In the last episode of CWS, we spoke to Amit Somani, Google India Product Management Head for Search, Consumer Apps and Infrastructure.. Today, We again have a very special guest - Mr. Sean Johnson, Product Manager @ IBM’s Content Discovery Group! to share his invaluable experience on Product Management. So, here we go, Coffee With Sean Johnson - To understand Product Management in IT sector better.

Coffee With Sean Johnson - Understanding Product Management Better.

Me: Sundar Rajan G S

SJ: Sean Johnson

Me: Hello Sean, Welcome to Coffee With Sundar! Can you please introduce yourself.. talk about your acads background, work experience etc

SJ: Hi Sundar. My name is Sean Johnson and I’m a product manager for IBM’s Content Discovery group, which is itself a member of IBM’s Information Management, which is in turn part of Software Group (yes, it is a very big company).

I have a CS degree and I started my professional life as a software engineer building workflow engines for large banks and manufacturers. I ended up as the lead technologist at a startup in Charlotte called Venetica, where after building another workflow engine, we decided we needed a web interface for it (this was the around 1998) and so we took a chance (at the time) and built one in Java. It was novel and relatively successful and so ended up being resold by different companies, but these companies wanted it to be independent of the content management system that supplied the content for the workflow, and so we then built a content integration middleware platform. This was a first of it’s kind and was quite successful, to the point where many large content management vendors were interested in acquiring us and eventually IBM did acquire Venetica in late 2004. I joined IBM through the acquisition as a software architect and I moved into product management about 1 year later. This wasn’t a big leap for me because in addition to my development and architecture duties, I’d been the de facto product manager at Venetica for about 6 years before we hired a dedicated product manager.



Me: Can you explain to us what a typical day @ Office would be? I am sure there will be an element of multi-dimensionality in your job. Can you explain about it?



SJ: A typical day in the life of a product manager at IBM involves 3 main things. Working with sales and customers, working with the engineering team, and working with product marketing. You might start the day participating in a sales call and demo web meeting with a customer, that may be followed by a strategy meeting with product marketing where you talk about ways to enter a new market, and then you could spend the afternoon working with engineering, participating in their Agile SCRUMs and giving them feedback on product builds.



Me: There are 2 ways for one to become a product manager… One is to rise up the technical ladder and then become a manager… The other is to pursue an MBA.. What are the pros and cons of both these approaches…? Are there differences in the roles played…?

SJ: I surely have a bias, but I can’t imagine being successful as a product manager (for a software company) and not having come from an engineering background. Your role as a product manager is to act as a bridge between the rest of the world and the engineering team. Unless you can speak the engineering team’s language and unless they respect you, I don’t think you’ll be very effective. The vast majority of engineers have a “bozo filter” they turn on whenever an MBA type starts speaking. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s the reality of it. Good product manager candidates tend to be engineers that lack this filter so that they can work effectively with the company’s sales, marketing and executive people and that also have the strong presentation and people skills to work with customers.



Me: Can you explain the product development cycle in IT industry… Who are the various players in the life cycle and what their responsibilities are… Can you explain this with some product (without violating any NDA)

I could explain how it works at IBM… but at IBM there are so very many people involved, literally many dozen different roles, many of which are quite specialized. Unless you work for IBM or Microsoft or Oracle it’s probably not a very enlightening answer. At some level, it really only takes 3 roles. You need an engineer, a customer or customer surrogate (product managers are good for this) and a marketer and/or sales person. If you have those 3 roles filled you can develop a product.

It all scales up from there as you add more and more roles with bigger teams working on more widely used products. At some point you have usability experts, technical sales engineers, level 2 support engineers, product marketing managers, language translators, quality assurance engineers, business development, graphical designers… and my personal favorite, release managers. To the best that I can tell, release managers at IBM are the people that actually do understand the dozens of roles and the product development life-cycle of IBM and that make it all work. Needless to say, at IBM they are a product manager’s best friend.



Me: What are the metrics on which your performance is assessed? What are the success metrics for product/service? Can you explain with examples?

