Get Equipped to Succeed

Product management training from Actuation Consulting can equip product managers with the skill sets they need to face the complex challenges that they are sure to face in their careers. Product managers will learn how to better utilize resources and how to more effectively lead product management teams. In addition to product management training, Actuation Consulting also offers product management consulting services for teams and organizations that want to create product management teams that can be as effective and efficient as possible.

There are several reasons why an organization or individual would want product management training. As an experienced product management consulting firm, Actuation Consulting can help product managers streamline processes, lead more efficiently, get products to market faster, and more effectively communicate with subordinates and superiors. Product management is unlike most career fields. It requires contact with a variety of industries and the ability to coordinate complex projects between a variety of departments. From sales to accounting, from research and development to marketing, a product manager must communicate with professionals in different industries and coordinate and balance the expectations of multiple departments at once in order to move a product through the production stream as quickly and efficiently as possible. Failure to meet the expectations of or effectively communicate with members of various departments could result in unexpected delays, and lost revenue.

Product Management Training is Mission-Critical

In today’s competitive markets, Actuation Consulting realizes that for most businesses the training of product managers is a critical component of being able to succeed. Product management training from Actuation Consulting will train your team to become more efficient, and more profitable.

Actuation Consulting is a professional product management consulting firm founded by and comprised of experienced professionals and accomplished members of the product management industry. We offer product management training, consulting, and coaching based on years of practical experience in the field and never ending scholarly study. Call us today to schedule product management training for yourself or your team.

The post Product Management Training appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

First a Refresher

Last week I shared this graphic illustrating the feedback from product team members in answer to the following question “How Much Time Do Product Managers Spend in the Field in Your Organization?”

I went on to detail some additional specifics. “Respondents surveyed indicate that more than 40% of their product managers spend at least 15% of their time in the field and 12.5% of this group believe their product managers devote more than 30% of their time to fieldwork where they talk to customers, conduct market research, attend tradeshows and interact with others in the field. On the other hand, more than 43% of respondents – a slightly larger group – see product managers (43.3%) spending 15% or less of their time in the field, a good portion of this group (14.8%) seeing their product managers rarely leaving the building at all.”

What Product Managers and Owners Actually Say

However, when you hone in on product manager and owner responses a more nuanced picture emerges. 44% of product managers and owners indicate that they spend between 1% and 15% of their time engaging with customers. The clear majority.

Additionally, 25% of product managers and owners spend 15% to 30% in the field. This is closely followed by those “who rarely leave the building” at 21%. Finally, a minority of product managers, 10%, actually spend more time engaging with customers.

Conclusion

While not earth shattering the difference between these two sets of responses points to the fact that product manager and owner responses skew toward the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to the amount of time they actually spend with customers. It is disheartening to see that 21% of product managers and owners are only rarely able to engage with clients and prospects.

How much time do you spend with customers?

Advancing the Profession of Product Management
website I consulting I training I toolkits I books I blog I twitter

The post The Actual Amount of Time Product Managers Spend with Customers appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

I recently read an article by Chris Fussell discussing lessons learned from his time working for the military’s Joint Special Operations Task Force. In the article Chris discusses the challenges today’s military faces in driving effective communication and high productivity levels.

There are many parallels between productivity and communication challenges military teams face and those of product teams. Before we get into the similarities I want to share Chris’s tips.

Five Productivity Tips

• Efficiency is not the same thing as effectiveness. Focus on effectiveness.
• There is a difference between doing things right and doing right things. Acting upon right things increases your effectiveness.
• The rhythm of communication and the quality of each interaction matter, the more frequent and face-to-face the better.
• Organizations and teams should value purpose over habit. It is all too easy to fall into habits that have little or no value.
• It is critical that teams align their day-to-day activities with company strategy. Without alignment your team’s effectiveness is diluted.

Interestingly, some of Chris’s tips also show up in our market research on product teams. For instance, this year we discovered in our regression analysis that the frequency of stand up meetings, face-to-face team meetings, matters. Teams that conduct stand ups daily are more likely to perform at a high level.

We have also substantiated through our statistical analysis that only 37% of product teams believe that their daily activities are aligned with company strategy. In other words, two-thirds of teams suffer from not knowing how their daily activities align to the strategies and objective that senior leadership is striving to achieve!

Conclusion

These five tips from Chris are equally useful whether you are in the military or on a product team. Effective communication starts from the top but teams also have the responsibility to fill in the gaps and lead by example. The more tightly strategy and tactical execution are aligned – the better your chances of success.

How productive is your team?

Source: Fortune, June 21st, 2015 Chris Fussell, The Biggest Career Lesson This Navy SEAL Learned in Iraq

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

website I consulting I training I toolkits I books I blog I twitter

The post 5 Productivity Tips For Teams appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

In anticipation of our latest white paper’s launch in July I want to share some data on the size of core product teams. By core we mean the roles that lie at the center of a product teams activities. For instance, the product manager or owner, the engineer, a project manager or scrum master, etc. The titles vary by organization and vertical. However, definite patterns appear in the data.

