your resource problems, right? If you want to be a good product manager, learn to lead without authority. Most product management groups are small, and product managers have few if any direct reports. Rather than complaining and trying to change that, good product managers learn how to lead cross-functional teams made up of people over whom they have no line authority. This is not necessarily one of the most difficult things product managers must do, though it’s one of…

If you want to be a bad product manager, compete on the same dimensions that have always been used in your industry. Another web host offers 1GB of disk space, so you should offer 1.5GB. Another search engine indexes 1 million documents, so you should index 2 million. Another photo editing software offers 25 filters, so you should offer 30. After all, these are the things that matter to customers, or else companies wouldn’t have been focusing on them for this long. Make sure your strategy is to take what the competition is doing and do more of it and do it better. If you want to be a good product manager, question your assumptions about what matters to customers. Access to round-the-clock customer service from a web host may be more important to your target market than another 500MG of disk space. Indexing speed or ease of installation may trump maximum index size. Extra photo editing filters may be worthless or detrimental if customers never use them. In A Pointed Lesson About Product Features, Marc Abrahams discusses how companies tend to focus research and development efforts using “industry wisdom” about what aspects of a product customers use to make…

If you want to be a bad product manager, put your well-known brand name on any new related product. You should leverage the brand equity that you’ve built up. Even if the new product is not really that similar to your current product, the fact that it uses the same name will help attract attention. For example, Research in Motion should leverage the Blackberry name they ever start producing MP3 players, and Salesforce.com could launch a subdomain which handles online payroll services should they decide to add on to their current online CRM service. Why build a new brand from scratch when you can just piggyback on an existing name which has high awareness in the market? Take the money you save from establishing the brand and use it to add more features to the product, since that’s what will really matter to customers in the long run. If you want to be a good product manager, be smart about how you use your brand name for product line extensions. While building recognition of a new brand from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming, it often is the most logical option due to how the current brand name is perceived…

If you want to be a bad product manager, use focus groups for all of your market research. The focus group is a time-tested tool, used by thousands of companies around the world. It’s relatively easy to set up and facilitate, and pretty much everyone knows how they work. They are very efficient as well; rather than taking a long period of time to speak with individual interviews, in an hour or so you can talk with a whole bunch of customers. Whether you’re making decisions on product naming, marketing strategy, features and functionality, color or design, focus groups are a great way to give you the answers you need. If you want to be a good product manager, investigate methods other than focus groups to meet your research needs. Too often, doing “some groups” is the default and only answer to questions of market research. While they have their place, focus groups are too often overused and misused. In How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, Gerald Zaltman gives focus groups a thorough thrashing, much of it deserved. He essentially argues there is never an instance where focus groups should be used, which may be…

If you want to be a bad product manager, keep comparing your product and company to Google. Chastise your data center for not having thousands of generic servers that can be pulled and swapped at a moment’s notice. Complain to HR about how your workplace doesn’t have free lunch and ice cream, open office space, rock climbing walls, lap pools, and massage chairs like Google. Redesign the home page of your web site to just be a search box. Change your logo every week. Pressure your developers to release new enhancements several times a month. Launch new products and enhancements throughout the year whenever they are ready to go. Google does it, and look how successful they are — if you just copy everything they do, your products will be as successful as theirs! If you want to be a good product manager, learn from Google and others but make appropriate comparisons. There are certainly things to be learned from Google, but endless comparisons do nothing to further your product and can in fact create a  combative atmosphere internally and a detrimental experience for your customers. If you don’t have a corporate culture devoted to “organize the world’s information and…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure to describe all of the benefits of your product. Devote time to each equally, since different customers have different criteria for selecting products. Make sure not to leave anything out, since if it’s not included on the list, customers may think you don’t offer it and choose a competitor who does. Stress whatever the key features are, whether that be unlimited usage, next-day installation, free tech support, or complimentary upgrades. Those are the features you’ve invested time and resources in providing, so they must be the ones that will make a difference to customers. If you want to be a good product manager, focus on the benefits of your product that provide the most value to your customer. Most products have too many benefits — let alone too many features — to list them all. Not all benefits are equal, since some are more important to customers than others. Through proper market research you should have a good understanding of those key benefits and the key differentiators between your product and your competition. While you’re stressing unlimited usage, next-day installation, free tech support, or complimentary upgrades, customers may only…

