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Why Leading a Product Org is Hard...

After doing in product management over the last 20,000+ office hours, I still find there are some things that are extremely difficult to do consistently well as a software product management leader.  

So this post is for all of you hot shot PM's a few years out of b-school who wonder what things might slow down your career progression once you've nailed the fundementals.  (Many of these might be applicable for leaders outside of product management as well.)  

Below are five tough challenges and some color on why I think they're hard.  In the future, I'll probably do some posts on lessons I've learned and potential approaches worth considering for each of these areas.  Feel free to share thoughts and advice in the comments.  I need all the help I can get ;-)

1. Hiring

Everyone knows the most important thing in any business is hiring great people.  Pulling that off is at least 1/2 of my job.  Here are some reasons building out a world-class team is a pain in the butt.

A lot of good people you want to hire to work for you would love to have your job (which is a good thing).  They're usually kicking butt wherever they are, have a long track record, and solid credentials -- which is why you're recruiting them in the first place.  Unfortunately, many of those same A candidates find anything less (working for you versus being you) beneath them even if their current job is less challenging than the one you're offering.  That's not a dig on them, it just makes it hard since you ideally want someone who's ambitious but also fired up to do the job for which you're hiring today.

Unless you're recruiting for the company du jour, the candidates you want may not know about your firm or at least the opportunity you're trying to fill so you may not be interviewing the right people.  Let's face it, there's only a few hot companies in tech each year.  A few years ago it might have been Myspace, Plaxo, and Yahoo.  Then it might have been Google, Facebook, and Zynga. Next year, it will be a whole new crop.  If you're like 99.9% of hiring managers, you're not from one of the two or three "it" companies of the year (of course we all believe we're the next one) so you have to hunt versus gather.

Most people are not a good fit and to make matters worse, the interviewing process is like weather prediction.  It's better than guessing but wrong enough that it can feel like that.  Case interviews, behavioral interviews, reference checks, etc. are most good at evaluating a candidates interviewing and personal marketing skills.  Trying to figure out how someone will actually grow long term in your Company versus talk about performing may be akin to picking stocks -- shades of improvement over random.  To be fair, it's a bit more achievable to pick people who can do the job you're hiring for today, it's the growth ceiling that's harder to forecast. 

Recruiting Product People

Hiring top talent is hard.  Check out this video to see the lengths people will go to attract the interest of great product managers.

 

What makes a Rock Star PM Candidate?

We often talk about looking for rock stars as PM's and recently, my team and I have been talking a bit about what exactly we mean.  Our goal is to put together the best product team in the country and we really mean it so we've mulled over what specifc characteristics do we think help us get there?  (Previously, we used the "we know it when we see it" method but realized this was a bit too cowboy and probably resulted in misalignment of interview loops.)

Below are the qualities we look for and evaluate when interviewing PM candidates.  When I take a step back and look at the list, it's interesting to note that product management skills are only #6!

Curious to hear others' thoughts on this as this is a list in progress.  For those of you looking to land that sweet PM gig, feel free to use this list as a self-assessment tool.  And yes, it's incredibly hard to find any candidates who meet all the criteria so it's more an assessment framework than a checklist (hopefully you make offers to people who have most of it and potential to do all of it with coaching and development).

 

1. Nice, interesting team player

• No jerks, no a-holes, no backstabbers.  We believe in karma and good things happening to good people who work hard, play well with others, and deliver.
• Team player, can lead but can also follow.  Want's to see the TEAM win.
• Good sense of humor. 

2. Eye of the Tiger

• Do they want to win, have something to prove, and have the determination to make history (as opposed to just taking on another product job).
• Do they get fired up when they hear about all that’s broken at MCHX and say to themselves, I want to fix that.  Now.
• Do they get fired up when they hear about all that’s working at MCHX and say they want to be part of that. Now.
• Are interested in doing whatever it takes for Marchex to become a $1B company and realize that helping us reach that goal is the ultimate boost for their career (as opposed to promotions, titles, or org charts).

3. High Intellectual horsepower. 

• Can they understand complex topics in seconds (not minutes).
• Can they zoom in and zoom out multiple times in a single conversation.
• Can they challenge assumptions and offer new ideas based on creativity, inspiration, and market and customer insights?
• Do they have an intuition for focusing on the things that matter and suppressing the  noise?
• Can they learn new tricks, technologies, customers, industries, etc. in weeks not months?

The Quadfecta

Saeed has a great post about the different functions of product management and the need to chop it up into different specialists.

