The PMQC brings you a different slant this time. Today, we are hearing from Gerardo Capiel, CEO at Gydget, a social marketing platform for music groups, sports teams, non-profits and other organizations. Gerardo is not your typical Product Manager, as you’ll learn, but much of what he says rings true for Product Management professionals.
Q: How did you become involved in Product Management and was it planned?
A: I have not had a specific Product Management title, but I have been a key influencer in the Product Management process for much of my career.
Q: What are the biggest challenges that Product Managers face?
A: Determining priorities based on input from different customer groups.
Q: What is your greatest Product Management achievement?
A: Changing a company strategy and building a whole new product in under three months to support the strategy.
Q: What was your worst Product Management mistake and how did you recover?
A: There have been many, but the most significant was ignoring the conclusions from a consumer survey we ran. Common mistakes have been attempting to build too many features into subsequent releases or not enough into an initial release to make the product useful to even one customer segment.
Q: What Product Management tool(s) would you consider most effective and why?
A: Trac, Excel/Google Docs, Survey Monkey and Wikis. Trac is free and has most of the functionality needed. Using spreadsheets, particularly Google Docs, is great for providing company wide summaries of key priorities and sorting and weighting priorities. Survey Monkey is great for collecting customer input and priorities. Wikis are great for document product features and collecting input.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: It depends on the organization, its industry, the skills of the managers and the stage of the company. When a company is pre-revenue, the company needs to be nimble and innovative, thus product management may better fall under engineering or the CTO. However, it depends on the skills of the leaders of that group. If the VP of Engineering or the CTO is not good at communicating with customers, then that may not be the best approach. In a more mature company, product management may better fall into marketing where product releases need to be better coordinated with Product Marketing, Sales and Customer Service, and also need to more heavily weight the feedback from those groups.
Q: How has your experience as a Product Manager influenced you as a CEO or founder?
A: It has has given me a better understanding of the challenges a Product Manager faces and how truly hard it is to build great products. I place a lot of importance of the role of Product Management, even in pre-revenue companies and have made sure than even in a small start-up, that role is clearly defined and staffed.
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to transition from a Product Manager role to CEO (or founder), what would you tell them?
A: A founder does not need to be CEO. I think the skills to be a good CEO are very different from those necessary to be a good Product Manager. I think Product Managers should aspire to be entrepreneurs and founders, but not necessarily CEOs. CEOs need to be good at fundraising, sales, hiring, start-up finance, managing outside vendors and setting high level vision. None of those skills are absolutely necessary to be a good Product Manager.
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Gerardo’s question for The Productologist:
Q: What do you think makes a great Product Manager?
A: Ahh, greatness…what is the definition of a GREAT Product Manager? Greatness definitely depends on the shape and maturity of the organization and product. I have mentioned this previously, but being a successful Product Manager at a small company requires different skills than at a large one.
There are some skills/characteristics that overlap, such as the following:
- good listening skills
- analytical, both fiscal and situation
- communication skills with a broad range of individuals
- organization
- results-oriented
Without these minimal skills, a Product Manager will not be successful, no matter what size the company or product. These are are the “you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-this-ride” skills.
For small organizations, you have to add these:
- comfort with ambiguity
- comfort with constant change
- generalized Marketing, Sales, and Project Management abilities
- autonomy
- bootstrapping
- try-and-fail
Product Managers at large organizations typically don’t need those and in some cases, those skills/preferences may actually hinder success. For example, even though large organizations are perfectly setup for fostering try-and-fail (diverse products, broad revenue streams, etc), they frequently reinforce with managers the exact opposite–”don’t even think about it, unless you are sure.”
This modus operandii creates an environment of “analysis paralysis” where no decision can be made or idea tested without thorough evaluation and buy-in from executives (I’m not trying to malign executives here, just that’s were most of the roadblocking happens at large companies with regard to this issue). That situation is exactly why skunk works teams happen.
