Product Management 1

The Product Champion  Nearly every successful project has a Product Champion who: Develops the Vision Document. Manages customer expectations. Negotiates with the development team, the customer, the marketing department, the project manager, and the company executives. Adjudicates the inevitable conflicts that arise over scope and budget. 2

Role of the Product Champion  Manage the elicitation process and determine when enough requirements are discovered.  Manage the conflicting inputs from all stakeholders.  Make the trade-offs necessary to find the set of features that delivers the highest value to the greatest number of stakeholders.  Own the product vision.  Advocate for the product.  Negotiate with management, users, and developers.  Defend against feature creep. 3

Role of the Product Champion (Cont’d)  Maintain a “healthy tension” between what the customer desires and what the development team can deliver in the release time frame.  Be the representative of the official channel between the customer and the development team.  Manage the expectations of customers, executive management, and the marketing and engineering teams.  Communicate the features of the release to all stakeholders. 4

Role of the Product Champion (Cont’d)  Review the use cases and requirements to ensure that they conform to the true vision represented by the features.  Manage the changing priorities and the addition and deletion of features.  And never give up, never surrender. 5

The Product Manager’s Recipe for Success  Take  2 parts requirements management  1 part development experience  1 part commercial practices  1 part marketing (measure dose carefully!)  Mix with plain common sense  Bake in user’s oven until done 6

Primary Activities for a Product Manager  Keep focus almost exclusively on the success of the product in the marketplace.  Major activities:  Driving the Vision  Maintaining the Product Road Map  Defining the Whole Product Plan  Sponsoring the Use-Case Model and Supplementary Requirements  Testing the Product Concept  Completing the User Experience  Defining Commercial Terms  Positioning and Messaging 7

Driving the Vision  The product manager must facilitate the elicitation and analysis of inputs regarding requirements and ensure that the proper conclusions are reached.  When there are conflicting constraints the product manager must “make the call”. 8

Sources of Input for the Visioning Process  Customers: stakeholders and end users  Product authors and inventors  Operating systems and platforms  Company objectives  Development team insights  Competitive products  Other resident systems and applications  Analysts and subject matter experts  Technological constraints and breakthroughs 9

Maintaining the Road Map  The product manager’s role is to gain agreement on what should be done and what can be done and to then use this information to synthesize and optimum path to market, based on constraints in the internal and external environment and the allocation of specific features to successive releases.  He/she represents the results of this in a simple timeline chart 10

Defining the Whole Product Plan  Aside from the Vision Document the product manager must develop a complete product plan that answers questions like: What specific services will be provided to help customers succeed with the product? What role does the customer support organization play in assuring customer success? What different configurations of the product are available? What third-party products, if any, are needed to make this product usable? 11

Defining the Whole Product Plan (Cont’d) What special hardware, significant bandwidth, secure access, or other computing resources are needed? How is the user supported with respect to installation, upgrades, maintenance, or usage problems? What licensing provisions will be applied for commercial sale and use? What price are customers willing to pay for the product, and over what period? 12

Defining the Whole Product Plan (Cont’d)  The Whole Product Plan should cover the four dimensions of a successful customer solution: 1. The product itself 2. Accompanying services and support 3. The commercial terms that define the business relationship between you and your customer 4. The documentation you provide to help assure your customers’ success 13

Sponsoring the Use-Case Model and Supplementary Requirements  The Product Manager helps the development team to define the use- case model for the product to ensure that all prospective users’ needs are met in the implementation and reflected in specific use cases.  In addition, he/she will leads the team to an understanding of the key nonfunctional requirements. 14

Testing the Product Concept  The Product Manager will ensure that the product concepts will be tested at every opportunity with the customer.  Specifically, the PM will work with the sales organization to identify and engage customers to assist with beta testing. 15

Completing the User Experience  The Product Manager must attend to a variety of additional artifacts that directly affect the user experience. For example: User documentation Online help systems Tool tips Embedded copyright notices Corporate and third-party component logo compliance 16

Defining Commercial Terms  The PM must facilitate or define licensing and licensing enforcement policies.  The PM must facilitate or define product pricing and discount schedule  The PM must facilitate or define support policies, including access mechanisms, support levels, service-level agreements, upgrade policies, and pricing for same. 17

Positioning and Messaging  The PM may be responsible for product positioning and the generation of a message platform.  The product positioning highlights your product’s strengths, minimizes its weaknesses, and ultimately causes customers to select your software over the competition.  Use specific words and phrases in specific sequence. 18

Statement of Purpose for Product Positioning For(target customer) Who(statement of the need or opportunity) The (product name)is a (product category) That(statement of key benefit, that is, compelling reason to buy/use) Unlike(primary competitive alternative) Our product(statement of primary differentiation) 19

Statement of Purpose for Product Positioning This product is for (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity). The (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit, that is, compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation). 20

Supporting Activities  Other activities that the Product Manager should be involved with include: Branding and Product Labeling (naming the product and product features) End User Training Materials (providing or finding requisite subject matter expertise) Product Demo (providing demo script and supporting data) Sales and Marketing Collateral (developing and delivering sales training material) 21

The Product Champion in an IS/IT Shop  There is no marketing department.  Your customers work with you.  It’s difficult to find a PM who can represent all users.  The best solution is to establish a PM and a Change Control Board (CCB).  The PM can manage the project and the CCB can make the difficult decisions. 22