Last week, General Assembly hosted a panel session on Breaking into Product Management for those interested in becoming a product manager or wondering how to get their 1st product manager job.

The panel included myself Liz Blink, Adam Fry from Sportsbet, Laura Cardinal from Xero and Brad Dunn from Nazori with Julien Viard from Rowben Consulting facilitating the discussion.

How to get started in Product Management

A theme that ran through each of the panelists’ presentations, was how they got started in the field, a taste of what the job is like and advice for those in the audience.

Laura Cardinal / Xero

Laura kicked off with her story – that she had been doing product management before she had her first job with those words in the title. She was working in customer service, and still dreaming of becoming a famous rock star, when she first was struck by a frustration at a problem that could be solved better, but had no idea how to go about implementing that idea.

Laura was working at a water company where plumbers would come in each day, on their way to their jobs to pay for and collect a print out of the house pipes for the job they were doing. Every day she’d listen to plumbers grumbling about the amount of time this took up, and in turn, she’d listen to the customer service reps grumble about the plumbers choice of deodorant – or lack there of.

The light bulb went off and what if they created a website where plumbers could access, download and print their own plans. With the amount of money that would save the business on printing paper and customer service, they wouldn’t even have to charge for it. At the time, Laura knew nothing about development, but surely that it could be done.

Laura talked to everybody that she could, would share her idea and solution with anyone who would listen and eventually she got the buy in she needed to implement her idea. All that talking and sharing and testing helped work through the refinement and iteration of the idea, and so they built the product. Laura had done enough convincing and managed to build a team around her to develop and launch what was called ‘Plumbers on-line’ and it still exists today… well a complete reincarnation of it anyway……

Her advice to those in the room who wanted to be in this space was to “fill your own scorecard with the skills you need” so that when you go for a product management role you already have everything you need to step into the role – without needing the title to sit on your resume.

Brad Dunn / Nazori

Brad drew our attention to the Apple retail experience and used that to highlight how paying attention to the right kind of data will really help you in a product management career.

His focus was very much on asking questions & using data until you really know why people do what they do. The Apple retail experience is one that very much contributes to the success of the product and is very precise. Nothing is done by accident in its layout including the angle the phones are rested on the bench.

The man behind this design, Ron Johnson, pioneered the concepts behind the store and came up with the Genius Bar. After Apple, he repeated his success and helped Target become “hip”.

However, this was not necessarily an easily repeatable approach because the exact opposite outcome occurred when he transformed JC Penney. Their stock price rose upon the announcement of his joining the company but the approach was the wrong one for JC Penney, the makeover did not work, the stock price plunged and he was fired.

Brad put this down to fundamental “attribution error” whereby one assumes that one internal element will determine the outcome & ignores that many other factors contribute to an outcome. In this instance, Ron Johnson helped Apple succeed with his retail store concept but there were other factors contributing to his success.

How do you avoid falling into the same trap & getting caught by this bias? Brad provided some guidance and suggestions. He suggested usability tools such as Usability Hub to get your designs and screens tested, get some A/B testing into your work, and he liked mixpanel over Google Analytics, especially the funnel component. Brad also had some favourite books to call out – he LOVES Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and he said he lends the book Ten Faces of Innovation, by IDEO co-founder Tom Kelley, to clients before they start on projects together (& the clients rave about it).

Liz Blink / Sensis & Product Anonymous

Like Laura, I have also followed a rather unobvious path to being a product manager and was surely one before I stepped into a job with that title. I think product management is very much a mindset.

Having started out my life as a scientist I often get the question of “well how the heck did you get to this then” :-). The mindsets and the skillsets are so resusable – the curiosity that wants to get to the bottom of every problem, the need to know why, why, why, and the testing of a hypothesis to determine if that theory is true could describe either profession.

I talked a little about what you want to look for when looking for a product manager job- complete with a Venn diagram – it isn’t really a product management talk without one!

I was interested in what an individual might want to seek out for themselves as they choose a company to work for. Depending on the stage they are at, it might be looking for good support, mentoring and an opportunity to work at a company where you can eventually move into that role from within the company. This will give you a great opportunity to prove you have the mindset – something that is harder to prove than we might like to admit!

One circle in this Venn is to check where the company is at in its maturity of leading product managers, where do you sit in the organisation, who do you report to, what department are you in?

The other circle is what can you bring to the team? Do you have lots of technical skill but need to build up your people skills, your influence skills, your customer interview skills?

