Onboarding – How To Train a Product Manager

May 13, 2016

Make new friends, but keep the old

Lately I’ve had many blessings to be thankful for. I just welcomed my new son to the world and I’ve been enjoying my new job at CA Technologies (CA) tremendously. I’m now one of the Product Owners/Sr. Product Managers for CA Agile Central!

With new changes come new learnings, and one of my favorites so far is in the CA onboarding plan. In it, there’s explicitly a step to say thanks to the folks who helped you get your new job. I think it’s a great to call out this important step in the journey of taking a new role. Although there will be many new friends and colleagues in a Product Manager’s new position, it’s vital to maintain the older relationships for future networking and growth opportunities. So, if you’re building an onboarding plan for a new Product Manager, think about making an action to have them send thanks to those who gave references, advice, and encouragement for their journey. It’s also a great time to get stable ways to contact them, like their personal email, LinkedIn connection, or Twitter handle.

Thanks to you for reading this blog too! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it over the last year. I look forward to sharing more thoughts and learnings as I begin my career with CA.

May 20, 2015May 20, 2015

The First Product Demo

A new Product Manager needs to demonstrate expertise in a product to gain respect and trust from others in the organization. A great way to prove this expertise is by giving a product demo to a set of internal key stakeholders and SMEs for feedback. This important audience will be able to see that the PM understands the product features, how those features contribute to an effective sales message, and get a chance to give the PM feedback for when they need to demo the product for customers. These key stakeholders are typically folks from the development team, marketing, support, and other product managers. The demo can take anywhere from 30-60 minutes depending on the product, and can be formatted however the new PM wants, as long as there’s time for questions and feedback. Since Jenni is helping manage 5 products, she’s doing three of these demos to cover the various product lines.

Whether the new Product Manager has given demos before or not, hopefully the tips below will help them be successful for their demo to gain the trust they’ll need to be successful.

Do your research – Talk to key stakeholders ahead of time to get their views on the product. This especially goes for Sales and Marketing where hearing a sales pitch or up-sell message will give great material for this demo.
Tell a story – A story helps give a foundation to your demo as well as win interest from the audience. Tell a compelling problem that brings users to your product, and how your product relieves user pain.
Use real data – Partner your story with screenshots or a live demo that shows a user’s account in action. This makes the story real and tangible. Screenshots remove any complication from technical, but for this demo a live account gives more opportunity for the stakeholders to give feedback or ask questions.
Focus on benefits instead of features – As the demo shows off the product, focus on the customer benefits and advantages in the marketplace rather than features. This shows understanding of how the customers use the product as well as mastery of what’s really important to customers.
Leverage analogies – Having analogies for various product concepts can help communicate what a product does and set up a quick foundation for product concepts. There are likely several analogies that Sales and Marketing use when describing the product to new prospects, and the PM needs to be aware of how they’re used.
Strike the right level of complexity – A great demo knows the audience, and sets the complexity at the right level. For this demo the complexity will be more than a real customer demo, but don’t get too distracted by details during the demo or the demo will easily take too much time.

April 7, 2015

Viable, Feasible, Usable

A Product Manager creates solutions that are viable in the marketplace, feasible to build, and usable by customers.

That is my 5-second answer to “What does a Product Manager do?” Everything that a Product Manger does, from customer discovery to writing stories to press releases, comes back to these core values for any solution. I’ve found time and time again it serves as a great framework for thinking through solution creation. All three values are equal and can be presented in any order:

Viable – Will Customers buy the solution? Product Mangers must test market demand and understand the marketplace for their solution. This often includes working with Marketing and Sales.
Feasible – Can we build the technology needed for the solution? Product Managers must work closely with developers to scope and assess the solution in terms of time-to-build, security, and performance.
Usable – Can Customers understand the purpose of the solution and how to get value from it? Product Manager collaborate with UX designers to create customer-friendly solutions.

