top three frustrations of product managers and tips to ...top three frustrations of product managers...

Eliminate key challenges product managers face when leading complex product development projects.

Top ThreeFrustrations of Product Managers & Tips to Avoid Them

2 © Jama Software, Inc

S ince the earliest days of commerce, customers have wanted

to buy products that provide timely, innovative solutions to

real-world challenges. Today, the problems customers need

solved are more complex and in step with the continuously evolving,

hypercompetitive dynamics of the marketplace. As a project manager,

you need the agility to quickly adapt to your customers’ rapidly shifting

requirements, while helping your development team focus on business goals.

DEVELOPING THE BEST PRODUCT POSSIBLE

In addition to customer feedback and demands for immediate

responsiveness, there are many other factors transforming your

role within modern product development: a push toward iterative

roadmap management; fluid, 100-plus-page requirements documents;

and geographically-dispersed project teams. As these challenges

mount, the pressure is on you to evolve your organization’s

product development process and shepherd in the new era.

The crucial first step is to acknowledge you can’t keep working the old

way. Continuing to communicate via unstructured methods — email, chat

messages, documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, document repositories,

and so on — simply doesn’t foster collaboration. Conversations about

your product need to stay connected to the work. In context, everyone

involved has visibility into what your team is building and why. This sort of

structured collaboration enables the healthy, vigorous engagement required

to deliver the complex, connected products your customers demand.

Structured collaboration enables the healthy, vigorous engagement required to deliver the complex, connected products your customers demand.


Chances are your organization already emphasizes iterative product

development, with inherent processes for on-the-fly improvements. Agility

breeds innovation, but it can also make your role as product manager much

more pressure packed. You own the roadmap, and as such, must lead your

teams to embrace change as workflows and the development cycle continue

to become more iterative. You also need to balance your company’s

business objectives with the realities of time, scope, and resources.

Geographically-distributed teams are the new reality, forcing product

managers to rethink how everyone can remain in sync. The last thing

you need is disconnected contributors in what should be a team-wide,

collaborative endeavor.

Understanding and transforming the ways in which your team collaborates

is essential to delivering market-disrupting innovations. To assist, we

addressed three of the top frustrations product managers commonly face.

Defining and executing on the roadmapEveryone across the organization claims to support the importance of building and maintaining a roadmap that guides your collective product development efforts. But many factors occur that could potentially disrupt the agreed-upon product plan.

Embracing change to accelerate product innovation and developmentWinning means introducing innovative products quickly. Doing so requires change. You need a new way to manage the product-development process — a modern system that delivers measurable efficiency advantages.

Maintaining consistent, organization-wide alignment despite rapidly shifting requirementsHow do you ensure all product development contributors are working together as a singularly-focused unit, when the rate of development accelerates and change requests threaten to derail alignment?

1

2

3

TOP THREE FRUSTRATIONS:


The product roadmap communicates the value you expect to deliver

to both your business and customers. It ensures your company’s

product plan dovetails with its longer-term strategic goals. It also maps

the product’s development path and known iterations throughout

its lifespan and creates unified buy-in across all stakeholders.

When developed correctly, the roadmap describes to your entire team

the problems the product will solve, why and for whom you’re solving

them, the prioritized order in which the product’s releases will be

developed to address those problems, and how they’ll be addressed.

After the roadmap has been defined,

developed, and agreed upon, it’s up to you —

the product manager — to stay apprised of and

document all shifting marketplace trends and

incoming customer change-requests to ensure

continued stakeholder alignment.

If developing the roadmap is half the battle,

effectively managing and rationalizing the

roadmap defines the other half.

Managed ineffectively, it’s easy for one

set of stakeholders — such as Sales,

Service and Support, Marketing, or even

the customer — to assert disproportionate

influence during the product development

process. Any one of these groups could

upset your roadmap’s balance.

Defining and executing on the roadmap.

Focus on Transparency

1


Roadmap transparency can help eliminate scenarios like the ones below that result when outside teams don’t have full visibility.

SalesRightfully focused on landing more business, the Sales team sees a promising opportunity to capture additional revenue. But to capitalize on the opportunity, the product needs functionality

that’s not slated in the roadmap’s current requirements.

