In the end, I’ve never met an Engineering Mgr at any level who didn’t appreciate (more correctly, clamor for) prioritization. After all, its almost certainly how its going to get built – module by module, layer by layer – not all at once.

Unlike working without a target audience, a Position Statement lets you build products people will want.

There are also dangers with being under the Marketing department too. The Marketing Manager often won’t understand that it actually takes time and effort to create a product… this is especially true if it is a software product. “Can’t you just whip that up? It’s only code…”. Sure, we can cluge just about anything together, but it ain’t going to work very well and we won’t be able to build on it. We’ll just have a one off orphaned product.

The Marketing Manager is also going to be pushing hard for revenue (at least at my company) especially at the end of the quarter. They are going to want to “ship it” even if it isn’t shippable yet.

However, I still see it as being a better situation to report through marketing instead of engineering for a PM.

You can have product mgmt report to R&D, but product marketing should be under Marketing to avoid the ginsu knife marketing syndrome. If you don’t pick a defensible target audience to actually market and sell to for your prospective buyers, then you won’t be on too many shopping lists.

Save the ginsu knife positioning for investors and internal discussions so you can tout how big your market will ultimately be, assuming that you can actually execute for every audience in the universe.

When I have had pig-headed executives outside of sales and marketing to deal with, I simply take them to one of my analysts’ friends at Forrester, Gartner, (you name your favorite) and do an “off-the-record” briefing (sort of a “what do you think of this?” briefing before the launch) to get their reaction to the ginsu knife approach. Then i let the analyst blast away. It usually starts a Q&A session between the Engineering guy or gal and the analyst that ends the internal positioning debate with a huge slice of humble pie.

My other favorite tactic is to bring the Engineering ginsu knife proponent to one of the Pragmatic Marketing public classes. That also results in another HUGE slice of humble pie.

If neither tactic works and you report to this person, then its time to update the resume because that company is in deep do-do.

Seth Godin’s book ‘Purple Cow’ is a must read on the positioning subject. Lot’s of refreshing examples.

Another possible approach: “‘Cause the sales people aren’t too bright, we need to give them a very specific demo to go after, where they can have a single consistent message, otherwise they’ll just be floppin’ around like fish out of water.”

The more rational version of that is to note that sales can only grow at so fast a rate. So don’t target the entire world out of the gate when you can only sell to a very small portion of it realistically.

Does this VP not realize that it takes different channels, stories, capabilities, and approaches to sell to different market segments?

He talks like he believes in positioning out one side of his mouth, and then does his best to undermine proper positioning, and sing kumbaya to address everyone everywhere with everything we do.

Then he has the gall to fail to understand the reasons why our competition, with well targeted products and tight positioning, are eating our lunch.

Time to find an escape route.

And laugh all the way back to your cubicle at his reasons for not being able to put one foot in front of the other.