Findings: Size of Core Product Teams

In companies with less than $50 M in revenue 42% of organizations have between one to four team members. Another 38% have five to nine core team members. So while smaller teams dominate it is only by a few percentage points.

When a company moves up to more than $50 M in annual revenue but less than $500 M the size of teams shows a dramatic jump with 37% of survey respondents indicating that there are between ten to thirty members on their core team! We attribute this to rapid scaling taking place inside the business and increased levels of specialization that did not exist in the preceeding stage of growth.

As one might expect when a company grows larger than $500 M the size of teams gets whittled down again. Thirty-nine percent of companies with over $500 M up to $2 B in annualized revenues state that they have five to nine core team members with ten to thirty the next most popular category with twenty-six percent of responses.

Finally, the majority of companies with over $2B in annual revenues also state their core product teams are primarily made up of five to nine team members (35%). However, ten to thirty is close behind at thirty-one percent.

In Conclusion

Companies with less than $50 M in annualized revenues have the smallest core teams as one would expect. Interestingly, but not unexpectedly, the next tier from $50 M to $499 M shows the largest team size with between ten to thirty team members being dominant. This appears to be a temporary phase brought on by rapid scaling and increased levels of specialization that tends to get sorted out as companies cross the $500 M mark in annualized revenues. Team size tends to contract to between five to nine core product team members. This five to nine number is the most consistent size of core team configuration.

How large is your core product team?

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

website I consulting I training I toolkits I books I blog I twitter

The post How Many People Are On Your Core Product Team? appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

Product Roadmap Defined

Product roadmaps are a visual representation of a series of planned product development activities which depict future product releases on either a calendar or rolling-year basis. Given the long duration product roadmaps often span across several future development cycles. The planned work efforts, commonly called releases or epics, typically reflect high-level deliverables.

How Are Product Roadmaps Used?

Roadmaps can be used many ways but most organizations utilize product roadmaps in order to ensure internal alignment between the product manager and/or product owner, internal stakeholders and team members. Product roadmaps are also used to ensure appropriate resource planning and performance measurement. Externally product roadmaps can be used to manage customer and key external stakeholder expectations.

Is There Only One Type of Product Roadmap?

As a result of these many possible uses organizations often create two product roadmap variants; internal and external. Internal roadmaps address the needs of key constituents inside the organization while external roadmaps tend to be less aggressive and are intended to effectively manage the communication process with the sales organization, partners, suppliers and the customer-base.

Additionally, company’s frequently create technology roadmaps which illustrate specific technology platforms that might be impacted by planned market-facing or internal activities. These types of roadmaps help all parties involved gain insight into resource allocation requirements and are often used to align the market-facing product teams with technology teams to ensure appropriate synchronization in both team’s activities.

What Does A Good Product Roadmap Do?

A robust product roadmap does several things well:

• Outlines a clear plan – with well-understood resource requirements – which have been agreed to with the executive team
• Serves as a visual guide to the planned releases in order to improve communication and coordination with internal stakeholders and the market
• Ensures appropriate alignment with an existing product strategy
• Sets an expectation that changes to the plan “might” occur as a product roadmap is inherently future-facing and therefore subject to this risk

Why Do Customers Value Product Roadmaps?

Customers value roadmaps because they want to make sure that a company is continually investing in their products. Roadmaps serve as a tangible way for customers to understand the level of investment in your product’s development. As such, they view roadmaps as concrete and immutable commitments.

Failure to effectively execute undermines the trust that customers (individually and collectively) have in you and your company. This is a common mistake that may organizations make – not effectively managing customer expectations and being too overly aggressive in telling customers what they want to hear and not backing these perceived commitments up with successful execution.

Back To Where We Started

So this brings us back to where we started. Do we really need product roadmaps? Arguments can be made on both sides. However, ultimately it all boils down to customers. While organizations may want to eliminate roadmaps – customers will continue to insist upon them as they remain the best way clients have to understand what your company is investing in, the level of your financial commitment to your product’s evolution, and how effective your organization is at addressing customer needs.

Roadmaps are not a perfect solution and product development organizations are often their own worst enemies by putting in place product roadmaps that are poorly resourced and not effectively calibrated to what the organization can truly accomplish. This sets the stage for customer disappointment.

As long as customers continue to clamor for them market-facing product roadmaps will continue to be produced. Can you blame them?

