Product Parenting

Product Parenting

The genesis of this article happened back in May when I posted a blog entry containing the following snippet:

And finally, for something completely different, don't miss the Jam Session at Tech-Ed on June 3rd. Several of us minions from SourceGear are planning to take the stage and give our rendition of Pinball Wizard. It'll be me on acoustic guitar, our development manager Jeremy Sheeley on bass, and our product manager Paul Roub playing the Evil Mastermind Schecter PT that will be given away later that week.

BTW, I'm not a very good guitar player, but the jam turned out OK.

Anyway, the first comment on that blog post was from a reader who said:

3 managers. Wow. Your company must be growing and/or is fairly large.

The person who made that comment was probably using the word "manager" to refer to "someone who manages people". If so, then yes, our company has more than 3 managers, but not all of the 3 people playing Pinball Wizard qualify:

* Jeremy Sheeley is actually a manager. He runs the development team that builds Vault and Fortress.

* Strictly speaking, I suppose I am a manager. But people who know me would say that referring to me as a manager is an undeserved compliment.

* But Paul Roub is a "product manager". Here at SourceGear (and in most other companies I know), a product manager is not [necessarily] someone who manages people.

So when I saw that comment, I told myself I should write an article about the role of a product manager. This is that article.

(BTW, the content of this article was my presentation at the Business of Software conference in September. I understand that the video of my talk is going to be posted at some point. When that happens, it will probably be announced on the Business of Software blog.)

What is a product manager?

In short, a product manager is a marketing person who focuses on strategic stuff and stuff that is specific to the product.

When people think of marketing, their thoughts often run to things like logos, graphic design, and advertising. This is the communications side of marketing. We call it "marcomm".

The other side of marketing is the stuff that is more focused on the product itself:

* Positioning

* Differentiation

* Features

* Competition

* Market research

These activities are the domain of the product manager.

I still remember the moment when I first started to learn this distinction. Back when I worked at Spyglass, one of my peers asked, "Why don't we have any product marketing people?"

I said, "What do you mean? We've got marketing people. Marc and his team just spent six months deciding which Pantone shade of red we're going to use for our logo. That's marketing, right?"

The discussion that followed my clueless remark was very enlightening.

Managing Products vs. Managing People

There is a confusion caused by the word "manager". As noted before, a product manager doesn't necessarily manage people.

To highlight the differences between product management and people management, I'm going to start by offering a brief but reasonably complete lecture on managing people in a software company.

A Brief but Reasonably Complete Lecture on Managing People in a Software Company

Stop treating them like children.

That's it?

Yep, that's it. Stop treating them like children.

If you follow this rule and all of its corollaries, you will be a competent manager, thus placing you in the top one percent of all managers in the software industry.

Software professionals are grownups. They do not deserve to be treated like children.

On the other hand...

Unlike your coworkers, software products deserve to be treated very much like children. They're rebellious and wayward. They need to be given strict boundaries and lots of guidance.

Like children, products go through stages. Joel Spolsky said that "good software takes ten years". Those ten years are not all the same.

The life of a growing software product has six different stages. And the progression of those stages is a lot like the stages of parenting a child.

* Each stage requires a different approach.

* There is a gradual progression from "high control" to "letting go".

Stage 1: Prepare

In parenting, the first stage is conception and pregnancy. In software, this stage covers all the time before your first product release. The key concept for this stage is "prepare".

This is the stage where you find a product idea and dream about what it might be when it grows up.

Product managers in stage 1 tend to make the same mistake that a new father makes: He believes that since the mother (the development team) is carrying the baby (writing the code), he doesn't have anything to do. All he has to do is wait until the kid is old enough to throw a baseball around, right?

Prepare

As a product manager, stage 1 is perhaps your most important stage. You have a lot of preparation to do if you want your product to be successful.

* You need to figure out your positioning.

* You need to clearly define your differentiation.

* And you need to figure out how those two things are going to express themselves in every other aspect of the product.

This is challenging stuff, and you have to do it now. Later it will be too late.

Fail

Anybody else remember the Apple Pippin?

When I speak at conferences, they sometimes introduce me as "the person who led the team at Spyglass who built the browser that Microsoft licensed to become Internet Explorer". That's true, but it is an incomplete rendition of the truth.

Spyglass licensed its browser to around 120 different companies who released products based entirely or partially on our code. All but one of those products crashed and burned. So it would be equally accurate (albeit far less flattering) to introduce me as "the person who has been affiliated with more failed web browser products than anyone else on the planet". :-)

One of those products was the Apple Pippin (although I would hasten to say that my code was not the reason why the Pippin failed). :-)

The Pippin was a disastrous example of product marketing. And it failed because somebody did a terrible job in stage 1. The positioning of this product was never clear.

