Today we have an excellent guest post from a professional ho-bag.  No, not Lady Gaga, nor Paris Hilton, but an IT Industry Analyst!  You know, one of those coin-operated Gardener / Forest Ranger types.

The Cranky PM feels positively DIRTY publishing this, but it is very excellently written, quite cranky, and pretty durn funny (O-holes!  *snort*).

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Here’s a quick memorandum to Cranky Product Manager, Cranky Marketer, Cranky CEO, and all the other members of the Cranky League. You may be shocked to hear that you have my sympathy…Up to a point. As soon as it starts warping the relationship between vendor and analyst, your collective crankiness means exactly Jacques Merde.

You should take a good look at how dysfunctional families behave, since as a group, that’s how many of you operate when dealing with the outside world. In exactly the same fashion as a dysfunctional family, you pretend that you can conceal your problems from outsiders. (You can’t.) If one of these outsiders takes note of these problems, you denounce them loudly and angrily. (It’s not convincing.) And you refuse help from anyone, not because you might need it, but because the shame of admitting to your problems might cause some beloved, confidence-defining portion of your anatomy to shrivel up and fall off. (It won’t.)

Just like any dysfunctional family, your attention is focused inwards. The tiny world inside your four walls, even if it gets abysmally ugly, can dominate your mind in the same way that a moth can’t think of anything but slamming itself over and over against a porch light. In contrast, outsiders—customers, partners, analysts, journalists—are just an annoying distraction. You want to get any odiously necessary contact with outsiders over with as quickly as possible, because you have to get back to winning that incandescent argument with the obnoxious twit who works on the next floor up.  And you act surprised when people don’t seem to like you.

If you think the dysfunctional family comparison is unfair, let’s take a look at how neurotic your behavior really is. We’ll use a typical pre-launch analyst briefing as a case study.

• You want to get analysts to praise your upcoming Mega- Über-Super Release Of Ultimate Power And Awesomeness. (Check that box: “Get analyst buy-in.”) However, you wait until the last possible moment to give the briefing, when it’s far too late for analyst feedback to have even the slightest effect on the release. Everyone knows what you really want is validation. When you don’t get it, you act hurt and outraged, like the relatives who ignore you the rest of the calendar year, but there’s hell to pay if you forget to send them a Christmas card.
• You try to convince the analysts, during the briefing, by talking them to death. Surely, if you keep piling up the words, the collective weight of them will crush any objections. Forget having a conversation, or questions, or even a bathroom break. And why stop talking long enough to show the product, when you can continue describing it in terms of abstract boxes, circles, trapezoids, and arrows in a PowerPoint slide? Or 187 PowerPoint slides?
• Rather than providing direct access to reference customers, you tell us that you have a case study. Or, to paraphrase, you know a guy in your company who knows a guy in another company who told the first guy that the new product looked pretty good. This standard of evidence works pretty well for the enthusiasts of the weird and unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and UFO sightings. The problem with the skeptics? They just don’t want to believe.

As obnoxious as this behavior can be, you still haven’t completely destroyed our sympathy. We know how much effort goes into an analyst presentation—all the hand-wringing behind the scenes, especially with the CEO, CMO, CTO, and all the other executive-level O-holes involved.

Unfortunately, despite all your pains, the result is a lot like the hideous plaid sweater you got from your well-intentioned but fashion-challenged aunt for your birthday: It’s not the gift you wanted. Hell, it’s not even what you explicitly asked to get.

I’m sure that, if the briefing doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, verbal fisticuffs ensue. However, these arguments among the Cranky Department Heads don’t usually make the next briefing any better. Dysfunctional families argue a lot, but the arguments are never about the real problem. If you can exhaust yourself yelling at Bob because he left the toilet seat up, or laying out your careful argument proving that Mary doesn’t give you the respect you deserve, or reminding Frank that you warned him a thousand times over that the god damn puppy he wanted was going to ruin the furniture, you don’t have the time or energy left over to discuss anything substantive.

