supported, it is impossible to be knowledgeable about the details.

And we have found that the devil is always in the little, seemingly unimportant, details. Interest means team members know what they don’t know and are willing and able to question the truth when something doesn’t seem right, doesn’t make sense or there just aren’t enough facts to support a decision. There are many, many skills for each member of a product team to master – but passion cannot be taught or supplemented with training tools. Passion is infectious and organic; it spreads and must be seeded in every product team.

With a passionate team that is interested in its product or service, the next step is to ensure they have a well-rounded set of business skills.

Why? Because ideally, product teams, and in particular product managers, need to be accountable for the business performance of their products. We have found that companies can only have as many great products as they have great product champions. In fact, product managers should ideally be considered the “CEOs of their products,” accountable for both revenue and cost (and therefore,contribution to the bottom line.) This may require leading by example, highlighting a few superstars and their product successes to the rest of the organization. But building a competent, world-class product team almost always requires preparing to be successful by providing the appropriate training, supports and tools.

Team members need a full complement of the following skills, each of which can be enhanced with professional development:

• Selling and influencing skills – the ability to excite internal and external customers, recognize the importance of stakeholders outside of the team and champion the product in alignment with their agendas.
• Communication & presentation skills – the ability to talk to anyone at any level in an organization and make the point in a language they can understand.
• Financial planning skills – the ability to logically dissect costs and forecast revenues.
• Technical competence – having a sufficient command of any underlying technologies to be respected.
• Pattern recognition skills – the ability to identify trends, and therefore opportunities, from random data. This is what Wayne Gretsky meant when he said “I skate to where the puck is going to, not where it is."

Since product managers in large organizations often live and work in different business units and geographies – and at a minimum spend their days wrapped up in the world of their product - they often have little opportunity to interact with each other. Therefore, it is also important to provide a forum for developing a community of practice, in addition to providing opportunities for teams to hone their skills.

In particular, establishing a community of practice and building visibility and credibility around the role and discipline can each serve to support the growth and effectiveness of their product development and management staff. A few key methods to try:

• Provide a mechanism for interaction across products – maybe it’s a web site, maybe it’s a monthly professional development seminar, or maybe it’s physical co-location. Because their daily lives center on their products, product managers seldom have the chance to work with (let alone see) other product managers. Find a way to get them together and let them share their experiences.
  
• Build credibility - everyone related to the discipline – from senior management on down – should communicate with the rest of the organization about what product management is, and why it is important. Most people don’t know what a product manager’s job is – so they need to be told.
  
• Provide air cover – reduce “professional risk” for product managers so they can operate at the right level of “product risk”. Product managers often feel exposed, threatened and unappreciated. They are accountable for results that our outside of their control, and the good ones push their agenda by taking all kinds of risks. Providing air cover means working behind the scenes to justify those risks and maintain perspective on the value of the people.
  
• Celebrate results – product development and management is an uncertain business. You need to be explicit in pointing out when something good happens. Making a critical decision, or passing a critical milestone, or even shutting down a project should be positioned as positive events inside and outside of product management.

In next month’s issue, we will discuss the 4th step in our program, developing an internal communications plan.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end and we look forward to seeing you next month. In the interim, if you have any comments or opinions you’d like to share, please click here.

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