People are trained not to call your baby ugly. You need to make them feel safe to do this. My approach was to explain that the worst thing that could happen to me was building something people didn’t care about, so the best way they could help me was absolute, brutal honesty.

My other favorite is what he says to do after the interview: Look for patterns and apply judgment.

Customer development interviews will not give you statistically significant data, but they will give you insights based on patterns. They can be very tricky to interpret, because what people say is not always what they do.

You need to use your judgement to read between the lines, to read body language, to try to understand context and agendas, and to filter out biases based on the types of people in your pool of interviewees. But it is exactly the ability to use human judgement based on human connections that make interviews so much more useful than surveys.

The way I do this in my own work is to collect my notes on a series of interviews and then review them one at a time, recording the incidence of certain problems, requests, needs, characteristics and other concepts. Extracting structured information from unstructured notes, though (as Giff says) not statistically valid, does help to bring out patterns. See my entry on qualitative vs. quantitive research methods for more on this and what to do next.

As a key member of our talented product group, you will lead a development team charged with developing, launching and managing products for NetProspex. This extends from increasing the growth and profitability of existing products to developing and launching new products for the company. You will build products from existing ideas, and help to develop new ideas based on your industry experience and insights gleaned from customers and prospects. You must possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy, of quantitative analysis skills and creativity; a big-picture vision; and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must enjoy spending time in the market to understand their problems, and find innovative solutions for the broader market.

You must be able to communicate with all areas of the company. You will be hands on with engineering to define product release requirements. You will collaborate with marketing to define the go-to-market strategy, helping them understand the product positioning, key benefits, and target customer. You will also serve as the internal and external evangelist for your product offering, working with sales and key customers.

A product manager's key role is strategic, not tactical. The other areas of the business will support your strategic efforts, though you will sometimes also be asked to help support their work as well. This position reports to the VP of Product (that would be me).

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage the entire product life cycle from strategic planning to tactical activities
• Determine market potential, trends, and opportunities
• Specify market requirements and manage backlogs for current and future products by conducting market research supported by on-going interaction with customers and non-customers
• Drive the success of your product across teams (primarily engineering and marketing) through market requirements, positioning and messaging
• Lead development of a company-wide go-to-market plan, and collaborate with all departments to execute
• Analyze potential partner relationships for the product and collaborate with business development to execute

REQUIREMENTS

• 5-10 years of software/internet product management experience
• Knowledgeable in technology, passionate about its possibilities
• Excellent creative instincts, a deep understanding of technology and strong project management and analytical skills.
• Entrepreneurial experience and success creating great products is highly valued
• Computer Science or Engineering degree or work experience a strong plus
• Significant people and organizational management skills, a natural leader and consensus-builder
• Roll up the sleeves attitude, proven ability to execute
• Strong communication skills with the ability to evangelize the merits of NetProspex products internally and externally
• Position requires occasional travel to customer and non-customer sites and industry events in North America

The position is posted formally on our jobs page. In the meantime, if you're interested and you think you qualify, email me with resume and cover letter at jobs@netprospex.com. I look forward to speaking with you.

Incidentally, this job description was adapted from the excellent sample description developed by Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing. Thanks, Steve.

Young Jedi product manager

Surveys from Pragmatic Marketing, Jama and Quantum Whisper paint a pretty detailed picture of a product manager and his or her job. I've assembled this composite persona from that information, my own experience, and many discussions with other PMs over coffee or beers.

I've recorded it here to get your input and feedback. Is this you? Is it like other PMs you know? With your help, this will form the core user and buyer persona for a simple, affordable requirements and roadmap tool. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Luke the Product Manager

Luke is a product manager in the software industry. He’s 39 years old and has a college degree. He wonders if he should go back to get his MBA because many of his colleagues have one but he doesn't have the time because he is already working 50-60 hours a week. He makes $117k per year in total comp, including a bonus he gets most of, most of the time.

Luke's Team

Luke is one of a group of 6 product managers at his company, reporting to the VP of Product Management who reports to the CEO of his company. Luke is responsible for 3 products and $23 million in annual revenue.

