top three frustrations of product managers and tips to ...top three frustrations of product managers...
TRANSCRIPT
Eliminate key challenges product managers face when leading complex product development projects.
Top ThreeFrustrations of Product Managers & Tips to Avoid Them
2 © Jama Software, Inc
S ince the earliest days of commerce, customers have wanted
to buy products that provide timely, innovative solutions to
real-world challenges. Today, the problems customers need
solved are more complex and in step with the continuously evolving,
hypercompetitive dynamics of the marketplace. As a project manager,
you need the agility to quickly adapt to your customers’ rapidly shifting
requirements, while helping your development team focus on business goals.
DEVELOPING THE BEST PRODUCT POSSIBLE
In addition to customer feedback and demands for immediate
responsiveness, there are many other factors transforming your
role within modern product development: a push toward iterative
roadmap management; fluid, 100-plus-page requirements documents;
and geographically-dispersed project teams. As these challenges
mount, the pressure is on you to evolve your organization’s
product development process and shepherd in the new era.
The crucial first step is to acknowledge you can’t keep working the old
way. Continuing to communicate via unstructured methods — email, chat
messages, documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, document repositories,
and so on — simply doesn’t foster collaboration. Conversations about
your product need to stay connected to the work. In context, everyone
involved has visibility into what your team is building and why. This sort of
structured collaboration enables the healthy, vigorous engagement required
to deliver the complex, connected products your customers demand.
Structured collaboration enables the healthy, vigorous engagement required to deliver the complex, connected products your customers demand.
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Chances are your organization already emphasizes iterative product
development, with inherent processes for on-the-fly improvements. Agility
breeds innovation, but it can also make your role as product manager much
more pressure packed. You own the roadmap, and as such, must lead your
teams to embrace change as workflows and the development cycle continue
to become more iterative. You also need to balance your company’s
business objectives with the realities of time, scope, and resources.
Geographically-distributed teams are the new reality, forcing product
managers to rethink how everyone can remain in sync. The last thing
you need is disconnected contributors in what should be a team-wide,
collaborative endeavor.
Understanding and transforming the ways in which your team collaborates
is essential to delivering market-disrupting innovations. To assist, we
addressed three of the top frustrations product managers commonly face.
Defining and executing on the roadmapEveryone across the organization claims to support the importance of building and maintaining a roadmap that guides your collective product development efforts. But many factors occur that could potentially disrupt the agreed-upon product plan.
Embracing change to accelerate product innovation and developmentWinning means introducing innovative products quickly. Doing so requires change. You need a new way to manage the product-development process — a modern system that delivers measurable efficiency advantages.
Maintaining consistent, organization-wide alignment despite rapidly shifting requirementsHow do you ensure all product development contributors are working together as a singularly-focused unit, when the rate of development accelerates and change requests threaten to derail alignment?
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TOP THREE FRUSTRATIONS:
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The product roadmap communicates the value you expect to deliver
to both your business and customers. It ensures your company’s
product plan dovetails with its longer-term strategic goals. It also maps
the product’s development path and known iterations throughout
its lifespan and creates unified buy-in across all stakeholders.
When developed correctly, the roadmap describes to your entire team
the problems the product will solve, why and for whom you’re solving
them, the prioritized order in which the product’s releases will be
developed to address those problems, and how they’ll be addressed.
After the roadmap has been defined,
developed, and agreed upon, it’s up to you —
the product manager — to stay apprised of and
document all shifting marketplace trends and
incoming customer change-requests to ensure
continued stakeholder alignment.
If developing the roadmap is half the battle,
effectively managing and rationalizing the
roadmap defines the other half.
Managed ineffectively, it’s easy for one
set of stakeholders — such as Sales,
Service and Support, Marketing, or even
the customer — to assert disproportionate
influence during the product development
process. Any one of these groups could
upset your roadmap’s balance.
Defining and executing on the roadmap.
