7 questions software product managers must ask during a job interview

December 16, 2008 12 Comments

I was asked by Jeff Lash to answer a question for his blog on what questions a product manager could ask during a job interview to better understand the role of product management in the company. Here are my recommendations -

1) Why are you hiring a software product manager? - This is an important question to ask especially if you are going to be the first software product manager in the company. Why has the company decided that they need the first or an additional software product manager? Is it because they realize that they need to listen to the market needs more, is it a replacement for a software product manager who has left the company, or is it because the company is expanding into new markets? The answer to this question will reveal a lot of valuable information that will help you make a decision. Yes, job description that was advertised will give you an idea, but job descriptions tend to be too generic.landscape

2) What does product management do today or what is it expected to do going forward? – Unfortunately, product management’s role is so diverse from one company to another. In some companies, a software product manager is responsible for running the business – market research, product requirements, product packaging, pricing, go to market launch etc. – the role is truly strategic. In other companies, it is all about writing specs with very limited exposure to the customer (believe me such companies sadly exist). You want to know where the company you are interviewing with falls in this spectrum. Are you comfortable with how the company views the role of product management?

3) Who does product management report to? – Companies that truly understand the value of product management have product management reporting to marketing. The ones that least understand the value of it, make it report to engineering. Engineering is the last place for product management from an organizational point of view. If you want to truly build market driven products, you want product management to be independent of those folks who build the products. I have worked in both the organizations and the case where product management reported to engineering was an outright disaster. There was no healthy tension between those that understand the market (external facing) and those that build the products (internal facing). You cannot have the fox guard the hen house, can you?

4) Who determines the future direction of your products – marketing, sales or engineering? – This again helps you understand how the company values product management. If sales drives the future direction, then the future direction is forever changing based on what was heard at the last sale. If it is driven by engineering, then it is usually determined by what can be build. If it is run by marketing it is fine as long as it is “market” driven and not “marketing” driven. How much voice does product management  in determining the future direction based on the market needs?

5) How does the company listen to the customer needs? - Dig deeper into this because all companies will tout that they are customer driven, but there are a lot of companies who don’t walk the talk. Ask for specifics such as customer visits, focus groups, user surveys etc. – how often is this done and how is the input incorporated into the product development process? The best way to do this is to find names of some of the company’s customers and ask them. This will give you the true story of how the company is viewed in the eyes of the customer. It is harder to do this with enterprise software, but with small business software, this is easy to do. Dig into discussion forums, do Google search and you will be surprised as to how easily you can unearth names of some of the company’s customers.

6) How would you best describe the company culture? – If you get a blank stare when you ask about the “culture”, then you need not ask anything more. Companies with good culture will give you specific examples of how well they treat their employees. If you are being interviewed by multiple people, ask each one of them this question. Look at sites such as glassdoor.com to see if there are any reviews of the company by current or former employees.

7) What are the company’s short-term and long-term challenges? – Great companies will be able to give you a detailed answer to this question. This is because they are very clear on what they are and where they are headed. Yes, the future is not guaranteed. Beware of pompous claims of “we are the market leaders of this market and we have no competition” etc. Another way to do this is to ask “What could derail the company going forward?” – how credible is the answer you get? If you get an answer that nothing is going to derail the company, then beware.

Yes, we are in an economic climate where it is hard to find jobs, but not asking these questions in fear that you may not be selected would be a big mistake. Good companies that truly value their employees will appreciate candidates asking these questions because it exhibits diligence the candidate does before making a decision. Would you not want your employees doing due diligence before making decisions? And if you sense the company or the person who is interviewing you is irked or bothered by these harmless questions, then beware – the company may not be a good fit for you after all.

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Filed under recruiting

Two words that will make you and your business better

December 10, 2008 4 Comments

THANK YOU!

We all are busy, we have all those emails to read, all those meetings to attend, all those conference calls we have to be on. We don’t have time. But, keep in mind that we have the thankyousame 24 hours that Albert Einstein had, Madam Curie had, Mahatma Gandhi had, Martin Luther King had, Richard Branson has. It is what we do with it that makes the difference.

But when we are on this treadmill that we cannot seem to get off, I think it will benefit us and others to take the time to say those two little words that will make you and your business better than what it is today – THANK YOU. Whether this is to

  1. Your wife who took the time to pick up the kids in the evening because your meeting ran over or
  2. Your kid who wished you good luck when you were going out for an important business meeting or
  3. Your family member who called to wish you good luck during your job interview day or
  4. Your colleague who picked up lunch for you or
  5. Your office manager who ordered all the office supplies you needed or
  6. The candidate who took his/her precious time to interview for a job in your company and did not get selected or
  7. The prospect/friend/customer who send you one of their ideas – independent of how good their idea is or
  8. The stranger at the mall who held the door open for you so that you could roll the stroller in

and the list could go on.

