Next PM open house: Agile in tech companies

Since our first Forrester open house for product managers and product marketers was a success, we're going to start scheduling them regularly. Like, say, once a month.

The topic that has received the most votes in our topic survey is, How does Agile affect the company, outside the development team? Other leading topics include:

• What's the state of the art in requirements?
• How are other companies structuring their PM teams?
  
• How do companies make a successful transition to a new business model?
• How do other teams handle sales support?
• What are some strategies for handling the product roadmap?

We're leaving the survey open, so please, vote for the topics that most interest you.

Meanwhile, here are the details for the next session. This time, we'll make sure to leave a good chunk of time just for conversation with your peers and colleagues.

• WHEN: Thursday, December 3, from 4:00 to 5:30 PM.
• WHERE: 950 Tower Parkway, Foster City, CA. The Forrester office is on the 12th floor.
• WHY: Have an informal conversation with other PMs about a topic of mutual interest, with a Forrester analyst providing some supporting information from our research.

Later, I'll post a calendar with future dates and topics. Please pass the word to your friends and co-workers in the Bay Area. And if you're thinking of attending, please RSVP to Marsha Versen. The RSVP isn't mandatory, but it does give us an idea how many people may be attending.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

The Heretech, episode 28: April Dunford on product marketing

April Dunford, who writes the blog Rocket Watcher, explains the product marketing challenges in the tech industry, and the special problems facing startups. We also talk about how PMs can embrace social media without a huge hit to their schedule. Plus, a juicy tidbit from the upcoming research document on requirements. (c) 2009 Tom Grant

Remember the KISS principle?

This morning, I had a briefing with McObject, a tech vendor that specializes in embeddable databases. From cars to set-top boxes to web sites, there's a near-universal need to put data somewhere, retrieve it, and manage it. In these use cases, the simplest database technology is the best.

Their product strategy is interesting to the readers of this blog for at least a couple of reasons. First, there's an unstated assumption in many technology companies that complexity is inescapable. If you want to keep pace with your competitors, you have to keep pace with their feature set.

Keeping the roadmap simple
Pshaw. If you look carefully at McObject's roadmap, you don't see crazy amounts of new features. Instead, their product strategy focuses on the essentials. Provide logical database devices as a layer of abstraction above the actual storage (on disk, in memory, etc.). Take advantage of the performance improvements in 64-bit architectures. Give the developer an optimistic concurrency option.

The acceptability parameters aren't too hard to figure out. Prevent database corruption. Don't screw up performance. Don't baffle your customer with new  options they can't figure out.

I'd like to think that every technology company understands these principles, but, alas, they don't. For example, I've seen product marketing materials for cloud-based data management that possess none of this clarity and simplicity. In a few extreme cases, I've been unable to decipher what the vendor was claiming they could do, even though I've been working with databases and file systems for a long, long time.

Keep it simple for your customers
Clarity in your communications starts with your own clarity about your customers. Steve Graves, the CEO of McObject, made an important observation about working with developers: they're really smart people, on average. However, they don't know everything, and they often don't understand databases.

That should be no surprise to anyone who has ever worked on a development team, which, like the Dirty Dozen, is often a collection of specialists (demolitions, build scripts, sniper, Ajax...). In no small number of cases, the team may have no one who's a seasoned hand at databases, or other important domains (performance, security, etc.). Therefore, vendors like McObjects have to be ready to educate and advise, not just sling technology at them and hope for the best.

Sure, we've all had a good chuckle at that guy who rampaged across the stage like an enraged mountain gorilla, screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Unfortunately, we've behaved equally ridiculously, assuming that all developers are the same, or they're always willing to tinker with technology until it works, or that the differences in job function in the same development team don't have any effect on buying and adoption behaviors. Are you marketing to rank-and-file developers, or development managers? That can be as significant a question as, are you marketing your CRM system to salespeople or sales managers?

The simpler your product, the easier it is to understand its value.  Doing a very good job in your niche, such as embeddable databases, is far preferable to throwing in every feature that might have value, or inventing strained explanations of why your technology is part of the latest trend.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Sometimes, you measure commitment by the hour

During a breakfast meeting this morning, someone asked a very sharp question: Are businesses really operating differently because of social media? I then jumped in the car, drove from San Francisco back to our Foster City office, and heard how Cisco has used social media to change product launches.