Every time you take a step, you want to understand what you need to bring to the team to ensure success, but also what you can learn from your team so you are developing your skill sheet further.

My last thought for my 5 minutes was really that as a product manager you are a little schizophrenic – you have to be empathic and constantly in tune with your customers and yet you will need to make tough, hard ass decisions – and you will have to make those calls as no one else will. I borrowed my quote from William Hsu – the constant balance between the fuzzy people stuff and the precise tech stuff. It’s a blast!

Adam Fry / Sportsbet

Last, but certainly not least, the polished Mr. Fry wrapped it all up beautifully for us with some fabulous pearls of wisdom.

Adam said that while he has been doing product management for awhile now, not a single one of those jobs has been the same so he talked a little about how a product manager should act.

If you mimic the process you won’t find yourself very successful nor it a very satisfying career! The core of the role stays the same though – you are the expert, the evangelist and a super sleuth. It is a little like being part of the United Nations – no authority & always the mediator. You are constantly challenged in everything you do, as someone always has an opinion and idea so you need to be ready to explain, defend and back yourself and your product decisions.

Sometimes you have to let people (including customers) down. When a feature hasn’t made it, part of your role is deciding who to tell & then to break the news to that stakeholder! Not an easy one – although when you get to announce great news/features/new products are coming it makes up for the bad news days…!

Thanks!

After the session, there were some great questions from the audience and a great set of conversations happening. Thanks to General Assembly for running the session and check out their course staring in February, where the one of your speakers, Adam Fry will be an instructor.

If you are looking to get into product management, come check out a Product Anonymous session (Feb 19th is the next one) & follow us on Twitter @product_anon or any of the other social networks we live in.

Our session for June was about balancing the customer need and stakeholder demands. The session was run by Mat Vine who has a wealth of experience to draw on for this topic. Mat organised his presentation into the top 6 factors to look out for to keep the customer need in focus as stakeholder demands creep into the product design process.

A perennial business challenge is the balance between delivering customer value vs business success. Developing a new product is complex and as you begin to get into the details, sometimes you get too far away from the original customer need you were planning to solve! To keep from “diluting the proposition” you need to champion the need through the entire process.

6 Factors to Help Balance Customer Need & Stakeholder Demand

1. Pick your business outcome

The outcome can be a range of things but make sure it is what people actually strive for and not what your KPI is.  For example, it is quite common for profit share to be the KPI at a company, yet people will be drawn to a different measure such as growing market share. Examples of business outcomes you could use:

• Profit
• Revenue
• Market Share
• Sales volume
• Revenue per sale

2. Be very clear on your customer need

[pullquote]You can never be too passionate on the customer need in the business[/pullquote]

An example Mat covered here was Adidas sponsorship of the London Olypmics. Adidas set up Adi-zones around London that had free use of sporting equipment. The intention was to help get young people, who might not otherwise have an opportunity, active and involved in sport. It worked out well for Adidas as they ended up with a 2% growth in market share, and £100M increase in apparel sales.

3. Choose your time horizon but never ignore the long term

One of the stories shared here was about the strategy of HR companies in the US going aggressively after market share. To gain customers they dramatically undercut the price of the software which meant in the short term they were not making profit at all. This approach eventually led to being able to sell the company off for a significant value due to the customer numbers they had to offer to whomever acquired them. The question in the back of the audiences mind however, is how much work the new company will have to do to be able to move those customers to a profitable state.

4. There are many levers to work with – choose wisely

There are many levers you can use to achieve balance in customer value and business outcome. If you don’t have enough customer value but doing ok with profit, then you are in a great position to add value/ features consistent with your CVP. If you are not delivering enough profit then it’s much more difficult because you need to remove features and value… you can replace with other features that cost less but have high perceived value, or remove features that aren’t highly valued by customers

5. Know your stakeholder and embrace stakeholder management

The image Mat used in his presentation did cause the audience to laugh. A reflection of the fact that we know this is such a critical part of a product managers job, but every now and then it isn’t always the favourite part. Anyway, the advice offered by Mat was to work towards you stakeholders being:

70% convinced, 100% committed

One of our audience asked Mat if he used this statement in front of people, and he said he did. He found that calling out clearly where people were at with their belief in an idea, could help with uncovering what was holding people back.

The other piece of advice was to start early with stakeholder management, the earlier they on the path with you the better. At this point, Mat wondered if perhaps he should have had time on his list. Time can give you many advantages but one key on is to allow you to work through all stakeholder concerns.

