Product Management Journal

Have you ever used a web site or service that "wasn't all there?" Maybe it looked good and did something useful, but it required that you go elsewhere to finish what you were trying to do. Travel-booking sites didn't used to have integrated maps. (Hard to believe...) Then some clever person (probably a travel-site product manager) realized that customers had a problem locating the motel they were booking, and that they were plugging the street address into Mapquest or Google Maps. Pretty soon every motel listing had a link to pop up a map, and eventually the maps were embedded into the listing itself. The product was more "complete", and it solved the customer problem more effectively. Likewise, one of the hazards in developing packaged software is the failure to make a "complete product." Simply put, if the product in the box does the whole job, then it's complete. If it requires the user to go elsewhere to do part of the job, then it'...

Product managers have a lot to do - from learning about customers to working with development teams to planning business strategies. So should PMs be based in Marketing, Engineering , or "none of the above"? I've worked in all three types of organizations, and while each can work, one is better. "Traditional" consumer products companies put PM in Marketing, under the rationale that Marketing is the customer-facing part of the company. That works well for consumer products, but when frequent interaction with a development team is required, it breaks down. When based in Marketing , there's often an expectation that the PM will have significant "outbound" marketing responsibilities. Product marketing is a big, important job, and it's too much to expect a true product manager to have primary responsibility for product launches, collateral creation, advertising and the many other tasks that marketers do. There just isn't enough time left for...

I had no idea what a Product Manager was until someone pointed out that I was one. In the dawn of the PC age, I discovered a program called AutoCAD. Hardly any other architects (I'm a licensed architect) seemed to realize that PCs were about to change the profession, so I wrote a book called "The Architect's Guide to Computer-aided Design" - the first book about using PCs in architectural practice. Computers were still fairly primitive, and much of the book was about how architecture could be changed by using PCs. Likewise, the columns and articles that I began writing for trade magazines explained how PC applications should support the profession. I had inadvertently taken a role as "the voice of the customer," and I began getting calls from Autodesk, their competitors, and entrepreneurs who saw opportunities in some of the topics I wrote about. One of these was a venture capitalist who wanted to develop software tools that would revolutionize building ...

Throughout my career as a Product Manager, I've been filling notebooks with thoughts and reflections about my professional adventures. Some of these thoughts have been posted in various forums; now I'm going to consolidate them here in one place: the Product Management Journal. I'll be posting them here as I have the opportunity to refine and edit. By posting these notes, I'd like to provoke an exchange of ideas with others who share my enthusiasm for developing great products. If you read these thoughts and have a response - positive, negative, whatever - please add a comment or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you.