Product Management Tips by Gopal Shenoy

I had mentioned in my last post that I would post tips from my experience looking for a job as a product manager - in fact I had to do this twice in the last 7 months. So here is what worked for me … Remember one thing - job hunting is nothing but a marketing and sales job of a single product - You !

1) Don’t respond to job postings unless you want your resume to end up in a pile.

2) Get your foot in the door: Instead, if you find a job in a company X that you want to apply for, use social networking sites such as LinkedIn (this is the only one I use) to see if you are connected to someone who works there or if one of your connections knows someone who works there - then get recommended. You are looking to get a foot in the door and get the first phone call. Candidates who have been recommended by internal sources will at least get the first phone call - it is up to you to take it from there. If you know someone at the company, it will also give you an inside scoop - what is the real story, how is it to work there, anything about your future boss you need to know about - his/her management style etc.

3) Call the hiring manager: If you are not connected to anyone, again use LinkedIn to see who the hiring manager could be - I look for titles such as VP of Product Strategy, VP of Marketing, VP of Product Management etc. If LinkedIn does not have it, look at the company’s website under the Team/Management section. Then call the company and ask for that person - if you do get the person on the line (tough because people are travelling or are in meetings), tell them who you are and why you are calling. If you get the standard response of apply for the job and send it to HR, be frank and tell them that you are trying to get your resume visible and ask if you can send the resume to him/her so that he/she can send it to the hiring manager. There is nothing wrong in asking, worst response you can get is a No. A lot of times this will work and it also shows your initiative and strong interest. Then email your resume within a day so that your name is still fresh in the other person’s mind. Followup with the person via email (no phone calls) after a week if you have not heard anything.

4) Email the hiring manager (long shot): If you do not get hold of the hiring manager over the phone, then try the long shot - you need to figure out if you can get his/her email address. How do you know if it is roberts@xyz.com or robert.smith@xyz.com or smithr@xyz.com - look at the bottom of the press releases at the company X’s website. The company’s contact for the press release typically puts his/her email address at the bottom - this will get you the syntax. Again, sending a cold email is a very long shot and may get you a response only if you are a very strong candidate. I will not follow up on such an email because you don’t want to spam the person.

5) Work your network - there is a great book of “Dig the well before you are thirsty” that is worth reading - basically don’t try to create the network just when you need it - keep your network alive, help others when they are in need and they will help you when you have a need.

6) Get involved in local product management associations - present at conferences on product management topics - you want to be seen as a subject matter expert - you need to do things (good things !) that will let you stand out in the crowd.

7) Always keep looking for a job - you never know what opportunities come along your way - but you don’t want to be switching too often either - pick a job that broadens your experience, stay there for a while, succeed and then think about making a career move.

8. Research, research, research - Get to know about company X as much as you can - as if your life depended on it - you need to comb through its website and know everything about them - where have they been (look at company history, look at old press releases), where are they going (job postings may give you an idea about their future direction), read about the company in the news - what else are others saying about the company (don’t just believe what the company says about itself). Last thing you want to be is a candidate who is not prepared.

9) Company cheat sheet - Prepare on companies you have applied to as if the phone could ring at the very next second for an interview. I created a 1-2 page cheat sheet on each company I applied for so that I can have this information at my finger tips (in case the phone rang).

10) Company’s customers - Can you find a way to talk to some of the company’s customers? If the company has a discussion forum, you may be able to find customers there - what do they think about the company? How are the company’s products perceived? What is the future of the company in the eyes of the customer? If you do talk to their customers, mention this during your interview - it shows how well you research something, how comfortable you are talking to customers etc. - good companies value this and if they don’t, it may not be the right place to work after all.

What about recruiters? I did not have good luck with recruiters - not that they are bad - but they are hired by companies when their own recruiting efforts have failed and hence recruiters only look for a round peg in a round hole - their clients give them specific requirements and recruiters cannot flex them too much to accomodate a candidate’s qualifications.

Tools that I used effectively:

1) LinkedIn
2) Indeed.com - it compiles jobs from different job boards and emails you a digest daily.

I did not find ladders.com useful - it costs a whole lot ($30/month) and it was not of much help.

There is nothing called “too much preparation” in job hunting. So prepare, prepare, prepare ….

Customer visits have always been one of my pet subjects because the only way I have learned to deliver good products is by getting out of the building and talking to real people who buy or will buy my products. At SolidWorks, customer visits was ingrained into our working culture and all of us had an MBO of conducting six customer visits every quarter.

Jeff Lash has written a very good article on his blog titled Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits. It is definitely worth reading.

I have heard this question being asked a lot of times - do you use agile development methodology? How about scrum, how about spikes? I heard this asked yesterday. To tell you the truth, I have some idea what agile is but to me it sounds very much like the latest buzzword to me. In my product management career spanning 11+ years, I have really not paid too much attention to what software development process my team uses. Instead what I have focused on are things like -

1) Is my development team delivering functionality that solves customer problems that customers care about?