This framework is also a perfect base for setting onboarding goals for a new Product Manager. A new PM needs to gain mastery of a product quickly, and thus these goals reflect these three values:

Viable – A new PM needs to understand and communicate the business model for a product. This includes understanding the unique value proposition (and thus the competitive landscape) as well as cost and revenue streams. The PM can prove mastery of a product’s viability by creating the Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas for the product.
Feasible – A new PM needs to understand the technology behind the product. Typically a PM will work with one or more developers to get a technical overview of the product, and then demo it back to the developer and others later to show they have internalized the technology and can speak to it. The PM does not need to understand every minutia of the technology, and just enough to collaborate with developers and understand what is feasible to build.
Usable – A new PM needs to understand the ins and outs of every feature of a product, and how Customers use them. As with the technical demo, the PM should be able to demo the product to stakeholders to show mastery and build trust from stakeholders that they know the material.

In setting 30-day goals for a new PM, I set the goals of given the technical and feature demos (feasible and usable mastery), and then have the canvas (viable mastery) created in the 60-day goals. The viable mastery goes past the first 30 days because it typically requires more special knowledge of how to create a Lean or Business Model Canvas. If a new PM is already well versed in canvas creation then that goal could come sooner, and another one potentially pushed out of the 30-day goals to the 60-day goals to give more time for special knowledge acquisition, such as understand what databases are.

Jenni is currently working through these goals as part of her onboarding by getting technical demos from developers, getting product demos from myself and training, and joining sales calls to understand the product position in the marketplace. Each aspect of the product builds on the others, so attacking all three values of a solution at once helps create an even base for being a strong PM for a product. In future posts I’ll dig in more on how these goals are accomplished and structured.

March 18, 2015

The Kano Crystal Ball

Previously I talked about how to do a feature inventory with Kano to help onboard a Product Manager. Kano can help them feel acquainted with a product’s feature set and understand how customers engage with your product. You should also use Kano to take a look at customer feedback and upcoming plans. Classifying the planned features into the Kano emotional responses gives the same insights as the feature inventory, and also helps ground a product’s upcoming plans.

An important aspect of Kano when viewing future plans is that your customers’ emotional responses to features change over time. Features that were once Delighters will become Basic Needs as customers get habituated to such functionality and your competitors match you in the market. When looking at the roadmap, I like to first check that Basic Needs are met at the minimal level to reap the large returns on removing customer dissatisfaction. Basic Needs are “check the box” features, so as long as you check the box you’re good, and there’s little benefit to putting extra effort into making the “box’s check” fancy. I try to keep the MVP philosophy in mind to get the most value for the minimal effort when working with Basic Needs, as I’d much rather focus on Delighters. Delighters deserve the focus for several reasons:

They age better – By building a Delighter today you can reap value from that feature for a while as it ages into a Basic Need. If you were to focus only on Basic Needs, your customers would lose interest in your functionality sooner as they age into Indifferent features. The longer lifecycle for Delighters gives you more time to focus on improving customer satisfaction even more.
Competitive Advantages – Delighters give jet fuel to your marketing and sales team as they are often competitive advantages that can be touted in demos and marketing materials.
Team Motivation – Delighters are often much more fun and enjoyable to create as they are innovative and rewarding to customers. They give your dev team a challenge and boost morale which in turn creates even more innovation.

Kano can thus be a crystal ball that predicts how your features will fare in the marketplace over time. By knowing your customer’s emotional response to your current and upcoming features, you can extrapolate how those features will age over time as the emotional responses change. Reviewing the product plans with a new PM will help them know what to be on the lookout for in customer discovery as well as where to look for Delighter opportunities when creating new features.

March 13, 2015

Total Awareness with Lean Canvases

We’ve started a series of Lean Canvas reviews at work, which is a succinct way to share a product’s current ecosystem and plans to expand or focus its features. I shared mine today, which led to a constructive conversation on how to tighten up the model and view the current environment differently.

Beyond evolving a business model, the lean canvas is an excellent tool for communicating your analysis and plans for a product. Thus it’s also a great initial tool for onboarding a new Product Manager as it gives them awareness of all aspects of a product’s business model. This then empowers them to think of new product ideas by supplying the basic vocabulary and goals for a product that they can leverage to express their own proposals.

