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Guest Post: The Cranky Analyst Wants Everyone To Stop Yelling At Each Other

by The Cranky Product Manager on August 5, 2009

in Analysts,Guest Posts

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*).

——————–

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.

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Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Part 3 – The Problem with Product Management

by The Cranky Product Manager on July 15, 2009

in Guest Posts,Marketing,The PM Profession

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.

(high)

Ability
to work across teams

(low)

Tenderfoots

Great people skills and usually very kind and decent overall, but unfortunately have no business being in Product Management as they can’t assimilate market facts and drive product direction. Far too many PMs reside in this quadrant

Angels

Said to exist but rarely seen. May be mythical beings. Have deep understanding of market issues, customer needs and competitor weaknesses. Are proactive in creating and conveying information across the enterprise. Truly understand that success is a team effort and take pride in helping other teams succeed.

Misfits

Have little knowledge of anything aside from their own opinions, and don’t even know how to convey those clearly. Think a cross-functional meeting is one where they ask everyone else what they did last week. How do these people ever get hired?

Assholes

Spend a lot of time reading analyst reports, attending conferences and talking to customers and prospects. Very eloquent when speaking with C-level executives. But will badmouth you endlessly when you’re not in the room and will throw a hissy-fit if you challenge them on anything they say.

(low)   Level of Knowledge and Understanding (high)

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.

Also in The Cranky Marketer Goes Off

  1. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off (Part 1)
  2. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux
  3. The Cranky Product Manager bitchslaps the Cranky Marketer
  4. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Part 3 – The Problem with Product Management
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