Challenges of Managing Product

One of the many significant challenges we have in building insanely great product is managing its product lifecycle. We did interviews of five dozen managers of products around the globe and across multiple domains. 

These are the challenges we found:

• Process / Methodology: The first major challenge is the process. The process doesn’t ensure success, but can help reduce the failure rate through checks and balances, and repeating what works vs. what does not work. This means that process maturity is key. As a result, organizations have to give serious thought about which process might or might not work for them.
• Enterprise Assets are being stored as Personal Assets (information on personal computers, for example): Most are using “point” solutions such as Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Email) for word processing, financial analysis, presentations and communications. The resulting artifacts such as competitive analysis, vendor analysis, and cost analysis, are also stored on personal desktops, making it difficult for others in the enterprise to access – especially when the knowledge worker is traveling.
• Collaborative tools like Wikis, SharePoint, and Google Docs are beginning to be used. With these there are risks of data loss, critical human resources going on emergency leave, or human error.
• Organizations need to make sure these assets, that form the knowledge base of the product, are available, created, and easily accessible by those who need it, and at the right time.
• In addition, that information needs to be the right information, and be current and up to date.
• Unstructured data: If it is left to individual intelligence on how product information is organized, then the artifact structure can become very complicated. Each will create their own structure, while others within the organization will have their own standards and conventions. Given the fact the information is distributed in various ways, either they will end up wasting a good amount of time to keep the information structured, or let an unstructured format take precedent. This results in wasting time looking for information, including finding the most up-to-date information at the right time.
• Collaboration: There are many options teams can use day-to-day to work together. Chat, Phone, Video call (Skype/Google Hangout), Slack, Jive and Webex/GoTo Meeting are all popular in 2016. On top of these tools, teams often have their own collaboration platform, which means that collaboration on the chat, phone, and other spaces are not necessarily stored in the collaboration platform. Without close and timely collaboration between all the stakeholders, the odds of product failure increase.
• Communication, Task Assign and Tracking: Email is still the number-one tool used to communicate. There have been studies on the side effects of overusing email that enable critical communications to be lost or overlooked. Despite the many issues, organizations rely on this tool, given that stakeholders are accustomed to it. Email is sometimes used as an action tracker system for tasks that email was not generally designed to accomplish. As a result, it is difficult to prioritize tasks and track their status. Furthermore, the rich history of information sharing and decision making is buried in email threads that are hard to find, especially in a timely fashion.
• Visibility: Managers, directors, and VPs must have effortless visibility on what their team members are working on. How much visibility do all product team managers have on their related areas of product development and go-to market activities? Many are perhaps working on quarterly deliverables with monthly reviews, which may not be frequent enough for agile, mid-course corrections. For example, product managers might create market research that may contain errors, only to be found when being reviewed and after the errors have been disseminated. These product managers, as a result, may not have had an opportunity to seek the input of their team in order to maximize the research project. As a result, strategic decisions might sit in wait-mode while these reviews happen. Since business dynamics are so fast, more visibility and transparency are necessary to make it easy for organizations to adapt to rapid change, and thus be agile.
• Lack of Authority: Influence is the key to overcome this challenge. But what else can product managers do to enforce a vi-able work product? RACIs or DACIs document the concept initiation stage and makes cross-functional teams clear on roles and responsibilities. It might have to be revised as when required. But many teams do not use this technique. Maintaining a structured way of working along with all team members, knowing for sure the extent of their responsibility and authority, is key. Doing so would be proactive, forcing cross-functional team members to respect the product lifecycle workflow and help avoid counterproductive political issues.

Thus, one of the keys to building insanely great products is to have the systems and tools in place to do word processing, financial analysis, presentations, communications, collaboration, process management, task management, document control (storage, search, retrieval, access, version management and organization), reporting, and decision management. Now with this list in hand, you can go out and look at the available systems and tools, and select the ones that make the most sense for your organization.

The Solution

Additionally, some new tools have recently come on the market for helping in road mapping, product backlogs, social media marketing, and product management. The list is evolving and rapidly changing so much it does not make sense to mention them here, when a quick online search will render good results.

When I was teaching my product management and product marketing course, I mentioned some of these problems.

One of my MBA students, Uday Kumar, an engineering manager at a premier Atlassian partner called Addteq, said he was interested in developing a product to handle these challenges.

Starting in January 2015, we started working together. He took my online courses and used the workbooks that come with each course.

I mentored him on market research, innovation, value proposition, product market strategy and creating the marketing plan for “Productize™,” a SaaS product to solve the major challenges of pro-duct management and product marketing. It is a JIRA plugin that enables product management of the complete product lifecycle. It includes a dashboard providing visibility into the status of tasks required in each phase of the product lifecycle. It enables the organization’s assets for the product and collaboration between members and teams. Such a capability has not previously existed, until now.