Saying Thank you does not cost you anything but if said correctly makes someone’s lives happier and makes you a PERSONAL human being (not just a professional one).  What do I mean by correctly? Don’t say it when you are rushing through to your next meeting, when you are rushing through the door. Slow down, STOP, look at the person and say Thank you with a smile. If you are not face to face (especially in the case of 6 and 7), call them on the phone – take the time to do it because they took the precious time to interview with you or write to you. Don’t use email unless you have 10′s and 100′s of Thank you’s to say. Yes, this takes time but who said building a good personal or business relationship is easy ? Is it something you can live without? In the interconnected world we live in, you never know who knows whom, who needs whom and when. No one has regretted on his death bed that he thanked people one too many times.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you who read this blog. Thank you for taking the time to read and leave comments.

Now, go say Thank You to those who are helping you to have a great day. No one will be offended. They may not remember every instance when you said it, but those instances when you did not, will be etched in their memory.

Image: Courtesy of VirtualHug.Wordpress.com

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Filed under customer service

Cross selling to existing customers

December 6, 2008 1 Comment

This morning, I had to get an oil change and I drove up to the local Jiffy Lube. They charge $35 for an oil change. Cross selling to customersWhen I pulled in, they pulled up my car record and based on the mileage, they told me about the Honda recommended maintenance I have to do. Replacement of automatic transmission fluid and rotation of tires was due. They could do this if I could wait another 15 minutes. To remove any likely objection, they even threw in a 15% discount for all of the services. Why did I do it? – I knew I had to get these done but had forgotten about them – these were genuine maintenance things I had to get done. They did not push those services that I did not need – for example, they showed me the air filter and said it was fine. I was sold. Total charges = $154.

What is the lesson I took away from this – Jiffy Lube knew how to cross sell. First of all, they knew I was a return customer and based on my car records knew exactly what my needs were. They recommended solutions to satisfy those needs and got it all done, while gaining a larger share of my wallet. Not a small increment by any means – they got $119 more out of me than what I expected to spend when I drove in – a whopping 340% more.

How well do you know your customers? Do you treat each touch point with the customer as an isolated incident or does everyone who touches the customer know more about the customer’s needs than the customer himself? Is the customer aware of all the different products/services you offer for problems the customer likely has?

A mistake that companies make is assuming that the market is up-to-date on what products/services they offer. Customers don’t really care about a company’s products, they only care about solving their problems. It is up to us to create the awareness and cross sell these products/services to the customer. And don’t miss the opportunity to cross sell these products/services. But be genuine – offer only those services/products, the customer really needs – win the customer’s trust.

Retailers have figured this out the best – next to the toothbrushes are the toothpastes, dental flosses, teeth whitening strips, mouthwashes. Jiffy Lube is doing this very well.

Selling to existing customers is much cheaper compared to cost of acquiring new customers. Many companies forget this – Susan Oakes has an excellent blog post titled How not to retain key customers.

How well are we, as product managers, helping sales understand how to cross sell related products/services to existing customers?

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Image courtesy of Displays Plus Inc.

Filed under marketing

Secrets of success in 8 words and 3 minutes

December 4, 2008 1 Comment

Wondering about how to be successful – watch this video by Richard St. John delivered at Ted 2007.

Filed under leadership

Twitter 101 – 8 tips to get started on Twitter

December 3, 2008 19 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked by many folks how to get started on Twitter. I have had to give them the Twitter 101 to help them get started and hence I think it is worthy of a post.

But before I recommend on how to get started on Twitter – let me give you some examples on why you should care. The following articles would help you.

Business Uses for TwitterTwitter logo

How social media shared pain and rage of Mumbai

How to build a community of Twitter followers for your company

Now, if you are convinced, here are 8 tips that will get you started.

1. Create your Twitter account – Obviously, you need one. You can do this at twitter.com. When selecting a username, I will suggest to select the username that is your firstnamelastname – you want to do this because your name is your personal brand. Claim it before someone else does. Once you create your account, your URL will be http://twitter.com/USERNAME.

2. Add your photo - You don’t want to use the default Twitter photo. Add your own. This can be done by clicking on Settings – Picture. Please don’t add the picture of your cat or your dog or a cartoon you like. Add a photograph of yourself that shows your face. Be professional, your twitter account again is your personal brand. I don’t follow anyone who does not have a photo of themselves – I have heard that others don’t as well.

3. Fill out your online bio - This can be done again using Settings – Account. The field for one-line bio is half way down. This is important so that when others find you, they can get to know you better by understanding your interests. Here is my bio – Product Management and social media enthusiast

4. Create a budurl account - Your messages on Twitter (called tweets) are restricted to 140 characters. So if you want to post a message with a URL (to your blog post or some other interesting article that you find), you can lose a lot of these characters if the URL is long. BudURL allows you to shrink the URL to a smaller one. There are many such services available such as tinyurl, zi.ma etc. I use budurl because of its analytics – it tells you how many people clicked on each of your Budurl’s, where did the traffic come from etc.

5. Post some tweets – If you have a blog, post links to your blog posts with a budurl for the blog post. For example, here is how I would post a tweet about this blog post – Twitter 101 – How to get started on Twitter – http://budurl.com/twitter101. If you do not have a blog, post links to interesting articles you find that are relevant to your interests (professional, hobbies etc.) and one that you think will be useful to others who have similar interests, post them as a tweet. For example, here are some that I have posted.