So, if the Cranky Engineer didn’t get all the requirements info he wanted, or the Cranky Marketer feels unappreciated for all the great leads she generated, Boo Fricking Hoo. Welcome to life in the vale of tears, where you might get the chance to fix some of these problems, but others will stubbornly resist all your world-class wailing and gnashing of teeth. No one expects you, or your company, to be problem-free. We do mind, however, if you use your problems as an excuse to treat the rest of us shabbily.

Yeah, yeah, the Cranky Product Manager is wicked delinquent in posting Part 3 by the Cranky Marketer.

You remember the Cranky Marketer, don’t you? That dude/dudette who thinks that in general Marketing is too busy with tactical crap to learn about and understand the customer, and that therefore Marketing’s failure to do its own job is somehow Product Management’s fault? (See Part 1, and Part 2, and the Cranky Product Manager’s response here).

Boy, that Cranky Product Marketer  pissed the Cranky Product Manager off.   Especially when she read Part 3, which she now posts here.  Once you read it, you will see why it cheezed off the CPM so much – enough that she could not bring herself to post it for several months.

But perhaps the intervening months have made her wiser. The Cranky Product Manager realizes that there is indeed something for us product managers to learn from this post from the Cranky Marketer, despite its thesis that there are basically no decent product managers out there, and despite its strong resemblance to another blog’s post on this very topic.

The Problem with Product Management, by the Cranky Marketer

(Part 3 in a series – see part 1 and part 2 here)

If there is one group that should actually work well with Marketing, you’d think it would be Product Management. C’mon folks!  Product Management was created from Marketing’s very womb. But perhaps, like Shakespeare’s MacDuff, it was from that womb untimely ripped.

Perhaps Product Management has some sort of reverse Oedipus complex with Marketing, or the problem is simply a transference issue related to the nasty aspects of the Development-Product Management relationship. Regardless, there’s way too much friction between Product Management and Marketing.

To paraphrase a recent post by the Cranky PM:

Product Management Community, WTF is wrong with you?

Why was it that in all my years as a Product Manager I never noticed that the Product Management community is filled with such a wide array of bizarre characters and arrogant jerks?

Let’s do a little segmentation. Let’s create the Product Manager Magic Quadrant. And trust me, this is one Magic Quadrant that’s sorely needed.

Gartner, you’re on notice. If you start using this in any way, I’ll sue your ass off.

And Forrester, if you put this into a “Wave” and repurpose it, make sure you send me a fat royalty check. I have a soft spot for you Forrester because you actually have analysts who cover things like Marketing and Product Management. Way to go!  And I promise not to sue you as long as the royalty check is big enough to let me take my family on a nice vacation away from my coworkers. I need that vacation real bad.

So, like all Magic Quadrants, this one has two axes.

The horizontal axis represents level of knowledge of the Product Manager. This is a combination of the PMs ability to understand market problems, customer needs, technology trends, and of course, their own product at a reasonable level of detail.

Note: very few PMs have deep knowledge in all areas, though many think they do, so very few PMs will be on the far right of this quadrant.

The vertical axis represents the ability of the Product Manager to effectively work across teams, This means that as the product or release is being developed, the rest of the company is kept informed and updated of progress, issues and opportunities so as to maximize revenue potential and minimize lag and wasted efforts.  And of course, on this axis, there is a slight bias to how well they work with Marketing. Hey, it’s my Quadrant, I’ll define it how I want to.

Note: a lot of PMs think they’re the ultimate cross-functional leader, but guess again. Every PMs will claim they’re easy to work with and keep everyone else up in sync. How could they answer otherwise? But the reality is this is not the case so a lot of PMs will not score at the top of this axis.

I’m sure you would agree, knowledge and ability to work across teams are two VERY important traits for product managers to have. So here’s what the Product Manager Magic Quadrant looks like.

