While doing a bit more research on Product Management, I found Julia Austins thoughts on HBR the topic. She reflects on three primary considerations for the role: Core Competencies, Emotional Intelligence(EQ) and Company Fit.
Category: Business & MBA
Business related notes.
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Produktmanagement
Die Wikipedia definiert ein Produkt folgendermaßen:
Unter einem Produkt wird in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre ein materielles Gut oder eine (immaterielle) Dienstleistung verstanden, die das Ergebnis eines Produktionsprozesses ist.
In der Praxis wird ein Produkt viel zu häufig als ein Ergebnis verstanden, das am Ende des Produktionsprozesses steht. Eins der größten Hindernisse für die Digitalisierung ist dieser Gedankengang, denn damit wird die Möglichkeit einer Dienstleistung häufig ausgeschlossen.
Gerade im traditionell produzierenden Gewerbe ist die Erwartungshaltung häufig, man müsse Apps herstellen, wie Produkte von einem Band laufen. Der Kunde kauft aber keine Glühbirne, sondern beispielsweise die Möglichkeit einen Mehrwert-Dienst in Anspruch nehmen zu können.
Je nach Produktgruppe unterscheiden sich die Möglichkeiten für Dienstleistungen natürlich sehr grundlegend. Vom traditionellen Produkt unterscheiden sie sich aber all dadurch, dass sie mit der Auslieferung nicht abgeschlossen sind.
Digitalisierung ist umgekehrt auch kein Enabler für Dienstleistungen, das gab es auch früher schon. Aber Digitalisierung eröffnet Möglichkeiten Kundenfeedback zu sammeln, zu verarbeiten, in Kontext zu setzen und nutzbar zu machen. Jede folgende Generation eines Produktes kann mittels diesem Feedback besser gestaltet werden und jede Dienstleistung kann zu einer besseren Kundenzufriendenheit führen.
Wenn der Kunde sich verstanden fühlt.
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Das Gewäsch von Volkswagen
Aussagekräftige Informationen – die gab es früher einmal. Heute versuchen Autohersteller, die Kunden mit emotionalen Geschichten für sich zu begeistern. Das allerdings könnte böse enden. Auch die Software-Industrie appelliert schon länger an das Bauchgefühl des Kunden. Eine Strategie die schon seit längerem populär. Man kann das – positiv gestimmt – als erfolgreichen Marketing-Mechanismus interpretieren. Storytelling heißt der Marketing-Trend, wie selbst die Süddeutsche in dem Artikel schreibt, und ist mittlerweile in aller Munde.
Das ist auch notwendig, weil viele der Produkte, nicht nur im Automobilumfeld, besonders aber im High-Tech Umfeld, sich nicht durch Basiseigenschaften unterscheiden. Tatsächlich finden die Alleinstellungsmerkmale sich im allgemeinen in sehr technischen Details, in Ingenieurs-Problemen, die ein Hersteller besser als der andere gelöst hat. Für den Konsumenten aber in der Regel schwer bis gar nicht nachzuvollziehen. Bleibt dem Kunden nur noch eine Geschichte zu erzählen, die er auch versteht.
Als Käufer muss man die Gefühle für eine richtige Entscheidung aber zur Seite lassen und eine an Fakten orientierte Entscheidung treffen. Das sind beim Automobil Verbrauch und Ökobilanz, für Software eignen sich beispielsweise Lizenzkosten, Developer-Velocity, oder messbare Reduzierungen von Support-Aufwänden.
Source: PR für Autos – Das Gewäsch von Volkswagen – Auto & Mobil – Süddeutsche.de
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Digitalisierung in Deutschland
Heute in der Welt:
Wie der Versuch Produkte zu schützen Digitalisierung, bei der es vorrangig um Dienstleistungen geht, behindert.
Leistungsschutzrecht: Was die Digitalstrategie der Regierung durchkreuzen kann: In wenigen Tagen wird ein EU-weites Leistungsschutzrecht beschlossen. Es enthält eine Regel, die das Kanzleramt in Aufregung versetzt. Sie droht die Bemühungen, den Anschluss an das digitale Zeitalter zu finden, zu untergraben.
— Weiterlesen www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article183795474/Leistungsschutzrecht-Was-die-Digitalstrategie-der-Regierung-durchkreuzen-kann.html -
`Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software – Bloomberg
It’s a huge effort considering the scale of the project and the relevance of customer data for Amazon. Given their cloud business and it’s maturity – AWS is more than 10 years old by now and leading the pack – this move seems overdue.
Amazon.com Inc. has taken another step toward eliminating software from Oracle Corp. that has long helped the e-commerce giant run its retail business.Source: `Keep Talkin’ Larry’: Amazon Is Close to Tossing Oracle Software – Bloomberg
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Idea meets Market
Unternehmensgründung gehört im Spätkapitalismus ja zum guten Ton, Startup ist eine Szene in der man in ist, wenn man drin ist. Das die Realität häufig härter ist, liest man ja meistens nur in den unteren Teilen der Berichterstattung. Sehr schön fasst das Video, das vergangene Woche auf Facebook aufgetaucht ist, den Prozess von der Idee über den Businessplan und Angel-Money bis zum Markteintritt zusammen.
https://www.facebook.com/100003314621576/videos/1792102640910206/%C2%A0Radosław
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Photos: Graffiti targeting Amazon and Jeff Bezos illustrates animosity toward tech giant in Seattle – GeekWire
Gegen Amazon wird hierzulande ja immer wieder mal gestreikt. In der Mutterstadt des Konzerns scheint der Protest mittlerweile entschieden tiefer in der Gesellschaft angekommen zu sein. Thematisiert werden dabei nicht alleine die Arbeitsbedingungen, sondern auch die Steuermoral des Internet-Versandhändlers.
