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From the Archives: Scrum This!

by The Cranky Product Manager on September 1, 2010

in Agile/Scrum

The Cranky Product Manager is a little busy this week, seeing as she is now also doing the work of 4 people who were laid off.  

So, she's going to be a laze and reprint an old article from exactly 2 years ago: Scrum This!  (see original post with the comments here).

Request: Don't be an a-hole.  Last time the Cranky PM published this article, she got scary, threatening, sexist, and pornographic emails and comments from the Agilista Henchmen - they were all freaked out she dared to say anything bad about their pet methodology.  

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Hey You! Mr. Release Manager!

The Cranky Product Manager appreciates that you're trying to do this Agile Scrum thing by the book. And that it is hard for you. Because before this Agile tsunami came crashing down you mainly just tracked the progression of different release documents (Is the PRD done? Check. Is the Functional Spec done? Check. Is the Design Doc done? Check.)

Ok, that's not fair of the Cranky Product Manager. You did more than that. You also ran hurried release meetings once a week that tried to bury issues instead of surface them (OK everyone, here's the status of all the documents. Anyone have any issues? None? OK, let's adjourn.) You also organized two or three Fantasy Cricket leagues plus your wedding during working hours, and boy it all took a lot of time.

But now, in the Scrum era, things are different.  It' s not easy. You once had a private office, but you now spend the bulk of your day tethered to a communal table in a stifling hot "War Room," inhaling the body odor of The Veteran, trying to tune-out the grandstanding arguments between two nimrod Hotshots ("My idea is the most elegant...", "No it's not. It's trivial. You'd have to refactor it immediately."), and listening to the documentation writer bitch and moan that she can't write the doc by Friday if the product keeps changing every hour. It's really hard to organize fantasy leagues or surf the web with so little privacy. Plus the porn shui of the War Room is completely off.

So it sucks to be you, Mr. Release Manager, and the CPM is sorry for you.

But just because you are stuck in that War Room doesn't mean the Cranky Product Manager should have to join you. You argue that in Scrum the product manager is the same as the Product Owner, and therefore the Cranky Product Manager needs to be constantly available to the team in order to make on-the-spot decisions within minutes of the asking.  Ergo, you demand the Cranky Product Manager sit in that sticky-note-encrusted, windowless tomb with you all damn day.

Uh, no way.  Not gonna happen.

Agile Scrum Development War Room
Why not? Because the Cranky Product Manager needs to be the Voice of the Customer and the Voice of the Market.  How is she to do that without actually VISITING some customers and prospects?  And VISITING means that she actually needs to leave the office, hop on airplanes, and fly far, far away.  She cannot answer questions from the dev team within 5 minutes if she's on a plane, or in a meeting, or on the phone with a customer.  Not that the CPM wouldn't LOVE to hear debates about Iron Man or whether that Star Wars cartoon is "canon" or not --  all day, every day, for hours on end. Who wouldn't?

And your response, Mr. Release Manager?  You argued that perhaps the Cranky Product Manager should not visit so many customers and should spend more time in the War Room.

Anyone else see the irony? The Voice of the Customer should have less interaction with customers?  All so she can make on-the-spot customer-facing decisions more quickly?

TRUST that the Cranky Product Manager will have more to say about this Fatal Flaw of Scrum in an upcoming post... She feels a HUGE rant coming on.

Related Posts: So You Think "Agile" Methodologies Exempt You From Product Management

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Why the USP for Every Technical Product Sounds the Same

by The Cranky Product Manager on August 25, 2010

in Analysts,Development,Marketing,The PM Profession

Watch as your unique selling proposition is ground into gruel, indistinguishable from everyone else's gruel.

Every time the Cranky Product Manager reads about a new B2B startup or product, she gets a sense of déjà vu.

Alas, it's not a glitch in the Matrix. It's because pretty much every single product pitch sounds exactly the same.  Watered down, generic, and 100% free of taste. 

A grinder is at work at almost every B2B software company.  A soul-crushing process that pulverizes the unique, complex, and interesting, into gruel-like messaging that the industry's lowest common denominator (and by LCD, the Cranky PM means the PR people) find acceptable and almost understandable. (see footnote 2)

telephone game girls

Observe as the Unique Selling Proposition of DysfunctoCrank is ground into pasty mush.  (Anyone remember that game "Telephone"???)

What Development Says to Product Management: 

DysfunctoCrank's architecture uses an MPP-architecture, patent-pending modified vulcan compression techniques, Eventual Iron(TM) technology, predictive klingon data cloning,  dynamic resource kirk-ification, blah, blah, and blah.  We tested DysfunctoCrank on clusters to 64 CPUs, and it did pretty well.  We haven't tested on anything bigger.  

