Answer from Gopal Shenoy of Product Management Tips: This is a difficult question to answer because there is no one question that will help you choose the best company. Here are the questions I would ask:

1. Why are you hiring a product manager?
2. What does product management do today or what is it expected to do going forward (if you are going to be the first product manager in the company)
3. Who does product management report to?
4. Who determines the future direction of your products – marketing, sales or engineering?
5. How does the company manage customer interaction events such as customer visits, focus groups, customer surveys etc? How often is this done?
6. How would you best describe the company culture?
7. What are the company’s short-term and long-term challenges?
8. What could derail the company going forward?

The answers to above eight questions should allow you to get an overall picture on the role of product management within the company. For more details on how the answers will help you, read my blog article: Unearthing the product management landscape within a company

I am looking for a product management job. What should I look for when searching for a product manager position?

Answer from Gopal Shenoy of Product Management Tips: First of all, you need to decide on what kind of product management job you would enjoy.

1. What size company do you want to work for — large, medium, small, startup?
2. What kind of work culture do you thrive in — startup chaos or established process culture of established companies?
3. What kind of products — B2B vs B2C, enterprise vs SMB, on-premise vs. on-demand (Saas) etc. ?
4. What industry? Don’t assume that you will be restricted by the domain you are currently in — your skills could be portable to other domains.
5. Where in the life cycle should the products be? Brand new concepts, products with initial traction, well established products, etc.

Once you honestly determine the answers for the above, then find out where you stand in having the skill sets for the product manager, and then go looking for your dream job. I have recently written about assessing a product manager’s skill set and also on job hunting tips based on my recent job searches. The links are given below:

State of you
Ten Job hunting tips for a product manager
Job hunting cheat sheet

One thing I would like to emphasize is that the size of the company in (1); not only does this dictate the company culture, but also dictates what kind of benefits you could get. Believe me, health care benefit costs now constitute probably the largest chunk that eats into your take home money. I personally have had to turn down offers because of this factor.

Our product is now to the point where it has all of the “must have” parts in order to even compete in its space. We’re ready to take the product to a “game changing” place, and recognize that the best way to do it is with significant market research to identify the pains of the space.

What’s the best way to start conducting basic user and market research as your product grows and expands? What’s the proper mix of current clients vs. desired clients / prospects?

Answer from Gopal Shenoy of Product Management Tips: Regarding a mix of customers (current or prospects), I always lean towards more of prospects. Not that current customers are bad, but many of them could probably lead you in a direction to build a better horse buggy or in other words very incremental improvements to your current products.

I would approach this market research using the following steps:

a) What questions do you want to get answered?

Are you trying to figure out why prospects are not buying your current product? Is it because they have needs that are absolutely not met by your current product (affordability, ease of use, lack of localization, I could name a million things)? Or have you just got to a point that the market is saturated and there is not much growth left in the market? Who are they buying from and why? Or are they not buying at all? In which case how are they meeting their needs today? Are they willing to pay for this need to be solved, or in other words will they buy. Make a list of things you want to get answered.

Make sure that these questions focuses on customer problems that your products could solve and not focus on your product. If you start the conversation along the lines of how do you think we can take our current product to a game changing place, you have started off the wrong foot. Instead, you could ask them questions like

1. Can you tell me about your business? What are the business challenges?
2. What are the challenges that you face in our job today?
3. Why do you have to do task X? (This is what your product does.)
4. Can you walk me through what you have to do to get task X done? (Based on what they tell, dig deeper. If they slam your product/company, don’t get defensive. Instead, find out why — is there some unmet need even there? Or could it be bad customer service, or pushy sales people — don’t discount these)
5. How do you get this job done today?
6. What are the inefficiencies in doing the way you do today?
7. What is the impact if this task is done incorrectly or not done? (This tells you the other things that are dependent on this.)

b) Which segments of the customer population do you need to talk to get all the different needs that may be out there?

Are the needs going to be different in different verticals? Does geography change the needs in the space? Will company size make a difference? Make some educated guesses based on your current experience. Then create a matrix and name 3 companies in each cell of the matrix. I would say you talk to about 10-12 customers.

c) How do you find these companies?

Work your network – internal sales people, win/loss analysis reports, business associations, your family/friends etc.

d) Do you call them/visit them?

I would prefer visiting these customers in their offices. But travel budgets or customer availability may put constraints. At the very least interview the customer over the phone and plan on visiting at least those locally. There is nothing more effective than doing customer visits especially in this kind of market research.

There are couple of resources I could point you to, for more details on doing this kind of market research

1. Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus by Edward McQuarrie
2. An article I had written on customer visits for Pragmatic Marketing Magazine. This article goes into more depth on what I have mentioned above.

I could go on, but hopefully this has given you information as to how to start.

I work in the IT dept of a financial institution. As such, we don’t build a lot of software in-house. We are more of a system integrator. But we want to have product roadmaps for many of our systems that support our business. But we have so many systems ranging from small 6-user systems to large enterprise wide system such as our CRM system. We can’t have product roadmaps for every little system out there.

What are some of the guidelines to determine whether a product roadmap is required for an application?

Answer from Gopal Shenoy of Product Management Tips: You need to figure out what systems play a role in your mission critical applications. Then for these systems, ask for product roadmaps so that you have advanced notice on what new functionality or change in behavior in existing functionality is being planned by the vendor. This will allow you enough time to make sure the vendor knows about any unique ways that you use their systems that they may not be aware of.

The last thing a good vendor wants is to introduce regressions that is going to piss off one of their big customers – You. They should appreciate your input since it is being given well before they have started cementing their new code and release. After all, good vendor relationships are two way partnerships – you helping them and them helping you.