Product Management Responsibilities

As I have been studying up on my responsibilities as the Product Manager for our All In One Solutions, I came across an excellent web site that collected the survey responses from about 1,500 product managers. The web site is: www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/survey/2009

As part of this information, they have an excellent graphic showing the various responsibilities of these product managers. This is a fairly overwhelming list of activities that span the spectrum.

To try to focus on the key items, I pulled out just the ones that were covered by 60% of those surveyed. The resulting view is:


This list represent a more practical view of activities where I feel I should be spending my time and boils down to these 6 activities (see: www.mironov.com/assets/What_PMs_Do-HassEdDev.ppt):

1. Product Requirements
2. Program Status
3. Roadmaps and Long Term Strategy
4. Meeting Customers (Selling)
5. Meeting Customers (Listening)
6. Internal Evangelism
   

All of these activities are equally important ... don't short change item number 6! Transformations are all about people and people's acceptance of the change. Point #6 is critical to reinforcing any change within the organization!

Hopefully, you will find this information interesting and helpful. Thanks for reading...

What is Product Management

My last post was about my new assignment as the Product Management of our All In One (AIO) SAP Solutions and I had described what AIO was at Emergys Corp. Today I thought I'd elaborate on what I view Product Management to be and the responsibilities that I now have.

As I was in discussions with my bosses (we all have many these days, right?) about Product Management, I had begun to do some research on exactly what I was signing up for. Coincidently, a customer of ours was asking similar questions, so the research I had undertaken actually was used in a presentation to them.

My sources included:

http://www.sequentlearning.com/
"The Product Manager’s Desk Reference" by Steven Haines
http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/survey/2009


"Characteristics"

The bottom line is, as the Product Manager, YOU own the product. It is your responsibility to help this "baby" grow! How do I do that?

Well, let's start with the characteristics of a Product Manager.

1. Personal Skills - this is about you (or me in my case). I need to develop the skills of being entrepreneurial, learn to network with peers/groups, be passionate about your product (it's your baby, after all!) Be able to answer the questions about what should happen now and what should happen next.
   
2. Business Skills - detect opportunities, work with your customers/marketing to identify trends, drive business cases, don't loose sight of P&L
3. Team Building Skills - be a talent manager, develop human capital in your team, help them grow their skills, see your baby as their baby, align them with your drive to help your product succeed

So what do you think? Do you have all of those skills? If you're like me, you have some of them in various shades of ability and much to develop and improve on ... but that's what's so exciting about new assignments!

In my next post I'll elaborate on more of the day to day stuff.

Thanks for reading....

Blog 1 - Day 1 - An Introduction

I've recently been named the Product Manager for our "All In One" SAP Solutions here at Emergys Corp and I'm truly excited to take on this challenge! My background is Project Management. Not too dissimilar from Product Management ... or so I think now. I thought it would be interesting for me to share the "trials and tribulations" of making this transition in my own personal career and maybe even gain some insight from you, the reader!

What is "All In One"

First off, I think I need to introduce what is meant by "All In One." SAP is an extremely powerful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application. There are literally modules available to run ANY business activity imaginable. Due to this robustness, it can be very over whelming to implement; especially for the "small and medium" size business. By leveraging our own knowledge gained since 1989, we've created solutions for particular business industries. Think of these solutions as a complete application made up of various SAP modules already integrated, configured, developed, tested, and ready to install at your company. These solutions have been test, reviewed, and SAP certified as ready to go. With this approach, we are building on the decades of SAP experience with business process to delivery "best of breed" and industry leading processes to run your business already packaged together and ready to be delivered.

Let me make an analogy. You go to a store and purchase MS Office. It comes with Powerpoint, Excel, Word, Outlook, etc. You may not use all of those tools, but you buy that bundle and install them all. It's the same with an AIO Solution. You will obtain 100's of business processes which you may or may not use, but you will have them. So as your business needs change and grow, the solution can change and grow with you.

Likewise, you aren't going to tell Word how to generate a document. It will generate the document the way that Word will generate a document. Frankly, you don't really care about how it does it, just so it does. Now you do want to customize that document: put your name, your address, your logo, etc into that document, but exactly how that document is created is really irrelevant. Likewise with an AIO Solution.

Some people think that they need to tell SAP how to run their business they way they have always run their business. But guess what? That may not be the smartest thing. Is the way you're running your business buying you a competitive advantage? Is it generating revenue as efficiently and effectively as you could? Or are your processes today being done because that's what worked when you started and you've not bothered to change or improve them.

AIO offers you the chance to use the best of breed processes to make changes that streamline the business in an integrated ERP solution that will grow as your business grows.

Okay, okay, I know I'm sounding like a sales guy ... but I'm really a passionate guy about this next step in my career!

Thanks for reading along...