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Professional Services Engineer or Surly Gifted-and-Talented Teenager?

by The Cranky Product Manager on June 7, 2012

in Customer Support,Professional Services,The PM Profession

Professional Services Engineers and Senior Customer Support Engineers, the Cranky Product Manager loves you.  She truly does.  

You get in there and make our products truly work– sing even! –for our most important customers, many of whom have really bizarre requests.  

You are ingenius, a MacGyver for the new century.  You can work around any product deficiency with a wad of gum, a Perl script, and a laptop stuffed with SSDs.

You keep the Cranky PM informed about what the customers are experiencing and the problems they face, and keep the Cranky Product Manager apprised of the experience of using her product day-to-day.  

You are great. And the Cranky Product Manager could not be prouder of you.  

Except for one thing:  your attitude.  You remind the Cranky Product Manager of a surly teenager.  A “gifted and talented” teen, to be sure, but an adolescent with all the part and parcel attitude problems.  

Witness the Cranky Product Manager’s awesome chart:

  Surly Gifted-and-Talented Teenager

Professional Services Engineer
/ Sr. Customer Support Engineer
 
General Attitude Embittered and feeling put-upon by parents’ rules. Embittered and feeling hampered by all the product’s warts and failings.
Opinion of self

Convinced she is brilliant and her parents are biggest idiots ever, and that everyone else’s parents are cooler.

Convinced that Dysfunctosoft Engineering are biggest idiots ever, because Engineering requires months to add the product feature when he hacked up an absolutely brilliant work-around within a few weeks. 
Ability to Understand Not Everyone is Like Him/Her If her best friend thinks something is cool, then she does too. Even if any reasonable person can clearly see otherwise. Believes that if his customer needs this feature, then surely everyone does.  Even if it has no alignment with future product direction, obfuscates the user interface, or would take effort away from more critical areas.
Understanding of Broader World Remarkably naive about life outside her home/school, but thinks she knows all from watching a lot of reality TV. Knows nothing about writing production-worthy code that will work for hundreds of customers, not just one: scaling, internationalization, integration, standards, platform support, testability, user experience, error handling, APIs, etc.  Thinks he already solved 90% of the problem when he really only solved 10%.
Political Savvy If Mom says no, asks Dad. If Dad says no, ask Mom.  If both say no, involves the grandparents or teachers.

If Engineering says “no” to including the hacked-up workaround in official code-base, lobbies Product Management, Sales, and the CEO/GM.
Unreliable 

To gain a privilege, promises to do an unpleasant task like cleaning out the garage.

Then does not do it.  Parents nag her for weeks before finally giving up.

Under political pressure, Engineering caves and agrees to add the hack to the official product code base, but ONLY if the PS engineer makes the code thread-safe, uses standard libraries, etc.

Naturally, this never happens.  Count on the PS Engineer to get very busy on a customer crisis instead.

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No Excuses Product Management (Part 1)

by The Cranky Product Manager on May 28, 2010

in Development,The PM Profession

As the Esteemed Crankerati already know, the Cranky Product Manager has been creeping around the software product management universe for quite some time.  Long enough that perhaps she should replace her blog’s masthead photo with a less youthful and more saggy derriere.

In that extended time, the Cranky Product Manager has encountered LOTS of product managers.  Hundreds. And thus she’s heard about every lame product management excuse that ever existed.

So she’s here to ask — no, BEG — PLEASE, STOP IT!  Please stop making EXCUSES for not doing your freakin’ job.

If you can’t do the Product Management job, if you don’t have what it takes, if you don’t have the passion and the drive, if you don’t have the scrappiness to figure out how to Get Shit Done (TM), well, PLEASE leave the profession. The Cranky Product Manager begs you. 

In this economy, there are plenty of GOOD, resourceful, and influential product managers who will gladly step up and take your place. The world will be better for it.  No doubt you will be happier too.

(Note that the Cranky Product Manager knows that you, as a wicked awesome and elite reader of this blog, would NEVER be so lame. But if you could please inform all the other PMs out there, she would be grateful).

So, let’s list some of the most common Product Management Complaints, and the Cranky Product Manager will explain why each is a freakin’ cop-out. 

And SURE,some of these cop-outs have some validity. Some organizations are truly screwed up (trust the Cranky Product Manager, she KNOWS), and some people are real dysfunctionals.  But just as you should NEVER call your former boss an idiot in a job interview because it makes YOU look bad — not your former boss — don’t say these things either.  Especially in the Cranky Product Manager’s presence, and you never know, she might be your boss or your co-worker.  So STFU.  And Suck it Up, Buttercup.