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

website I consulting I training I toolkits I books I blog I twitter

The post Do We Really Need Product Roadmaps? appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

We then took a closer look at the organizations that indicate that they are predominately hit or miss. As it turns out roughly half of the organizations that report hit or miss performance are technology companies. This is strikingly disproportionate. Service companies garnered the next largest concentration of hit or miss responses followed in descending volume by consumer products, government and education. In fact, all these other verticals combined make up approximately the same amount of hit or miss responses as the technology segment.

So what is it about technology companies that increases the probability that product team members will indicate that they are executing less consistently and disproportionately so? The jury is still out but the data reflects that there is more variability in technology company execution than in all the other segments.

From a purely speculative point of view it is possible that factors such as the inability to hire qualified staff, poor team cohesion, the lack of strong leadership, lack of clarity in requirements, weak line of sight to clear market goals and a host of other possible factors contribute to technology companies having a disproportionate amount of hit or miss responses.

To be fair, the majority of tech companies report the ability to deliver value even if they execute inconsistently. But it is striking that so many of the “hit or miss” responses are concentrated in the tech sector.

What do you think drives this level of inequity?

Advancing the Profession of Product Management

website I consulting I training I toolkits I books I blog I twitter

The post Technology Companies Are More Hit or Miss Than Other Verticals appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

As a product management consulting and training organization we have seen the balance tilted in every conceivable direction. From product management holding sway through the informed use of objective data to sales teams driving the process based upon their perceptions of market needs guided by first-hand customer interactions. And everything in-between.

A Personal Disclaimer

Before I wade too deeply into this subject I need to share a bit of my own personal history. I began in sales and carried “a bag” for years. I have also run a sales team. I hit my plan every year and I could have stayed on that career track forever. However, for reasons I don’t need to get into here I decided to alter my career trajectory. Now that I have framed a bit of my history let’s get back to the question at hand.

How strong of a voice should sales have in the product development process? The conclusion that I have come to, having stood on both sides of this line, is that product management needs to collect objective data from a variety of sources, including sales, and look at the information dispassionately against the needs of the market and the organization. In the majority of instances the data will point the way toward the appropriate decisions but sometimes these decisions are situational. When situational decisions arise the call needs to be made by executive stakeholders and framed, whenever possible, with a data supported recommendation from product management that balances the best interests of all parties.

Trust is a big factor. Product managers that have an effective working relationship with the sales organization often get the benefit of the doubt. Having a sales history prior to becoming a product manager also lends a modicum of credibility (if fleeting). The sales team knows you understand the pressure they are under and their pains. In sales, if you don’t perform you don’t typically last too long. Organizations are not hesitant to upgrade the talent pool. There are plenty of sales professionals around.

From the Sales Perspective

Unlike product management things in sales feel much more immediate. You are planning for calls weekly if not daily. You have monthly goals that are closely tracked and often shared publicly to spur competition which roll up to your annual target. Effective sales leaders know how to spread the sales plan and typically build their annual plan knowing that a certain number of individuals are not going to make it. So they hedge their bets by increasing the individual allocations accounting for this under-performance. You can understand why sales professionals are often insistent – they often have a lot at stake both personally and professionally.

Product managers often lament the sales people that continuously ask for “one-offs” that are outside their thoughtfully constructed plans. After all, product professionals are asked to think longer-term and to focus on aggregate market needs. At the end of the day, the short-term needs of individual sales professionals don’t always neatly align with product management’s plans.

This is where executive arbitration matters. If the requested individual enhancement makes the plan for the company at the end of the quarter or year it may make sense to deviate from the well-crafted longer-term plan. If the “one-off” doesn’t have a material impact on the business another call will have to be made.

Like all relationships in life, the product management and sales relationship needs to be built on a foundation of trust. However, our data shows only 9% of product development teams are fully aligned with their sales organizations! Most organizations are dealing with a relationship that is not fully optimized. Sales is certainly not an adversary. They are under a lot of pressure and often coddled but they have a lot to add to the product development process. On the flip side, it is important to note that one customer does not represent a market need and that the quality of information degrades each time it is exchanged.

Conclusion

So in the end, sales is an important partner in the process. One voice mind you, but one that needs to be paid attention to. Executives at the end of the day set the tone on the balance. Will it tilt in the direction of the needs of the market or the needs of individual customers? Based upon this decision, conscious or otherwise, senior leadership holds the key to the resulting culture of collaboration or conflict that results.

What has been your experience?

The post How Strong a Voice Should Sales Have in the Product Development Process? appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

Setting the Innovation Context

Innovation is a frequently discussed topic which ranks highly with senior executives. Most believe that innovation is a critical area of investment in order to remain relevant in the marketplace and to continuously nurture a healthy product portfolio. While innovation and disruptive product development rank highly, the actual implementation of innovation processes and the development of disruptive products tends to be a combination of both art and science.

