Mark Lummus

I help growing software businesses get products to market with less risk and less chaos

As your business grows, it demands more of your time and attention. You may find that you are a bottleneck and have trouble making product decisions in a timely manner.

You may need someone to help you drive your product strategy. Someone you trust. Someone who can give your product the attention it deserves. Someone who can help you implement product management. Because building a product management culture is a whole different ballgame.

I can help.

Would you like to know the current product management challenges in business?

Before we identify the challenges, let's start by defining Product Management.

What is Product Management?

Product Management may be different across organizations, but the goals are the same:

• To discover the unmet needs of customers in a market
• To deliver solutions that address those needs
• To meet the objectives and key results of the business

At this high level, it sounds simple. Let's dig in a little to get a better understanding of the complexities.

Discovery

Discovery is that part of Product Management where you continuously observe your market, your customer, your business environment, and your competition to discover the unmet needs of your target customer.

Delivery

Delivery is that part of Product Management where you translate needs and insights into features, and user stories and feed them to a product development team to produce your business' offerings.

OKRs - Objectives and Key Results

Business objectives differ based on where a company and product is in its lifecycle. Typically the objectives will address financial (revenue, profit, cost) and market adoption (% penetration, # of users).

What are The Challenges?

The challenges to achieving success are too numerous to address here (I have collected a list of more than 200 challenges!). Here are some to consider:

• Who owns the product vision, strategy and goals?
• What is the proper role and authority of a product manager in your product team?
• How do you craft a roadmap and prioritize features to align with your company's goals?
• How much time do you spend with your customer - do you get out of the building?
• What do you do with all of that user feedback?
• How do you handle changing priorities and squeaky wheels?
• Are you using processes, tools and systems?
• Which product management framework should you embrace?

Implementing Product Management

Before you hire your first product manager, please consider the following:

Your organization may not be ready for Product Management

Many of the challenges are cultural and fall outside of the control of the product manager. Successful product management will change the way the business builds and launches products. The people, processes, and systems in your organization may not be ready for that change.

This a process, not an event

Let's face it - in most small companies the first product manager is actually one of the founders and the first product is very important to them. It's like their baby. You wouldn't hand your baby to a complete stranger, would you? You need to trust the product manager implicitly. Your process must account for some sort of transition or handoff period to allow trust to be earned. In fact, many of the people that I interviewed actually suggested promoting someone internally rather than hiring externally.

Product Management is not something learned in school.

A recent study determined that only 2% of product managers have any formal training. Whatever process you follow needs to account for training, coaching, or mentoring to ensure that your product manager develops the skills necessary to succeed in the job.

I Can Help

Product management is not something most business owners are equipped to handle on their own. If your business has grown to the point where you are feeling overwhelmed defining, developing, and delivering your products, it may be time to bring in someone who can help you diagnose the problem and offer solutions.

Let's talk soon about the right approach to implement product management in your organization.