Remember, DysfunctoCrank uses a proprietary clustering. We're going to have to rearchitect the entire thing from the ground up if you want to support cloud deployments, and that will take the entire Engineering team at least a year or two.

What Product Management Says to Product Marketing -  For 80% of the use cases, DysfunctoCrank is about 35% faster than anything else out there and can handle double the workload of anything else.  It can scale out and scale up near-linearly, across any number of CPUs or machines, and has best-in-class features for high availability.

DysfunctoCrank can currently be deployed on-premise, but in our next release we are aiming for cloud deployments (although we still have significant technical challenges to overcome).

What Product Marketing Says to Corporate Marketing -  DysfunctoCrank delivers cloud-based reliability, performance, and scalability that no other Crank system today can match. It is the industry's most efficient, cost-effective way to achieve your business goals.

  • All the benefits of the Cloud: Pay only for what you need - start small, add cloud capacity only as needed. 
  • Infinite linearly scalable, supercharged predictable performance, and no wasted capacity
  • Self-healing, managed reliability

What Corporate Marketing Says to the Press and to the Analysts - DysfunctoCloud is a cloud-based solution platform designed to increase your revenue, lower your TCO, and synergize with your efforts to engage users in a virtualized, Social Media Web 2.0, cloud-based world.  Plus it's in the cloud. DysfunctoCloud is CLOUD-TASTIC!!!!

What the Press Says to the World - DysfunctoCloud is just like the cloud-based offerings from vendor X, vendor Y, and vendor Z.  

What the Analysts Say to the World- In our TragicQuadrangle, we're moving DysfunctoCloud a smidge to the right on the "vision" axis, because their cloud stuff sounds kinda seksi. But we're moving them down on the "ability to execute" axis until they buy more of our consluting (see footnote 2) services.

Footnote 1:  Allow the Cranky Product Manager to continue digging at MBA programs: Business school is a similar grinder. At top B-schools, the newest crop of MBA students arrive on campus as a highly diverse group, from all professions and walks of life. Then, just two years later, 80% of the students depart as one of only two varieties: banker or management consultant. 

Footnote 2: Not a typo.

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B-School and the Missing Product

by The Cranky Product Manager on August 17, 2010

in The PM Profession,Your Career

The Cranky Product Manager was just thinking back -- oh so nostalgically -- on her MBA years.

Ah yes, what a joy it was to devote herself full-time to the study of BUSINESS.... so different than her undergrad years as an Engineering major at a random institute of technology.

No more studying seven days and nights a week and working endless hours in the lab, all to get a lousy "B" or "C".Nope.

Business School couldn't be more different than Engineering School.  Ah yes, the easy A's.  The off-da-charts drunken parties, multiple times a week. The hot men who worked out, showered, AND shaved EVERY single day! The random hook-ups with the aforementioned hot men.  The four black tie events per year. The exotic vacations "study trips," funded by federally guaranteed student loans, to international locations with hot locals and lots of alcohol in need of the MONSTEROUS brains and awesome business expertise possessed by a gaggle of privileged 28-year-old MBA students.

What a time it was!  Those were the days!

The Cranky Product Manager took classes on marketing, finance, accounting, organizational behavior, strategy, operations, statistics, etc.  All that standard MBA stuff.  Especially the marketing and the strategy.  She ate that stuff up.

But in all her time as a drunken and downright slutty full-time MBA student, the Cranky PM never took a SINGLE class on developing products and services.   She doesn't even recall such a class being offered. (see footnote) 

...which is ODD, when you think about it.  After all, EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS IN EXISTENCE sells either a PRODUCT or a SERVICE. 

Why would a Top-10 MBA program essentially ignore the CORE of all business? 

Perhaps it is because MBA types, including the professors, think of product and service development as being the realm of engineers?  Did they think the engineering curriculum was covering it?

Maybe.  But if so, what a horrible misjudgement.  The Cranky Product Manager's computer engineering education consisted of a lot recursive loops, mathematical proofs, Turing Machines, oscilloscopes, FPGAs, and exhaustingly insane late nights (once stayed up 54 hours straight), trying to get some effing wire properly situated on a breadboard, or debugging a mind-bending multiple inheritance issue in some code written in an arcane/academic language.

The end result was that the Then-Engineer-Future-CrankyPM could probably build a product if someone told her EXACTLY what to build.  She learned NOTHING about how you decide WHAT to build, how you determine if it should even be built in the first place, or how you get ideas. And that's probably pretty typical of most Engineering educations.

Aren't these questions absolutely fundamental to any business: how you decide WHAT to build, how you determine if it should even be built in the first place, and how you get ideas???

Footnote: Sure, the Intro to Marketing class touched on the "product", but as only one of The Four P's: product, price, promotion, placement. The Marketing Research class talked a bit about products too, but it wasn't truly central to the class.
 