The obvious change, of course, is lowering the cost, if you're not renting out the Moscone Center for a big launch party. Slightly less obvious changes include the ability to reach more people in more countries. , the virtual launch also makes it possible to reach more people, in more countries, than Cisco could with traditional face-to-face events.

So far, we're just considering changes in capability. Doing product launches cheaper, faster, better is an important innovation, but it's not a sign that a company is operating or thinking in a significantly different way. You might buy a cheaper, better, and faster car, but you might not change your driving habits one bit, or take more care to follow the traffic laws.

Therefore, during this conversation with Cisco, the one change from going to virtual product launches that really stuck out was operational: the marketing effort continues beyond the big ballyhoo day. Cisco employees remain engaged in conversations with customers through social media channels.

Contrast that with the old Moscone Center-style launch events. Everyone shows up for the big photo op, and then they go home. Sure, leads get entered into the CRM system, but that's hardly the same as continuing a conversation with the people you met at the launch event.

Of course, that means that some people at Cisco have to dedicate time to that continued conversation, instead of racing off to the next big launch event. There's a business decision behind allocating resources in this fashion, based on a different set of assumptions and calculations than the "marketer with a megaphone" launch events of 15 or 20 years ago.

Are social media for real? Yes, when they effect how companies operate.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

The Heretech, episode 27: Rob Koplowitz on SharePoint adoption

Forrester's Rob Koplowitz tells us how organizations adopt SharePoint, and the lessons learned for other technology vendors. But first, a recap of last week's open house on "social product management," and some musings on the product strategy for Google Wave. (c) 2009 Tom Grant.

And when Mr. Customer gets angry, PEOPLE DIE!

Not every unwelcome change is necessarily a fiasco. It's how you handle the transition that determines, to a large extent, whether people perceive it to be a fiasco.

Case in point: Oracle's transition from its creaky but familiar Metalink support site to the new support portal. I'm sure that anyone who has ever been involved in the transition from one web application to its replacement has learned just how many unexpected glitches can creep into the process. Certainly, Oracle has faced similar scenarios, such as when it switched the main corporate web site from a custom-built content management system to a new infrastructure based on Oracle Portal.

Unfortunately, the corporate web site, where people go to find high-level marketing information, is not the same as the support web site, where people go to get problems with mission-critical applications resolved.

Some of the new support site's problems, such as slow performance, are to be expected when you're putting a web application through its real-world paces for the first time. Others, such as the Flash UI that won't work in organizations that block Flash, are regrettable design decisions that should have been avoided. The team behind the new site can certainly fix these issues.

However, as Oscar Wilde once noted, "In matters of great importance, style, not substance, is the vital thing." Considering the style with which Oracle has handled the blowback from the My Oracle Support launch, they might take a few moments to ponder Wilde's maxim. For example, this snarky post from an Oracle support manager is getting linked pretty widely. In fact, the phrase, "Get in front of this one…seriously," might appear on a few T-shirts and bumper stickers, once the dust settles.

To their credit, people at Oracle are trying to both be responsive, and appear to be responsive. This detailed post on how Oracle handles usability issues in the My Oracle Support portal may include way more information than the average customer wants to read. But heck, when you're explaining the categorization and prioritization of usability issues, you're definitely being transparent to your customer.

Nonetheless, some Oracle customers are still alienated by the It's coming, deal with it message of the initial launch. And certainly, the industry is littered with examples of (allegedly) improved user experiences that either didn't improve anything, or that weren't marketed effectively to the people affected by the change. And, of course, there's the unfamiliarity factor of any new UI, which offends people who have built their daily work around the old, familiar UI. Why Oracle didn't heed these cautionary tales is anyone's guess.

Whenever anyone designs a user experience, they're well advised to remember another Oscar Wilde maxim, "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." The natural tendency is to build a UI that makes sense to you. Whether or not it makes sense to the person using that UI is another matter entirely.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Is "social product management" for real?

Here's an important rule of thumb, if you're a researcher such as myself: Don't name something unless it really exists. That sounds fairly obvious, but unfortunately, in the history of the technology industry, there's a sad history of failed neologisms. In some cases, these phrases exaggerated the importance or complexity of some relatively mundane aspect of the world. That's how the superheated usage of the term knowledge management turned into a four letter word. In other cases, people use neologisms designed to describe things that might (or might not) exist in the future as if they already existed now. I've heard some presentations about the Semantic Web that certainly fall into that category.

