Heath: And it’s like no, no, a Gantt chart is not what we need for the roadmaps. BPMA is its own thing. Some even say “I didn’t know what a product manager … Right. Executing … Either whether the feature’s needed at all, or how to design it appropriately, or who it’s for and what situation they’re going to need it in. It’s about resource optimization; it’s not about achieving objectives. Decode and Conquer — Answers to Product Management Interviews: The author gives an industry insider’s perspective on how to conquer the most difficult PM interview questions. And in my mind it’s not actually the best one. But what’s different now is that as technology has spread from tech-focused business to virtually all businesses, and as businesses have started investing in technology, either they need a presence on the web, or they need an E-commerce capability, or they need a mobile app, or they need some sort of technology enablement for their even very traditional business, they’ve realized that hiring a bunch of engineers and sort of throwing them at building some stuff is not the recipe for success, at least not by itself. And I think it’s that he just has a very specific way that he wants it done, and he wants them to learn it from him rather than having their own perspective on it. And so I asked her, of course, this same question. And so confidently putting out a list of the features that you plan to ship, in your mind internally the vision of what value that adds to your customer and your business is very clear. Join us at members.productcoalition.com. But I will say that the problem underlying that is connecting strategy and execution. And so many businesses have moved to agile development. I have been, this is my third term. It’s not date-driven. And just because someone has done product management before, doesn’t mean that their experience is actually super applicable to your situation. I’m the president of BPMA. Product management is a multi-faceted, complex discipline that can be difficult to grasp and hard to master. There were a few things that made sense, but who the customer was and the underlying problems they had were the same. And are you gonna have it in this release? Heath: You end up with … and this is partly a commentary on Waterfall too, I suppose, but you end up releasing something, and then it’s the old adage if a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, did it make a sound? No credit card required. So that was great, so there wasn’t a huge delta in the functionality we needed to add. When one scrum team suddenly becomes 2, 3, or even 4 scrum teams, it can take time to adjust processes to be as effective as possible. There’s two reasons for that. And I think it’s that he just has a very specific way that he wants it done, and he wants them to learn it from him rather than having their own perspective on it. And so I created a complimentary product that would work with our CD-ROM product. Did it move the needle for you? Create beautiful roadmaps in minutes. And in talking with the salesperson, I was getting some weird signals about the features that he really valued in the old product. He adds that the failure rate for second products is just as high as it is for first products because executives often forget the importance of validation and experimentation. When we experience products, we do so through a primarily emotional lens. Bruce: Absolutely. I think it’s that he-. Now, I think that I might have been a little ahead of the market with that product, and also, in the end, I’m not sure people really were looking for a roadmapping product per se, because everybody’s process is a little different, and because a lot of people are really looking for more of a workflow Jura like thing, I think, for product management. It’s really the general manager or the owner of the product, the pull, the drug, which is very different than the owner of the product technology, at least in terms of their responsibilities, as I began to understood. Should you be listening to your customers? And I built this online letter shop where you could upload your list from the CD-ROM, and we did a partnership with Pitney Bowes for them to print pieces for you to do a mailing. It’s also very interesting the way titles are different in other industries. That’s a far more interesting conversation. But to the average customer or executive or investor, it’s not. But it seemed like there was still a huge problem in the area of people not really having good framework for roadmapping or prioritization. Well, sounds good, motherhood and apple pie, right? I’m the president of BPMA. And this seems like a distraction to us executing on our plan for selling the CD-ROMs. We just had one last night at Bentley University. Because it’s different everywhere, the hardest part is figuring out where to focus. You get-, Bruce: Project plans, Gantt charts, flowcharts. Instead of asking, What do you want? And then when that startup crashed and burned, I was looking for a job. So a community is a natural place for that to come together, and BPMA is really trying hard to fill that niche. Undefined Goals – When goals are not … Heath: She of course was not at the table, she being overseas, but I was doing it via Skype. And I thought this is gonna be awesome. I think there’s plenty of room to argue that this challenge is one universally faced by product managers regardless of the stage of their companies. What did I miss here? And we’ve actually expanded into some adjacent niches as well based on demand. And prioritization came up to the top. Now, according to the folks at Babson, just about all of them wanna be product managers. But what’s different now is that as technology has spread from tech-focused business to virtually all businesses, and as businesses have started investing in technology, either they need a presence on the web, or they need an E-commerce capability, or they need a mobile app, or they need some sort of technology enablement for their even very traditional business, they’ve realized that hiring a bunch of engineers and sort of throwing them at building some stuff is not the recipe for success, at least not by itself. But that’s not our strategy, it’s not our market. And that one was on the … we had a panel discussion on the working relationship between product and UX. And I learned a hard, hard lesson that day about first of all tying it to strategy, and second of all, doing your … managing your stakeholders, making sure you’ve got the whole plan from development to delivery to sales and