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Product Management Haiku, Redux

by The Cranky Product Manager on January 21, 2011

in The PM Profession

This post is sponsored by Quantum Whisper. The Cranky PM loves them because 1) they pay her, and 2) they are maestros of the agile product management tango.

———————

In their spare time, the Product Management Crankerati just LOVE writing haikus.

Check it: here (Pivotal PM), and here (previous Cranky PM post), and here (Product Management Meets Pop Culture), and here (Tyner Blain), and here (On Product Management), and here (Spatially Relevant).

The fun just never ends.

Anyway, here’s some brand, spankin’ new haiku from the Cranky PM.  From her sleep-deprived, addled brain. (Too many products to manage, too many kids to parent – at home and at work.)

As always, submit your own Product Management Haiku in the comments!



Feemium product
has too many great features.
No one upgrades. Crap.

CTO sees the
bright shiny object du jour.
Development stops.

Virtual dev teams.
Half of meetings are now spent
debugging A/V.

Agile dev process
moves bottleneck from Dev to
Product Management.

Product Manager
who cannot use his product
should be fired. Now.

The new Architect
always demands rewrite of
every line of code.

Hey, Support Martyr,
some enhancement requests won’t
get done ever! Chill!

Sales Droids always bitch.
Unless they can do no work,
but still collect checks.

The Agile stand-up
should be 10 minutes, not hours.
My feet really hurt.

{ 30 comments }

Cranky Cartoons: The Generic Product Management Interview (parts 1 & 2)

by The Cranky Product Manager on November 15, 2010

in The PM Profession,Your Career

Watch (and groan at) the world’s most generic product management interview. 

Observe as the Cranky VP of Product Management interviews an exceedingly typical product manager for a thoroughly generic product management position.

Today, you get parts 1 & 2.  The Cranky Product Manager expects that there will be six parts by the time she finishes, so stay tuned for future posts.

The World’s Most Generic Product Management Interview

PART 1: Interview Dress Code

PART 2: The Questioning Begins

Also in The World's Most Generic PM Interview

  1. Cranky Cartoons: The Generic Product Management Interview (parts 1 & 2)
  2. CRANKY CARTOONS: THE GENERIC PRODUCT MANAGEMENT INTERVIEW (PART 3)
  3. Part 4: The World’s Most Generic Product Management Interview
  4. Part 5: World’s Most Generic Product Management Interview
  5. FINAL CHAPTER (part 6): World’s Most Generic Product Management Interview
| Next in series >>

{ 48 comments }

How to Be a Jackass Product Manager in Nine Easy Steps

by The Cranky Product Manager on October 27, 2010

in The PM Profession

1. Don’t visit customers. If customers want to talk to you, ask that instead they put their list of enhancement requests in an email or a spreadsheet. Take said list and cut/paste it into Bugzilla. Don’t bother to find out WHY the customer wants any of this stuff.  If the Execs pressure you to do talk to more customer to validate your plans, send  out a 300 question survey. If no customers responds, it must means s/he agrees with everything you plan.

2. Don’t learn how to use your product, ‘cuz you’re too consumed with being a blathering “visionary” (although a visionary who never defines and articulates a true product vision) to be concerned with such details. Plus you’re far too elegant a gentleman/lady to eat your own dog food. Disgusting!

3. Become an email router.  Insist that the field write you emails (no phone calls!) whenever they have technical  product questions.  Forward those emails directly to selected CodeBoyz/Grrlz.  When they answer, forward the email directly to the original asker.  

But BE CAREFUL. For this to work correctly, you MUST insist that the Droids NEVER EVER contact CodeBoyz/Grrlz directly, and vice versa.  YOU must always be the intermediary, even though you’re just an email router.  Take care NOT to add any value to the exchange, such as translating detailed techno-blah-blah speak into Droid-friendly English.

ADVANCED MOVE: Remove the email headers and other indentifying info prior to forwarding emails, so that the Droids can’t wise up and contact Development directly. This move makes it look like YOU were the one who actually answered the questions! Congrats!  Also, make sure you don’t send all your questions to the same CodeBoy/Grrl, or soon he/she will be on to your little scheme.