Therefore, when I use a phrase like social product management, believe me, I'm using it very carefully. Over the course of the last week, I've had occasion to use it on several occasions, most recently at last night's open house for PMs in the Forrester Foster City office. (Thanks to all who attended, by the way.)

Social product management passes the sniff test for neologisms because it describes something that's really happening: social media are changing the way that product managers and product marketers work. Here are a few manifestations, excerpted from the research I've been doing for the last several months:

• Social media figure increasingly in the to-do lists for PMs. Whether it's answering forum postings or monitoring "chatter" about your company on Twitter, PMs are spending more time using social media to get some aspects of their job completed.
• Social media demand new skills to master. It's abundantly clear that using social media, in either an inbound or outbound capacity, takes real skill. Unfortunately, not everyone has learned how to  spot the social media outlets where particular kinds of stakeholders congregate, or how to collect and interpret a representative sample of aggregate social media activity.
• Social media frequently require investment. It takes time and effort to figure out which social media channels are worth your attention. In some cases, new tools, such as listening platforms, can be a big force multiplier in these efforts.
• Social media require new attitudes to work. Everything falls apart if the company isn't ready to take social media seriously. Strangely, customers expect social media to be the place where conversations happen, instead of providing yet another brand of megaphone for vendors to announce their greatness. They also expect you to follow up on these conversations. Weird, but true.
• Social media foment professional crises for PMs. The natural consequence of the previous bullets are some tough conversations between PMs and their managers. Topics include How the hell do you expect me to do this in my free time to Why use these new sources of intelligence if we continue to make the same mistakes in the decision-making process? However these conversations turn out, the fact that they're happening at all means that social media are having a real effect on the PM job.

Let's be clear: I'm not saying that social media obliterate everything that PMs used to do. Far from it. In pretty much every aspect of the job where social media are relevant, they supplement existing PM tasks, deliverables, or resources. For example, as useful as innovation sites may be (users propose features, comment on them, vote on them), you still need to have occasional face-to-face conversations with people in customer organizations. If 5,000 people vote for a great new feature, Ion flux regulator, that doesn't tell you why it's important to them, how they expect it to work, and other critical details that bear directly on prioritization and design decisions.

Therefore, the phrase social product management does have weight and purpose, to the extent that social media are changing the way that PMs in the tech industry work. Me absolvo, it's not just another meaningless buzzword.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Reminder, open house on social PM is tomorrow

Just a quick reminder that the "open house" for product managers and product marketers is tomorrow at 4 PM PST at Forrester's office in Foster City, CA (click here for a map). As my earlier post explains, the intent is to kick off a series of informal conversations about topics of interest.

For this first open house, we'll be discussing how social media are changing the job descriptions, priorities, deliverables, and required skills for PMs. All are welcome, the event is free, just come on down.

The Heretech, episode 26: Brian Drummond on Agile at Yahoo!

Brian Drummond tells us how Agile adoption worked at Yahoo! How did it start? How did different teams share best practices? How do you make Agile the status quo in a big software company? Plus, news of the first PM open house at the Forrester office in Foster City, CA. (c) 2009 Tom Grant

New VPR for IT Management Software - Call For Submittals

By Peter O'Neill

We are just starting our research for the next Vendor Positioning Review of IT management software vendors. While they all accepted our emphasis on BT instead of IT, many vendors actually ridiculed our VPR methodology focus on the website when we started these reports (“our customers don’t care about the website, they talk to us”). But it must now be clear to everyone in the technology industry how important B2B digital media has become. Our most recent data shows that the percent of technology buyers that are most advanced in using social media, what we call the Creators and Critics, is nearly double that of the US population in general.

Our plan with this VPR report is to highlight an IT management software best practice in each of the categories that we evaluate. These are listed below and remember, it is all about how well you present business technology as opposed to just technology. Just as a reminder, we evaluate the positioning of both the corporation and the products as follows:

Corporate Positioning

Corporate strategy
	Vision
	Growth objectives
Corporate marketing
	Tagline
	Advertising
	Web site
Corporate sales
	Sales alignment
	Sales skills
	Channel/alliance management

Product Positioning

Product strategy
	Road map
	Implementation strategy
Product messaging
	Role-based targeting
	Business value communication
	Business issue resolution
	Business justification

 

So, here is in invitation. While we will be doing our own research, you have the chance now to influence our selection. If you think that your own website could qualify as a best practice, then let us know and point us to that page. If we agree, then we will highlight that page in our report. I look forward to hearing from you.  

Always keeping you informed!

Peter