An Inside Peek at Doing Product Management for a Product Management Tool
By Michael Shrivathsan on Dec 4, 2009 in Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Roadmap
I received a fun email recently from one of our customers.
As many of you know, at Accompa we make a popular SaaS tool used as product management tool (by PM teams) and requirements management tool (by Engineering teams). Some of you may also know that I manage the Product Management & Marketing teams at Accompa.
Our customer was wondering in his email how it’s like to do product management for a product management tool! I hadn’t consciously thought about it a lot before - but his question got me thinking.
The more I thought, the more I realized there are indeed several differences. In this post, I give you an “inside peek” into the key differences in doing product management for a product management tool. Read & enjoy! 
Product Management for a Product Management Tool
Some key differences I can immediately think of (compared to a typical product management role) are:
- Quality of suggestions from customers
- I’ve been doing product management in one fashion or another for nearly a decade and a half, for a variety of products. The customer suggestions we receive at Accompa are without a doubt the best quality, most well-thought-out suggestions I’ve seen.
- This is probably to be expected - because many of our customers are experienced product management professionals themselves.
- Sometimes, we even get the business case for suggestions, including a detailed list of “If you do this, you’ll get these benefits: X, Y, Z”.
- Quantity of suggestions from customers
- In addition to the quality, we also get a large quantity of suggestions.
- This is again to be expected - since our customers are creative folks used to thinking about products a lot, especially on how to make them better.
- Our product management team is virtually HUGE!
- We’re a startup and our own product management team is not big.
- But due to the above two factors - the virtual extension of our PM team is HUGE. We have a lot of sharp minds thinking about our product critically and offering extremely insightful suggestions.
- I feel neither expensive consultants nor buckets of money could necessarily buy this. We feel really blessed in this regard.
- Challenges in sorting through & prioritizing
- With this quantity and quality of suggestions - our challenge is in sorting through and prioritizing the suggestions.
- We use our own tool to do some of this activity. We’ve also gotten good insights into how to improve our tool to do this better. We’ll be implementing these ideas in the near future.
- What drives our roadmap
- Nearly 100% of our roadmap originates from customer requests.
- This point may be somewhat controversial, as there’s a school of thought that says you can’t do this. The famous quote by Henry Ford goes something like: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.“
- But at Accompa, we’re totally comfortable doing just this - and I’m 100% convinced it is the right approach for our product/market combo.
There you go - I hope you found it entertaining! Do you have any questions about any of this? Or maybe you disagree on my thoughts about roadmap? Chime in here…
Did you know?
1. Adele Revella | Dec 13, 2009 | Reply
You are indeed fortunate, Michael, to have such a helpful client base. I just hope that you’re also spending time with non-customers. One of the traps of getting too much feedback from current customers is that the roadmap is exclusively focused on “using criteria” — the capabilities that users care about once they start using the product. As you’re prioritizing new capabilities, it’s important that you balance “using criteria” with “buying criteria” — the subset of capabilities that driver buyers to purchase in the first place.
Too much focus on feedback from current customers produces a stream of new releases that satisfy only using criteria, compromising the product marketing goal to have something important that will attract new buyers. And product marketing needs to understand all of the buyer personas who influence the buying process, not just the users.
2. Michael Shrivathsan | Dec 14, 2009 | Reply
Good thoughts Adele, thanks for sharing. I agree - it’s important to consider “buyer criteria” as well as “user criteria”.
3. mark | Dec 22, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for sharing this, Michael, very good stuff!
I product manage project management software and our product managers are very involved in the development cycles with our Agile development teams.
As a PMP, I sometimes find that I have to consciously catch myself from falling into the trap of trying to be SME.
IMO, as a product manager, if you are SME in the product that you are managing, it can be more of a challenge to understand your market, customers and competitors to the level at which is needed because you already know the subject area so well.
You probably run into this same problem. If I were PMing a PM tool, I would think this would be harder for me.
Although I probably would enjoy the insights from other product managers, just as I learn more about project management from other project managers.
After all, isn’t that a big reason why we have blogs anyway ??