As you can see from this Magic Quadrant, the pickings are slim with the vast majority of PMs either too unskilled or too arrogant to be helpful.  The knowledge that Marketing needs about the product, product direction, strategy, capabilities, differentiators etc. is very hard to come by, with Angels being the ones who can convey it with any credibility and without extracting a severe price for that information.

With Assholes, the information has to be painfully extracted, and in most cases, abuse is heaped on the Marketer by the Asshole.

And of course, with the Misfits and Tenderfoots (Tenderfeet?), there isn’t a lot of information to actually extract, so what’s a Marketer to do?

Product Management is an important role and those of us who depend on Product Management to help enable us to do our jobs better struggle because a key piece of the chain is weak or missing altogether. As I said in my first post, it’s very difficult for Marketing to be the product and customer expert given all the other things we have to do in our job.

As Product Managers, ask yourselves how much thought, energy and time you spent researching needs for your most recent major release? How many discussions did you have amongst yourselves and the Engineering teams on architecture changes to make the product better? In how many internal conversations did you spend time debating competitive and technology issues before you came to agreement of what would and what wouldn’t be in that release and how it would be implemented and exposed to customers?

Now ask yourself, how much time was spent helping Marketing understand all those decisions you made, why you made them, the background information behind the key decisions, the alternatives you did and didn’t consider, the way the competitors do or don’t address the same problem sets etc.

I’m sure the ratio of time spent with Marketing is only a tiny fraction of the time you spent amongst yourselves and with Engineering. And then you wonder why Marketing “doesn’t get it”, or why Marketing “dilutes the message” or why Marketing “focuses on the wrong things”.

You didn’t gain your deep insight based on a 90 minute Powerpoint webinar, so why do you expect Marketing to be any better?

You want Marketing to gain a deep understanding of all the hard work you did over the last 6-12 months so as not to dilute the message etc.? Then don’t think we’re dumb or dumb things down for us.

Give us the facts, early and often. Give us time to think about the issues, ask questions, debate amongst ourselves and engage back with you. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how great it can work!

Or just continue to be Tenderfoots, Misfits and Assholes and be happy in knowing that the greatest barrier to maximum success of your product is you.

The Cranky Sales Engineer swears that the next marketing person who flies into town and plunks himself down in the CSE’s cube and asks, “So what deals are you working on with my product?” will be boiled in his own bullshit.

The CSE does not need a marketing funnel hawk.  Funnel hawks, for those who don’t know, are a parasitic form of marketing dweeb who think that they can maintain a funnel report by badgering the sales force.  The sales force avoids talking to these people for the same reason they don’t reply to spam, because any communication will cause a sudden and annoying increase in valueless communication.

Compare this approach to another marketing person who has a 100% handle on the funnel.  When this person learned about a deal I was working on, she hooked me up with a dynamite piece of training collateral that taught the customer how to use the product while highlighting all the features.  The CSE keeps this marketing person apprised of all deals in hopes of getting help in closing the deals.

(BTW.  Do not confuse funnel hawk activity with the CPM’s gathering of pricing information by talking to the sales force.  I can’t imagine who would fire a PM for such an activity, but that person needs to try a new line of work.  Perhaps something involving a squeegee and a dirty rag.)

Do not become a funnel hawk.  If you want to know what’s happening in the field, provide useful help to your sales team and you will be welcomed with open arms.  Random calls asking  “How’s that deal coming?” will not make you anyone’s friend.  Instead, become a sales partner, and you will get all the info you want.

Oh…alcohol helps as well.

Today we have a super-duper-uber-fantastic guest post from the Cranky Engineer, aka DGentry of codingrelic.geekhold.com. Check out his blog.  It’s WICKED AWESOME.

Also, you might recall that DGenery was the BIG WINNER of the Cranky Product Manager’s caption contest for the “7 Types of Engineers.” He won a fancy pants coffee mug.  AND HE LOVES IT.  Maybe YOU should buy a coffee mug too….