If you want to be a bad product manager, first implement the features that are quickest to develop. Yes, there may be some major important things that you want in your product, but if those are going to take a lot of time, first focus on the small, quick things to do, even if they’re not as important. A bunch of small less-important features is just as good as one big important one — maybe even better, since it’s more bullet points to list on your marketing materials and extra rows to add to your table comparing your product to the competition. Plus, if something happens and funding or resources are cut, you’ll still get to keep all those little features, rather than being stuck with something big that’s halfway done. If you want to be a good product manager, first implement the features that will provide most value to your customers and users. What good are a handful of “neat but unnecessary” features if your product doesn’t solve the main customer need it’s trying to address? Kano Analysis is a useful tool in product management for helping to identify what features provide the most value. In his article on…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure your product is infinitely customizable. Why run the risk of losing customers because it doesn’t work exactly the way they want? What’s more “customer focused” than letting customers tailor their experience of using your product exactly to their needs? Not sure if it’s better to have lists of items sorted alphabetically or by date? Let users do both! Can’t decide if it’s easier to read text that is dark blue or dark grey? Provide both options! Don’t know if there are any standard shortcut key combinations? If you let anyone customize the product to suit their needs, how could anyone not be happy with it? If you want to be a good product manager, don’t substitute customizability for making difficult decisions. Allowing customers to configure the product seems like a great idea in that it will allow it to adapt to different user needs. Unfortunately, often customizability is not included for the customers’ benefit but because the product manager was not able to make a decision. There are many cases where product managers improperly will choose customization over decision-making. Maybe the product manager can’t get all the stakeholders to…

If you want to be a bad product manager, be timid and cautious. You don’t want to make any bad decisions, so be very careful about everything you do. Make sure to clear everything with all of the impacted stakeholders, and if any of them question your initiatives, be sure to put everything on hold and rethink your plans. Since the market is likely to change as you’re carrying out projects, don’t be afraid to put them on hold to reconsider in light of new information. If you can’t decide between two courses of action, wait and do lots of research, thinking, and soul-searching before making a decision (and hopefully by the time you have to, the situation will have changed and your decision will be irrelevant). Hopefully these suggestions will prevent anything from going wrong, but if it does, be sure to have a good explanation of why it’s not your fault. If you want to be a good product manager, be courageous. You will make bad decisions. You will do things that upset some stakeholders. The market will change. You will have to choose between two options when you have no idea which one is better and don’t…

If you want to be a bad product manager, give your product away for free without defined metrics or eventual business models. First you need to get people hooked. Get them interested in your product, get them addicted to your product, and then later on you can figure out how to make money off of it. In fact, once you get people hooked, it doesn’t matter what your business model is, since there’s probably a bunch of different ways to make money. With so many products out there, you need to get the attention of your potential customers with some sort of hook — and what better hook is there than “free”? Since you’re not charging anything just yet, there’s really nothing you can measure as far as revenue, so don’t worry about coming up with hard metrics until you start making money. Every user is a potential future paying customer, so as long as you know how many people are using your product overall, that’s good enough. If you want to be a good product manager, make the decision about to give away your product for free as part of your overall product strategy. While many products have been…