6. Decide what’s important with your Customer Value Proposition (CVP) – and champion it

Some good discussion occurred around this point, with some thoughts shared on how to help make sure the core vision isn’t lost and does get communicated and cascaded to everyone. The audience had very mixed experiences with how hard or easy this is to do, and at times astonishment that it even needs doing. This led us nicely into further conversations at the bar.

A fantastic night, newcomers, old faces and time to chat with each other afterwards as well. Join us for our next event on the 24th of July or coffee on June 26th.

Our next event will be a session on Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

We’ll cover:

• what is MVP – and what isn’t it
• how do you ensure MVP is really testing your assumptions
• what you can learn from MVP

Hear from other product manager folk and founders about their trials and tribulations with getting to an MVP and if it worked or not.  We will take questions from the audience for the panel and encourage discussion amongst our speakers and audience.

Our facilitator will be Jock Busuttil, Founder of Product People.

Jock is a product management consultant, author and startup mentor with over thirteen years’ experience working in technology. He is the founder of Product People Limited, author of imanageproducts and has a book coming out soon to be published by Hachette / Grand Central. Flick him any questions you would like to ask on MVP or of the panel @jockbu

We have a great panel of product managers and start-up founders joining us to share their experiences. Let us introduce them:

Susan Teschner, Super Product Manager at 99designs

Susan’s degree in Political Science qualified her for nothing, but her journey through the ranks of product management sure has. Having tried her hand at all angles of product, Susan’s found that straying too far from either the thinking or the doing makes her seriously cranky pants. She’s most happy building collaborative, creative and generally ass-kicking teams, learning daily, delivering on a shared vision and laughing hard along the way.

Currently looking after a few teams of engineers, UX and product managers, Susan’s work growing 99designs — the world’s largest marketplace for graphic design — keeps the cranky pants away.

Tom Howard, Co-founder Adioso

Adioso is a new kind of flight search engine, that supports unmatched flexibility on destinations, dates and other travel motivators.  Adioso was initially launched as an MVP in January 2008, and due to the complexities of the travel industry, has taken till 2014 to reach maturity.  Tom is now working on a mobile-focused flight search & booking application.  He will talk about the MVP that initially launched Adioso, contrasted with the one he is currently building for mobile”.

Emma Stabey, Senior Product Manager – Candidate Experience, SEEK Limited

Emma Stabey is a Senior Product Manager at Australia’s #1 online employment site, SEEK.com.au. In her time at SEEK she has managed the experience and vision for SEEK’s first foray into iOS apps, and evolved the candidate profile on the desktop channel with the aim of creating a more personalised experience, and is about to take on a new role to head up the Product team for SEEK Learning.

Janet Horwell, Product engineer at Geoplex 

Janet Horwell is a Product Engineer at Geoplex, a GIS mapping services company. She’s been working in a team on a dashboard MVP and will be running through her experience in measuring risk and validating a concept to the point of MVP.

We look forward to you joining us!

Note the new day of the week and location: Wednesday night at 99designs, level 2, 41 Stewart St, RIchmond, which is just behind Richmond station.

Time: 6-6:30pm arrival & drinks. Talk starts at 6:30pm. We wrap up about 8pm.

On Tuesday March 11th, I attended a talk by Steve Blank at the Melbourne Accelerator Program at Melbourne University. One of our Product Anonymous community mentioned Steve was talking so I signed up due to this recommendation. But I didn’t do my homework and I didn’t know what I was getting into.

I was nicely surprised as I walked in – due to the beautiful location that is the Melbourne University Law building, the free book (The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company) I was given for the attendance and signs that suggested drinks and food to follow – but I digress…

Steve Blank’s book – The Four Steps to the Epiphany – and his customer development methodology for entrepreneurs launched the lean start-up movement. He was/is a mentor to Eric Ries. Steve teaches customer development and entrepreneurship at Stanford. He is a very intelligent, experienced individual across start-up land and he is also very funny so the hour flew by.

While I didn’t do my research prior to the talk, I quickly realised I needed to sit-up and listen. What pearls of wisdom did I learn? Many! AND I also heard so much that resonated for the product manager.

The session was for founders who presumably are part of the Melbourne Accelerator Program and are getting insight and guidance from that program. Steve took the time to outline what a start up is and isn’t and what makes them different to an existing business.

“Start-ups search for business models. Large corporates already have them and execute on them.”

