What happened? Was it an outright rebellion of the authors, editors and publishers? Maybe it was a boycott from the consumer. It may have been caused by our ousting the old worn out marketer. Perhaps the answer is a little, "All of the above." Whatever the reason, the publishing environment has changed -fundamentally. I'm sure the "Generation X" persona had something to do with it. There always trying to get involved.

Unlike the changes that took place to the word processing environment in the 70's; caused by easy to use and affordable software applications. This new change has multiple drivers. Pointing to the internet itself does little to shed light on the cause. We could blame everything on the internet if we wanted to.

For the Product Management Team, the question isn't so much of "Why", but of "How do these changes in the publishing environment impact our processes?" --- And they can in a very fundamental way if we let them. Of course, another question is should we let them?

"Conversation is KING!" That's the motto to remember. In the past, content was KING. Content is still important. It's just not sufficient, especially for Product Managers. The value of a published work is driven by the conversation contained in and around it. When conversation levels increase, the value goes up. This isn't new, but how that conversation is created, captured and published is.

If we recognize that the majority of Product Management processes are document centric, we can understand why this change impacts Product Management in such a fundamental way. The outcome of Product Management activities are published documents such as; strategies, reports, lists, rankings, roadmaps, schedules, and specifications. These kinds of documents are then consumed by other activities in the product innovation process. In fact, most product innovation progress stems from our ability to socialize the content of the product manager's documents within their enterprise, customer base, and even target market.

Now I can see that changes within the publishing environment can directly impact product management practices. Today Product Managers are beginning to feel the market pressure for quick adoption of the new publishing practices where "Conversation is KING." This is no surprise when we consider that our ability to socialize these documents increases product management efficiency and effectiveness.

When we define the purpose of Product Management as increasing the organization's competitive advantage through product initiatives, I see why adoption of the new publishing practices is seen as a competitive advantage of the entire enterprise.

I'm interested in the views of other Product Managers, Social Media Specialists, Innovation Practitioners, IP Specialists, Process Engineers, and Publishers. According to my own thoughts, all of my content isn't as important as your conversation.

Michael Hopkin, from Lead on Purpose, is running a quick one-question survey as part of his market sensing research.

Considering what your product management organization is tasked to deliver in the next 3-6 months, please indicate which of the following would help you the most by distributing 100 points to the options listed below.

Please take a minute and respond here - http://budurl.com/8yks.

Product Management is rapidly evolving. It's an exciting time to work with a product management tool vendor! Ryma is the world's largest implementer of product management technology and solutions. RYMA's participated in much of this evolution first hand.

Customers come to RYMA wanting to grow product management capability. They're frustrated because of the gap between theory and practice. The rate product management practices change makes this even more frustrating. I believe understanding a few trends can make it simpler for everyone. I've broken this blog into a series of four posts; a posting focused on each trend and one posting bringing the trends together.

Trend One: "Predictive" Product Management
Even before the ancient pyramids, there were architects and there were builders. The role of the architect was reserved for those with access to power and money. Power and money enabled decision making. The common citizen lacked both power and money to become the project architect. They found themselves building without much decision ability. Large projects were made possible by driving the builder's wages down to almost nothing. Those few architects, with enough power and money to make decisions, worked alongside of the builders throughout the product lifecycle. Decisions were made at every step of the effort; but they were made by an elite class.

As time passed, more and more people were included in decision making as citizens could retain larger amounts of power and money of their own. One of the fist things these people decided was that they didn't want to work for free. This forced large projects to search for other methods of economy. In those days the search was for a solution to a specific issue, not on improving the entire product lifecycle. Growth in the building processes came first because of the eminent need; the rising costs of building activities were diminishing returns.

A commonly accepted approach to this problem was to employee fewer builders, by finding ways for them to do the work of 10. They were paid more because they could do more. Along the way strategies such as standardization, mass-production, automation, re-use, and encapsulation have helped increase builder efficiency.

This gave rise to three separate but interrelated historical trends;

1. "Predictive" product management,
2. Polarization of decision making, and
3. Resistance to building changes.

Within "predictive" product management the architect specifies or "predicts" what the product will look like. The builders build.  If the finished product compares favorably to the "prediction" the product is declared a success. This practice has continued on into modern days.

In this "predictive" world, product functionality, cost, and delivery schedule is fixed prior to start.  There is little tolerance for variation. This trend fits well into the notion of keeping the decision making isolated to a few. It was discovered that the uncertainty of creativity was also contained this way. The unpredictable nature of innovation, creativity, and decision making is restricted to that upfront elite class. The building phase in the product lifecycle becomes predictable by pulling as many decisions as possible up front. The elite class no longer works along the side of the builder.

This trend continues to increase pressure on product management methods designed to predict market problems, customer values, business opportunities, competitive advantage, technical solutions, and so on. In this world, the best product management teams are identified by the better predictions.

Historically "Predictive" Product Management produces:

low-valued product releases,
missed aligned functionality,
product complexity, and
budget overruns more times than not.