In large organizations, Product Management has a much more formal role and process is a greater factor in how things get done. For that reason, Product Managers at bigger companies need the following skills/preferences:
- navigate/operate bureaucracy
- engage formal process
- focused function
- manage large-scale initiatives
So, there is no single set of characteristics that make a Product Manager great, but great Product Managers know how to create, launch, and nurture products that solve a market problem, no matter what the mechanism they use to accomplish that is.
A little more about Gerardo:
Gerardo Capiel has been in the software industry for over 15 years. His prior experiences have been as a systems integration consultant, the CTO and co-founder of an email marketing technology company and the CEO of a social media marketing technology start-up.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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Tags: career, ceo, consumer survey, CTO, customer groups, customer input, customer segment, Customers, feedback, founder, Gerardo Capiel, Gydget, influencer, initial release, Marketing, new product, platform, priorities, product management, Skunk works, social marketing, software, survey monkey, Trac
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The end of the year is a time for reflection (and so frequently, hasty efforts to catch up). In between all the hustle and bustle of the last few days of 2008, take some time to count your accomplishments, cherish your blessings in life, and examine your challenges. Life, like Product Management, requires understanding the market, identifying some requirements, and measuring how well you met those requirements. Then you start the cycle again for the next release. Make sure YOU are ready for YOUR next release.
No more posts from me, save a few twitters here and there, but there’s already some great stuff in the pipeline for 2009 including some more Product Management Question Corners and book reviews. I’ve also gotten a few questions via email, so I will put some posts together around answering those.
To all my readers, old and new, thanks for tagging along. May we all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.
Ivan Chalif
The Productologist
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Tags: Book Review, challenges, Ivan Chalif, pipeline, product management, reflection, Time, twitter
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Today’s Product Management Question Corner brings us some insights from Mary K. Marsden (she prefers just Mary K), New Business Leader for Retail and CPG accounts at Acxiom, a developer of large-scale enterprise business intelligence and marketing databases. While Acxiom is not a start up in any sense of the word, Mary K has participated in her fair share of entrepreneurial efforts. Read more below about how she leveraged her Product Management experience in CEO and leadership roles.
Q: How did you become involved in Product Management and was it planned?
A: No, this aspect of my career was not planned. When I was working in Marketing Communications at Novell back in 1988, we were growing so fast and having challenges recruiting people our executive team expanded marketing’s responsibility and that is when I got my first leadership role in Product Marketing.
We were divided into 2 discipline areas Product Marketing and Product Engineering. Product marketing was responsible for the market requirements, pricing, release schedules, communicating with Sales, Marcom, PR, product launches, new release priorities, bug fix priorities… We were also responsible for the business case and presenting any new products to the innovation center. Product Engineering defined the most efficient way to develop the product we had designed.
Q: What are the biggest challenges that Product Managers face?
A: I believe the biggest challenge Product Managers face is knowing how to prioritize product functionality. What do customers really need and will pay for. It is easy to fall in love and start creating products and services but will the market value the product and will they pay for it. The balance of development to revenue is a perpetual challenge.
Q: What is your greatest Product Management achievement?
A: My greatest achievement again was at Novell releasing an SDK (software developers kit) in conjunction with Microsoft’s operating system release. Microsoft did not make it easy for partners/competitors to write software to their platform. Getting a product out the door on schedule, that worked was a Herculean accomplishment for our team.
Q: What was your worst Product Management mistake and how did you recover?
A: We developed a computer telephony application that was a “great idea” only we could never get the telco companies to adopt our products. We did not recover and the company failed. We did not understand the market, and we created the product mostly in a vacuum with some input from consumers. We learned a hard lesson on that one; we had raised $1M in venture funding based on our business plan and a rough prototype, getting the money was the easier part getting into the market proved impossible for us.
Q: What Product Management tool(s) would you consider most effective and why?