4. Overengineer a small part of your job and do it to the hilt, ignoring every thing else. For example, spend at LEAST 150 hours developing product training for Sales.  And then schedule at least NINE different 2-hour time slots to give the training, so that each Droid can pick and choose his/her favorite time slot from the nine. This will make training completely occupy your time for almost 2 months, giving you an excuse for never getting around to your product strategy.  And — best of all — you get to bitch n’ moan about being SO overworked!

5. Decide what features are in and out of a release based on one overly simplistic measure, like the number of customers requesting X in the bug tracking system. Don’t worry about whether the request is actually an implementation-level detail and a kludge at that. Don’t worry about whether your product is actually solving the usnderlying problems that the customer has.  Don’t worry about whether the feature has broad applicability to your target markets.  Because that would require you actually know what your target markets are, and you’re too busy being a Jackass Product Manager to find that out, right?

6. Whenever you are forced to get customer feedback, call that one geeky customer who thinks _everything_ your company shits out is a gold nugget, because his resume is so wrapped around your company’s technology that he would have serious career problems if you changed course.  He’s so TOTALLY representative of your customer base, as well as your future target markets, right?  And thus he is a wicked awesome source of unvarnished feedback, validation, and advice.

7. Get into a swinging dick contest with a technology analyst.  Get out the rulers and start measuring. Cheat, if you must, to make sure yours appears bigger. Talk down to the analyst and disagree with everything he/she says.  Because those Gardeners and Forest Rangers just LOVE it when you downplay their expertise.  They are such an ego-free bunch that they’ll actually appreciate your product EVEN MORE if you call them idiots to their faces.

8. Go around saying stuff like “explain this technical concept to me as if I were a 5-year old.”  ’Cuz that’s the way to get the respect of Development.  They don’t mind _at all_ if the person laying out the future direction for their _child_ (aka their product)  seems to have the mental capacity of Paris Hilton.

9. Be a complete A-hole to your fellow product managers.  Monopolize team meetings with your concerns.  Don’t let anyone else speak.  Pontificate at length – have fun with it! Undermine the broader product line vision in order to elevate your product at the expense of the others. Blame as much stuff as you can on the other PMs. Undermine their credibility in front of development, and later in front of marketing and sales.  They’ll respect you for it. Really. But watch out if one of them becomes your boss one day.

{ 84 comments }

Sexism in the Software Industry, as Encountered by the Cranky Product Manager

by The Cranky Product Manager on October 18, 2010

in The PM Profession

Following up on the previous post about the deepening dearth of women in the software industry, here are some incidents of outright sexism that the Cranky Product Manager has encountered in this industry.

Admittedly, most of these are pretty mild.  After all, she doesn’t feel she was every denied a promotion or made less salary because she was female. She was never pressured to “do” anyone.  And she honestly believes that the overwhelming majority of men she has worked with really WANT to see more women in technical and product roles, and to see them advance.

But still.

And no, The Cranky Product Manager never reported any of these incidents to HR.  Maybe she should have, but – let’s face it – it probably wouldn’t have changed things anyway. 

1. Being one of the 3 engineers in an R&D group of 20 that were not invited to the big industry tradeshow in Vegas. All three of the “left behinds” were women, and all 17 that attended were guys. The excuse was that we women would not have had fun, and they didn’t think we’d want to attend anyway since most of what they did was go to strip clubs. (The group came back from Vegas with lots of awesome research project ideas, triggered by their conference experiences. Experiences that we women missed out on.)

2. Booth babes at Trade Shows. Every year. And having people assume that the Cranky Product Manager is a know-nothing booth babe who doesn’t know CSS from NoSQL.

3. Account managers asking the Cranky Product Manager to please flirt with a prospect’s tech guys on sales calls. Because those guys “get off on geeky chicks.”