SJ: The metrics are pretty simple. Were you able to work with engineering management to get the release out the door on time and on budget (the product manager controls the most malleable lever in that equation, the scope) and did you make the right trade offs during development so that the product is well received in a sizable market? Assuming the rest of the team is at least competent at their job, then a product manager should ultimately be assessed on just one thing, is the product profitable?



Me: What the typical Career path of the product managers in IT industry… What are the various options available to them?

SJ: I already mentioned that I think product managers should come out of product development. The best product managers I know also came from startups or small companies where the engineers are very close to the customer and to the business of software. You won’t pick up the needed business experience otherwise.



Me: What is the skill set required for a product manager? How does one build such skill sets? Also can you talk about skills need to handle rapidly changing sector like IT.



SJ: I’ve hit on this a lot already so I’ll just touch on the last part of the question. I think you need to be a life long student of the field. The guy that gets his CS degree and thinks he’s done and spends the rest of his non-work hours watching reality television is not going to develop the skills needed to be a product manager.

Beyond a CS degree there are some obvious skills you need such as the ability to present to customers and at industry conferences. But more than a specific skill set, you need to develop a base of knowledge. You need to spend time with the sales organization learning how a deal progresses from an email address of a prospect to a closed deal 9 months later. You need to spend time with marketers to understand how hard and expensive it is to generate a quality lead. You need to spend time with quality assurance and support teams to understand the ramifications of ill defined features. You need to spend time with software executives to learn how a software business operates, how contracts are negotiated for example or how a partnership is put together. You need to learn the domain that your product is in and become something very close to a domain expert in it. You need to know your customers, their business, their challenges and their opportunities. You need to know your competitors as well.

More than anything though, you need to develop a comfort level with all of this so that you can say “no” to everyone when need be. You need to be able to tell a sales guy, “no”, he can’t have that feature to close that deal because you know it will never close anyway. You need to be able to tell an executive, “no” we can’t ship it this quarter because it won’t sell without a “widget segmenter” feature. You need to be able to tell an engineering manager “no”, he can’t have an extra 3 weeks to refactor the “widget segmenter” because it’s just not going to matter to the customers. You need to be able to tell a marketer, “no” you can’t build a product for that market segment, it has to be narrower. You need to be able to tell a customer, “no” he can’t have that feature because it’s not going to make his business problem go away. Products don’t succeed because of “yes”. Yes is easy, but not very useful in building an excellent product. It takes a lot of experience to get to “no”.



Me: Wow.. That was an amazing reply! I am sure to keep this in mind.

Me: What is the best thing you like about product management as a career? What are the occupational hazards associated with it?



SJ: The best thing about product management is probably the variety. It’s an excellent job for the generalist… the restless soul… the multi-talented, multi-tasker. As far as an occupational hazard the hazard that I see hit product managers most often is that it’s a bit of a tweener role. Not quite in engineering, not quite in marketing, not in sales, not managing people. There is no obvious career path of where to go next once you’ve mastered product management. It should be a great breeding ground for software entrepreneurs though. I say should instead of, because I’m not actually aware of any specific examples of successful CEO’s coming from product management. In theory though, it’s an excellent job to have before starting your own software company because you really get a lot of experience in all aspects of a software business.



Me: Thanks Sean for sparing your time and answering these questions.

SJ: Thank you for the great questions Sundar.

Readers, hope you enjoyed this episode of Coffee With Experts, where Sean Johnson has shared a lot of information from his experience.. For previous episodes of Coffee With Experts, click here.

Its my pleasure to invite Amit Somani, Product Management Head, Search, Consumer Applications and Infrastructure, Google India.. for a show on Coffee With Sundar! In this episode, We mainly talk about Product Management, typical day @ Work, product development cycle etc.. So, without further ado, its Coffee With Amit Somani!!

Coffee With Amit Somani

Me: Sundar Rajan G S

AS: Amit Somani

Me: Hello Amit, Can you please introduce yourself. You can talk about your educational qualifications/prior Industrial Experiences. What Companies you worked for. What were the roles you played etc.



AS: I’m a technologist at heart. I started my career in the mid-90’s at IBM’s prestigious Almaden Research Center working with and for some of the best computer scientists in the world. Almaden is where the relational database was invented, as was SQL and numerous innovations over the last many decades.

