Tired of hearing the U.S.-centric view of the world? Me, too. So today, we’re talking to Donal Kane, a Product Manager from the United Kingdom, who works at Mediaplex, the technology division of ValueClick, an online marketing company focused on ad serving, customer acquisition, and affiliate, email, and search marketing. Donal takes us on a journey that starts in Medieval times and ends up 24 months in the future.
Q: How did you get involved in Product Management?
A: I guess I’ve a somewhat unconventional academic background for Product Management having studied Medieval History and Economics in University. I’m sure there’s a good joke somewhere about studying the religious warfare in the Middle Ages and the position of product management in an organisation but I haven’t come up with it yet! Seriously though I would say that an analytical mindset and the ability to clearly communicate requirements and requests are something that’s more important to successful product management than anything else.
Following university I wandered into Software Engineering and then equally accidentally ended up in online advertising at Doubleclick’s European HQ in Dublin back in late 1999. I started out in Technical Support and after moving up through the ranks with Doubleclick for over 5 years I moved across to ValueClick in 2005 as European Product Manager, initially in the Mediaplex business and more recently in Commission Junction as well.
Q: Where is the best place for the Product Management function in an organization and why?
A: My product management experience has been focused on working in remote offices at quite a long distance from the engineering teams and the core product managers; this probably gives me a slightly different perspective on this than some of your interviewees so I would give a geographical answer here and say the best place for the Product Management function to be located is in the same location as the main engineering/development, in my experience anything else doesn’t really work.
However I think there can be a danger of Product Management being “captured” by the engineering function so some organisational distance is useful in maintaining a degree of independence and avoiding Product Management becoming too close to Engineering/Development. It may be useful for Product Management to sit with Engineering, but if they have lunch with them every day too that’s probably too much!
Q: If someone told you that they wanted to be a Product Manager, what would you tell them?
A: I think it’s far more important to be interested in the product than to want to manage it. If you’re interested in the product and you understand well what it does and how it’s used then that’s the most important part of being a Product Manager. I’d always encourage people to work in a business they’re interested in rather than concentrate on a job title in a business they may be less interested in or have less aptitude for.
Q: What have you done or what would you consider the best way(s) for Product Managers to improve themselves?
A: Always be conscious that your users and customers (internal or external) probably aren’t using your product in the way you intended them to use it, or the way you think they want to use it. It’s always a useful exercise to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”; spend some time on client calls, support tickets or RFPs to get an understanding of what’s really going on out there with your product.
I think it’s critically important to avoid the “ivory tower” mentality with Product Management, just because you think you know the best way to do something with your product doesn’t mean that that you’re correct and even if you are it doesn’t mean it’s immediately obvious to everyone else.
If you talk to your customers and users you’d often be very surprised at how their usage of your product diverges from the ideal that you have.. sometimes (in fact quite often) your users may have come up with a better way to use your product than you would have thought of yourself.
Unless you understand in detail what your users are doing with your product, and why they’re using it in that way you can’t be an effective Product Manager.
Q: What was your worst Product Management mistake and how did you recover?
A: Spreading myself too thinly across the business so I can’t properly practice what I preach with everything I work on and really learn in detail how a product is interacted with by the users and customers.
Recovery is a slow process and I don’t think I’m there yet!
Q: If you could be the Product Manager for any product, what would it be and what would be the first thing you would do?
A: Microsoft Windows, and the first thing I’d do is roll back to XP and keep the only genuinely good feature on Vista – the “Snipping Tool.”
_________________
And now for Donal’s question for The Productologist:
Q: When it comes to roadmaps and strategic product planning what’s the optimum level of forward planning you should do ? … It always seems to me that while a little planning is undoubtedly a good thing, too much planning is bad as you lose flexibility and can become hostage to your own plans. Finding that balance must be hard .. any tips?
A: Plan for change. The problem that a lot of Product Managers get into is that once they put something into a product plan (or roadmap or whatever you want to call it), it’s set in stone. Sales saw you present it at the last quarterly meeting. The CEO mentioned it at the board meeting a week ago. That customer you showed it to wants to know when the feature that is 3 quarters away will be done.
In general, I like to think of the roadmap more like a compass. It helps you understand and communicate the general direction you want to go. If you commit to it like an unbreakable contract, you may end up doing something that is out of line with your business by the time you get it done.
For folks who are trying to figure out a roadmap, I usually give this advice:
6 month roadmap should be cast in clay. It’s pretty stable, but it’s not cheap. It takes a lot of work to build it. You can be modify it slightly if necessary, but it’s gonna cost you.
12 month roadmap should be cast in marshamallow creme. It’s big, fluffy, and tasty. You can shape it any which way you like and if it doesn’t look right, you can throw another dollop here and there to easily adjust it. Plus it doesn’t look real, so no one will expect you to actually deliver it.
24 month roadmap should be cast in pixels. Nothing there, but pictures that can easily be modified to suit whatever business whim you need. It’s low-cost (except the labor), infinitely tweakable, and can be as big and fantastic as you can dream up.
A lot matters about your company and product(s), too. Big companies usually require lots more formal planning. Young, small companies are flying by the seat of their pants and planning more than 3 months out might seem ridiculous.
As the Product Manager, you have to drive the planning process. Figure out what works best for you, your team, your company, and your product(s). But don’t get stuck just because you think you found the right cadence and detail. Hopefully, you company is growing and changing, so you’ll need to keep evaluating whether your product planning process is still effective.
A bit more about Donal:
Donal has been working in Online Advertising in Europe for almost 10 years and is currently Director of Product Management for Mediaplex in Europe, working out of the ValueClick offices in London.