User>Driven

The most successful organizations I've seen have a split between product management and product marketing. They have people who support sales and others who set product direction. Both talk to customers every day, but the conversations are very different. In the end they work together, of course. The work of each feeds into the other. But in the end, the mission of one is to bring the message from the market in, and the mission of the other is to get the message out.

Product Management brings the message from the market in and Product Marketing gets the message outIt's different wherever you go. Sometimes product managers are part of the Marketing department, sometimes they are part of Development. Sometimes their primary job is developing products and sometimes it is helping sell them. Sometimes they are called product managers and sometimes product marketing managers. There's little consistency in naming or responsibility, but there is one role that must be present if the company wants to succeed long term.

It must be someone's primary job to listen to the market and become the advocate for the market's point of view within the company - to bring the message in. Someone must be able to gather the information, do the analysis and promote internally the solutions that result from trying to answer three key questions.

1. Who is the buyer and what problems do they have that we can solve?
2. Will the buyer pay enough for a solution that we can make money selling it to them?
3. Are there enough of these buyers that we can grow the company by selling to them?

These may seem like product management 101 concepts, but each of them illustrates why a person must be dedicated to the task of defining product direction.

Very often people with the title of product manager or product marketing manager are expected to know these things and to provide input to product direction, but are expected to do this somehow in their spare time. Their primary responsibility is to help sell the product. Why is this bad? After all, if they are on sales calls they'll get to know the customers and their problems, right?

Wrong. Supporting sales is only half of the messaging cycle described above. As Adele Revella of The Buyer Persona blog says: "ask a sales person to describe a persona and they’ll tell you that each account, each buyer is unique. Sales people are not paid to look for patterns. Their job is to learn about each account and to develop a strategy that is tailored to that prospect’s needs." Product people who's primary job is supporting sales spend a lot of their time supporting sales opportunities and end up thinking primarily about how to sell. That's not bad if that's their primary job, but it's very bad if they are the only ones in charge of setting product direction.

Organizations need marketing people who know the product and can support sales activities with expertise, demos, collateral, website copy, white papers and so on. But the conversations they have with customers are colored by their mission to help sell. That mission makes it hard to sit down and just have a discussion about a customer's business - and then move on.

To develop the insights about market problems needed for new product development, a product manager must step away from what the company has to sell today and engage with customers about their business and its problems. They must do this over and over again until patterns emerge. Then they must find ways (surveys, analyst reports, etc.) to quantify those patterns to size and target the right market opportunities. That's the other half of the messaging cycle, and the critical one to developing new solutions that respond to the market's needs.

How does it work in your organization? Drop into the new PM Exchange Forum and share your stories about this and other subjects in product management.