If you want to be a bad product manager, answer customer comments or questions and be on your way. When customers email you with a question about a certain feature that doesn’t exist in your product, reply nicely that it doesn’t but you’ll consider it, or, better yet, explain why it doesn’t. If someone stops by your booth at a trade show and asks about a certain capability you’ve built in, ensure them that your product has full support. If an upset customer posts a distressing message to a mailing list or their blog, work quickly to post a detailed and clear response that negates their complaints. You need to make sure you provide good customer service, which means politely responding to any suggestions for changes or enhancements as promptly as possible, usually through a “thanks for your suggestion” form letter. (You don’t have time to respond to each of these personally — you’ve got a product to run after all!) If you want to be a good product manager, treat every point of contact with a customer as an opportunity to learn more. Responding to emails, answering questions at trade shows, and posting replies online is not necessarily bad…

If you want to be a bad product manager, finish your requirements and hand them off. Your job is to define the requirements of the system, and other people are responsible for implementing them. You’ve spent days, weeks, even months poring over the requirements and making sure they capture everything that must be in the product. Now you can relax, because your job is done just as everyone else begins theirs. If there’s any confusion about what you’re asking, it’s probably just either that (a) people haven’t read the documents in enough detail, or (b) they are trying to find ways to get out of building the hard parts. Your job is to document what the product should do — how many times or ways do you have to explain it? If other people really don’t seem to get what it is you’re trying to do, you need to write more documents explaining in even more detail. If you want to be a good product manager, continue to review and provide additional detail around your requirements. Clear requirements are necessary for a successful product, but it’s just a start. Documents are always open to interpretation and often don’t convey the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, be inconsistent in how you take advice. For issues that are very obvious and clear-cut, don’t bother conferring with anyone else. These are easy problems to solve and you’re well qualified to do so. For much more complex problems, make sure to get as much advice as possible. It may be worth even bringing in consultants, since they are likely very qualified to help with your dilemma. If you want to be a good product manager, value advice similarly regardless of the difficulty of the situations about which you are seeking advice. Even though a product manager is traditionally the “president of the product,” you need to recognize that a good president will rely on his or her “cabinet” (sales, marketing, technology, user experience, finance, etc.) for assistance. All product managers know that they need to get advice from others at certain times. The problem is knowing when to ask for and take advice and how to use it appropriately. Something that first appears to me to be a very simple and straightforward situation that doesn’t require consultation may in fact be a more complicated issue that deserves outside input. Conversely,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, pay special attention to the area of the business from which you came. If you were a software developer before moving into product management, make sure to inspect the developers’ code closely. Don’t be afraid to delve into the details of the application — after all, that’s where you came from, and you were obviously good at it or else you wouldn’t have been promoted to product management! If your background is in sales, be sure to tell your sales staff exactly how to sell the product. When you accompany them on ride-alongs, help them sell and after the visit make sure to give them critiques on their performance. If you were a user experience designer previously, discuss every design decision with the user experience designers working on your product. When you see something that is designed differently than you would have designed it, don’t be afraid to tell them. And if you find that they’re really just not doing a good job, don’t hesitate to just change their designs — this is your product, right? If you want to be a good product manager, be very conscious about not micromanaging…

If you want to be a bad product manager, make sure no other products from your company can possibly cannibalize your sales. You are responsible for your product, and you must protect it at all costs. Other product managers responsible for other products may try to capitalize on your success and steal your customers — don’t let them! If anyone else in the company even tries to create a product that comes remotely close to yours, make sure they know to back off. If you’re using shared components across multiple products, fight to get get as much functionality in your product and as little as possible in the other products. Your job is to make your products successful, not to make other product managers look good. If you want to be a good product manager, carefully analyze the potential impact before crying cannibalization. In a broad sense, it’s possible for any product to cannibalize any other one. Obviously, the more similar the products are, the more there is possibility of one product being purchased as a replacement for another. A scientific calculator could be a good substitute for a financial calculator in many situations; a calculator designed for an elementary…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just focus on the customer of your product. If your customer isn’t the person who will actually be using the product, that doesn’t matter. Your goal is to drive revenue and profit, and you need to focus on creating a product that can close a sale. The decision maker should be your only focus. Add in features that they want, even if you know no one will ever actually use them. Don’t tailor the product to the people actually using it, since their needs are likely very different from the person who actually signs the check. Any effort you put in to making the product work better for end users is wasted, since that’s effort that could have been spent adding more features specific to the person making the buying decision. If you want to be a good product manager, create a product that will meet the needs of your customers and your users. While there are many products for which users and customers are the same, more and more products are being used by people who did not make the purchase decision. Focusing only on the decision maker ignores the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, focus on solving problems for one customer. Being “customer focused” means giving a single customer your attention, solving their problems and addressing their needs. Customize your product and service to their situation. Spend time resolving their specific questions. Give them “personal attention.” If you want to be a good product manager, focus on solving issues and creating solutions for a large number of customers. Working directly with specific customers is productive and something all product managers should spend a bit of time on, but there are plenty of other roles dedicated to serving individual customers specifically. Sales representatives, sales engineers, and customer service are usually available to solve individual customers’ problems and concerns. Product managers who focus on single customers are essentially neglecting everyone else. Every minute spent solving an issue for a single customer is a minute that could have been spent solving an issue for all customers. In an ideal world, you would be able to work with each customer individually to give them a very high level of service, addressing their concerns, complaints, and questions. This is not an ideal world. You need to be conscious about when…