He works as part of a small development team of 18 people. The team is spread out over multiple locations and time zones, so Skype and Microsoft SharePoint are every day tools for him. Recently, however, he’s also been looking at Google docs for sharing.

Luke's Job

He’s good at his job but puts in long hours, including frequent evening and weekend work, and never feels as though he’s really caught up. He wants to spend more time talking with customers, doing win/loss analysis and thinking strategically about the future of his market and where his product should go. Instead, he spends many hours composing, organizing, prioritizing and communicating requirements to engineering and to the many other constituencies around the company that need to know about them.

As part of his job, Luke must gather information about market requirements and communicate information about these requirements and the status of development efforts to meet them to a variety of stakeholders, including people in marketing, sales, sales engineering, customer support, finance, development, architect, C-level management, partner, customer and prospect roles.

He’s getting more attention from the C-level execs at his company, which is gratifying and he assumes will be good for his career, but it is also creating more work in preparing materials suitable for that audience.

Luke is managing his first nominally Agile project, learning as he goes. The team is not following a pure Agile process, however, preferring to retain some of their established methods, habits and tools.

Luke's Process and Tools

Luke is a gadget hound, carrying iPhone and iPad wherever he goes. He meticulously records interview notes with customers in Evernote and captures feature requests in Excel. He dashes off UI mockups in Balsamiq.

Luke writes requirements in Word as a single Product Requirements Document, uses Excel to prioritize those requirements, and uses PowerPoint to communicate the committed roadmap.  Luke’s PRDs and Prioritized Feature Lists contain a lot of information and a large number of features to manage. He usually has to make multiple versions of each type of document as projects evolve, and it is a challenge to keep them all up to date and in sync. 

Luke enters features into JIRA one at a time once they’ve been agreed to. In that process, he modifies and makes the requirements more detailed, obsoleting those parts of the PRD and leaving unimplemented features orphaned in a doc no one will look at again.

Luke wishes he had a tool for managing requirements that was easier to use because it would save him a lot of time and effort in maintaining and publishing his many disparate documents.

Luke's Work Style

Luke is fairly technical, thanks to his background in engineering and as a sales engineer. He is also an excellent communicator, which makes him good at bridging the gap between business problems and what Engineering needs to know to solve them.

He is a good listener, very easy to approach and talk to. He likes learning about people's jobs, their challenges and goals. Luke asks good questions. He is also very analytical and does a good job synthesizing all he learns into a coherent plan. His most difficult challenge is prioritizing the myriad requests and ideas he gets for features, bug fixes and other work in a way that serves the strategic needs of the company, keeps customers and other stakeholders happy, and can be explained clearly and defended using objective criteria.

Does this sound like you? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Source: 2010 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey (http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/survey/2010)
Source: 2011 State of Requirements Management Survey (http://www.jamasoftware.com/resources/state_rm_2011.php)
Source: Product Management Survey 2009 (http://www.quantumwhisper.com/product-management-survey-2009/)

Duh.

Accompa's own website says:

"Studies by organizations such as Forrester Research show that there is a high incidence of "shelfware" among companies which purchased requirements management software. The primary reason for this problem? Their users found the software too hard to learn and use."

And yet Accompa's tool still looks like a challenge to get started with to me (and it's a minimum of $200/mo).

So what's a product manager to do? Gather requirements, of course! I'd like to get your input on what a simple, inexpensive roadmapping tool would need to do. For clarity, I define roadmapping as requirements gathering, prioritization and communication.

If you'd like to weigh in in what such a tool would need to do for you in your job, enter your ideas here (or vote for ideas already there). You can see what others are voting for and I will publish the overall results in a few weeks.

Social Industries - New Tech But Not Old

It's no surprise that tech companies are among the most connected through the new social media. But I thought it was interesting that the auto industry is at the very bottom, including dealers, repair shops and parts stores (all in the bottom 10).

Social Jobs - Finance But Not The Board

I found it surprising that Finance folks (plus M&A, less surprising) were ranked number 2 in connectivity, after recruiters. Having absorbed that, though, I thought it was fascinating that Board members were at the very bottom. Isn't that where Finance folks go when they retire? maybe it's just a generational thing.