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Harvester Research and Analyst 2.0

by The Cranky Product Manager on August 13, 2010

in Analysts

Oh goodness.  The Cranky Product Manager realizes that this April Fool's send-up of technology analysts has been creeping around the Internet for well over a year.  But, alas, this is the first time she saw it.

Please read.  Very funny stuff. It's about Harvester Research's launch of ForceSales.com, the industry's first Analyst-as-a-Service (Aaas) offering.

The Cranky Product Manager especially likes the Harvester frameworks: the Harvester Fave, the Harvester Magic Kingdom , and the Harvester Market Dream Cycle.  

 

 

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No Excuses Product Management (Part 3): I Have No Market Data

by The Cranky Product Manager on August 12, 2010

in Marketing,The PM Profession

Please excuse the Cranky Product Manager with a long overdue post, to continue her "No Excuses Product Management" series.

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LAME-ASS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT EXCUSE #3: "I have no market data.  I don't know the market size (or market share, competitor share, market growth, competitor features, or other relevant facts about the market) because there is no budget for market research."

This excuse demonstrates a defeatist, passive, victim-ish attitude that the the Cranky PM always finds shocking in a product manager. Product Managers should have the OPPOSITE attitude.

When tripe like this is trotted out as a justification for not knowing basic market facts, well, The Cranky Product Manager's Official Excuse-to-English Translator yields: "I don't know how to use the Google. I'm not resourceful. I don't know how to use SurveyMonkey or LinkedIn or email. I am uncomfortable with ambiguity. I have no idea how to make estimates (even though my two-year old learned how to do it from last week's Sesame Street). I'm lazy. I expect someone else to do my job for me. I have no business judgment. I have no tolerance for risk. I don't know how to dial the phone. I don't care enough to put in the effort. I am, and always will be, merely a requirements monkey."

The Cranky Product Manager sometimes hears this Lame Ass Excuse from former Proctor & Gamble-ish people who've given up the ivory tower life and are now "slumming it" in tech product management.

Sure, at P&G, the Market Research Fairy leaves conjoint analyses and detailed survey results under Brand Managers' pillows (along with a few much-needed breath mints) a few times a week, and there is nary a question about the product or brand that is too minor (or too expensive) for P&G to research.  But you ain't at P&G, are you?

Freshly-minted MBAs are also prone to trotted out this line of bull. Yes, we know your B-school professor told you that one-on-one interviews are no substitute for focus groups. And that focus groups are no substitute for surveys. And that if you're going to do a survey, you better do it right with a sample size of at least n-hundred, a sample group that is exactly demographically representative of your target, and perfectly designed questions that have been psychographically proven to be 100% free of any trace of bias.  And this is why the Cranky PM loves hiring spankin' new MBAs so much (for all you native Californians, we call this statement SARCASM).

Argh.  Here's a NEWS BULLETIN for all you Rapunzels in CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) and all you shiny happy MBA grads: That ain't life in tech,and probably never will be.  It ain't life in any B2B industry, really.

In the world of tech, marketers don't rule the roost, but instead technologists and former Sales Droids rule supreme.  In general (and yes, the Cranky PM realizes there are some exceptions), if a tech company has an extra $400K lying around (right!), it'll probably hire a few more CodeBoys/Gurls or Droids, rather than ordering up a wicked huge market research study. 

You might think this tendency is dumb, dumb, dumb.  You might argue that without proper market research that your company will attack the wrong customer problems and will ultimately fail.  And you might be right.  No doubt, we could ALL use more "real" market research, especially about customer problems and whatnot. 

But guess what.  It ain't gonna happen. This is tech, remember. Sure, you might get to do a bit of "real" market research now and then.  But it won't be every year, and it will only cover a tiny fraction of the questions you need answered.  (After all, it's a bit tougher to do a conjoint analysis on all the features of a CRM system than it is for a bag of flour. And since CPG companies spend big bucks to analyze flour, your dream conjoint study would probably cost a pretty penny - possibly more than your product's revenue.)

So deal with it.  

Sure, continue to beg for that market research budget.  But in the extremely likely event you do not get it, do your own market research.  

Conduct your own customer interviews.  Use LinkedIn to find non-customers in your target market to interview.  Create you own surveys with SurveyMonkey, even though the questions will be imperfect and the respondents will undoubtedly be unrepresentative.  For market size estimates, create a model with high and low estimates, and fill in with data from as many distinct third party resources as you can find. Go at it top-down and then bottom-up - the answer is in the middle. Make adjustments based on reasonable assumptions. Be ingenious. Read everything you can. Talk to everyone who will talk to you.

Trust the Cranky Product Manager, you will learn something very important in this process.  Something you wouldn't know if you just trotted out the Lame Excuse and punted on the research.  Something neither you, nor any of the CodeBoyz/Gurls, would have ever guessed.  