If you want to be a bad product manager, spend as much time as possible on the middle of the development projects. It shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what you want to create, and after that you need to make sure it gets built. You are responsible for getting the product to market, and you need to oversee the development of the product closely to ensure that it is completed successfully. Once the product is ready to go to market, you can just let the marketing folks know it’s ready, or, if you have to launch it yourself, just write the press release and create the brochures. If you want to be a good product manager, spend as much time as creating the vision for the product and communicating that vision to the market. Your primary responsibility is to create a valuable product that will solve a market need. There are plenty of people within the company working on the tactical activities necessary to get the product built, but few if any people usually looking at the market and trying to identify needs and few if any people thinking strategically about how to take the product to market….

If you want to be a bad product manager, stick with what has always worked for you and ignore advice. What has served you well in the past will likely serve you well in the future. You got to where you are for a reason, so why would you need to do something different? You don’t become a product manager without knowing what you’re doing, and anyone who says you need to improve obviously doesn’t understand your skills, experience, and expertise. When people give you feedback you can accept it if you really want, but you don’t need to go actively looking for ways to improve. If you want to be a good product manager, seek out opportunities to get feedback. Actively look for ways to improve even when it requires you to do extra work. Not only can you always improve your skills and methods, but there is a difference between accepting feedback when it comes and seeking out feedback where you normally would not receive it. K. Anders Ericsson, author of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, recently told Fast Company about “‘deliberate practice‘–an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance.” (Thanks to Victor for…

If you want to be a bad product manager, react to fads. Your product needs to adapt to popular culture to keep it relevant. Pick the cool fad of the year/month/week and make your product relevant to it. It’s a great way to get attention and free publicity. You don’t want to be left behind as competitors take advantage of the hot fashion of the day. If you want to be a good product manager, be on the lookout for trends. Trends are usually longer-term movements indicating larger shifts in behavior, attitudes, or beliefs. The decrease in traditional land-line phones, more meals being eaten outside the home, population movement away from rural areas, and increased reliance on web-based services are examples of current trends. Fads are crazes where there is short-term and perhaps irrational attention paid to the current fashion. Hula-hoops, pet rocks, the Atkins diet, and Mahir (the “I kiss you” guy) are all examples of fads. How many of these are still relevant today? Fads change so quickly that by the time you react the fad you are chasing is probably old news and there is a new popular fad taking over. Good product managers can look into…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume you know how all of your customers will use your product. You’ve done research, talked with customers, maybe even watched some usability testing. You know the different types of users and how they approach your product. There’s not much else you can do with your product, really, if it’s pretty simple. Plus, if people are buying it or using it for other reasons, you shouldn’t be concerned with those customers — that just takes your attention away from the main purpose of the product and your main target market. If you want to be a good product manager, continue to learn more about new and different ways customers will use your product. As much as you may design very specific tasks and use scenarios, customers will always find ways to use your product that you never intended. Understanding these alternative uses will help to identify new markets, new ways to promote your product, and new distribution channels. It also can help suggest minor changes that will better support these new uses without detracting from the main purpose of your product. Duct tape is the classic example of a product known…