Social Companies - Tech Plus Newspapers

Again tech companies dominate the top 10 most-connected companies, but interestingly, the New York Times trumps them all and grabs the number one spot. Could it be David Pogue and Walt Mossberg all by themselves?

Check out the report on NetProspex.com. It's a free download and it's fun to check out your own industry, job and region.

Let me walk you through the badness. I get an email inviting me to sign up for their pre-release trial program. I love betas. Fantastic. As the illustration of the email I received shows, they claim that I will be able to make purchases "using only your mobile phone." How very Minority Report. I'm in.

I am so sick of packing all those little mini credit card loyalty card things everybody from CVS to Stop & Shop and Olympia Sports make me carry around to get discounts, I figure using one thing (my phone) that I carry everywhere anyway to pay (and maybe in the future manage my loyalty accounts) will be way more convenient. I'm so gullible.

A few weeks later I get another email welcoming me to the trial. Sweet! Then an envelope comes in the mail. Hmm? What do they need to send me in the mail? Turns out the pay tag is just that. It's a plastic mini credit card like all the others that - get this - you stick on your phone. That's the big innovation. Glue.

So never mind that I have a sleek, unblemished iPhone 4 that there is no way I am going to gunk up with mini credit card glue and a BofA logo, how is this supposed to scale? Am I supposed to encrust my phone with cards for every organization I do business with? Pretty quickly the bunch of mini cards would be bigger than my phone.

This is product design gone horribly wrong. Some VP at BofA said "we need to have a mobile strategy" and the idea of enabling phones to act as credit cards got lost in the corporate initiative process. As a result, attaching old technology to new technology with glue became an acceptable solution. This solution answers the question, "What is our mobile strategy?" for BofA but fails to answer the question, "What will make customers' lives easier?"

That was mistake number one (and the most fundamental one) but it wasn't the end of the badness. Mistake number two was a routine one made by many authenticated web-based services. They made the registration process difficult. In order to sign up for this program, you need to have a BofA account (which I do). And if you are the type to sign up for this kind of program, you probably have an online account with them (which I do). Can I use the ID and password combination from my online BofA account for this program? No, I can't. I tried. They said that ID was already in use. Yeah, it is. BY ME!

So I have to make up a different ID and password. Annoying enough that I forget to write it down and weeks later when I get the invite to log in to find out what merchants in my area accept the tag (yes, you have to log in just to view the list), I can't do it. No matter, they have one of those "forgot your login?" links. No wait, they have two. One for if you forgot your ID and another for if you forgot your password. How nice of them to think of both possibilities. Nice. Except that I don't know which I have wrong. What if it could be both?

They do have a phone number but, like many of you, I have called BofA before and at this point I am not planning on spending half an hour wading through voice menus designed to keep me from the only reason I am calling, which is to talk to a person.

I was psyched to try this idea of using my phone to pay for stuff but I have been disappointed at every turn. Three strikes, BofA, and I'm out.

I've stopped blogging about product management so there won't be new content on this site in the foreseeable future. All of the content will remain here as long as people seem interested, though, so feel free to use it as you like. 

So what am I up to? Well, instead of blogging about software, I've started blogging about food. Over the past 3 years I've lost and kept off 45 pounds, got fitter, happier and had a more positive influence on my family and friends as well as on the earth.

People have often asked me how I did it and there isn't one simple answer so I thought I would start writing down some of the insight I've gained through trial and error. I hope it's useful.

You can find my new blog at www.madeofgoodfood.com. Check it out and leave your thoughts and question in the comments.

The Times article goes on to discuss how email and social media have accelerated feedback to marketers and manufacturers, quoting Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America as saying that consumers can communicate with marketers “more readily and more quickly” than ever. “For companies that put consumers at the center of what they do,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”

What the Times article doesn't emphasize is that the new look was designed at great cost by the exclusive Arnell design shop. I love it when real user feedback overrules pedigreed designers. User feedback is the best designer.