4. Erased #4 because this post is getting an unexpectedly huge audience and the CrankyPM needs to protect her identity.

5. Attending a Sales Kick-Off party where the CEO hired an “actress/comedienne” to perform / strip for the company. (You see, she only got down to her bra and panties, so it was “okay.”)

6. Scantily clad women (no men!) dancing in cages and groping each other, at the “big party” every year at the DysfunctoWorld conference for customers and partners.

7. Having the skeevy, drunk Division GM, dressed as Santa Claus, basically force the Cranky Product Manager to sit on his lap during the Christmas party. For an excrutiatingly long three minutes.

UPDATE:  Forgot a few!  More below….

8. At her first out-of-college job, being referred to as the “Build Mistress.”  This isn’t bad in itself, because she was indeed the Build Master/Mistress.  But the dominatrix jokes (and white board doodlings) stopped being funny after the 25th repetition.

9. As an engineer at an early-stage startup, being sent home to change and scrub the makeup off my face prior to a meeting with prospective Venture Capitalists.  Because the VCs would never believe that I was a serious engineer if I wore a skirt.

10. Having every visitor to her startup’s office assume the Cranky Product Manager was the office manager just because she was the nearest female to the door.  (There was a male office manager, plus about 5 other guys were closer to the door than the CPM.)

11. When interviewing at a startup with no female employees, the Cranky PM attended a “company meeting” to get a feel for the culture.  The VP of Engineering dropped the F-bomb and a few other swears (big deal!). But THEN the speaker turned to the Cranky Product Manager and said, “Excuse me! I didn’t realize we were in MIXED company.” Later he made a blow job joke and said “Oops! I keep forgetting we’re in MIXED company!”  

Way to make a girl feel at home! Keep pointing out she’s different than everyone else, under the guise of “politeness.”   And PLEASE, the Cranky Product Manager drops more F-bombs before breakfast than that douchebag does in a week.  (this is not a good thing, but it is what it is.)  Needless to say, the Cranky PM did not join this company.

Software Sisters, add your own experiences in the comments!

{ 106 comments }

Power Post #2: Hoarding Features & Products

by The Cranky Product Manager on January 22, 2010

in The PM Profession

(OK, another 5 minute Power Post.  An attempt to break through the procrastination and writer’s block that has been plaguing the author of this blog.)

The Cranky PM has recently become obsessed with the TV Show Hoarders.  If you are unfamiliar, it is a reality show that profiles people who hoard stuff — tons of worthless artifacts and even unsanitary crap (literally crap! think rotten food!  old diapers! full cat boxes!) — until the point that they are buried under 10′ mounds of germ-ridden garbage, their homes are rotting underneath the filth and about to be condemned,  Child Protective Services is about to take their children away, and Animal Control is confiscating their pets.

It is super depressing.

Why the Cranky Product Manager watches, she does not know.  She doesn’t exactly “like” the show.  But it is kind of addictive.

She guesses some of the allure is that it makes the Cranky PM feel like she’s pretty damn organized and productive compared to these people.  Isn’t that cruel, though?  Taking comfort in the misery of others?  Plus, really, what is the great achievement in keeping a nicer environment than people who have a bona fide mental illness?  So, the fact that she watches this show should tell you, Gentle Readers, something not-so-nice about the Cranky PM’s lackluster character.

But ANYWAYS… Like EVERYTHING (pretty much), it reminded the Cranky Product Manager just a teensy bit of life at DysfunctoSoft.

(Watch with utter amazement, as the Cranky PM attempts to segue – like a crappy local newscaster – to a completely unrelated topic).

How? Because DysfunctoSoft has NEVER, EVER thrown out a feature, truly de-supported a platform, or dropped an obsolete product.  No matter how decrepit, bug-ridden and just FOUL that hardly-used-but-now-completely-obsolete feature is.  No matter how ridiculously costly it is to continue supporting that horrible Active X plug-in from 10 years ago. Who really cares if the thing integrates with Adobe Reader 4 anymore????