Focus on Transparency
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Roadmap transparency can help eliminate scenarios like the ones below that result when outside teams don’t have full visibility.
SalesRightfully focused on landing more business, the Sales team sees a promising opportunity to capture additional revenue. But to capitalize on the opportunity, the product needs functionality
that’s not slated in the roadmap’s current requirements.
Service and SupportSeeking to expand revenue from existing customer accounts, the Service and Support team raises concerns about product implementation. In such a scenario, the team would be too narrowly focused on delivering customer-specific iterations that
aren’t in step with the product’s broader, long-term value.
Marketing Intent on maintaining your company’s standing as an innovative thought leader, the Marketing team wants to skew the roadmap toward delivering new features more rapidly. However, quality could be compromised, or those features may not address the requirements of the broader market or customers.
As a product manager, you want all these stakeholders to have
seats at the table, without one group having more influence than
another. To do that, you need to weigh the value and impact of all
stakeholder inputs and balance their often-competing interests.
What’s more, after the development team commits to scope and
schedule, it’s your responsibility to track the activities of UX designers,
developers, and QA testers. You must also minimize churn and
ensure continuous alignment during the varying stages of definition,
design, and validation. What you need is a way to connect and
align every stakeholder, every product development team member,
and your organization’s top priorities, every step of the way.
MAINTAIN BALANCE
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Successfully managing your roadmap requires a hub where every product-related conversation is clearly and logically associated with the relevant requirements.
Successfully managing your roadmap requires process transparency
and unambiguous communication. Whether or not priorities shift,
everyone benefits from robust collaboration that gives all participants
complete, contextual, real-time visibility into how the roadmap
adheres to broader business, customer, and user goals.
A specialized product development platform with inherent collaboration
capabilities can serve as a comprehensive system of engagement;
a hub where every product-related conversation is clearly and
logically associated with the relevant requirements. One where
everyone can see the work of designers, engineers, and testers.
Collaboration promotes team-wide ownership of the entire product
development process and allows stakeholders to provide feedback,
solicit reviews, and approvals, and discuss in real time their work
in progress. When challenges and conflicts arise, you can more
easily overcome them and maintain your “deliver faster” ethos.
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At the end of the day, your business depends on being able to give
your customers the most innovative products as quickly as possible. Is
your product development process equipped to do this perfectly? Are
you willing to settle for “good enough?”
If we’re talking about appeasing customer
needs, then “good enough” is probably not good
at all. Not if your company strives to accelerate
the pace of innovation without sacrificing
the value you deliver to your customers.
An iterative system enables greater roadmap-
management flexibility and responsiveness
to customer input. In many cases, smaller
portions of the entire job can be parsed-out
for rapid prototyping, testing, and debugging,
and then validated with end-users. This allows
your product development team to focus on
developing the most high-value result possible.
Heightened emphasis on agility and a faster pace
of development also requires company-wide
buy-in. Every team member — from upper-tier
decision-makers to software engineers, QA testers, sales reps, marketers,
and service and support staff — should be able to view the product roadmap.
This will allow them to better understand how the process quickly solves the
timeliest problems while adding overall product value with each new iteration.
Embracing change to accelerate product innovation and delivery.
Focus on Agility
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If your product development method lacks clear visibility, then
minor misunderstandings can quickly devolve into a systemic
communication breakdown where true collaboration is impossible.
When an iterative development process is embraced business-wide, the
potential for a new mindset takes over. This can foster a collective comfort
level with a new product development method with a modern view on
product releases. Instead of trying to “get everything right” with each
release, your team focuses on development products that solve major
issues — providing immediate value where customers need it most.
With the right foundation in place, you’ll have more flexibility to solicit
customer feedback and gauge market indicators to fine tune secondary
or tertiary releases once you’ve accomplished primary objectives.
Of course, embracing and implementing a new product development
method requires more than a fresh mindset; you need to rally all contributors
around successes. With an effective solution in place — one that offers
complete visibility into changing requirements, cross-project relationships,
and the impact of change — your stakeholders will see precisely
where your team is getting the edge and support you accordingly.