In order to increase the science and decrease the art many senior leaders strive to infuse innovative thinking into the DNA of their organizations. This is not easy to accomplish as a wide variety of factors can adversely impact successful implementation. Size of company, culture, skills and talent levels and a host of other factors all contribute to the long list of risks.

As part of our ongoing research into high performance product teams we have been investigating who is responsible for leading the definition and development of innovative or disruptive products within organizations from the perspective of actual product team members. The survey is ongoing but we have already identified a pattern – a continuum of leadership that is reflected in the data.

I would argue that the data is not rocket science although I am sure it will stir up some controversy as there are many opinions on the subject of who should lead the development of disruptive products and innovation processes. Since our research is not complete the preliminary findings may change before all is said and done but it is pretty clear at this point that size of company impacts who leads.

Preliminary Findings

In companies of less than $50 M in annual revenue the CEO and/or company founder are perceived by product team members as having ownership of these processes and activities. Once a company crosses this annual revenue threshold team members tell us that leadership shifts. Respondents indicate that product managers lead, or should lead, the incubation and development of disruptive products for companies with annual revenues above $50 M and up to approximately $2 B. The closer you get to the $2 B in annual revenue line leadership tilts in the direction of a “special cross-functional team” appointed by senior executives.

The preliminary data clearly illustrate a continuum of leadership. Once the study concludes we will publish our findings. We believe the data will spur discussion as individuals and organizations tend to have strong views of who should lead these critical activities given the associated high risks and rewards.

Tell Us What You Think

We would like to hear your point of view! Who is responsible for leading the incubation and development of disruptive products in your organization? And just how big is your company?

The post The Innovation Leadership Continuum appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

Actuation Consulting has been conducting a worldwide study of product teams for three years and respondents continually tell us that only a minority of product teams are performing at a high level. There are many factors that contribute to lower levels of performance and we have statistically analyzed them for years. So this year we incorporated the following question into our global survey.

“How Effective is Your Product Team in Identifying and Incorporating Industry Best Practices?”

As it turns out the answer is a bit shocking. Only 21.83%  of respondents report that their organizations invest significant resources in keeping in tune with industry best practices and that their culture allows the product team to experiment with new ideas.

In other words, an overwhelming 78.17% of respondents are not committed to actively identifying ways to be more effective. This data illustrates that continuous improvement is not a central part of the majority of product teams’ DNA. Organizational resources, focus and culture all contribute to this startling finding.

Passive Monitoring to Completely Ignoring Best Practices

According to the responses, over half of the teams surveyed passively keep an eye on what is going on in their industry and occasionally introduce innovative new ideas into team activities. Nearly one quarter of those surveyed feel they are too busy managing their workload to devote any time to keeping up with new developments in their industry let alone incorporate new practices into their workflow.

Barely a fifth of respondents indicated their organizations actively monitor emerging best practices in their industries and encourage experimentation with new ideas. Just over 2% of respondents hold that best practices are too far afield from their day-to-day challenges and pay no attention to new ways of approaching challenges in their industry.

The Catch 22 Paradigm for Product Teams

Product team members have made it exceptionally clear that only a fifth of product teams aggressively seek continuous improvement and are allowed to do so with the support of their organization. It is no wonder then that the majority of product teams continue to operate at sub-optimal performance levels. In many ways this seems like a catch 22. Organizations that are not investing in their product teams improvement actively or passively will continue to wallow and wonder why their teams are struggling while those that empower their teams to take risks and continuously seek improvement will continue to thrive.

Where does your organization stand?

Greg Geracie is the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management©and the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge© (ProdBOK).

The post Do Product Teams Really Incorporate Best Practices? appeared first on Actuation Consulting.

List of Possible Responses

When asked about which performance metrics product managers are being held accountable to respondents have a variety of possible options to choose from. Here’s the full list…

• Topline revenue
• Profitability
• Customer satisfaction
• Market share
• Velocity or throughput metrics
• Our product managers are not held accountable to metrics (but support attainment of company goals)
• We don’t have product managers

A Single Metric Is Prioritized Consistently Across All Verticals

While we’re still in the final stages of collecting survey responses it appears that there’s one dominant metric that crosses all the verticals. The majority of survey respondents, regardless of vertical, indicate that customer satisfaction is the most dominant metric currently being used to measure product manager performance.

The data is really interesting as it becomes increasingly variable once you dig deeper into the data. Each vertical breaks down into a different set of weightings. There doesn’t appear to be a consistent pattern from one vertical to the next. When our survey closes at the end of this month we’ll be able to complete the analysis. Once complete we’ll share our findings on the weightings for each vertical.

In the meantime, we would love to hear from you. What performance metrics are product managers in your organization being held accountable to? Are your product managers being held accountable to customer satisfaction?

You can let us know by clicking this link.

The post Performance Metrics: Which Metrics Are Product Managers Held Accountable To? appeared first on Actuation Consulting.