2) Are they delivering it on time so that it satisfies my existing customers and can help the business meet the revenue projections for this year?

3) Is the team receptive to iterative input or to customer’s new requirements during the development cycle to change the functionality based on customer feedback during alpha and beta testing - without telling me that “hey it was not in the spec and it is too late to make changes” (I fully realize to meet schedules and quality, there is indeed a point where it is too late to make changes)

4) Does my development team create very frequent and usable builds (not fully tested and hence buggy in some respect) so that QA and product management get to play with it early to ensure that what is being built is what customers want and to provide iterative feedback (Believe me, I do not think there is anything called a complete spec because have written so many functional specs over the years, I consider it difficult to foresee all the different permutations and combinations when writing the initial spec)?

5)  Are they delivering functionality of good quality that customers can use?

To me, delivering usable products to customers  that help the customer be successful and helps my business to make more money, is all that matters. What you call the process, agile, scrum, spike, non-agile does not matter.

Like anything else, if your development team does not have the right skill set, no development methodology stands a chance to do what is needed to sustain and grow your business. So before one starts using the latest fad in development methodology or starts saying things like - if you are not using agile, you are doing something wrong - it would be better to ask the question - why do I need this new methodology? what current development problems will it solve? What benefits would it bring to my customers or to the business.? Such an assessment would be well grounded in objectivity and reality rather than getting carried away by this hype.

I am not saying “agile” is bad or wrong (I don’t know enough about it) but no process can fix a problem if you don’t know the root cause to the problem.

Imagine that you have to make a business case to your upper management for a product/project you want to get funded. There are two ways a product manager can ask for this:

1) I need $$$$$ and XXXXX number of people to do this project?

2) I have this idea that I have vetted with customers and prospects, here is the total size of the market, this will help us move the business forward, this would establish us as a market/thought leader, here is potential revenues we could bring in, what do you think and do you agree we need to do it?

Which do you think is going to be received well? Of course answer 2 (provided you have done enough research). The obvious question that will be asked would be - what would it take? And the answer is 1). But going in there with guns loaded just with 1) is not going to get anywhere.

The other benefit with 2), is you are asking for input whether it is the right thing to do - you are engaging your management to help you make the decision. Once you have the buy in that the idea/product is worth doing, they will open up for your justification for resources. But the common mistake made by product managers is doing 1) with no luck.

As a product manager, you are quite busy doing product roadmaps, gathering requirements, working with cross functional teams, getting the messaging right,writing positioning statements etc. You are busy trying to do all the work with less time and resources available at your disposal. In the midst of this chaotic professional life, have you taken the time to evaluate how well you are doing growing your career, building value for yourselves such that your market value is increasing? Yes, the first and foremost thing we should focus on is building value to our employers (that is what we get paid for), but it is also important that you spend time adding value to yourselves. After all, I doubt that most of us want to do the same thing and work for the same employer for the rest of our working lives .

One technique that is useful is creating an honest assessment of the one product you are in full control of - YOU!!. The way I did it the other day was to create a list of all the skills an ideal product manager should have (if you don’t know the full list, read a bunch of job descriptions for product managers in your industry and look at the requirements or skills being asked for and then create the list) and then made a honest assessment of where I currently stood on a scale of High, Medium and Low (High = strong, Low = weak). I also did an assessment of what my personal interest is for each of these skills. For example, as a product manager, one is required to help legal with contracts - I consider this as a necessary evil that I as a product manager has to live with, but not something I want to get very good at. On the other hand, product positioning or market sizing is something I have great interest in and should have a strong skill.

Once you do this exercise, your strengths (High skill set, high interest) and weaknesses (low skill set, high interest) is going to stare at you. Now you need to create a roadmap on how you are going to work on your weaknesses and figure out what projects you may want to take on (read “initiative”) at your current employer to add more value to your employer and yourselves.

I have done mine and found this very useful and I intend to use this once a year to evaluate my progress and analyze the State of “Me” going forward. The above technique can be used by anyone - engineers, scientists, doctors etc. and not just product managers.

Other day, I was talking to Jon Hirschtick (founder of SolidWorks and my previous employer) and we were talking about positioning statements. Jon had an interesting way to put it - he said words in any messaging consists of three types of words:

1. Blather words: In other words, marketing buzzwords - integrated, extensible, scalable, value added, synergy, paradigm, value added etc. - so commonly (mis-) used that it adds no differentiation to your message
2. Glue words: Words that you are forced to use such as “and, or, the, with” etc. Does not add to your message but necessary to hold your message together
3. Keywords: These are the real things. This is where you need to spend your most time carefully picking them. Choose simple words that communicate the essence. Use what will resonate with the audience, words they can associate with, words that will stick with them.

Jon has put this out in very simple terms that this will be my guideline in all messaging that I do from now - positioning statements, key messages in my presentations, marketing material etc.