Service and SupportSeeking to expand revenue from existing customer accounts, the Service and Support team raises concerns about product implementation. In such a scenario, the team would be too narrowly focused on delivering customer-specific iterations that

aren’t in step with the product’s broader, long-term value.

Marketing Intent on maintaining your company’s standing as an innovative thought leader, the Marketing team wants to skew the roadmap toward delivering new features more rapidly. However, quality could be compromised, or those features may not address the requirements of the broader market or customers.

As a product manager, you want all these stakeholders to have

seats at the table, without one group having more influence than

another. To do that, you need to weigh the value and impact of all

stakeholder inputs and balance their often-competing interests.

What’s more, after the development team commits to scope and

schedule, it’s your responsibility to track the activities of UX designers,

developers, and QA testers. You must also minimize churn and

ensure continuous alignment during the varying stages of definition,

design, and validation. What you need is a way to connect and

align every stakeholder, every product development team member,

and your organization’s top priorities, every step of the way.

MAINTAIN BALANCE


Successfully managing your roadmap requires a hub where every product-related conversation is clearly and logically associated with the relevant requirements.

Successfully managing your roadmap requires process transparency

and unambiguous communication. Whether or not priorities shift,

everyone benefits from robust collaboration that gives all participants

complete, contextual, real-time visibility into how the roadmap

adheres to broader business, customer, and user goals.

A specialized product development platform with inherent collaboration

capabilities can serve as a comprehensive system of engagement;

a hub where every product-related conversation is clearly and

logically associated with the relevant requirements. One where

everyone can see the work of designers, engineers, and testers.

Collaboration promotes team-wide ownership of the entire product

development process and allows stakeholders to provide feedback,

solicit reviews, and approvals, and discuss in real time their work

in progress. When challenges and conflicts arise, you can more

easily overcome them and maintain your “deliver faster” ethos.


At the end of the day, your business depends on being able to give

your customers the most innovative products as quickly as possible. Is

your product development process equipped to do this perfectly? Are

you willing to settle for “good enough?”

If we’re talking about appeasing customer

needs, then “good enough” is probably not good

at all. Not if your company strives to accelerate

the pace of innovation without sacrificing

the value you deliver to your customers.

An iterative system enables greater roadmap-

management flexibility and responsiveness

to customer input. In many cases, smaller

portions of the entire job can be parsed-out

for rapid prototyping, testing, and debugging,

and then validated with end-users. This allows

your product development team to focus on

developing the most high-value result possible.

Heightened emphasis on agility and a faster pace

of development also requires company-wide

buy-in. Every team member — from upper-tier

decision-makers to software engineers, QA testers, sales reps, marketers,

and service and support staff — should be able to view the product roadmap.

This will allow them to better understand how the process quickly solves the

timeliest problems while adding overall product value with each new iteration.

Embracing change to accelerate product innovation and delivery.

Focus on Agility

2


If your product development method lacks clear visibility, then

minor misunderstandings can quickly devolve into a systemic

communication breakdown where true collaboration is impossible.

When an iterative development process is embraced business-wide, the

potential for a new mindset takes over. This can foster a collective comfort

level with a new product development method with a modern view on

product releases. Instead of trying to “get everything right” with each

release, your team focuses on development products that solve major

issues — providing immediate value where customers need it most.

With the right foundation in place, you’ll have more flexibility to solicit

customer feedback and gauge market indicators to fine tune secondary

or tertiary releases once you’ve accomplished primary objectives.

Of course, embracing and implementing a new product development

method requires more than a fresh mindset; you need to rally all contributors

around successes. With an effective solution in place — one that offers

complete visibility into changing requirements, cross-project relationships,

and the impact of change — your stakeholders will see precisely

where your team is getting the edge and support you accordingly.

The solution will allow them to experience just how seamlessly you can

collectively transition to a new world of agile innovation. And, through

productive collaboration, you can beat your competitors to market.

An iterative development process empowers your team to focus on providing immediate value where customers need it most.