EXCUSE #1: "The developers just do whatever they want because Product Management has no authority over Development."

Barf. And So WHAT.  Probably only 1% of product managers in the world have ever had official authority over Development.  Yet, somehow, every single day, product managers the world over manage to convince developers to take their direction.  It’s called leadership. You do it by respecting people, gaining their respect back, and convincing them that your vision of the future is a compelling one.

And sorry to tell you, even if you had the power to fire every last developer tomorrow, well they still wouldn’t do what you wanted unless they bought into your vision. People with brains are like that. (OK, to keep their jobs, maybe they’d do 10% of what you want.  But that’s it.  They’d claim the rest was "technically impossible.")

If you want to whine that "all the responsibility and no authority" blahblah yet AGAIN, instead why not put a neon sign above your head that proclaims "I am a bottom 20% product manager, with no ability to lead or influence" instead?  It would be less annoying to the rest of us.

NO EXCUSES!

SHAMELESS PLUG! Buy a "No Excuses Product Management" mug or t-shirt!

(This post is getting way too long, so it’s been broken into 4 parts.  Tune in NEXT WEEK for Lame Ass Excuses #2 ("I didn’t get training").  Plus at least two more.

Also in No Excuses Product Management

  1. No Excuses Product Management (Part 1)
  2. No Excuses Product Management (Part 2)- Stop Whining About Training
| Next in series >>

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To the Agile Community – WTF is wrong with you?

by The Cranky Product Manager on March 16, 2009

in Agile/Scrum

As you might know from previous posts, the Cranky Product Manager is pretty neutral on Agile / Scrum.

Yes, Agile is trendy.  Everyone is doing it.  Some consultancies out there have tied their entire brand to the Agile concept (digression – how smart is this when the inevitable backlash against something so over-hyped will inevitably occur?).

And don’t get the Cranky PM wrong, Agile/Scrum can help greatly with many types of product development problems.  It’s good. It can be fun. But Agile/Scrum is not perfect.  It has its problems too.  Some of which have been elucidated more eloquently by others.

Well, the Cranky Product Manager is going out on a limb and declaring that:

The BIGGEST problem with Agile/Scrum is its crazy, insulting, demeaning, and threatening lunatic fringe.

Yep, these zealots — and YES, they are TRUE frakin’ Drink-the-Kool-Aid, Jihadist ZEALOTS — believe that Agile is The One True Way to build a product.  And that if you do anything else, well, you’re a frakin’ moron who must be silenced.  You “just don’t get it,” “you must be doing it wrong”, etc.

And if a non-believer DARES publish something with less than ridiculous adoration for the Agile concept, well they get freakin’ flogged in a over-reacting, vitriolic, personalized fashion.

At best, the non-believer gets publicly berated as stupid/really naive by the principal of a product management consultancy.

At worst, the non-believer gets called a c-word who should “shut the f#$# up” and “watch out,” topped off with a “I’ll get YOU into some very Agile positions, you effing  b@#$%,” for good measure.

Lovely.

Yep. Each of the Cranky Product Manager’s three posts on Agile/Scrum received an amazing amount of hyper-nasty emails and comments, some of which were downright threatening.  The Cranky Product Manager has learned to scan and promptly dump these abusive comments and emails directly into the garbage before she has time to properly comprehend them.  Because otherwise, the Cranky Product Manager might become too afraid to leave her house (remember Kathy Sierra, anyone?  Fortunately, the Cranky Product Manager writes anonymously).

The Cranky Product Manager has had this post in draft form for months because she’s afraid of unleashing the wrath of the Agile Jihadists once more.  But eff it.  She won’t be intimidated by those f@#%s any longer.  Seeing the attack on Adam Bullied (even though it was relatively minor) made her want to speak up.

Anyway, the Cranky Product Manager does not know how to wrap this post up, except to call upon the more moderate elements of the Agile community to

  1. Stop getting so defensive with people who don’t think Agile is the second coming, and
  2. Do something about your lunatics.

Please.  And thank you.

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Guest Post: The Cranky Test for Agile Product Managers

by The Cranky Product Manager on February 6, 2009

in Agile/Scrum

Today we have a glorious guest post from Scott Sehlhorst, product management consultant extraordinaire and author of the tasty-good Tyner Blain blog.

Scott may be genetically incapable of true crankiness.  One of his co-workers once accused him of having excess serotonin levels.  And he’s never had a headache.  Nor has his dad or his grandfather. Scott once parachuted in to help out late in an “agile” project.  It inspired the following exam.  After you take the quiz, you’ll understand why the Cranky Product Manager is publishing it.