Consider these aspects of the canvas when reviewing it with the new PM to help them get the full value from the exercise:

Problem – Make this juicy to captivate the emotions your customers feel. As a PM, why should they lose sleep over scheming great solutions to this problem? The “Existing Alternatives” section also gives a chance to talk about competitors in the market.
Customer Segments – This is a place to introduce personas and other formal categorizations of users that the new PM can use as shorthand in future communication.
Unique Value Proposition – After you review the canvas, you may want to come back to this section to see if the new PM has an alternate way to express the proposition. With their fresh eyes, they may see a different angle that you missed to make it more compelling.
Solution – You can introduce some basic existing or proposed product concepts here, that will then be built upon in later activities like feature demos and tech diagramming.
Channels – Be sure to cover any unique or oft-forgotten channels like special partner relationships. This can also highlight the different internal and external communications the new PM will need for launch coordination.
Revenue – Help the new PM see what financial numbers are important to the business. Is it monthly recurring revenue, or one-time sales, for instance?
Cost Structure – This is the place to highlight any uncommon costs such as data acquisition or partner integrations. If you can put concrete numbers it will get the new PM a baseline for comparing the scale of different models.
Key Metrics – Try to get specific to give the PM a focus in exploring new products. This helps them see the user behaviors you want to increase or decrease. At work, we’re also exploring the use of “KPIs” for this panel to better link it to higher-level planning.
Unfair Advantage – Tie it all together and talk about how this product gives you a competitive advantage.

Another use for the Lean Canvas can be in the interview process. If your product has a rich website, you could have the PM candidate create the Lean Canvas for one of your existings products for the first interview. This prework will validate interest from the candidate, give you a chance to review actual work material, and judge their critical thinking and research skills. With the same above conversations used in onboarding, you can investigate the candidate’s product thinking and share some more details on the product to ensure they’re excited to manage it.

March 10, 2015

Feature Inventory with Kano

The Kano model provides a great framework for not only thinking about how to prioritize new features, but also giving a great lens for evaluating existing ones.

Even if you don’t use the Kano questions in customer interviews, the Kano chart of the emotional responses to a feature helps think about the life cycle of existing features. Most Kano analyses focus on the Delighters/Attractive (features that drastically increase satisfaction, especially as they are enhanced) versus Basic Needs/Must-Haves (features that remove dissatisfaction with a product, up to a certain threshold). There are other emotional responses, however, of Indifferent/Unimportant and Detractors/Undesired. Indifferent/Unimportant features are ones that do not increase customer satisfaction as they are built, and Undesired/Detractor features decrease customer satisfaction as they are enhanced.

A great activity for onboarding a Product Manager is to look at the existing feature set of a product and classify them in the Kano emotional responses they elicit in your users. You can then interpret each response in the following way:

Delighters/Attractive – These are often competitive advantages that you have in the marketplace that may be worth reviewing with Marketing to ensure they’re capitalizing on them. These may warrant future investment as well.
Basic Needs/Must-Haves – Features you need to maintain to “check the box” on product capability. Over time, Delighters/Attractive features fall into this category as competitors match these capabilities, making them a feature that is taken for granted by customers. These may not warrant future investment if the basic need is met.
Indifferent/Unimportant – Features that may have been needed at one time, but no longer serve the user. These features are eligible for sunset as long as you consider that they may have different emotional responses for different personas.
Undesired/Detractors – Features that should be sunset now as they are negatively impacting the customer experience. They may have been well intentioned at one point, but the industry or customer landscape has changed such that they are no longer helping customers.

By going through a product’s features with this lens, you can help a new Product Manager understand the ‘why’ for existing features as well as the future plans for these features. Doing a regular feature inventory also ensures you’re thinking about feature sunset plans. You can start trying this technique today by asking the Kano questions to some existing customers about current features. From their answers, categorize them into one of the emotional responses and identify the next appropriate action for these features, be it sunset or future enhancement.