If you want to be a bad product manager, avoid asking awkward or naive-sounding questions. You’re responsible for a major area of the business, and you can’t appear to be clueless about basic issues. There’s an appropriate time to ask basic questions, and it’s at the beginning of a product life cycle or a specific project. IF you raise those types of issues up at any point later down the line, everyone will question your ability to understand the business and lead the product. If you want to be a good product manager, do not be afraid of asking what may seem to be dumb questions. “Dumb” questions are really more about when they get asked than what they are inquiring about. Too often, people make assumptions about products and these assumptions go unchecked. We assume the business model is solid. We assume the market research points to a specific solution. We assume we need to keep specific features in the product in the next version. Dumb questions challenge these assumptions, often at a time in the project when they are most relevant. Some of the most productive and enlightening discussions I’ve had when working on a project have been…

If you want to be a bad product manager, respond to every feature request that comes in from the market. If one customer is asking for it, there’s probably dozens of others whom you are not hearing from would benefit from it. If you want to be customer-focused you need to listen to all of the customer feedback coming in and respond to all of it. When there’s a posting on a message board about a specific potential feature, make sure to either get working on that feature and/or reply and let people know when it will be available. You don’t want customers requesting things you don’t plan on delivering, do you? If you want to be a good product manager, track high-level customer needs and requests and prioritize them over the long term. You’re going to receive more requests for new features, changes and enhancements than you can realistically respond to or even capture at a granular level. Reacting to each individual request will take up all of your time and leave you with a product with no discernible focus and a hodge-podge bunch of reactive features without clear benefits. You need to make sure that you have a…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume your boss is trying to get in the way. Managers are always trying to take credit for their subordinates’ work and meddling in details that they shouldn’t be involved in. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you by sharing as little information as possible. Don’t go to your boss until you’ve got a really solid idea that’s been vetted and can’t have any holes poked in it. When you run in to trouble, don’t let your boss know — you don’t want to look like you can’t solve problems yourself. You need to be sure that your boss is confident that you know what you’re doing, and the more time you spend with him or her, the more he/she will think that you’re not competent to be in product management. If you want to be a good product manager, work with your manager to help improve your effectiveness as a product manager. Product managers are in an interesting position, often fully responsible for a “business within a business,” yet still accountable to a single individual with even broader responsibility. By working with your boss properly, you can still maintain your…

If you want to be a bad product manager, focus on how your product’s requirements should be implemented. You need to make sure that not only the right features get implemented, but that they get implemented in the right way. If you don’t specify it, someone else will decide how to do it and their decision might be wrong. Make sure to put plenty of detail into your requirements so the other members of the product development team know exactly what they’re supposed to do. If you want to be a good product manager, focus on what requirements should be in the product in the first place. Product managers are responsible for what the product should do and other roles are responsible for how the product should do that. So why do product managers often spend a lot of their time on how the product should work? A few reasons: If no one else is specifying or is available to specify “how,” product managers will need to do it. Product managers may know they should not be specifying “how,” but for whatever reason do not trust other roles to do it. Product managers may not realize that they should be…

If you want to be a bad product manager, resist change. You put lots of effort into everything you do, and it wouldn’t make sense to go back and revise it. You promised that you would your product launched by a certain date, and you need to hit that date no matter what. You spent a lot of time on your product roadmap, and you don’t want to waste time and effort revising it. You’ve got to be consistent and focused and get done what you said you would get done. If you want to be a good product manager, be prepared for and adaptable to change. If you are looking for a “set it and forget it” career, product management is not for you. Product managers need to be flexible and adaptable, ready to change at any time. Release dates need to shift depending on internal and external factors. Product roll-out strategies may need to change based on market conditions. Corporate strategies and priorities often dictate a different direction for your product than maybe you originally thought. The more tied to technology your product is, the more quickly and dramatically it will change. As an example, compare web-based products…

