Category Archives: Product Managment

No Margin = No Mission

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“Put on your Oxygen mask first before helping others”, how many times have you heard this in a preflight safety talk as the attendant wraps the rubber band around their head.

Just a little perspective here, what have folks forgotten about basic math, Money in needs to be greater than money out, period end of story. Sure you can build community and monetize later but bottom line is the longer you live on OTM (Other People’s Money) the less you take away after the work.

There are no free lunches, even if you are an 18month old start-up with 8 employees that hits the Google lottery you are not the first one in the dinner line at the end of the day. Accepting funding is giving away future earnings from an equity event. The only way to offset that is to use that money to add greater value than the money taken in, oh yes value here is market return in Dollars, Euro or Yen.

Every expenditure you ask an executive or investor for you best have an ROI that is above twenty points in less than 2 years. We only read about the long term in so many news stories because it is easy to be right when there is no accountability curve.  99.9% of business is run on a short turn ROI or it fails. Even a young company needs to think 2 year turn on concepts or the bootstrap becomes dilution of equity not increase in value.

Large companies get this, Mid-size companies become successful when they learn to live it and small companies that don’t get it become someone else’s and the founders’ slaves to investors.

Build your business model up front when you are building your product, in Lean approaches we often focus on the service and building the product but honestly the expectation is that the PM is in the background building the model.

Capitalism is bad only to those who cannot compete, the simple goal is add value to someone’s life and they will pay you. That is true for the marketplace up and down the chain. You provide value to the marketplace they pay, your employees’ provide value you pay them, your firm provides value to the financial markets you IPO, your valuation goes up as a company people invest in you, your brand gains promise and proves performance customers pick you first>

Simple Right! Produce value to the system and it returns value to you!

The Product Leaders DNA

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Watching the NFL draft, I started thinking about what are the qualities of a great product leader? Through my work and role in the PDMA I get the chance to play a role in placing, sourcing and training product leaders and staff. So I thought I would put in words and share what I look for.

  1. Domain skills – Performance is a base line and includes, marketing, research, technical as needed in the company, meeting leadership, Presentation and basic project management skills, lastly is the cross functional awareness and financial modeling
  2. Energy and positive outlook – Leading teams takes its toll on the strongest of us and you need someone who has a good focus on the big picture who can demonstrate an attitude of connecting the dots, finding the connections. It may be a surprise to some but very few people in this world naturally seek new and enjoy walking without a net.
  3. Comfortable with Chaos – Change is a daily event, those who need rules and status quo do not survive
  4. Analytical – This is in nature not in training. The great product professional is always learning, asking why and has an insatiable need to learn.
  5. Willingness – you can’t ask someone to clean the toilets if you are not willing to at least empty the bucket and put away the cleansers
  6. Respect for others  - if you judge others and think about status or value skills differently you will fail. Like any sport product development takes an all hands/all skills approach. No one is “Non-Essential” (never understood that phrase) If you cannot honestly embrace that mindset get out!
  7. Active listening skills – How do you hear words, intent, sub plots, can you listen for intent or the real issue. This is a developable skill ask your best sales person how they listen and ask questions
  8. Self-awareness – Again a skill, our society is not naturally self-aware, learn who you are and be flexible with boundaries and you interactions with others

Lastly there were two questions that define the spirit of a great Product Professional –

How do we?

What if?

Metcalf’s law and the politics of everything leadership…

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Metcalf’s law defines the value received from productive additions to the internet. It also defines the drain of no-productive elements. When you act you are a productive node when you protest or refuse to participate you are a non-productive node.

On tax day there was an IRS report on only 88 million workers paid into the system our of I believe 156 million US workers.

Are you productive or an energy sync to your team, company, community? We have all seen this in action and it looks like top down control or container building. Today the world is more horizontal in nature and this is rarely more on display then the business world. In some research recently I came across a stat that stood me straight up. There are only 18k companies in the US with 500 or greater employees. So, that leaves millions with less.

We are all individual contributors!

As leader/worker communication and trust help your team hold those productive node roles. Long rest Command and control! Cross functional team lead is an early developed skill of the product manager who rarely has direct report accountability but has always lived in a matrix driven structure. Product teams work in a container more than a reporting line.

In this learned leadership path is part of the reason so many PMs find their way to the start-up and leadership roles. The entrepreneur is self-directed and action based at their core. They are followed because they create containers within groups.

Teams is a word that I would like to lose as it comes from sports and if the market competition is the target of the event, great. If internal groups are the target, not so great. Seems minor but take it from someone who has learned the hard way pushing the fulcrum to far in command and to far back to abdicating leadership, Lead from the center of the pack, ensure all your nodes are positive on your network, remove the Hackers and 404s!

Innovation vs. the Idea

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Ideas are random for the most part, dots that get connected whereas Innovation is a targeted process often building on current solutions and participating actively in creative destruction.

Clearly one of the hardest parts of creating an innovative culture is the destruction. I have never met a creator who likes to see their last work of art destroyed, but I have met innovators who have learned to honor the new and let go of the past.

There was an old saying in the commercial arts world of my past that went.  The greatest thing about the work is you carried around the best 10 days of your career in your portfolio and got to relive them at every review. Folks who had 20-30 pieces in their book were always suspect. They had so many because they had either run out of creativity or were stuck unable to move from evolution to evolution.

This truth is alive in many product companies who struggle with innovation. They struggle to leave the past and move on, fear sets in, 2-3% growth, maintaining market share become the goals. This is honoring success of the past and leads to a small future. There are two things to do after the walk off home run.

First is celebrate –Honest specific gratitude and acknowledgment, an Ice cream social, a few specific awards and back to work..

Second is get up in the morning and Play the next game. You can’t replay yesterday’s game, but in business you need to keep delivering on that. Delivering, day in and day out is good business management. It is an art in itself to keep the flywheel running and moving through its’ lifecycle. But if your innovation engine gets engaged at this level you are wasting you resources and limiting your future.