In certain companies, mostly those that have an IT heritage (see http://www.svpg.com/blog/files/moving-from-it-to-product-organization.html), there may be an additional role somewhere in the product organization ­ either in product management or in the product development organization ­ that may be called 'Business Analyst.'

This is not to be confused with the Business Analyst role in product organizations where the person is responsible for analyzing the business metrics and analytics. I¹m referring to a very different role here.

In IT organizations (those doing either internal software or custom software) 'business analysts' are often responsible for the gathering the detailed product requirements.

Imagine a typical custom software project, where the customer might be someone like an HR manager needing some sort of benefits related application. There may be a handful of IT developers that are available to code, but who is it that translates the HR manager's business needs into something the developers can build? In an IT/custom software organization you almost never have product managers, so there¹s a need for someone to do this requirements capture / requirements definition role. One common term for this role is 'Business Analyst' and in fact the term and role has been around for more than 30 years.

The problem arises when this IT/custom software model is inserted into a product software organization, which typically has the role of product manager responsible for defining the product.

The first reaction of most product managers brought into such an organization is to try to understand who are these people and aren't they doing essentially the same job that I'm supposed to do?

This is especially common if the engineering organization has grown attached to their business analysts and lean on them heavily for the detailed product requirements.

Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the two-people, one-role problem that I have highlighted earlier (see http://www.svpg.com/blog/files/product-management-vs-marketing.html). It's the same basic issue as the 'business product manager' vs. 'technical product manager' split, with all the same pitfalls.

To be clear, I¹m against this split in either form. Each product (or product area) needs that clear owner that¹s accountable and responsible for everything from high-level objectives to the details of the user experience.

The good news is that often these business analysts have the potential to be excellent product managers.

One exception to this is when the business analyst is not actually capturing the customer requirements, but instead they are documenting the internal systems design (aka internal spec). Occasionally I find the business analysts really playing this internal documentation role. I think there are other issues with that, but in this case it really has to do with how the engineering organization wants to operate, so it¹s outside of the scope of product management.

If you are a product software organization, and if you have business analysts trying to split the responsibility of product definition with the product manager, I'd encourage you to take a hard look at how the roles are defined and staffed in your organization. Identify the true product managers, and empower them to own product definition completely, from the high-level to the details. Clear ownership and clear accountability.

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Many of you probably saw that eBay recently had a lay-off, and given the condition of the economy they are not likely to be the only one doing so. What I wanted to talk about in this article was what to do if you find yourself in the same boat.

Others talk about dealing with the effects of a lay-off and how to find another job, but I wanted to talk about using this time between jobs to significantly improve your skills as a product manager and your desirability as a job candidate.

The only thing I¹ll say about the actual job search is to get active on social networks for professionals ­ both LinkedIn and Facebook. Make sure you have an accurate and up to date profile, plenty of endorsements, and that you¹re connected with people that can help you either because they know people you might like to be introduced to, or because they can vouch for you. There are also local off-line networks such as the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (www.svpma.org) that are worth joining. And check out the very cool new job site NotchUp (www.notchup.com).

So now on to some very concrete and valuable skills that you can dive into during this time between jobs.

For many people, while they are working, they are so busy rushing to put out the endless stream of urgent fires at their job that they spend almost no time developing their actual skills. And especially if you don¹t have a manager that is committed to your professional development, it's unlikely that you're improving at the rate you could and should have.

What follows is a list of actions you can do right now, to significantly bump up your capabilities:

1. Remember that product management is all about product discovery. Great product managers are great at product discovery, and you can always improve your skills here. Product management is by its very nature interdisciplinary, and product discovery combines business value, user experience design, and technology. The better your skills in each these areas, the better you¹ll be as a product manager.

2. Develop your technical skills. There is never a shortage of technologies to learn about. At the moment, there are social network platforms like Facebook and Open Social. There are mobile device platforms like iPhone and Android. There are user interface technologies like AJAX, AIR and Silverlight. There are new run-time platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Force.com.

3. Develop your design skills. The most in-demand position right now is an interaction designer. It¹s not impossible for product managers to move into interaction design. There are several excellent courses and books on interaction design (see www.svpg.com/resources) and countless articles online. Even if you don¹t want to become a designer, learning about interaction design makes you significantly more valuable, and since many companies are dramatically understaffed on interaction designers, you can help fill that gap.

4. Develop your user research skills. Learn about different quantitative and qualitative techniques for learning about your users.

5. Develop your prototyping skills. Check out tools like Axure (see www.axure.com) and learn how to use them. Create a prototype for an idea you have. Test this prototype on some target users.

6. Develop your market knowledge. Read one or more of the major blogs following the startup world (e.g. www.techcrunch.com) and learn about the companies they like, and check out the portfolio companies of the major VC's.

7. Develop your financial skills. This is an area many product managers are lacking in. See the article 'Make a Friend in Finance' (www.svpg.com/blog/files/make_a_friend_in_finance.html).