If you want to be a bad product manager, craft your product positioning as you’re ready to launch the product. Once you’ve got a good product almost ready, all you need to do is come up with a slogan, put some brochures and a press release together, and you’re ready to go. The real hard work is in building the product, not getting the marketing together. In fact, if you’ve done your job right, the product will practically sell itself! If you want to be a good product manager, plan your product positioning as early as possible, even before you start building your product. The positioning of your product needs to be closely tied to the product itself. The position of your product will dictate much of what you put in to it. Before building a product, you should know your customer needs and where your competition is positioned in the market. Picking your position in the market will help define your strategy and then guide the many tactical decisions you will have to make along the way. Let’s say you were the product manager in charge of new software that could perform powerful mathematical calculations. Research shows customers are…

If you want to be a bad product manager, never take risks. Be afraid to try anything new until it’s been tried and tested hundreds of times. You’ve gotten this far by sticking with what works, so there’s no reason to change. If your competitors aren’t doing it, then why should you be doing it? When you try new things, there’s a good chance they might not work out, and there’s no benefit to that. If you want to be a good product manager, experiment and learn. You need to take chances, try out things to see if they work, and get ahead of the market. Even if your experiments do not succeed, you will at least learn something in the process. I owe the “experiment and learn” tagline to my colleague Rafael Sidi, who embodies this good product management trait and has a post on his blog with the same title. He used it to describe a new feature that has been added to his product. The feature likely wasn’t something that was commonly requested by customers, nor was it something that the competition really offered, but Rafael saw an opportunity to leverage ideas taking hold in other areas….

If you want to be a bad product manager, create mystery around your product. Be coy with your name and message to the market. You want to “build buzz” and by making your soon-to-be-released product an enigma, you can get people excited about it. Telling potential customers what the product does would just ruin the surprise and squash any potential viral marketing opportunities. If you want to be a good product manager, make the product’s purpose absolutely clear. There are rare instances where some mystery and intrigue is really essential to a product’s success (The Blair Witch Project comes to mind). For most products, you need to immediately connect with customers. Grab their attention by communicating the value of your product, not by trying to be sly or overly clever. Especially in this information-overloaded world, the need for a clear message is even more paramount. When customers are flooded with thousands of messages each day, you can’t risk losing some potential interest because people can not figure out what it is your product actually does. Can you clearly communicate the value of your product in 5 words or less? Try it; refine it. Boil the value down to its core…

If you want to be a bad product manager, treat all aspects of the job as equally important and try to do everything yourself. Make sure you balance your time equally between studying the market, talking with customers, writing requirements, monitoring development, and supporting sales. You don’t want to neglect your duties in any one area, nor do you want to give the impression that one aspect of the product is more important than any other by focusing your time there. You need to personally spend a bit of your time on all of the different responsibilities of product management. If you want to be a good product manager, focus on the most important areas of your job and find people who can help with other aspects of product management. Treating every aspect of product management equally is a noble idea but is neither realistic nor necessary. Most products have one area that needs more attention. Maybe the vision and strategy is clear but the requirements and development are issues. Maybe development is fine but there is no long-term product roadmap. Maybe the product itself meets customer needs but customers are unaware of it. Good product managers focus on the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, use market research to justify a decision you’ve already made. You’re the product manager, after all, and you know what the product should do and how it should do it. You’ve done your research already. If someone else has research that conflicts with what you’ve found, then it must be a problem with how they conducted the research. Either way, what you’re doing is so new and innovative that there’s no way to do research about it because it’s something people haven’t ever seen before and have no way of evaluating it. And even if the market could, you don’t want to be a robot that just does everything market research tells you to do, do you? If you want to be a good product manager, use market research to inform your decisions. Part of being a market-focused product manager is listening to what the market has to say, whether you like it or not. At times, that may mean overturning a decision you’ve made. It could lead to the company squashing a pet project that you’ve been working on for months. There’s potential that you will get a good dose…

