Real-World Tips and Advice for Software Product Managers
One of the key contributions that a Product Manager can make is to provide regular, bite-sized input to the sales force about product benefits and competitive advantages. So often, sales reps are thrown into quarterly (or even less frequent) product training sessions consisting of more than an hour's worth of material poured into a single hour's ...
Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.
Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.
What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.
As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.
Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one
Of the myriad responsibilities that Product Managers take on, probably the most challenging one is training the sales force. It's like teaching at a troubled inner city school. You have to create all your own learning materials. You get no support from the people who run things. The class is disobedient and out of control. Then, ...
You often see job listings for Product Managers that describe the role as "product champion." It sure sounds interesting, but what exactly does it mean? Just what do you have to do to be the champion of a product? Product Managers are also often described as the "owner" of the product, or the "product CEO" (that's ...
In an earlier topic called "Product Positioning: Where Do You Stand?" I discuss product positioning to give your product a unique and highly competitive placement in the market. One of the outcomes of the process of determining the focus of your product - in terms of such elements as target market, users and features - ...
As the software industry has developed from its infancy, companies have learned to provide very specific services around the core software product. They have gradually come to understand that these services - such as project management, implementation consulting, training, and software customization - are essential to the product's success. Companies that have pushed the envelope ...
"Product positioning" is the high fallutin' term for deciding how your product is unique and how it compares to the competition. Companies embark on a product positioning effort in order to be able make the product appeal to the specific type of customer the company has selected as the best prospect. This target customer may ...
Socrates, the founding father of Greek and Western philosophy and self-styled gadfly who got under the skin of ancient Athenian society, pioneered a way of teaching that he called the Socratic Method. It consisted of asking a series of questions that challenged his students to drill down into the deepest logic of their arguments, and ...
One thing that gets clearer with every new discussion I have with a Product Manager is that there may be nothing more important than your soft skills. You may find they're the only tool you can rely on to create change, improve coordination between Marketing and Engineering, prepare the sales force to effectively sell the ...
Alyssa Dver is the author of the book Software Product Management Essentials Today's issue is devoted to an interview with Alyssa S. Dver, author of the newly published "Software Product Management Essentials, A Practical Guide for Small and Mid-Sized Companies." "Often, we Product Managers get so caught up in what we have to do, that we don't ...