8. Learn about different product development processes. If you don't already have experience with Scrum, read a few books, or better yet, take a course and get certified as a Scrum product owner. If you do have experience with Scrum, read some of the articles talking about the challenges of doing product software using Agile methods and how to succeed with Scrum.

9. Create a business plan for an idea you have. If you don¹t have any business or product ideas that you¹ve been thinking about for the past several months, product management is probably not for you. Show the business plan to some friends and have them critique it. If they really think its a great idea, show it to an angel investor or VC friend. If it's not a great idea, make sure you understand why.

10. Develop your competitive analysis skills. Great product managers need to be able to quickly and accurately evaluate competitive offerings. As part of your business plan above, evaluate the major players in the category. Ask yourself what you'd do if you were the product manager for each of those products. Identify what you consider the top three strengths of each product, and the top three weaknesses.

BONUS: Read the book 'Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love' and/or the articles in the SVPG archive (www.svpg.com/articles) and/or apply for one of the scholarship positions in the '100 Essential Lessons in 'Product Management' workshop.

If you have the personal discipline, this can actually be an extremely valuable period for you. Mostly you will do these things in parallel with your job search, but others you may want to make an ongoing part of your professional development, long after you¹ve landed in that choice new spot.

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In some companies, mostly larger companies with multiple business units, there is an additional role in the product mix.

This role typically comes about when you have a matrix organization where a common product organization is responsible for serving the needs of multiple business units. Common examples include business units by geography (e.g. US, International), by device (e.g. mobile, PC), or by function (e.g. search, advertising).

There really has never been a good title for these business owners. Sometimes they're called business managers, business development managers, or product line managers, and sometimes they borrow the title 'product manager' or 'product marketing' which can cause another layer of confusion.

Be careful not to confuse the concept of a business owner with a 'product owner' which is the term used in Scrum teams for the product manager role.

In large part, the role of the business owner is a reaction to the matrix, and for the understandable desire of general managers that are accountable for revenue to have people on their staff (i.e. that they can directly control) that are driving the business forward.

Many product managers resist this model because they can feel disempowered (when the real product decisions get made by the business owners), or because of the complicated stakeholder management that comes along with trying to serve the often conflicting needs of a range of business units.

I have seen, and actually worked in, two major organizations with this model, and I can tell you that it can go either way. It can be a very effective model, or it can be a major obstacle to creating good products. Everything depends on how the role of the business owner is defined relative to the role of the product manager.

When this model goes wrong, the product manager is relegated to essentially gathering and documenting the requirements of the business owner. Those who have been reading these articles know that this is not the job of the product manager, and in fact represents the absence of product management.

However, when this model is done well you can truly drive the business forward very aggressively by the combination of business and product.

The business owner has five key responsibilities:

1. Opportunity Assessments. The business owner defines the business need. For those using the opportunity assessment that I advocate, the opportunity assessment defines the contract between the business owner and the product manager. This opportunity assessment defines the problem to be solved and the measures of success; it does not define the product solution that will address this need.

2. Revenue Model. The business owner drives the revenue model including identifying the key revenue levers, and establishing pricing and promotions.

3. Stakeholder Management. The business owner plays a major role in stakeholder management, working closely with legal, marketing, sales, business development, and execs. This is a big help to the product manager.

4. Partner Management. The business owner manages the relationships with key partners (advertisers, vendors, channels). There is a significant business development aspect to the business owner role, and this also frees the product manager further.

5. Business Analytics Tracking. The business owner closely tracks the business metrics and analytics, and works with the product manager to identify and resolve issues.

Each of these five areas are important, and in the absence of a business owner, the product manager must spend time to cover, taking away from the product manager's primary responsibility (sometimes other roles such as product marketing and business development can help cover some of this as well).

What the business owner is not responsible for is product discovery. That is the job of the product manager. The product manager is the person responsible for discovering innovative product solutions that deliver the necessary value, are usable by the target audience, and can be delivered with the available resources in the required timeframe. Product discovery is a big enough job that there's plenty of room for help from a good business owner to cover these other areas.

Things go wrong when these two roles are not clearly defined, especially when the business owner believes he is responsible for the product solutions. Whenever I find a business owner handing mockups to the product manager I know that there¹s a deep problem here, and either the business owner ought to move over to product management, or the product manager is not up to the job, or the roles are not clearly defined.

I said earlier that essentially the business owner role is a reaction to the matrix. If a general manager is truly empowered and accountable for the success of his or her business, and if the matrix organization is not able to deliver at the pace and quality the business feels it needs, then desperate business owners get creative about how they get product done. The first thing they do is essentially staff their own product management organization (but they are usually careful not to call it product management). The second thing that often happens is that the business unit will contract with third-party developers or outsourced engineering so that they can get what they need built more rapidly.

While this is totally understandable and a direct consequence of strong, empowered business unit leaders, at this point the organization is in serious trouble. The team will soon have a mix of software from different sources, largely incompatible and not integrated, very difficult to maintain and support, the users and customers will suffer, and everyone will be frustrated.