The endless quest for perfect research and perfect clarity is the enemy of the Product Manager.

As is the refusal to do any research because it would not be perfect enough to satisfy your Market Research Professor.

Taking action, based on reasonable though imperfect data, is the Product Manager's friend.  80/20, baby.  80/20.

NO EXCUSES Product Management.  Try it, you might like it.

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Product Management, Czech Style

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 21, 2010

in Your Career

Ah, Prague.  How fondly the Cranky Product Manager remembers you.  Such a beautiful city. Such wonderful espresso. Such fantastic Czech beer. Plus amazing architecture. *sigh*

And even better, Prague is where the Cranky Product Manager first learned the wicked awesome English word defenestration, as in "the defenestration of hotshot engineers is tempting for most product managers, but ultimately not advised."

Anyway, because Prague is so freakin' cool, the Cranky Product Manager is going to do something she's never done before: a job posting. 

Don MacLennan, esteemed member of the Crankerati and frequent cranky commenter, happens to be the Sr. VP of Product Management at AVG.  AVG is a purveyor of antivirus and security software with an interesting freemium business model.

Dan is hiring for two roles IN PRAGUE (or maybe Brno, CZ) that would report to him: a Director of Product Management and a Product Strategy Analyst.

You don't have to speak Czech, but you must be fluent in English, written and verbal. There are no citizenship requirements, as relocation and visa sponsorship are available.

The Cranky Product Manager emailed Don several tough questions about the nature of the Director position, as she believes that many companies don't fundamentally understand what product management is.  Either that, or they set product management up for failure.

Well, she liked Don's answers -- he "gets" product management and his answers did not raise any red flags.  She can't promise these positions will be All That And More, but at least it's a good start.

So, if you're a go-getter and a rock-star level product management pro, and you want to join a growing and thriving company IN PRAGUE, check it out.  The Cranky Product Manager would apply herself if family circumstances allowed. Did she mention the positions were in PRAGUE and you don't have to be an EU citizen?

And for the record, the Cranky Product Manager does not know Don personally and she has no relationship whatsoever with AVG.  She's received no compensation or benefits of any kind for making this post. These just sounded like a really cool jobs and she wanted to let you know about them. And it seems that Dan could be a cool (although potentially cranky-in-a-good-way) boss -- after all, he is a frequent reader of this blog.

Readers, do you DETEST or LOVE the CPM using this blog to profile cool-sounding PM jobs? Big mistake? Should she ever do it again?  Please answer in the comments? Thanks!

Next post will be "No Excuses Product Management #3 - Do Your Freakin' Product Strategy Already!" Promise.

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Happy Birthday to Me

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 11, 2010

in The PM Profession

FourthBirthdayYep, the Cranky Product Manager has been creeping around the blog-o-sphere for FOUR years now.

Check out the very first post.

Four years. That's a long time.  Don't know whether to celebrate or cry.  

Probably cry.  Because even though this blog has been around long enough to graduate from college, it's still living at home, not paying rent, and eating the author out of house and home.  

 

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A Blog You Should Read: Ribbonfarm

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 7, 2010

in The PM Profession

Call the Cranky Product Manager a laggard or whatever. But she has only just learned about the excellent blog, Ribbonfarm, by Venkatesh Rao. It is a blog about "business and innovation and stuff," and the Cranky Product Manager just spent the evening digging through its archives.

This blog gets the Cranky PM's thumbs-up because:

1) It is extremely well written. This dude can totally write, and the Cranky PM is wicked envious. 

2) Venkatesh is an original thinker and good at convincing you of his views.  His reviews of business books (Lords of Strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy, and many others) are especially worthwhile and thought provoking.

3) He brings The Cranky, and you know how the CPM loves that.

4) The Cranky Product Manager learned a lot! Even though her skull is very thick and her neurons are dying from watching The Hills and Millionaire Matchmaker.  

Seriously, check out Ribbonfarm. It's very relevant for product managers.

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Quick Clarification and How to Convince Your Boss to Get You Training

June 3, 2010

Just wanted to clarify the Cranky Product Manager’s previous post on training. The Cranky Product Manager is NOT against training for product managers.  Not at all. In fact, she HEARTS training, and any effort product professionals make to improve their skills and knowledge.  There are some really great classes out there! (see note 1) It’s [...]

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No Excuses Product Management (Part 2)- Stop Whining About Training

June 1, 2010

In this post, The Cranky Product Manager continues her vendetta against all those sniveling product managers who trot out pathetic excuses for NOT DOING THEIR FREAKIN’ JOBS. This is Part 2 of here NO EXCUSES PRODUCT MANAGEMENT series.  Enjoy Part 1 here.  There will be at least parts 3 and 4 (and who knows, maybe [...]

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