The product documentation is clogged up to the point of complete obscurity with all this crap.  You can’t read it and understand what the product actually does! The price list is out of control and so freaking confusing because it has tons of space devoted to products and licensing options that no one ever uses (or if they do use them, let’s face it, they’re freaks).  The automated test suite – which is supposed to run every 6 hours — now takes over 30 hours to run.

WHY? Because  DysfunctoSoft is a HOARDER.  Not all Software Companies are. But there are more than a few out there.

Just remember, if you refuse to pick up your stinkin’ house now and then – and clear out the dead products, obsolete and bug-ridden features, and unsanitary filth out of your product line – well, one day it will collapse under its own weight, with you inside.!

(well maybe not, but didn’t that sound dramatic)?

(OK, actually went 10 minutes on this one. So not quite a Power Post, but whatev….)

{ 17 comments }

The Cranky Product Manager Sez Go Big or Go Home

by The Cranky Product Manager on October 20, 2009

in Marketing,The PM Profession

Oy.  Product managers create business cases and business plans all the time.  The Cranky PM has created and seen a bajillion of them in her day.  Lots.

But, cripes, so many of them suck.  In particular, so many business cases use a device that is a major peeve of the Cranky Product Manager.  Oh yes, you know it.  You’ve probably done it yourself.  It’s the “one percent of the market” argument.  It usually goes something like this:  “The total market is $X.  If we manage to garner just 1% of that total market, we will have $Z in revenue per year.  $Z is a lot of money!  Ergo, fund my project.”

Gack.

This argument seems wise and safe…. conservative even. After all, it is no major achievement to acquire a paltry 1% of a market… OR IS IT?

It is.  Trust the Cranky Product Manager, this argument is WICKED WEAK. It ignores the dynamics of how competitive markets work, especially in the software industry.

In the beginning of a new market’s life, sure, there are lots and lots of competitors.  Enough that many players might achieve 1% of the market.  That’s what markets look like when they are immature and stupid. But soon enough, the market’s childhood is over and you have an adolescent market on your hands. 

And in an adolescent market, a 1% position is completely unsustainable.  Because as that market starts sprouting the accouterments of puberty — the appearance of chest hair, voluptuous hips, or the first contrarian articles in the press (a la “this technology is not quite the shizz that was promised”)  – the number of players shrinks big-time, as the small-time players — the ONE PERCENT players — all die or get acquired.  And voila!  You end up with about 5 players.  And you better believe they all have more than one percent of the market.

And then, our frisky little teenager of a market grows up more and becomes a fuddy-duddy adult, with only 2 or 3 players — the smallest of which will almost certainly have at least a 15% market share.  And that is likely that way it will stay until the market is wheeled off in a casket, or at least put into an assisted living facility.

Anyway, all this rambling about puberty was the Cranky Product Manager’s way of saying that aiming for 1% market share is  basically aiming for failure.  You can’t sustain that.  You’ll either be a success and have a MUCH bigger market share, or you will fail and not exist.  And do the Cranky PM a solid….DON’T show her any business cases where you are aiming for failure, okay?   And don’t show a business plan that only applies during the market’s childhood years.  Show her your plan to become one of the top two or three players in the market’s adulthood – preferably the NUMBER ONE PLAYER — with a hell of a lot more market share than 1%.  Either that, or GO HOME. 

OK, don’t go home.  Your spouse doesn’t want you there either.  Go take up residence in the local Starbucks while you work on the next draft of your oh-so awesome business plan.  Get back to the Cranky Product Manager after you fix it.

{ 20 comments }

Is There Anything as Predictable as a Sales Droid?

by The Cranky Product Manager on May 19, 2009

in Sales

For years, the Cranky Product Manager has been dealing with all those whiny Sales Droids. 

You know, those people who moan all the time about how Sales is The. Hardest. Job. Ever., as they yap on their bluetooths while driving around in their Porche 911s?   You know, those dudes/dudettes who always win deals because of their mad persistence, unequaled interpersonal aptitude, and their wicked awesome sales skills? Yet when they lose it’s always the fault of the product or the price?  