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From: Cranky Engineer #4
To: Product Manager #4
Date: Apr 1, 2009
Subject: Twitter reliability enhancement functional spec

Got your PRD about the 3G connectivity issues at the SXSW conference and the resulting drop in twitter volume, thanks. We couldn’t help but notice the lack of any actual requirements in the requirements document, but the main point seemed to be to “make it mo’ betta.” As mobile tower placement is subject to considerable regulation, we presume that the PRD is not calling for a build-out of a new national 3G network, but rather to eliminate dependencies on external factors beyond our control. Thus:

• No dependency on mobile network capacity
• No impact from density of surrounding buildings or obstacles
• No necessity for the presence or absence of electricity.
• No requirement for the user to own or know how to operate a computer

I think we’ve come up with a proposal which meets these requirements. The only remaining dependency is literacy. As we do not control the educational system in this country, this dependency may also need to be eliminated in a future version of this document.

Abstract of Proposal

Twitter usage is growing robustly, but is hampered by insufficient network capacity at heavily attended tech events such as SXSW and anywhere Steve Jobs gets up on a stage. Tweet volume from such events is lower than would be expected due to the connectivity issues.

It is proposed that designated drop zones be established at major tech events, where conference attendees can send and receive tweets. To avoid any dependency on telco infrastructure, tweets will be delivered to these TweetDrops by a robust and innovative mechanism.

1. Encoding

Each 140 character tweet is printed on a 5 mm wide paper strip, which is laminated and wrapped about the leg of a single carrier pigeon. The tweet is printed using a standard UPC barcode for ease of decoding at the remote end. The lamination is not necessary in theory, but in practice the messages often need to be wiped clean before processing (these are pigeons, after all).

2. Ordered Delivery

Conversations become difficult to follow if tweets are delivered out of order, but ordering is not guaranteed by the underlying network topology in this case. Therefore an 8 bit sequence number will be prepended to the barcode, which will be used to re-order pigeons arriving at the destination.

With 8 bits for sequencing information, only 256 pigeons can be launched at a time. The next wave of pigeons cannot be launched until it is certain that all members of the previous wave have left the system. To achieve acceptable throughput the natural lifespan of the pigeons cannot be used for this purpose.
Therefore, a small explosive device is fitted before launch to place a strong upper bound on the Time To Live (TTL) for that tweet. The next wave of tweets can be launched when the TTL for the previous wave has expired.

3. Loss detection

Due to the TTL mechanism employed for robust ordering it is possible that tweets will be dropped (or, more properly, exploded) in transit. To allow for retransmission an additional 8 bit acknowledgment field will be prepended to the barcode, and used to implement a sliding window protocol. (XXX Hang on, are we reinventing TCP here? Let’s have a sit-down about this before you forward it to PM, or we’ll end up rat-holing on this topic.)

Though lost tweets are expected to be a serious burden during initial deployment of this technology, it is believed that natural selection will result in a more reliable infrastructure as the less dependable population of pigeons is removed from the breeding stock by the TTL mechanism.

4. Operational Issues

The operations cost of this infrastructure is expected to be high, due to the need for replacement of pigeons whose TTL expired in transit. It is proposed that a breeding program be established in order to replenish capacity at minimal cost. This also nicely solves the problem of providing something for the pigeons to do between major tech events.

5. Direction of Future Work

The necessity of printing each tweet on a strip of paper and scanning the paper at the destination is a serious bottleneck in the communications path. A more efficient mechanism would be to download the tweets directly into the carrier pigeon via an existing Twitter API. Unfortunately the pigeons have strongly resisted attempts to implement any such mechanism.

The TTL mechanism can reasonably be expected to elicit a negative response from both animal rights activists and civil defense authorities, and should be considered only a temporary measure to reduce the time to market. A subsequent update to the infrastructure should investigate use of electromagnets to confuse the carrier’s natural homing instinct and send them somewhere where the tweet payload they carry will be harmless.