* Is it a game machine?

* Is it a computer?

* Is it a set top box?

The answer to all of these questions was "yes". By trying to fit in every category, the Pippin ended up fitting in none of them.

Predictably, the primary differentiation for the Pippin was that it was lame in every category. Yes, it was a game machine, but it was insanely expensive and incompatible with 100% of the popular games in the world. Yes, it was a computer, but it was slow and underpowered.

Stage 2: Care

In parenting, the second stage is birth and infancy. In software, this stage covers the 1.0 release and the time thereafter. The key concept for this stage is "care".

This is the stage where you endure the final pain of getting the product out the door.

The product manager has a very important role in the first release of a new product. The labor pains are endured by the development team, but the product manager is responsible for the launch. It is important to get the messaging just right.

Shipping release 1.0 is a lot like the birth of a new baby: Lots and lots of pain, followed by a brief period of pure happiness, and then no sleep for quite a while.

In most B2B software products, shipping the 1.0 release is more like a beginning than an end.

Care

After a baby is born, the parents are overwhelmed with the responsibility of its care. A newborn is completely dependent, unable to do anything for itself. When it wants to be fed at 3 o'clock in the morning, that's what has to be done.

Many version 1.0 products have similar needs. Users need tech support, sometimes urgently and at very inconvenient times. That's what has to be done.

Like the husband of a breast-feeding mother, the product manager may not have primary responsibility for all this care that needs to be provided. But he can be involved, and both he and the product will benefit from his choice to do so.

Product managers and new fathers typically share one other task in common during stage 2: Soul searching.

Every father I know has held his new baby and wondered if he was really prepared for the responsibility.

Product managers in stage 2 need to be asking themselves questions about the quality of their preparation:

* Is the positioning right?

* Is the differentiation sufficient?

* Is the messaging clear?

Stage 2 is not the time to start doing the stuff you should have done in stage 1. But it is time to review. It's not too late to make changes.

Fail

Around ten years ago, my company shipped version 1.0 of a product called SourceSurf. It was a web-based application for browsing source code repositories.

If you were to travel back in time and ask SourceSurf what it wants to be when it grows up, it would look into the future and say, "I want to be sort of like Atlassian FishEye". But SourceSurf never got the chance to grow up. Version 1.0 was its first and last major release. What we should have done was tweak the strategy and keep going. Instead, we looked at the initial results and gave up.

SourceSurf 1.0 didn't do very well, but the product concept was generally good. We failed to make the minor course corrections this product needed to be successful.

Stage 3: Listen

In parenting, the third stage is the so-called "terrible twos", (which, as all parents know, actually lasts until the child is almost four). In software, this stage typically covers the 2.0 release cycle. The key concept for this stage is "listen".

This is the stage of defiance and rebellion, where the product begins to exhibit its own will.

One day when my oldest daughter was in this stage, we called her to dinner. She sauntered up to the table, glanced at the food we had prepared, and gasped in horror, "There's nothing here I like except butter!" :-)

Obviously children need correction during these years. But they also need to be heard. This is the stage when "kids say the darndest things", some of which are cute, and some of which are annoying or embarrassing. Either way, this process is an important stage of growth. Parents need to provide correction without crushing the child's spirit. Often that means listening to the weird things the child says.

Listen

The product manager also needs to spend stage 3 listening. Customers ask for a lot of stuff, and that feedback needs to be heard and incorporated into the next release of the product. There is still time to tweak the strategy before the product goes mainstream.

Fail

Stage 3 is the most common place where products fail. There are plenty of examples. Almost any product that died at the bottom of the chasm was a failure in stage 3. My favorite two examples are BeOS and Wingz.

* BeOS was a new operating system released in the late '90s. Technologically, BeOS was very cool, but it fell into the chasm because it never found a niche on the other side.

* Wingz was a new spreadsheet released in the late '80s. Wingz had features that Excel doesn't have today. But to survive, it needed to get popular with a small group of users and spread from there. I liked Wingz a lot, but I think most people thought it was just too weird.

I often wonder if these products might have succeeded if they had been more willing to listen to the very early user feedback and change course accordingly. This might have meant allowing the product to become something its parents never dreamed it would be.

Digression: Looking across the chasm

Since I am employed by a version control vendor, the chasm situation that is most interesting to me today is the Decentralized Version Control System (DVCS). Notable examples in this category include open source tools such as Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar.

Today, these products are not yet mainstream. They have a lot of buzz in certain communities, but the vast majority of all companies doing software development are still using centralized tools.

Will the DVCS tools make it across the chasm?

Stage 4: Talk

In parenting, the fourth stage is the time from elementary school to adolescence. In software, this stage typically covers version 3.0, which is often the first release where the product can be considered mainstream. The key concept for this stage is "talk".