marketing all figured out, and you’ve got the organization behind you. And also making sure that it’s not about deliverables and dates, but it’s about problems to be solved, it’s about broad themes. It’s the same or very similar kind of job in an agile context. So we announced at a certain point in time, Hey, we’re sunsetting this old product, and here’s this new product that you can have. Bruce: I do know that article, and I had this conversation with him about why he hires people who haven’t had product management experience before. Waterfall, 20th century concept. If you are planning on rolling out changes, well you’re not rolling them out in September, you’re just not. And he taught me all the essentials about cross-functional teams, about starting with why we’re doing this, and about the nuts and bolts of the job. And we still cooperate closely under the BPMA umbrella. And we still cooperate closely under the BPMA umbrella. I’ll probably delete that, because I think I’m misremembering it. When you and I started in product management, or when Janna started for that matter, it wasn’t that well known a discipline. It’s the old Henry Ford faster horse comment, right? As the product grows, the team needs to grow too or else the product manager will be spread too thin. And that’s okay, but it’s not really transformative, it’s not disruptive, it doesn’t take advantage of the real promise of technology. So, not that I wanna be heretical about not listening to your customers, but what things you prioritize and what tactical activities you engage in on your endless list really needs to be focused by your strategy. I’ve actually introduced myself as a product manager and had people say back to me, Oh, what’s it like being a project manager? Otherwise they end up just trying to build a better way to do that. Right. You’re usually outnumbered eight or ten to one by your engineers and by your salespeople. Now, I love the now, next, later format as well, and I use it as sort of my starting place when I’m doing a roadmap. Why did you write the book, and how did you decide on that as your topic? Bruce: And that was the other thing, was there are so many bad roadmaps out there. But I do mean the real constraints of coordination across business units or with your partners. And I think that’s working out really well. But the organization’s been around since 2001, and I’ve been a member ever since then, going to events and so on. In fairness, he also says he doesn’t believe in product roadmaps, and yet he clearly does. I got some terrific quotes that we used in the book. And then some of what you build now and next may change whether or not I feel good about that later stuff. And so I started telling him about my job, and he said, It sounds to me like we do the same job. And we usually have speakers or interactive sessions on things of interest to product people. When there is a lack of support, people do not proactively make the changes … The world's largest independent Product Management community. You end up with … and this is partly a commentary on Waterfall too, I suppose, but you end up releasing something, and then it’s the old adage if a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, did it make a sound? Heath: They’ve been on our show.Bruce: Right. It would be interesting, if not ice cream headache inducing, to break that down a level further. At the same time … well, for example, I looked on LinkedIn about a month ago. If you focus on the software, I found when I struggled most it was when I was spending too much time on the physical presentation of the roadmap, right? Well, like a lot of people, I kind of fell into it backward. The CD-ROM product was again it vended mailing lists using a meter, physical dongle. But I interviewed with them, and they liked me and I liked them, and they hired me. And it was the world’s first online letter shop. So things have not changed in that way. We weren’t surprised when 33% of product managers who participated told us aligning strategy as their organization grows is the biggest scaling-related challenge they face. I even ended up writing a short piece, like a 10-page report, on the difference between product management and project management for O’Reilly, for their online Safari subscription service, because they’re so frequently confused. I think the biggest challenge for a product manager is focus. You don’t hire product managers? I got really lucky, the guy who hired me, John Wang, went on to become the CMO of HTC, was a genius in product management, self-taught. There are situations where some more specificity about dates makes sense. And so it’s hard to have somebody else to really talk shop with, but also just talk about the soft side of it, the what’s it like doing the job. It’s not release-plan. Even if the company has launched the product and decided to go back to conduct research from the beginning, is n… Heath: Is there a national body as well that you’re a member of? The primary obligations of a project manager can be boiled down to handling difficult projects and obtaining positive results. Are you going to build a group of generalists who have more flexibility in what they do? But they have the catch-22 problem. And invariably, while we do talk about best practices, people come away saying, It’s just so good to connect with other people who know what I’m talking about and know what I’m going through. It seems like everybody has a story about how they had some other job and then they found out about product management. Because product management, even with all of this rise in hiring of product managers, it’s still a bit of a lonely job. And I, back then when I did that survey, started writing and talking about both topics. Because it’s interesting, back to when we started this discussion about how people get started in product management and how often the first few sentences of a job req are product management experience, it felt like to me it used to be that business analyst was almost the junior … was the first thing you did on your way to becoming a junior product manager then a product manager then a senior product manager. And what he means is, if you read it, is it’s not that I don’t hire them, of course we have them, but I don’t go seeking for those with the experience. If you can write a book about this, we will publish it. But in practice, they’re not often giving them more than a one-time training in scrum process, and hoping that it gets some, that it gets better. 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