He talked about why he launched his own start-ups – due to his own frustrations with such questions as what is the “5 year business plan” and the apparent plethora of ideas he had in his head that would mean he always has a something next to try. Steve hates it when companies or people ask for that long term 5-year view, because who has that good of an insight into so many unknowns? He sees that as one of the futile corporate organisational questions which give them a bad name and which start-ups don’t waste time on.

Steve talked about founders being artists. An idea which resonated for me as I had seen this idea previously in some of Seth Godin’s works, Linchpin and the Icarus Deception. He then told everyone in the room:

“if you don’t believe in what you are doing, get out now. Don’t do it. You need to think about this (your idea) when you wake up, when you are in the shower, in other words ALL THE TIME”

Steve believes founders are the type of people who can see a work of art when others see only a blank canvas. They are a set of people who haven’t even been given paintbrushes yet – but they know they need to paint. He talked about incubators and accelerator programs as ways in which you give your artists/founders an art school. In other words, they give you room to learn to wield the paintbrush, room to fail on that first canvas when you use too much red and room to work on your masterpiece. To follow on with this analogy – one cannot learn to paint from books, one must paint.

He went on to say the lean start-up movement writings are not scriptures that one must follow religiously but they are a way in which to encourage and nurture the artist to reach their full potential. The same way an art school may help you understand whether you need acrylics over water based paints, the customer development model and lean start up methodology are there to help you understand whether your art (ie your idea/product/concept) is worthy. It’s a way to find out if you are the only one who loves what you do or whether there is an audience willing to pay for your idea. An concept that is so important for founders, but also for product managers.

How are you going to test these hypotheses (as he would ask his students at Stanford) or guesses (as he would ask those outside Stanford)?

“Get out of the office and test them”.

This statement immediately jumped out as we in the product management and user design communities know it well. It does seem to be a principle that shouldn’t have to be discussed anymore, right? No! Apparently even the guru – Steve – had to be reminded it can be applied everywhere.

Steve had sworn black and blue that the customer development methodology wouldn’t work in life sciences. After quite a bit of chasing, he was finally convinced to step in and work with a group of scientists on bringing a more customer oriented thinking to their work. He set the group a challenge to talk with x patients in 10 weeks. And he found himself proven wrong! Scientists also need to get out of the lab!

One of the audience asked, why would you need to do that if you are curing cancer? Isn’t your need fairly obvious? The answer provided was that you still have to work with many bodies to get your cure to the patient. Any insight, better knowledge and validated assumptions will make that path more likely to succeed if you have tested and validated along the way.

A member of the audience asked about the difference between talking lean rather than doing lean. Steve laughed at this point and said the word pivot has become an excuse for ADHD. In other words, a poor excuse to change direction suddenly off a single data point. Steve’s advice was to apply a 72 hour rule before being allowed to mention any new insight – let alone tie it to a pivot. He suggested having a board or a group of people keeping an eye on the founder to prevent this. I think this also makes sense for a product manager. A lot of the constructs around the discipline of the development cycle are there to help make sure no one is running off a single data point.

Steve had another way of seeing this – a founder cannot be smarter then the collective intelligence of your customers. This is so true for everyone’s product. Anyone can be guilty of continuing to tinker with the product without seeking further input but it’s so much easier for a founder to tell people what to do rather than to get out of the building and hear your baby is ugly! This is a great reminder for product managers working with founders who may be not be used to hearing alternative viewpoints and it also serves as another reminder to get out of the office!

Humility is very important to remember. You or your team or your company may think something is fabulous but you need to test it to know for sure. To that end, the artists metaphor is receiving a standing ovation from the audience as a clear sign of success. Silence in the auditorium might be the moment you know you need to pivot.

Did you attend the talk or have you read Steve’s work?  What are the product management bits that spoke to you?

Our next event on the 20th of March is all about the skills needed to master UX!  Really, you ask?  Yes really!

The fabulous Matt Magain, co-founder of UX Mastery and the fabulous Fox Woods, freelance user experience architect and co-founder of Girls Club Melbourne, will look at the 5 skills required for UX mastery and how to incorporate them whether you have a UX team to work with or if you’re the sole UX representative.

They will talk about what skills UX experts specifically bring to your team and which skills product managers may already have and can hone further.  They will share practical exercises for improving these skills.

Note the new location:  The Governor’s Lounge, Royal Melbourne Hotel is just off the corner of Bourke & Spencer (almost directly across from previous location of the Mail Exchange Hotel).

Time: 6-6:30pm arrival & drinks. Talk starts at 6:30pm. We wrap up about 8pm.