The Cranky Test for Agile Product Managers

One of the challenges that comes from the growing popularity of agile development is that sometimes the people racing to adopt the methodology out-pace the clue-train of understanding. Some teams say “Agile” without knowing what that really means. Sometimes part of the organization knows how to be agile, and other parts don’t. That can be a source of frustration for everyone. If you’re a product manager, working with an Agile (or “agile”) team, you might just get cranky. Being sensitive and pragmatic and realistic, just how cranky can you justifiably be?

Here’s a quick multiple choice test, for product managers joining an Agile team mid-flight.

Take the test to see just how cranky you can (justifiably) be. Record all your answers without reading ahead.

  1. In the first daily stand-up meeting you attend you heard (pick one):

    1. Each member of the implementation team say what he did yesterday, what he will do today, and what if any roadblocks he faces.
    2. A user-rep / proxy from the business says “I have a couple UATs I’d like to add to that ‘send a gift’ story you’re doing this sprint.
    3. The architect proclaims that all stories must be delivered two weeks prior to each sprint, after which point, the business is not allowed to change them — only development can change them.
  2. You sit down with the key stakeholders to prioritize the target users / market(s) / market segments, and you’re told (pick one):
    1. Here’s the persona representing our most profitable customers, and the one representing the bulk of our customers.
    2. We are focused on mom and pop SMB retailers. We’ll define the other market segments later. Remember:  Mom. And. Pop.
    3. It’s the Internet — for all we know, our customers are dogs. We suspect most of them speak English. At least some.
  3. You reviewed the stories to find (pick one):
    1. Each story is on a yellow post-it on the whiteboard in the war room, with a pink post-it nearby including some ‘verify’ statements.
    2. All the stories that were just estimated for this sprint are sorted into columns based on size in points (and the team uses fibonacci for the values).
    3. All ‘stories’ are managed in a requirements repository, from which MS-Word docs are generated, zipped up, and emailed to the development team, who modify the word documents, and store them in subversion in a directory structure reflecting if they were accepted or rejected (for lack of clarity).
  4. When you asked about testing, you were told (pick one):
    1. We automate our unit tests and incorporate into the daily build process – we won’t promote to the trunk with bugs.
    2. Do you mean testing what we wrote, or testing by users to make sure we wrote the right stuff? We did both.
    3. The person who manually tested was working against a different version of the product than development.
  5. When you asked what the user feedback so far has been like (pick one):
    1. Very positive from a couple people in our target demographic – and we uncovered some great new ideas.
    2. Rough. The stakeholders let us know that they met last week, and completely changed their strategic goals – but we’re adapting now.
    3. Users? Look at the time…
  6. You corner the QA lead for the project to talk about performance testing and (pick one):
    1. She shows you the logs, and how they identify which stories get the most action, and how long they take. Then she circles “the bad one” and shares that it just got prioritized into the current sprint.
    2. She takes you to the break room, and shows you the trend charts on the wall, for average response-times for the top ten stories (in importance to the key persona) – pointing out which times are above “ok” and which ones are below “ok.” Then she starts to ask you about scalability.
    3. She suggests that if you sit down with a stopwatch in front of the test server, next week, after the next build, you can probably measure performance, if the build doesn’t crash all the time like the current build.
  7. You hear a rumor that the cadence of releases is not working very well. When you investigate, you find (pick one):
    1. Weekly releases are too frequent for the users to review, and they are asking that we move to biweekly releases.
    2. Monthly releases are too far apart, and now that the automated build process is done, developers want to move to biweekly releases.
    3. Our first release is two months away. How can anyone be complaining about the frequency of releases? No one has seen it yet.
  8. The management team is completely replaced when a new CEO cleans house. When you meet with the new CEO to review project status, you share (pick one):
    1. The burndown charts and expected “completion” of today’s version of “the project vision.”
    2. The sequence of deployment of tangible, valuable capabilities, combined with the number of users at each release.
    3. A hand-waving explanation of why nothing can be deployed after 6 months, and how “everything” is 80% complete.

CALCULATE YOUR SCORE

  • For every (a) answer, give yourself 0 points.
  • For every (b) answer, give yourself 0 points.
  • For every (c) answer, give yourself 5 points.
  • Give yourself 1 point for every time you’ve been hit with the recent Facebook reincarnation of the 25-things meme.

Add up the points. This will tell you, on a scale from 1 to 40, just how Cranky you can justifiably be.  If you hit 40, make sure you sign up to write a guest post.  The Cranky Product Manager needs your rantings and ravings to be put to good use!

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