Twitter sample postThe reason you want to start posting tweets before you try to follow others is because you want to again showcase your interests via these tweets. I would advise against posting tweets such as “I am having lunch”, “I am feeling sleepy”, “My dog is sick” etc. – yes, you can do this once in a while, but if that is all you do, you are not exchanging any useful information to those you might decide to follow you. I, for one, do not follow anyone if all they do is tweet such things. I look at twitter account as part of my professional brand that I would like my business acquaintances / future employers to see.

6. Start following others – Just like how you don’t want to blog in a vacuum, you don’t want to tweet in a vacuum either. Use search.twitter.com and search for people who have posted tweets in areas of your interests. For example, if you run marathons, search for running marathon. You will find tweets from a bunch of people with similar interests. Click on their photographs and then click the Follow button. Some of them will follow you back and some of them won’t. Don’t take it personally if some of them don’t.

7. Give, give, give – Share your knowledge, share articles that will be useful to your followers. Give, give, give. If you find interesting articles posted by people who you follow, Retweet them. The syntax is RT@USERNAME and their tweet – where USERNAME is the name of the person whose tweet you are retweeting. For example, if you want to retweet one of my posts, it would look like.

RT @gopalshenoy – Updated my blog post – Yes, it is a piece of a cake, but … http://budurl.com/cake2

If someone asks a question via their tweet (for example, I am having problems with gmail – anyone having the same?) and you want to reply to this person, the syntax would be

@USERNAME – No my gmail works fine – where USERNAME is the name of the person whose tweet you are replying to.

8. Be professional – No flame wars, no name calling, no swear words (OK, it is fine to use WTF once in a while but I would avoid it). Post everything in a professional manner. Two litmus tests – would your future employer like to see what you have posted and still give you a job? Would your family be ashamed to read what you have posted?

Once you get familiar with twitter (believe me it is addicting), you can checkout the following tools:

1) Tweetdeck - Client that you will need to install

2) Twitter grader - If you want to boost your ego on where you stand compared to other Twitter users and also to find some new people to follow.

3) Twitter feed

4) Mr.Tweet

5) Twitterberry – if you want to tweet from your blackberry

and there are a whole lot more.

Getting started is the toughest part, after that you will learn as you go and figure out how to use Twitter the way it works best for you. Good luck.

If you have any questions, follow me on Twitter and tweet the questions to me using the syntax in #7. I am learning as I go myself, so if you find other interesting tips, please tweet them as well.

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Filed under twitter

Yes, it is a piece of cake, but ….

December 2, 2008 3 Comments

It is quite common for people to say that doing something is a piece of cake. It is very easy to say this especially if you are not the one doing it. I have personally heard this many times from my upper management – “oh, that should be so simple to do that you should have it implemented in a couple of hours”. Yeah, right!Piece of Cake

Like everything else, there is no free lunch. It sure might take the developer only couple of hours to write the code. But what about testing time, what about the time to fix bugs? What about the time it takes to document the new feature? What about time to test the new widget during the software updates so that there are no regressions? – God forbid if the few customers who use it are the most vociferous one who will scream bloody murder if something breaks.

Let us take the simple example of adding a checkbox to your UI – sounds simple right? Let us consider some of the details that you will have to account for.

1. What is the default value for the checkbox?

2. What should happen when the checkbox is checked or unchecked? Should the impact be immediate or time delayed?

3. Does it remember the state when selected?

4. Are there conditions that have to be satisfied before the checkbox can be checked or unchecked?

5. Does checking/unchecking automatically change the status of other UI elements? If yes, which ones?

6. Should the checkbox be grayed out in any particular case?

7. What is the label of the checkbox? If you support international languages, what are the labels in the different languages?

8. If your product is a web product, does it work well in all the browsers you support?

You can see how quickly things add up in terms of details. I am not saying that this change cannot be done in couple of hours, maybe it can be. But to say it is so easy to do may not be accurate unless you get to the nitty gritty details.

So, it sure might be a piece of cake, but it may take a long time to bake!

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Image courtesy of BakingBites.com

Filed under product management

Did Mumbai graduate”Twitter” to mainstream?

December 1, 2008 1 Comment

Last Wednesday, Mumbai experienced one of the worst terrorist attacks (if not the worst) seen by India since its independence in 1947. 200 people were killed and over 325 were injured in the 60 hour carnage carried out Twitter logoby Islamic terrorists, with nexus to Pakistan’s ISI. The country and the world remained glued to CNN as it covered the attacks and the response by India’s National Security Guards for 3 days.

But in midst of all of this, there was this one little tool that kept people far and wide updated on the latest – Twitter. With 80 tweets every 5 seconds, mainstream media could not catch up. While the mainstream media was recycling the information they had already broadcast, Twitter was giving all of its members not only the latest but different perspectives as well.

Even CNN.com whom I commend for its continuous coverage of this event, summed it up; “It was the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with.”

Did this sad and inhumane event help Twitter graduate to mainstream? I think it did. What do you think?

If you are not on Twitter, what are you waiting for? Follow me on twitter.

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Filed under twitter

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