Here's just the sort of diagram that you might find in a book about product management. Or maybe it could be something that the VP of Product Management presents to other groups in the company, to explain the PM team's strategy for understanding customer requirements.

OK, I lied. It's not a diagram from a product management or product marketing presentation. Here's the real version of the diagram, which comes from an article in the Small Wars Journal, the magazine for people in the business of fighting guerrillas and terrorists. The article's title is a bit of a mouthful: Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Collection Management in the Brigade Combat Team during COIN: Three Assumptions and Ten "A-Ha!" Moments on the Path to Battlefield Awareness.

I've been doing a fascinating set of interviews with the successful heads of product management and product marketing organizations. Since the topic is, "Tell us your best practices," the interviews are the perfect occasion to probe many issues that vex people in this profession.

Whenever we got to the part about running a PM team, I inserted a question about the type of person who makes a good product manager. As seen in some of the research I did last year, product managers come to the profession from a motley collection of previous jobs. (No surprise there.)

However, it's clear from these interviews that the people who run PM departments are pretty unhappy with this state of affairs. Frequently, they've taken deliberate steps to fix it.  Sometimes, this means an agonizing reappraisal of whether the people in the team today have all the skills and experiences they really need.

Last Wednesday, the part of Forrester that runs the Leadership Boards sponsored a dinner in the Boston area for product managers and product marketers. (This was part of the regular activity for the new Technology Product Management Council.) And wow, was that a good conversation.

The good news is, the research agenda is on the right track. From social media to product requirements, from the PM job description to general best practices for PM, from Agile in the tech industry to how people become thought leaders, we seem to be picking the right topics.

The bad news is, I have a lot of research to do. But that's only bad news as long as I'm not doing it.

However, that wasn't the best part of the dinner, which was when we Forresterites shut our big yaps. The product managers and product marketers had a lot to talk about themselves, comparing experiences in profession that doesn't give many opportunities to talk across organizations. Fostering and participating these missing conversations was one of the reasons I wanted to join Forrester in the first place.

I suspect that there are two reactions to this video:

1. "Oooooh, cool! Now I want a Prime Computer!"
2. "Who the heck is that guy?"

Count yourself on one side or another of this dividing line of humanity. I bet some enterprising company could take this commercial, digitally alter it to include a different product, and still reach people in Category #1. (At least, consumers in Great Britain, and the attendees at the San Diego Comic Con.)