So if your company has a central product organization trying to meet the needs of multiple business units, you¹ll need to make very clear to everyone involved on the business side and the product side what the roles and responsibilities are, and management will need to monitor this closely to make sure that the roles are respected and that people are in the right positions based on their skills.

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Occasionally a company starts its life as one type of business but then finds that they need to change into another type of business. The most common such transition I see is to start by building products for very large companies (enterprises), but then decide you need to switch (or expand) to sell to consumers and/or small businesses.

Even before the recent turmoil in the financial services industry, I was often asked by enterprise CEO¹s how can they change course to a consumer company. Or, I would be asked by product managers how to make the move from product management in an enterprise company to product management in a consumer internet company.

There are many potential reasons for this.

It may be because the company has saturated the enterprise market. Or because they determine that there simply aren¹t enough companies out there with pockets deep enough to pay what they would need to survive. Or because their investors point to the dramatically larger market of consumers and small businesses and say that¹s the new objective. Or sometimes companies simply tire of their fate being driven more by deals on the golf course, rather than the fruits of their product efforts.

For whatever reason, if your company decides it must evolve from an enterprise business to a consumer business, then I¹ve learned that there are several things that you can do to increase your chances of success.

I will warn you however that changing your company like this might sound easy but let me assure you it¹s not. In fact, most companies don¹t survive the transition. Unfortunately, often this transition is necessary, so the business may not have any choice but to try to change.

Note that much of this also applies to product managers that wish to transition from working in an enterprise software company to a consumer software company.

Corporate DNA

First, realize that whether intentional or unintentional, your company is surely populated by many people that have spent their career in enterprise businesses, and that¹s the world they know.

There are clues to this all over the office. Do you see anyone with ties on? Do you have a direct sales organization? Does the company have a box at the local arena to entertain clients? Do you have a customer briefing center? Is your company name along the side of some race car or sailboat? Is the role of marketing at your company to support the sales force? Do you see a lot of specials? Are there a handful of very big customers that cause the entire company to bend over backwards?

At a superficial level all of these things may seem easy to change, but they stem from deep down beliefs about how to run a business and how to attract and retain customers.

Start at the Top

The CEO must tackle this DNA issue head on and take a hard look at the culture and the organization and consciously set the new tone. This will almost certainly require some new blood on his or her staff with the new DNA.

But it¹s also almost certain that there will be people in the company that will resist these changes, and push back hard. Many of them see the writing on the wall and know they are fighting for their jobs. Fortunately, many of them have long wanted to make the switch to consumer but with their enterprise experience have had trouble finding a company to take them. If your company is willing to teach them what they need to learn then they can often become strong supporters. But honestly those that don¹t want to move will need to be moved out of the way.

Consumer Companies

I¹ve written earlier about what makes a great consumer internet service (see http://www.svpg.com/blog/files/consumer_internet_services.html) so I won¹t
repeat that here, but I will emphasize a few key points:

- You only survive if you create a product that hundreds of thousands if not millions of people want to use.

- With consumer products, every customer is a user, and as such, every user makes the decision to purchase or use.

- It¹s all about scale ­ the ability to scale the software, to scale the marketing/customer acquisition, and scale the customer support processes.

- In an enterprise company, it¹s really mostly about sales and the sales organization. In a consumer company, it¹s all about product, with a good dose of online marketing challenges as well.

- Because you can¹t depend on training classes, online tutorials, or an SE to hold the hands of the new users, the product has to be dramatically easier to learn and use. This means building out a user experience team that knows how to design this type of software, and a product organization that knows how to work with this team to define, design, build and run this software.

- In an enterprise sale, you may have charged on average say $100K in license fees with $25K in yearly maintenance, and of course the marginal cost of the software is essentially zero, so there¹s plenty of room for the sales rep, the SE, the big dinners with the client, the time required for custom RFP responses, the special visit the engineer makes to customer to help get the software working, etc. But for a consumer or small business sale, for say $25/month/user (and realize that most consumer or small business revenue is actually significantly less per customer), you obviously have no room for such luxuries on a per customer basis. Even at $250/month per small business you have no such room.

- In consumer products, the software absolutely has to actually work. No more leaning on professional services or SE¹s or integration partners to glue things together for the customer. It has to work, work well, and work immediately. Exceptions to this will destroy your customer service costs and erode your margins.

Back to the Culture

Much of what I¹m describing above has to do with skills and best practices, but a lot of this is really about the culture, and I think that not enough companies attempting to make this transition pay enough attention to the cultural aspects.

Remember that in the consumer software company culture, it¹s not about ties or sales or big customers, it¹s about how many people are loving the product, how do you make the product even better, how do you get people to engage even more with the site, and how do you continue to get the message out to others that will love the product.

Once companies truly get this, they usually end up significantly reducing the size of the sales and sales support organization, and significantly increasing the size of the product and marketing organizations.

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