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Guest Post: Measuring Product Management (part 1)

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This is part 1 of a series of guest posts by Don Vendetti. Don is the founder of Product Arts, a product management consulting company in Seattle.

NOTE: If you’d like to write a guest post, contact us and let us know about your idea.

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Measuring Product Management – The Executive Viewpoint

There have been plenty of discussions about how to measure and demonstrate the value of Product Management within companies.    From posts on this site:

and from a recent roundtable at the October Seattle ProductCamp, there’s an obvious challenge for the profession.

I decided to follow the prescribed Product Management protocol – I went out and talked to my customers.

Here’s the feedback from some senior executives running technology companies.

My list of execs is comprised of 12 individuals from my contact list, most of whom I’ve worked with at some point and are now scattered around in varying roles.   All have been on the senior executive staff of at least one company.

Most are in the Seattle area, some are CEO/COOs, some are technical heads, some are marketing heads and several have worn multiple hats – business development, engineering, marketing, general manager, program management.   Some have been product managers at some point or managed it as a function.

Company size varied from multi-billion dollar enterprises to startups still trying to get off the ground.

I contacted them through email initially with 3 questions:

  1. What is the value that product management brings to your company or to your department?
  2. How would you measure success for the group and individuals, i.e. on what metrics would you reward them?
  3. (Bonus question) Have you found product management to be effective in meeting the goals, in your experience.

On some of the responses, I probed further through email or met with them in person to discuss.   Some responses were intriguing.

Question 1.  What is product management’s overall value to your company?

There was a strong agreement of the strategic value expected from product management, and that fell into a few categories:

  • Bringing an understanding of the customer and the market into the company
  • Creating a vision, direction, and focus for the product internally and externally
  • Defining product/business plans to meet company strategy and objectives
  • Evangelizing the market needs and product solutions internally

At a tactical level, the front-runners were:

  • Managing product features, product requirements, competitive analysis, prioritization and roadmaps
  • Working with and supporting other functional groups – development, sales, support, marketing

Some comments included:

(VP Eng) “Product Management needs to be the voice of the customer AND the business and they need to advocate for both.”

(VP Biz Dev/PM) “Product management provides a key linkage between our end customers, the field sales and support organizations that support them, our engineering and QA teams responsible for product innovation and delivery, and our executive team from an overall company and product strategy perspective.”

(COO) “Overall product direction and roadmap, clearinghouse for requirements, driver of product delivery.”

(VP Eng) “Right brain, big picture, strategy, positioning, how to win in the market.  Bring customer view into company.  Outline the product needed.   Evangelize the product internally.”

(VP Corp Dev) “Ability to distill corporate goals and objectives and customer / market needs into products (services / solutions) that are built and sold at positive margins!  That includes not just having the bright ideas, but the organizational savvy to make them real.”

Some interesting comments came from multiple respondents involved in Agile. They indicated the value of product management is even higher in that environment.  Working as the Product Owners with Development seems to raise their visibility as an integral piece of the machine.

(VP Eng) “In the modern world of Agile the product management role is even more critical. They are often embedded in a SCRUM team as a product owner or business owner. These highly cross-functional teams can move quickly and demand that the role is in touch with the business and on-demand available to the team – in early iterations for prototyping and market validation, in mid iterations for feature build-out and in late iterations for sustaining and ongoing investments.”

Take-Away

If I rephrase some of the key expectations from above, here is what I come up for the primary value product management brings to a company:

  • Creates a shared awareness of the customer and market needs to the internal functions
  • Drives product solutions that meet both market  needs and company goals
  • Facilitates and supports cross-functional and external activities required to achieve the planned objectives

So if this is what is valued, then what is actually measured?    I’ll get to that in part 2.

Don

Also in this series:

Measuring Product Management (part 1)
Measuring Product Management (part 2)
Measuring Product Management (part 3)