Product Management - The Conscience of Every Product Company

It’s not a dirty job, but someone has to do it!

Ask any product management professional at any level to define the charter of the product management function and you’ll get answers that run the gamut. The one word you probably won’t hear is “conscience.” But every product company needs one to be successful. Here’s why.

• The agendas of CEO’s and senior executives are largely influenced by perceptions of the board and investors and ultimately drive initiatives, product and otherwise, in many parts of the organization.
• The agenda of corporate marketing is heavily influenced by press, industry and financial analysts. By definition then, marketing pushes product initiatives that improve brand awareness and public perception to help drive revenue.
• Sales people are driven solely by the opportunities in their pipeline, as they should be. But pipelines change from day to day, and product direction can’t.
• Technology experts are often motivated by using new technology to build revolutionary products, often without regard to market needs.
• Customer service and support teams are motivated to make customers successful, pushing yet another product agenda.

Harmonic convergence of these five disciplines, let alone others, will never occur on its own. Ever! So whose job is it to make it happen?

The combined functions of product management and product marketing have to be the conscience of the company. They are the only functions whose collective responsibilities by definition, support all other disciplines.

Consider the following:

• Each of the five disciplines mentioned above has a distinct view of the market, none of them wrong per se, but each of them incomplete at best.
• Multiple views of the market result in multiple strategies and multiple operational plans that unintentionally conflict and ultimately have a paralyzing effect on the organization as a whole.

The first and most important step in aligning all disciplines to a common set of priorities is establishing a consensus view of your target markets. If not explicitly assigned to another function, product management and/or product marketing own the responsibility of creating and socializing profiles of each key market segment to attain consensus across disciplines.

Once that hurdle is crossed (it’s not as difficult as you’d expect), strategic priorities become much more obvious and agreeable to everyone. This exercise also raises product management and product marketing’s influence and strategic value to the organization for obvious reasons.

At the execution level, product management and product development can focus mainly on priorities that will drive revenue and customer loyalty in the future while sales and marketing focus on priorities for driving revenue from current products. All other disciplines align accordingly.

There will always be distractions and temptations, some of which will be legitimate and require unplanned resources. But if the conscience of the company is successful (80/20 rule in play here) in creating a consensus view of the market, all goals both strategic and tactical will be easier to meet because the collective weight of the company is behind fewer initiatives that have a bigger impact.

If a company has no conscience, the tail (sales opportunities and customer needs) will continue to wag the dog (product direction and everything else). Result: sustainable growth will be far more difficult and come at a much higher price.

If your product management and product marketing teams need the tools and skills to become the conscience of your company, send them to Product Management University - Portfolio Management where they’ll learn how to determine the market segments most conducive to growing the company as a whole, create a strategy to penetrate those markets then deliver the best mix of products, marketing messages and sales tools to execute the strategy. 

This approach ensures a single set of priorities across marketing, sales products and operations and eliminates silos with competing objectives that unnecessarily consume resources and ultimately inhibit growth.  

If you have a team you'd like to train, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it about a onsite workshop.

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