After about 6 years at Research, I wanted to get closer to the customer and a line of business type role so I jumped into the IBM Software Group. There I led the creation of an Unstructured Information Management portfolio through several new products that we created and two acquisitions. When I left IBM almost exactly a year ago, I was the Director for WW Engineering and Product Management for the IBM Enterprise Search and Discovery group.

Today, I’m heading Product Management for Search, Consumer Apps and Infrastructure at Google, India.



Me: Can you explain to us what a typical day @ Office would be? I can safely assume that there will be multi-dimensionality in your job. Can you explain about it?

As: Product Management at Google is a very, very exciting role. Every day is a new adventure. Two activities where I spend the most time :

(a) Figuring out how users are using your products. Google is a very data driven company. One spends a lot of time looking at metrics for user happiness, usage, etc. as a way to figure out user happiness.

(b) Working closely with engineers to build or improve features for existing products or create new products.

Of course, as a product manager, you also spend a lot of time reading about what’s happening in the market, working with a cross functional team across Marketing, Sales, etc.

Me: There are 2 ways for one to become a product manager… One is rise up the technical ladder and then become a PRODUCT manager… The other is to pursue an MBA.. What are the pros and cons of both these approaches…? Are there differences in the roles played by the *PMs*…?

AS: Both are viable approaches depending on the kind of product you’d be leading and the culture of the company that you’re based at. Google is a very technology driven company and hence whether you have an MBA or not, practically all of the PMs at Google have a technical background and in most cases they have an undergrad in Computer Science. We also have folks who have a graduate degrees like MS and PhD’s in Computer Science who go on to do a PM role.

An MBA definitely helps develop your business and analytical skills, ability to understand markets, improves your communication skills, helps you build a great network of people, etc. There are many technology companies where an MBA is a must for you to get into a Product Management role.

Me: Can you explain the product development cycle in IT industry… Who are the various players in the life cycle and what their responsibilities…are… Can you explain this..

AS: There are a lots of different technologies and methodologies that exist in the industry so it would be hard to cover all of those here. Let me talk about two approaches which are representative of a significant fraction of our industry - one is an enterprise product (from a company like IBM, Oracle, Symantec, etc.) and another one is more of a Software as a Service - SaaS (from say a Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.)

The major roles and players are generally the same - i.e. Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, etc. However, typically, for an enterprise product, you will likely have a more established Customer Support organization, a pre- and post- Sales Organization, etc. On the SaaS side, you will have an organization that ships software much more iteratively, perhaps as frequently as every day. You will typically also have core competency in operations management.

The way the development cycle works is typically similar across both styles. Typically you start with a market and set of customers you want to focus on within that. You might represent something like that with a Market Requirements Document (MRD). You then understand and articulate the pain points for these customers and define a product or a set of features that will address these pain points. This is usually called a Product requirements document (PRD).

Engineering will typically then figure out what’s the best, most innovative and effective way to build the product. Simultaneously, the product is being sold to customers (in an enterprise world); once the product is ready and bought by a customer, it will be deployed, etc. On the SaaS side, its sort of “instant” deployment.



Me: What are the metrics on which your performance is assessed? What are the success metrics for a web product? Can you explain with examples?



AS: Its all about Users Users, Users, and more Users. Typically that translates into number of new users, usage and user happiness metrics.

Me: What the typical Career path of the product managers in IT industry… What are the various options available to them?

AS: If your passion is to create innovative new products, Product Management is sort of a destination job - once you get there you try different products, different markets but that’s what you do

However, just as well, since a PM has a cross-functional leadership job it lends itself really well to General Management or Business Leadership positions.

If you have operational and people management experience along with PM experience, it would be an ideal combination for a CEO type role as well.

Me: What is the best thing you like about product management as a career? What are the occupational hazards associated with product management?

AS: It gives you the direct ability to have impact to real customers and be a able to measure it. It lets you to see the big picture, even create it in some cases. Occupational hazard associated with Product Management - its the Eagle’s song titled Hotel California - You can checkout any time you like, but you

can never leave!

Me: Thank you Amit, for sharing your insights on Product Management.

AS: Thank you! I hope it was helpful!

Readers, hope you enjoyed this edition of Coffee With Experts! For the previous episodes,

check it out here.