6. Security Considerations

No thorough analysis of the security of the carrier pigeon transport has been conducted. Because each pigeon will follow a different route to the destination owing to differences in wind currents, temperature gradients, and mood, it is unlikely that an attacker would be able to capture an entire conversation.
Additionally the TTL mechanism discourages interception of the pigeons in flight.

Encryption of the tweet payload is acceptable only if the pigeons can be guaranteed not to cross from within the United States to another sovereign nation, as such would violate US export and munitions laws.

7. References

[1] D. Waitzman, “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers,” RFC 1149, 1 April 1990.

The Cranky Product Manager is SUPER LAZY these days. Once again, she’s letting someone else do the work – the Cranky Marketer – the dude/dudette in charge of Marketing at a B2B tech company. This is part TWO of three (see part one here).

This post is a  longie but a goodie, so check it.

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The Cranky Marketer on The Problem with Sales and Senior Management

While I really had a tough time with Engineering when I was a Product Manager, it was nothing compared to the problems I have with Sales, now that I’m in Marketing.

As individuals, most salespeople are pretty decent folk. There are a few assholes in every company who don’t give a sh*t about who they abuse en route to meeting quota, but when it’s getting late in the quarter or the economy sours, and account reps are hustling to hit their number, even the normal ones turn into the highest paid set of babies and whiners you’ve ever seen.

And while they’ll blame everyone in sight if needed, a lot of the complaints point to Marketing.

“There weren’t enough leads.

“The lead quality was sh*t.”

“I needed new success stories. The existing ones aren’t relevant to my prospects.”

And my favorite of all:

“My territory is different than other territories. The standard collateral doesn’t apply to my patch. What else have we got?”

And while this is clearly an exercise in creative excuse making, Sr. Management never fails to give in to this crap and an edict comes down from above to generate more “quality” leads, “refresh” the collateral etc. And the downward spiral continues.

There are ways to address this, but most companies don’t have the patience, skill set or culture to fix the problem. They’re too caught up in the quarterly tactical objectives than to do what is right.

First of all, even in companies where there are way too many leads – and believe it or not, I once worked in a company where even an order taker could meet quota – a number of reps complained there weren’t enough leads.

Why is it that no matter how good the lead generation programs, 98% of leads end up in the dustbin? And isn’t it such an amazing coincidence that no matter what company, no matter what product, 49 out of 50 people who are counted as leads turn out to be uninterested or unable to buy the product? What are the odds of that?

Here’s a novel idea: put some accountability on the sales people beyond simply “making their number”. I’m pretty sure some territories are better than others, but there’s no way all sales reps are doing their jobs even moderately well.

I’ve seen sales reps who can’t tell you what business their prospects are in, what the business issues are for some of their larger opportunities or whether any channel partners have in roads at a prospect and can help move the deal forward. Forget about channel conflict or compensation issues for while. The question here is whether or not the rep even has a clue about the dynamics of the account. But that’s rarely analyzed. It’s time consuming to actually keep on top of sales reps. It’s a lot easier to tell Marketing to do a better job.

For many reps it’s simply a numbers game. With enough leads, even a very unsophisticated approach can yield results. And instead of trying to maximize the value of the deal, they’ll discount more to close the deal sooner. But then, they’re compensated on quarterly revenue so why not take a smaller amount now right?
So it’s not their fault. It’s Sr. Management who set up the sales compensation plan that forces them to behave that way. And that compensation plan along with Management’s tacit consent of the “big baby” behavior, in turn forces Marketing to fall into line and ensure the reps are properly “fed and nurtured”.

Moving beyond the sales issues, it turns out that virtually every Sr. Executive wants to be a Marketer. Yup, absolutely true. Why else do they forward emails they receive from competitors to the Marketing department, with comments like “FYI, check out the messaging in this email I just received.” Or, “Has your team seen what X is doing lately?”