The solution will allow them to experience just how seamlessly you can
collectively transition to a new world of agile innovation. And, through
productive collaboration, you can beat your competitors to market.
An iterative development process empowers your team to focus on providing immediate value where customers need it most.
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It doesn’t matter who wants to make a change. It could be anyone
on the product development team who sees an opportunity
to improve an iteration during the development process. And
as you know, change can derail delivery deadlines.
However, some of the most common
reasons for missing deadlines are unclear
or changing requirements, quality issues,
and delayed decisions. Each of these
stem from communication issues.
So how can you ensure all stakeholders
are able to perform their tasks on
schedule when aiming at a frequently
shifting target, and when proactive
communication is lacking? As a product
manager, one of your key responsibilities
is understanding and articulating to
your team the issues you’re trying to
solve. You must ensure the team knows
exactly how the issues are problematic
and comprehends the contextual rationale for why you want to solve
them. That will help chart the course to accomplish the agreed-
upon solutions. Of course, while that sounds great on paper,
game-changing collaboration doesn’t materialize organically.
When managed properly, product development is a cyclical process
that repeatedly brings timely and innovative solutions to market. Each
Maintaining consistent organization-wide alignment despite rapidly shifting requirements.
MOST COMMON REASONSFOR PRODUCT DELAYS
Unclear or changing requirement
Quality issues
Delayed decisions
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of your team’s contributors must rely
on one another’s complementary skills
to ensure collective alignment with the
company’s long-term business goals.
For instance, the sales department
depends on the development team
to introduce innovative, value-packed
solutions that win new business. Likewise,
the development team relies on sales
and other end-user-facing teams to solicit
customer feedback, seek marketplace
findings, and analyze and convert them
into actionable improvements for future product releases.
When all is said and done, the talented people who comprise your
product development team are your most critical assets. Discovering
a more effective means of ensuring that their suggestions, opinions,
intelligence, and expertise are shared and leveraged in a timely manner
will create more effective teamwork and better products as a result.
Truth is, even the most capable product manager needs help
achieving this level of cohesion. One of the most effective ways
to attain alignment is to recommend and push for a collaborative
product development platform that everyone can easily use to
engage throughout the product lifecycle, from concept to launch.
With the right system in place, you can rapidly access and discuss
suggestions for improvement. You can also efficiently monitor activities,
The talented people on your product development team are your most critical assets — leverage them wisely.
Focus on Communication
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issues, and decisions related to product requirements and tasks in one
centralized location. Plus, you can track change requests and related
impacts in real time. In short, can have complete visibility into your
team’s activities and your organization will have visibility into yours.
You can keep everyone aligned without having to take valuable time to
report, update, and rationalize all that you do. This will ensure your team
stays focused on delivering the highest-value products to your customer.
TRANSFORM YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Transparency, agility, and communication are vital in your product
development process. Without them, you won’t be able to meet customer
and market demands. You’ll also open yourself up to ever-increasing
competition, as well as risk losing organizational trust and customer loyalty.
In most cases, however, implementing transparent, agile, and
collaborative systems requires a paradigm shift in process. According
to a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report of product
developers creating digitally-infused products, the majority (52 percent)
are partnering with software or other companies to assist with their
transformation. So you don’t have to enter this new territory alone.
Jama Software’s product development platform transforms your
product development process into a competitive advantage. Imagine
the success and confidence you’d have as a product manager,
and as part of a product development team, with the right tools in
place to build the complex, connected products of the future.
ABOUT JAMA SOFTWARE
Jama Software is the product development platform for companies building
complex, smart and connected products. The Jama solution enables
enterprises to accelerate development time, mitigate risk, slash complexity
and verify regulatory compliance. More than 600 product-centric
organizations, including NASA, Thales and Caterpillar, use Jama Software
to modernize their process for bringing complex products to market.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
www.jamasoftware.com
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