Yep.  Those Droids.  You know who the CPM is talkin’ about.

Anyway, the Droids have been bitching for YEARS to the Cranky Product Manager about the price of her product.  “It’s way too expensive.”,  “I can’t sell it at that price,”  “The competition is priced so much lower we can’t compete,” “We need to drop the price by at least 20%,”  blah, blah, blah. 

All that time the Cranky Product Manager resisted dropping the price.  Yes, her product was priced higher than the competition, but it offered way more value.  Plus, being a wicked big geek, the Cranky PM created this elaborate pricing model spreadsheet based on shitloads of historical pricing and sales data .  It showed price was relatively inelastic. 

Well, fast forward to 2009.  The economy is in the shit and the Droids all miss their numbers by a mile.  Their screaming about the “too high” price reaches 120 decibels.  Loud enough that it catches the attention of The Man, AKA The Quasi-Playboy, AKA The Dirty Semi-Old (50-65 years old) Man Who is Always Scanning the Marketing Events Planning Staff for New Blond Mistresses.  AKA  The CEO.

So, the CEO calls the Cranky Product Manager into his office.  After complimenting her hair and the way her jeans fit, asking her if she is still happily married, and trying to give her a George-W-style shoulder rub,  The Big Boss tells her to drop the price to the one the Droids are begging for. 

The Cranky Product Manager sez, “No Effing Way,  Mr. CEO (and I mean that in the most respectful way).  Behold my awesome spreadsheet!  Dropping the price will NOT lead to more units sold and will make the product unprofitable.”

“You look hot when you’re angry,” sez the CEO, “But we’re still dropping the price.  I want you to create a new forecast based on the new price.  Not your lovely theoretical spreadsheet.  Instead, do it bottoms-up and go ask each sales rep how much he’ll sell at the new price.  Oh, and let me know when you tire of that husband of yours.”

And so the Cranky PM announces the price cut to the field. She then asks each rep, one at  a time, how much product he/she was committing to sell based on the new price.

And SHOCK OF ALL SHOCKS, the Droids sandbag it.  Apparently, even with a 25% price cut they can only sell about 3% more units than the numbers they had signed up for just 3 weeks earlier. 

Guess price wasn’t the issue after all.  WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT WOULD HAPPEN?   Oh wait, I know this one…. Yep.  The CRANKY PRODUCT MANAGER guessed it!

AS EXPECTED, the New and Improved bitching and moaning from the Droids began immediately .  “The price is too low”,  “You just made it 25% harder to make my number!“, “With a price like that, people will think we offer less capability than the competition”, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Will. It. Never. End.

Even the 2-year-old CrankyKid changes his mind less often.  And even the CrankyDog can remember past events  better than Sales Droids. 

There are two things you can always count on at DysfunctoSoft: 1) The Droids will never like the price, and 2) The CEO will always skeeve you out.

{ 22 comments }

Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux

by The Cranky Product Manager on March 26, 2009

in Guest Posts,Marketing,Sales

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.

—————-

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.

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
<< Previous in series | | Next in series >>

{ 38 comments }

Divine Rules for Product Managers #3: On Helping the Press with Product Reviews

January 5, 2009

If a member of the press wants to review a product, the Product Marketing Manager shall assist by providing an Evaluation Guide. If thou does this according to THE SOFTWARE LORD’S wishes, the trade magazine just might run an article extolling to the world the virtues of your product. Keeping in mind the lower-than-expected IQ and [...]

Read the full article →

The 5 Types of Beta Testing Programs and Why 4 of Them Suck

December 18, 2008

Let the Cranky Product Manager remind you all what the purpose of a Beta Program is: To get customers to _actually use_ your about-to-be-released software, in order to find and fix problems that would not have been found by internal-only testing.

So WHY then, WHY(!?) do so many so-called Beta programs seem explicitly designed to PREVENT this type of feedback?

Let the Cranky Product Manager classify and explain the different types of Beta, the vast majority of which do NOTHING to improve product quality or identify customer issues.

Read the full article →

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