OK, thanks Mr. CFO. First, I’m glad you are taking such an interest in our competitors that you’ve decided to surreptitiously add yourself to their marketing database. But do I forward you links to our competitors’ 10K statements pointing out how much better they are doing financially than we are? Or how about this Mr. CTO? Maybe I should start forwarding the patents our competitors are filing, you know, just as an FYI.

And I hate nothing more than the Sr. Exec who decided to spend 5 minutes actually reading our website, and then starts making suggestion on how to “tweak” it. Listen, those pages on the website have been like that for the last 9 months. What took you so long to send your suggestions forward? Needed a bit of time to think about them? Thanks, but we’re way ahead of you.

By the way, we don’t “tweak” anything in Marketing. We have a plan and we’re trying to execute on it. We’re measuring our work at every stage in more detail than any other part of the business. I’ve got so many metrics and measurements I could unload on you, you’d think you’re an actuary.

And one more thing. The website isn’t simply a “website”, its a freaking web application. It’s got integrations into our CRM, bug tracking and order processing systems. The Partner and Customer portals are sitting atop a home-grown CMS (cuz the company was too cheap to let us license a real one) and both portals are tied back into our Identity Management System. There is a lot of content on the site that we have update regularly. It’s a critical part of our business operation.

And yet, we have to keep it up and running with no budget, on second rate servers and without full support from IT. Why? Because they’ve decided they’ll only support the “back end” databases etc, but the “front end” belongs to Marketing. Gee, silly me. I thought we all worked for the same company.

I could keep going but I’m sure you get the point. Somewhere between having to baby sit the sales team, let everyone think they are a marketer, and maintain a complex web application with only a minimal development staff, we still have to do our marketing jobs. And none of this includes all the crap we have to put up with from Product Management.

I’ll get to that in the next installment.

Annual planning is nearly over and the Cranky Sales Engineer almost has his quota for the year.  In a tequila inspired fit of account-planning ecstasy, he has decided to share how he and his brethren actually sell products and what product managers can actually do to help.

The Cranky Sales Engineer and the rest of the sales force look for a mystical confluence of three features to make any deal happen:

• A Technical Problem—Nobody buys anything because its “cool” or “neat” unless they are penniless early adopters.  The rest of the market needs a problem to solve or they aren’t interested.  We need to find a real problem.  Not a “my back bothers me sometimes” problem but a “I’m going to knock my own septic molar out with an ice skate” kind of problem.
• A Relationship—The Cranky Sales Engineers spends an inordinate amount of time at sporting events, dinners, lunches, and, yes, pub crawls, with customers.  Why?  Because customers will only buy if there is a relationship. Without it, they don’t trust us to actually solve the problem.
• A Business Proposition—There needs to be a business deal on the table that makes economic sense.  Without it, the problem remains unsolved, and the relationship is just another excuse to go to the ball game.  The business numbers must add up.

The Cranky Sales Engineer is constantly astounded by product managers who manage to be completely irrelvent to this process.  These managers talk about features with no problems.  In fact, that’s all they talk about.  Features they have, features they will have, features they don’t have, and the Cranky SE’s favorite: features that don’t work.

What can you do to help your SE’s sell your product?

• Tie features to technical problems—You should know what gawd-awful problem you’re solving before you invest in new features.  It’s true, that sometimes the problem being solved is that the customer is tired of five mouse-clicks when there could be three. But that’s a problem if you have to do it 100 times a day.  Show us a technical problem to solve.
• Make sure the features work—Trust is one of the keys to a sale, and the Cranky Sales Engineer loses trust and credibility every time a feature isn’t fully tested.  Here is a clue to when your sales engineers have lost the customer’s trust: the customer asks, “Don’t you guys test your programs?  Why do I have to do it?”
• Ask the sales team about pricing—You can screw up pricing two ways.  If you make it too high, we can’t sell the product.  But worse, if you make it too low, we can’t make any money selling the product.  Here’s a thought.  Ask us.  Ask the good account managers and good sales engineers.  The good ones don’t want to sell cheap products, and they especially don’t sell on price.  Make it worth our while.