If you want to be a bad product manager, insist on arbitrary and inflexible release dates. It’s vitally important that you get this product out in the market as soon as possible. The sooner you launch the sooner you can start making money. It also doesn’t hurt that the release date is a few weeks before that big vacation you’ve scheduled. And you told senior management that you would have it released by then and don’t want to look bad in front of them. And you’re hoping to show it off at that conference coming up — of course, no sales will come out of that conference and there’s another similar conference a few months later, but you’d still like to be able to show it there. Hold firm to your release date — if you start budging now then it will show weakness and you’ll never be able to get a firm date for any progress on the project. If you want to be a good product manager, be realistic about the necessity of meeting release dates. In almost all cases you want to launch a new product or product enhancement sooner rather than later. There are many benefits…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just focus on your product on its own. Don’t worry about how it works with other products. You’re not responsible for those products, you’re responsible for your own. Why should you care about other products that your company produces? Your product needs to be good enough that it stands on its own. Plus, any issues with how your product works as part of a system with other products is really an issue for those other product managers to figure out, not you, since the problems are probably with their products. If you want to be a good product manager, think of your product as part of a system. The old adage that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is definitely true here. While you may view products as separate and structure your organization appropriately, customers may view them all as part of one system from one company and expect added benefits and efficiencies when using them together. Peter Merholz provides two good examples. First, the Apple music universe — iPod, iTunes music management, iTunes store. Though there may be different product managers in charge of each of…

If you want to be a bad product manager, always try to compete in the biggest market available. Even if you’re a small player in that market, if you can take just a tiny percentage of market share (which has to be really easy, right?) you’ll be wildly successful. It’s much better to grab a small piece of a big market than waste your time trying to get a substantial portion of a small market. After all, once you’ve done that, where do you go next? If you want to be a good product manager, realize that bigger is not always better. One of the most common misconceptions is that it is easy to take just a small piece of a huge market. Though the percentage may be small, the competition can be very tough, much more so than a smaller uncontested space in the market. Usually when you have a big market, you have major players who are fighting tooth and nail for every piece of market share they can get. Another misconception is that a product which is the biggest fish in a small pond has nowhere to go. ZIGZAG Marketing offers this tip: Many successful technology companies…

If you want to be a bad product manager, react swiftly to any objections pointed out during the sales process. Any issue that customer raises could potentially cause you to lose a sale, so you must make immediate changes to prevent that from happening. If a competing product has a type of content that yours doesn’t, start a special project to create and add that content into your product. If a customer comments that they’d like to be able to export to 10 different file types, not just eight, add in those other two. When a potential customer asks if your product supports OS/2 and PCL 4 printers, make sure to stop all other development work and prioritize those features. After all, being a product manager is about giving customers what they ask for, right? If you want to be a good product manager, identify and focus on areas that are actually impacting sales. There may be some issues that are creating uncomfortable moments during the sales process, but you should not immediately react to them. Instead, when issues are pointed out during the sales cycle, ask yourself three questions: Does this fit with the overall strategic direction for the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, use customer visits as an opportunity to sell your product. You’ve got the attention of key decision makers for an extended period of time, so why wouldn’t you want to promote your product? If they’re current customers, try to up-sell them or plug other products from your company. You need to do all you can to drive revenue since it’s one of your key objectives. Salespeople will appreciate your help in closing sales and customers will value your in-depth knowledge of your product. What better use of time with customers could there be? If you want to be a good product manager, use customer visits as an opportunity to conduct voice of the customer research. Selling product when you visit customers may have some short-term benefit, but understanding customer needs and market problems will provide much more value in the long term. Customers are constantly being sold to, by your sales staff and others. They do not need someone else coming in and trying to sell to them. In fact, they likely will appreciate talking with a vendor who is not trying to sell anything but instead interested in hearing about…