So, the survey is now closed. I’ll be looking at the responses, sharing them and commenting on them over the next few days.
While there were a variety of responses, most of them revolved around a few common themes such as maturity, organization, training, practices etc. Here’s one response from someone who seems to summarize many of the problems quite well.
1. What do you see as the biggest problems facing the technology product management profession today?
The lack of adequate portfolio management and planning. Poorly defined roles and processes for product management within organizations. Lack of executive support for Product Management (Senior level executives that understand the value of PM and are champions for it). Strategy execution and alignment are also important issues we have. Communicating the strategy in roadmaps and across the organization is an area I find many organizations lacking in, but also aligning the day to day product management task to the product and corporate strategy.
2. What solutions would you suggest to address these problems?
As a community we need to be able to precisely and clearly state the value proposition of PM to upper management, development and all other organizations PM touches. We need to form a community of practice that takes all of the best practices defined by StageGate, Pragmatic Marketing, Sequent Learning, ZigZag, PDMA, AIPMM and others and communicates the practical applications of these practices by industry. Focused more on real world application of best practices. Need to determine ways of measuring success within product management. We could probably take and adapt some metrics and performance systems for Corporate Performance Monitoring methods and strategy execution.
To whomever provided the above, all I can say is Amen!
More to come. Stay tuned.
Saeed