It’s hard to make all three parts of a deal line up.  Customers have no money.  They are retrenching.  Help us find toothaches and give your sales team the tools to pull the the deals together.

Despite the Cranky Sales Engineer’s best efforts to educate product managers in the proper way to train a Sales Engineer, he is now sitting towards the front of a large room being pummeled by wordy slides.  He has written this dispatch from the front, in hopes that product managers will understand the nature of the immense pain they inflict on their captive audiences.

Some highlights of this death march of a presentation:

• One hour into the presentation the marketing guy put up a slide called “Agenda”.  It is ten items long. He has promised us that he will talk about each one in detail, this has given the Cranky Sales Engineer the time to write this dispatch.
• The presenter insists on using slides that the sales force has been presenting for the past year.  The Cranky Sales Engineer thinks he presents them better.
• The Cranky Sales Engineer has suggested a murder/suicide pact to the SE next to him. The suggestion was met with enthusiasm.
• After hearing the presenter say “But, you already know this” for the third time, the Cranky Sales Engineer knows why he drinks.

Only an hour and twenty minutes have passed … The Cranky Sales Engineer observes that he must be reaping the wages of sin.

Paco continues his guest post arc on the plight of the unemployed product manager (see parts 1, 2, and 3). Give him some love and a job already!

Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager, Part Four

Ahh, the final installment. Time to wrap this puppy up. Sadly, I can’t really afford a puppy right now, so I’ll probably have it euthanized, but hey, let’s not dwell on the negatives.

OK, let’s dwell on one:

Why Big Career Switches Suck Right Now

OK, I’ve tried this. When I first got laid-off, I studied and got certified in another field. Yeah, I’m being ambiguous cuz I’m trying to remain anonymous – duh. Suffice it to say the training classes and cert exam weren’t cheap, and I rocked the cert. And it’s for a field that’s constantly hiring, even now.

After applying for job after job in that new field for a couple months, I decided to just focus on PM and related work.

Why? Because NOBODY in the new field wanted to hire someone without experience when there’s a ton of people with experience who are also looking for work.

So before you decide to change fields completely, try to find out if you’ll actually find work in it with no experience. If it’s a field where they’re still hiring lots of people straight out of school, great. Otherwise, you might just be wasting your time.

Last Bit of Advice

Well, if none of the advice in these installments works out for you, the FBI is currently on a hiring blitz. They’re looking to hire around 800+ special agents, and computer skills definitely help. Plus, you may finally get the opportunity to pistol-whip somebody as part of your daily job. And what PM hasn’t wanted to do that?

Or if you’ve always wanted to travel to the Middle East and you want to get back into shape without joining a gym, the Marines would kill two birds with one stone. I think they also teach you how to do that, literally.

Oh, and a have a homebrew.

Just sayin’…

P.S. If any of you lovely, intelligent, and oh-so-generous readers is looking for a salty PM in the Twin Cities area, feel free to contact me at sometimespaco-social@yahoo.com :)

The Cranky Sales Engineer has been reading Paco’s musings on moving into sales with some interest.  Having been laid off four times, and having made the transition between marketing and sales and back and back again, and having been a manager of sales engineers, he offers the following suggestions:

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers—The Cranky Sales Engineer is not interested in generic tasks that stink of pointless meetings.  The Cranky Sales Engineer is impressed by numbers.   A resume entry that says, “Led a cross-functional team responsible for…” is headed for the trash.  A resume that says, “Grew product from $5M to $15M in revenue in 5-years” will get an interview.

Customers, Customers, Customers—The field is not interested in your ability to run a meeting or set a direction. The field is interested in your ability to please a customer.  The Cranky Sales Engineer and his cohorts view customer satisfaction as the most important thing in the world.  Specific entries on satisfying specific customers are key. “Conducted a customer satisfaction survey” is bad. “Increased customer satisfaction from 50% to 90% at Big-Company through a user council meeting” is good.

