Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Product Management

October 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Product Management

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When I joined MySQL four years ago, there was quite a lot of debate about product management. We didn't actually have any product managers and the view in Engineering was "we don't need 'em." The rationale was that we were so far behind in implementing features requested by customers that there was no need to have another opinion. "We already know exactly what we need to do" or "The Community tells us what we should focus on" were typical responses.

It took me a while to convince people that product management could add value in helping to prioritize things and make sense out of sometimes conflicting views from customers, users and partners. But every time I would bring up the discussion it ended up as a theoretical debate over who would decide what.

So I decided on a different approach. I just put up the resumes of two of the folks we were considering hiring and showed them their backgrounds. They had tons of hands on experience with multiple databases, had worked for more than 10 years as DBAs, had written technical articles and books about database technology and had become advocates for MySQL within their companies. Then I asked the question: could guys like this help us?

By focusing on the skills of the candidates rather than the grey areas of the role, it became a much more productive discussion. Everyone saw that they brought a real world perspective that would be valuable. And we were successful in recruiting the candidates. A few months later, the question became "Where do we get more guys like this."

Product management is not an easy function to perform or define. I did the job for 10 years and still have trouble explaining exactly what it does. Mostly its about making sure you build a product that people will care about and solves real problems customers have.

One of the things that makes the job challenging is it suffers from the imbalance of responsibility (lots of it) and authority (none of it). A PM needs to be a strong customer advocate and also a diplomat to work with Engineering. Having good product management on board has helped us immensely to make sure we are focused on solving the right problems. Its not a panacea; at the end of the day, Engineering has to deliver on making sure the product does what it's supposed to do and has the performance and ease of use to make it successful. But hopefully guidance from Product Management makes the Engineering job more focused.

Product management is an important investment for open source companies that want to get better at meeting customer needs. You can find out more about product management at the web site www.PragmaticMarketing.com. There's a particularly good article called "Who Needs Product Management?" There's also a humorous blog called www.TheCrankyPM.com. And also some good war stories by David Pogue of the New York times from years gone by.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on October 3, 2007 12:59 PM

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