While I've seen this taken to the extreme (Microsoft IMHO has way too many people doing product management for a single product), I’d build on Saeed's point about overly broad PM job descriptions by suggesting sometimes product leaders get carried away with the “mini-CEO” strategy.  The risk of one great PM to do everything is that you undercover a product with a single “hero” PM when in reality, few people in the industry really _can_ do it all and even if they have the capabilities, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

We’ve found having a program manager and product manager co-located pair on each of our products has been very successful. We partner those guys with the engr manager and business manager and it seems to be a good set up for the 10-20 engineer products.

Check out Saeed's post here.

Ideation is Overrated, Internal Buy In is the Real Innovation Showstopper

Comparatively speaking, new product ideas are cheap.  It's buy in, execution, and timing that separate the doers from the dreamers.  As an example, here are times where I sucked at getting buy in...

• In 2004 at MSN, I unsuccessfully proposed an idea where we'd take people's IM status messages and publish them in a micro-blog format.

• In 2006 at Trumba, I unsuccessfully proposed an idea where we'd enable special deals where the more people purchased tickets to an advertiser's event, the lower the cost of the event (so people would get their friends to buy tickets).

• In 2009 at the Google, I unsuccessfully proposed an idea where consumers could search for and get daily deals emailed to them based on their opted in preferences and search history.

It's entirely possible that one or more of these ideas could have been a big success had we given it the college try.  Instead, these ideas died on the vine -- usually in one minute of a 1:1, a couple minutes before a different meeting got a quorum, or in a hallway conversation on the way to lunch.   Generating good ideas is only as important as getting buy in for them.  If you come up with ideas no one wants to act on, you're about as useful as someone who doesn't come up with any ideas (but you'll be a lot more frustrated and bitter).

Some tips for winning buy in:

Getting Ready for an Exec Review? Be like Wonder Woman.

Interesting research by HBS and Columbia professors on body poses, confidence, and hormone levels in the workplace.  As with all news interviews, way too short and rushed an interview but the images were entertaining.  The takeaway, be as expansive as possible in your body language to assert your alpha power and boost your testosterone.  

I would offer one caveat.  While these poses may boost your testosterone, they may be off putting to the other folks in the meeting and make you look like a bit of a prick (why is ABS PM standing like wonder woman when the rest of us are sitting down around the conference table).  The professors' advice to pose in private (before a meeting or presentation) might be the most practical (just make sure no one walks in on you before the meeting as you strike your poses and risk looking like a narcissist).

 

When Smart People Do Stupid Things

I recently read a blog post on Why Wesabe Lost and it was one of the most interesting and best blog posts I've read in years.  If you've not read it, please ignore the rest of this post and read the Wesabe post immediately.

Reading that post reminded me of how you always learn more from your failures than your successes.  I don't have enough time to write about all of my own failures but here are a few of the lessons I've learned the hard way over the years.

1999: Management consulting is not really work experience.
Dumb Tom: I've worked for my boss who advises SVP's and C-levels at Fortune 500 companies.  I scored high on the GMAT.  I can run my own company no problem. 

2000: Business partnerships are like marriages.
Dumb Tom: Starting a company with my own brother will be great.  We know each other well and will trust and respect each other. 

2001: There's a difference between entrepreneurial belief and blind faith.
Dumb Tom: Yeah, the numbers are 10X below our forecasts but if we just work harder, we can do this.  There's nothing wrong with our assumptions about the business, we just need to brace ourselves for the imminent hockey stick. 

So you think you're an awesome PM?

I recently wrote a similar note to my team at Marchex to help set clear expectations on what makes a great PM.

While I've written in the past about the abstract qualities, below is a more specific diagnostic you might find helpful.  Personally, I only scored at around 78% so it's safe to call them a nice set of aspirational goals ;-)

1.  Is your product awesome (users and revenue up and to the right)?

 

2.  Does your primary internal partner (GM, Engr Director, tech lead, etc.) consider you his/her right hand person?

3.  If your primary internal partner got hit by a bus, would you be ready to do his/her job?  

Product Manager Mantras to Live By

Some folks on my team seem to be getting pretty good at predicting what I'll say in meetings or 1:1's with them.  I thought I'd share some of my favorite mantras and give a little background.

1. 1.  It's not your fault.  But it's your problem.
   This is one of my favorites.  It's kind of the buck stops with the PM statement and it squashes any tap dancing around reporting structure, org structure, the inherited problems, etc.  It very clearly puts the PM on the spot to take charge, figure it out, and fix it.  I say this to myself every day.
2. 2.  What's the right call for the shareholder?
   Much like #1, this one also clears the discussion of any distractions like organizational turf, sunk costs, personal loyalties, or personal bias and just focuses the decision making on the right call for the business.  Whenever I'm faced with a thorny decision, the shareholders usually make it more obvious which direction to go.