A: Listening. Listening to the market, your customers or potential customers, your competitors… I know you wanted me to suggest a tool, the tool does not matter if the product team is not listening.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: I believe the best place is aligned with marketing. Understanding the market, the gaps and the clear needs of the customer are critical to Product Management success. Also the release cycles are so rapid now and most of the debugging is done in partnership with the customer – putting Product Management customer facing is the best for the organization and the customers.
Q: How has your experience as a Product Manager influenced you as a CEO or founder?
A: Having a product management background made me a better CEO it let me focus the company’s resources effectively. We spent our time and money on product features that made a competitive difference. It also taught me how to communicate with my development team and how to architect the solution I wanted without telling them what to do. That gave the team the space to be creative within the needs of the business. My background in Product Management also made me a better judge of time lines. We got the first version of our platform to market on time, that keeps the investors happy and that is important in the very early stages of the business.
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to transition from a Product Manager role to CEO (or founder), what would you tell them?
A: Spend a year or two in Marketing, Marcom, and/or Sales–all the customer-facing functions. You will learn to “hear the customer needs” and be able to translate that into products, and services. You will learn to prioritize and manage the resources of your company much more effectively. Also you will see the gaps in the market and come up with better ideas. Don’t create a product in a vacuum; 9 out of 10 companies fail because they create products no one cares about or ever hears about.
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Mary K’s question for The Productologist:
Q: What is the biggest challenge product managers face in today’s development environment? What company has the best product managers – why, what do they do that others don’t?
A: There are many Product Management challenges, but the biggest one is the lack of consistency in Product Manager roles across (and sometimes even within) companies. There are so many differences in job descriptions, functional responsibilities, placement in the organization, and goals, that it is difficult to make the transition between one Product Management job and another.
Take positions like Account Manager, Marcom Director, or Development Manager. They each have relatively defined roles, responsibilities, and success characteristics. It’s not guaranteed that a Marcom Manager at one company will be a success at another, but the variance in the necessary skills and experience to be a good fit across several companies is minimal.
On the flip side, 20 Product Management job postings could have 20 unique skill sets and experience requirements, as well as be situated in many different areas of the organization. Is the team Agile-based or do they do more traditional waterfall? If it’s Agile, what flavor? These little differences matter a lot. At start ups versus mature companies, Product Management might not even look like the same job!
While diversity is usually a good thing within an organization, it can hinder the development of Product Management professionals by making job requirements so specific that very few candidates are actually a good fit, at least on paper. With that in mind, it’s difficult to say which companies, if any, turn out the best Product Managers. Big companies typically have a lot of process in place, so their Product Managers get a healthy dose of that, for better or worse, but they are also highly specialized, so they lack the broad general skills required in smaller teams. Product Managers at small companies get a lot of experience working directly with many functional areas within an organization, but they don’t get to do many of the purely Product Management tasks because they are spread so thin.
That’s why hiring Product Managers can be such a difficult and drawn out process. It’s a lot like trying to find a good dance partner…it’s not one-size-fits-all.
A little more about Mary K:
Mary K is a proven entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in global marketing and management with some of the software industry’s best companies. Over the last decade, Mary K has built two successful consulting companies that focused on strategic management marketing and the “smart application and commercialization of technology”. Her clients included leaders in the industry, such as Microsoft, Novell, HP, and Fujitsu. Prior to that Mary K had a very successful management tenure with Novell, Inc. during the rapid growth stage. She has also led the successful commercialization of dozens of software products and rolled-out over 20+ companies in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan.
Popularity: 18% [?]
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Tags: Acxiom, agile, API, balance, business intelligence, business leader, ceo, challenges, communicate, competitive, Customers, Engineering, focus, Innovation, leadership, leadership role, leadership roles, Listening, Marcom, Marketing, marketing databases, Mary K. Marsden, new product, Novell, platform, prioritize, product management, product marketing, prototype, release cycles, release schedule, release schedules, SIG, software developers kit, start ups, UI
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