It doesn’t matter who wants to make a change. It could be anyone

on the product development team who sees an opportunity

to improve an iteration during the development process. And

as you know, change can derail delivery deadlines.

However, some of the most common

reasons for missing deadlines are unclear

or changing requirements, quality issues,

and delayed decisions. Each of these

stem from communication issues.

So how can you ensure all stakeholders

are able to perform their tasks on

schedule when aiming at a frequently

shifting target, and when proactive

communication is lacking? As a product

manager, one of your key responsibilities

is understanding and articulating to

your team the issues you’re trying to

solve. You must ensure the team knows

exactly how the issues are problematic

and comprehends the contextual rationale for why you want to solve

them. That will help chart the course to accomplish the agreed-

upon solutions. Of course, while that sounds great on paper,

game-changing collaboration doesn’t materialize organically.

When managed properly, product development is a cyclical process

that repeatedly brings timely and innovative solutions to market. Each

Maintaining consistent organization-wide alignment despite rapidly shifting requirements.

MOST COMMON REASONSFOR PRODUCT DELAYS

Unclear or changing requirement

Quality issues

Delayed decisions

3


of your team’s contributors must rely

on one another’s complementary skills

to ensure collective alignment with the

company’s long-term business goals.

For instance, the sales department

depends on the development team

to introduce innovative, value-packed

solutions that win new business. Likewise,

the development team relies on sales

and other end-user-facing teams to solicit

customer feedback, seek marketplace

findings, and analyze and convert them

into actionable improvements for future product releases.

When all is said and done, the talented people who comprise your

product development team are your most critical assets. Discovering

a more effective means of ensuring that their suggestions, opinions,

intelligence, and expertise are shared and leveraged in a timely manner

will create more effective teamwork and better products as a result.

Truth is, even the most capable product manager needs help

achieving this level of cohesion. One of the most effective ways

to attain alignment is to recommend and push for a collaborative

product development platform that everyone can easily use to

engage throughout the product lifecycle, from concept to launch.

With the right system in place, you can rapidly access and discuss

suggestions for improvement. You can also efficiently monitor activities,

The talented people on your product development team are your most critical assets — leverage them wisely.

Focus on Communication


issues, and decisions related to product requirements and tasks in one

centralized location. Plus, you can track change requests and related

impacts in real time. In short, can have complete visibility into your

team’s activities and your organization will have visibility into yours.

You can keep everyone aligned without having to take valuable time to

report, update, and rationalize all that you do. This will ensure your team

stays focused on delivering the highest-value products to your customer.

TRANSFORM YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Transparency, agility, and communication are vital in your product

development process. Without them, you won’t be able to meet customer

and market demands. You’ll also open yourself up to ever-increasing

competition, as well as risk losing organizational trust and customer loyalty.

In most cases, however, implementing transparent, agile, and

collaborative systems requires a paradigm shift in process. According

to a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report of product

developers creating digitally-infused products, the majority (52 percent)

are partnering with software or other companies to assist with their

transformation. So you don’t have to enter this new territory alone.

Jama Software’s product development platform transforms your

product development process into a competitive advantage. Imagine

the success and confidence you’d have as a product manager,

and as part of a product development team, with the right tools in

place to build the complex, connected products of the future.

http://go.jamasoftware.com/hbr-bridging-the-gap.html?utm_source=jama&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pm+frustrations+paper

ABOUT JAMA SOFTWARE

Jama Software is the product development platform for companies building

complex, smart and connected products. The Jama solution enables

enterprises to accelerate development time, mitigate risk, slash complexity

and verify regulatory compliance. More than 600 product-centric

organizations, including NASA, Thales and Caterpillar, use Jama Software

to modernize their process for bringing complex products to market.

VISIT OUR WEBSITE

www.jamasoftware.com

FREE 30 DAY TRIAL

www.jamasoftware.com/try-jama

http://www.jamasoftware.com?utm_source=jama&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pm+frustrations+paper

http://www.jamasoftware.com/try-jama?utm_source=jama&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pm+frustrations+paper

top three frustrations of product managers and tips to ...top three frustrations of product managers...

Documents