Thoughts on Product Management

re: Thoughts on Product Management

vikasgoyal77 — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:47:46 GMT

Hi Tom,

I think what u have written is excellent. I have been associated with a Product since last seven years. Joined as a developer and now playing role of technical architect for .net version of it. The aspect of someone playing a role of bridge between customer and product roadmap has always been missing in my team. This resulted in releasing lot of functionality which never got used. I think role of Product Manager is most critical for any product and should be executed with very open mind.

Thanks for your post.

http://DotNetWithMe.blogspot.com

vikas goyal

re: Thoughts on Product Management

dfoliveira — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:32:07 GMT

Hi Tom,

Great post... I don't have a product management, but is good to learn about. I'm a fan of patterns & practices team.

I was thinking... why don't create a forum Patterns & Practices at MSDN Forum?

Regards.

Daniel Oliveira

re: Thoughts on Product Management

David Mammen — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:15:00 GMT

Check out www.productmarketing.com for our Pragmatic Marketing's online resource library for product managers. More than 40,000 product managers have been trained in the Pragmatic Marketing Framework.

Using the Policy Injection Application Block

^(?:[^$]*)$ --Matches everything, captures nothing — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:45:26 GMT

Since Both Tom and Ed wrote an article explaining whatever the Policy Injection Application Block [PIAB]

re: Thoughts on Product Management

donsmith — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:12:22 GMT

Great post Tom. I really think you captured the essence of the role and the responsibilities. As fellow p&p product manager, my team often refers to me as the Product Owner. It didn't make a lot of sense until our dev lead pointed me to this: http://www.think-box.co.uk/blog/2005/08/being-effective-onsite-customer-or.html

Don

re: Thoughts on Product Management

Hai — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:51:07 GMT

I have the same thinking about the role and responsibilities as yours. Software development process does not have the rigid rule such as you are the project manager you must do that and no one has the right to do. The most important thing that the PM can do is selecting the right person to right work. I like the simple model like MSF and I will try to apply it in my project also. Thanks for great post.

Just Released! Enterprise Library 3.0 - April 2007

Tom Hollander's blog — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 02:03:15 GMT

Yes, it's finally here. The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce the official release

re: Thoughts on Product Management

Elizabeth Simmer — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 03:04:46 GMT

Tom,

You have provided an excellent overview of the most common characteristics involved in Product Management versus a type of Program Management (there are all kinds of characteristics with this role as there are with PdM).

Upon having dinner with a neighbor recently who is the Director of Product Managment for a small startup in the telecom industry, our dinner conversation drifted to what I did for a very large company. I described my role as a strategic alliance manager involving the development of three-year strategic business plans (updated yearly), jointly developing go-to-market plans to drive revenue goals, recruiting new alliances, negotiating $MM$ contracts and managing milestone deliveries/payments as needed.

She claimed that that was what she did in her role as Dir. of Product Management. Clearly, I felt there was a disconnect until I began to look at Product Managment job descriptions that clearly included a significant element of alliance development and management.

The differences I have discovered are twofold. One, the sheer scale and deal flow of the business I drove and the fact that in a larger company, jobs tend to be more specialized due to greater numbers of resources. Other than that, the similarities are striking. often in small companies, the employees are expected to wear a multitude of different hats whereas in a larger company the opposite is generall true.

In interviewing for business development roles, I tend to ask a key question that has turned out to be quite revealing. It is this: "What is the unwritten rule in 'your' company?"

Often, the reply is, the product managers really own the strategic direction not the bus dev manager.

My quest for you and your readers is - Is it your experience that the alliance development and management is part of the product manager's role?

Do you agree that Product Managers drive strategic plans that bus dev managers execute?

re: Thoughts on Product Management

Ron Fredericks — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:09:31 GMT

Thanks for your write-up. As a product manager it is nice to read about new leadership ideas and ways to solve problems. Recently I wrote a blog post on community-based product management with an example of a successful community engineering project back in 1981 for us all to consider emulating. Here is the link:

http://www.embeddedcomponents.com/blogs/2007/04/community-software-development-for-embedded-devices/

My new role in p&p

My Technobabble — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:45:27 GMT

Hi everyone I've recently joined patterns & practices as the Product Manager for the Client Software

What am I doing now anyway?

Tom Hollander's blog — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:31:21 GMT

Another Tech.Ed has come and gone, and I'm currently relaxing in the Qantas Club lounge at Auckland airport

What am I doing now anyway?

Noticias externas — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:17:26 GMT

Another Tech.Ed has come and gone, and I'm currently relaxing in the Qantas Club lounge at Auckland

Thoughts on being a Solution Architect

Tom Hollander's blog — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:49:20 GMT

About a year ago I put together a post called Thoughts On Product Management , containing some random