Good Post Overviewing Product Management

Deepak Thomas, a product manager in the Valley, recently launched a blog and catalogs some of the key functions of the product management discipline. His blog is one of the few blogs that I’ve seen address product management, and it is of special interest to me as it is one of a few practices areas (under the acronym PACE) that was core to the management consulting firm, PRTM (my alma mater), at its founding. Although lots of b-school students love to get on strategy projects after graduating and entering management consulting, I can think of no other process in a product company more core than making products. What is interesting to reflect upon after reading Deepak’s post is that in early-stage ventures, the product management "process" can be pretty compressed  – it can easily feel as if one is in a tornado as opposed to participating in an orchestrated planning process.

In any case, I find that a key aspect to focus on in venture with respect to product management is making sure that sales, marketing, and R&D work on product management jointly (i.e., on a cross-functional basis). This is probably #1 on my list of things that is usually broken in companies that come from predominantly technical origins. An essential question is this: Can the company list out the features of the product for future releases as mapped against R&D resources needed against competitive positioning and against sales & marketing priority? Time to get out the Excel spreadsheet. It will be easy to lose one’s way without having a guiding voice of the market built into a company’s products.