What's been your experience? Is the elite class scalable?

How hard is it to predict the future?

A request from my friend Saeed at On Product Management:

A few people have responded to the survey I posted, asking about problems facing Technology Product Management, but we need more of you to participate.

We need the collective input of the community and from there we can move forward to try to address some of the issues that you raise.

Read the rest of the post here.

So let's see... in January 2007 I predicted that 2007 would be a big year for product management. I think it was. The number of blogs and product management associations increased and people were generally motivated to work smarter. In December 2007 I made a few rather snarky predictions about 2008. To recap...

1. You will be asked to do more with less as the screws tighen
2. You will update and present your roadmap at some point then neither deliver it or keep it up-to-date for the remainder of the year
3. If you didn't change jobs in 2007 you will in 2008
4. You will attend too many meetings and continue to support sales
5. If not already, someone will suggest that you become more Agile and if already ... welcome to your new title of Product Owner

Not bad. Screws are tight and you will continue to be asked to do more when more cuts happen in the new year. I trust you know this already. Not sure how you made out with your roadmaps (I could make an educated guess) and suspect a lot of people changed jobs. And last but not least... Agile. Rarely do I meet anyone who is not playing with it in some way. If you are, I suggest you read James Shore's recent post "The Decline and Fall of Agile". James is seeing what I am seeing. Doing a release every two weeks is not Agile and is only going to lead to frustration and failure. Sorry. To get back on topic... 2008 was generally a pretty positive year, again, for product management types. The PMAs continue to rock and we attended three unconferences with the inaugural P-Camp in Silicon Valley and two ProductCamps in Austin and Toronto. With 4 scheduled for 2009 (including Boston), we need to find a way to launch more through the year. 2008 saw some new Product Management type books published, most notably Tuned In, The Art of Product Management and others. The Cranky PM continues to entertain and help understand that we are laughing at ourselves. Everyone I meet loves her and yet no one knows her. Despite one grumbler, a bunch of us are now on Twitter. I am following and networking with hundreds of Product Managers all day. I understand the attraction and repulsive force of the service. For me it works.

So what is in store for 2009... economic grief for one... this will result in more job cuts. So we need to work smarter. If I could offer one suggestion... be able to answer why for everything you do. Why am I going to this meeting? Why is this feature on my roadmap? Why is the sales team struggling to sell my product? If you can answer why to everything and directly link it to a strategy, either corporate or product you will achieve in 2009. Make 2009 the year of measurable achievement and 2009 will be the year of the Product Manager.

Participate Now!

Does your market sensing process measure up? Take the survey and attend the webinar on January 14th to see how your organization rates.

Market Sensing is the process of gaining a profound understanding of the market by capturing market input such as enhancement requests, win/loss reports, analyst reports, market research, competitive analysis, etc.

This survey can be completed in less than five minutes. All responses to the survey are anonymous.

I've been talking to many prospects on this topic lately, ever since we released our integration with SalesForce.com.

Would like to hear what the blog thinks on this topic.

Seems some companies are more focused on this than others. Are you actively associating sales opportunities or pipelines to your roadmap and product plans?

There is definitely something to be said about best-practices and being market-driven, and that we do not want to be completely sales driven by only building things that sales believes they need to close business. With that said, I do believe it can be a powerful additional metric to our product planning.

If we have good market data on something, for instance enhancement requests, call reports and win/loss to support it, an active view into the potential opportunity of building it can be a great additional piece of data to solidify the need.

Created a quick poll on the topic, and would love to get comments from the field on this one.

Regional content, but interesting none the less.
Red Canary's Product Management Survey and Work | Life results

Hundreds of product management professionals connected to the hi-tech industry responded to our survey, painting a great picture of what employees of fast-growth companies in Toronto, the Greater Toronto Area and Waterloo Region earn, and how happy they are.

We were discussing roadmaps at Ryma the other day (yes we really talk about this stuff in our spare time for fun!) and the question was posed: Are people developing roadmaps to answer a question about release content or strategy. So, it is poll time again! Click here to participate in the poll.

I've been speaking with lots of clients recently about this topic, and wanted to get input from the blog.

How many of you and your product management teams have an internal roadmap? Everyone thinks product roadmap when you use the word but, I'm talking about the internal team and its plans.

As a critical part of our respective organizations, it would seem logical that we understand our priorities, our pains, and have a path (roadmap) on how we plan to get there.

What goals or issues to we plan to deal with this year?

Will we do a better job gathering and responding to customer feedback, or perhaps building better requirements to hand off to development?

Will we implement a strategic or customer advisory council to validate our direction?

There are so many facets to product management, and it would be easy to get lost in the amount of interaction we have with our customers, both internally an externally.

The easiest approach I've seen to date is to interview our key constituents and customers. We can ask them what they do and do not like about our planning processes and list out the key issues or challenges.

Armed with that data, we can ask our management to prioritize the list and give us guidance on which problems to solve and perhaps how.

I've created a survey below, would love to see where the blog is on this topic.