Sales, Sales, Sales—The Cranky Sales Engineer has reservations about misrepresenting one’s title on a resume.  In the CSE’s organization, such a deception will get the applicant a quick visit to the exit.  That said, highlighting one’s sales experience in explicit terms is good.  If you were part of a $10M deal, say, “Worked with field to drive closure of a $10M deal” or better yet, “Instrumental in closing $10M deal at Big-Company” or better yet, “Instrumental in driving $12M in business in 2008.”

The Cranky Sales Engineer’s parting advice: “Numbers talk, bullshit walks.”  Find out the real numbers behind the value you created.  If you don’t have any real numbers this time, make sure you have them for the next time.

Paco continues his guest post arc (see part 1 and part 2), allowing the Cranky Product Manager to enjoy some time with her kid. Thanks!

Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed PM, Part Three

Last time, I waxed poetic (I’m being generous) about learning to drink dirt once the Product Management well runs dry. Some of you may already have looked-up many dirt-based mixers to add to your little bartending book. OOOoh – that’s another good transitional career for PMs!

But once you’ve made the switch, how do you make it seem like you’re not a total newbie?

Convincing Others You’ve Drank Dirt for Years

Prepare to have umpteen versions of your resume. Why? Because no measly HR schmuck or IT recruiter is going to read “Product Manager” and equate that with all the other roles you could fill.

No, when one of these dips is tasked to fill a position for “Senior Monkey Trainer”, they look for those exact words on every resume. So if you apply and your resume shows your previous title as “Tarzan Lord of the Jungle”, it’s not going to click in their tiny wind-up brains and you will go on the reject pile. Even worse, you may have to apply through one of those utterly horrible online job applications – they’re scanning for keywords, and job title will be one of them.

And don’t try explaining in your cover letter that “a PM fills the same responsibilities as X/Y/Z roles”. Been there, tried that, doesn’t work. Again, their tiny wind-up brains can’t handle such wildly abstract explanations. There’s a reason why your high school guidance counselor could only get a job as a high school guidance counselor. Same reason why these schmucks could only get a job as HR recruiters.

So what to do?

Simple. Replace your “Product Management” title with the title you’re applying for. Really. Of course, this assumes that you’ve actually filled the responsibilities for that role – then it’s just semantics that your past employers gave you one title while this prospective employer will give you another. The point is, you’ve done the work before, and that’s what “experience” is about – what you did, not what your title was.

This also means cutting out all the stuff that obviously doesn’t apply to the new position. Otherwise, they’ll think it’s odd that a Sales Engineer was responsible for updating the quarterly roadmap, etc.

Is this deceptive? No. Again, it’s getting over the hurdle that is the recruiter’s tiny brain. When you get an interview with the actual hiring manager, be forthright about what your previous PM roles were and how they match what they’re looking for. Fact is, the hiring manager has probably heard of Product Management and will understand it more.

OK, I’m sure some of you are calling BS on this tactic, thinking that it’s lying about your past experience. If it makes you feel better, I actually use a “slash” title – “Product Manager / Pre-Sales” or “Product Manager / Business Analyst”. This gets me by the keyword scanners, and it even clicks with tiny-brained recruiters. Plus, it doesn’t make me feel dirty, like I’m turning my back on my one masochistic true love – Product Management. Oh, it hurts me so…

That brings us to the end of this installment – I have to get back to spinning my resume into myriad mythical forms. I don’t know about you, but I think my experience manning trade show booths makes me more than qualified to be a seal trainer at the zoo. Bucket of fish, bucket of tchockes – both are good at getting an audience to slap their fins together. What’s your take? How far would you feel comfortable “rebranding” yourself to find work? In the next installment, we reach the end and I reveal my best advice to date.