From Capitol Hill to Crown Hill, graffiti targeting the tech giant and the CEO is showing up on sidewalks, the sides of buildings, light poles, bike racks, bridges and even Amazon delivery lockers. -
Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast
“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” is a quote that is often attributed to Peter F. Drucker, but was apparently coined by Ford’s Mark Fields. Whoever said it, both have plenty of business acumen to take some credit for the thought behind it. There statement has lot of truth in it, looking into corporate structures.
With the arrival of digitalisation it is more true than ever before. All verticals struggle with fundamentally changing markets, forcing them to innovate in technology and services, and strive for new business models. In this environment it is crucial to embrace change, which enterprise culture often outright rejects.
Change Management has been a topic in management and HR for many years, and never has been so fundamental to organisational success as it is nowadays. Technology is converging at a breathtaking pace. The Internet of Things, as an example, requires electrical & mechanical engineers to cooperate with computer scientists and data analysts to produce a product a usability engineer designed jointly with a designer. Fundamentally different schools of though define the success of a product, and even consumer and enterprise grade of products converge in their appearance.
At the same time, the technologic ecosystem has outgrown individual organisations capabilities. Partnerships with technology vendors require management while intellectual property needs defence at the same time.
Organisations develop anti-patterns like “Silo Thinking” or “Not invented here” syndrome. While these cultural behaviours are tolerable in less dynamic situations, their effect can quickly go out of bounds and create a substantial counterforce to any change infused through external factors.
Embracing an open ecosystem and building on technologies developed outside the own organisation are fundamental to innovation. This open mindset is a prerequisite for any change into agility. Any strategy aiming for change ignoring these behaviours will be eaten by this exact culture. For breakfast.
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Corporate Open Source
One concept that is under active discussion for the past decade or so but constantly being misunderstood. Open Source is often taken as a label for software downloaded from the internet, packages free of charge, components under a particular license filed under “Creative”. Often enough it’s misused for lower quality software, which reality has proven wrong by 2017, not to mention the issue with intellectual property.
However, there are many much more aspects to the concept, that add substantial value to any software centrist product organisation. And in times of digitalisation and digital transformation, software will move into the value chain of many organisation that don’t anticipate it yet. Whenever a customer offering is complex and / or service based, transparency and documentation are often key to a satisfactory result and efficient processes.
Open source may not be the one single bullet for any organization, but the concept will help becoming more transparent and efficient.
Single Source of Truth
While SharePoint is a powerful tool with many opportunities to improve processes, many organisations use it to maintain a file server. Which has information about any other effort, therefore creating a large spread between the tangible product and the then theoretical documentation. Not to mention the version horror everybody experienced at least once, trying to ask a few people for the latest version.
Reversing this process through Wiki or even Version Control Repositories allows to keep only one version, that is automatically the latest. Software will take care of all versioning, that would go in filenames_v01_final.docx otherwise.
Transparency
Adding together the product with documentation allows quick reference, pointing back and forth between customer facing and engineering. While this may sound terrible technical, the nasty guts of any product can still be ignored by those who don’t need to see it. However, for those requiring insight, they don’t have to go through a process to see it. Or even have to talk to a colleague first and ask. Oh, and the colleague will be on vacation anyway.
Opening the product internals will remove any barrier to productive work and allow employees for quick insight. Obviously, some may argue an open repository may lead to uncontrollable product results, but that’s actually a different point. Write access or merge credentials are not required for anybody without responsibility.
Applicable Metrics
To shape it all up, the management world has plenty of nice metrics that can be applied to measure the whole thing. Not all of them express quality by themselves, but applied consciously these can carry a product far.
Documentation Coverage is something that will serve as a great basis for the point I’m trying to make here. With closed projects, or engineering only code, it’s often difficult to understand whether a product, feature or bug is actually just badly documented or the colleague just doesn’t want to help.
With a metric to measure percentage of a product being documented, at a minimum the amount of available documentation can be measured. And with the product internals being transparent, any reader can – at least theoretically – see whether the documentation correctly corresponds.
Conclusion
While being a strong supporter of open source software in general, I’m not trying to make a point for open sourcing anything outside an organisation. However, transparency will help any organisation improve the offering and processes. And the concept of open source will help achieve this transparency. It has a hurdle to overcome, in particular management will have to overcome their fear of software and technology to adopt this concept, but the step is worth taking on the way to digital transformation.
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Change.
Yesterday, a software engineer, also new to the organization, roughly told me the following. The way the organisation plans projects is so different to what he is used to as a software engineer. Planning projects with a horizon of 12 or even 24 months is something he says he just cannot wrap his head around.
While this is very common and necessary in the hardware industry, it is indeed something terribly alienating software people. Software is typically treated as a living product, that takes tiny changes at a time, it is more governed towards a direction to take than having the one exact goal it has to hit by a specific date.
These very fundamental goals both mindsets follow make it difficult for change to happen. While the software engineer above obviously has a point to make, he cannot reach the people he needs to reach, because both sides are just too far apart.
At the same time, I don’t yet have an answer to the problem, but the problem itself became so obvious when this colleague told me he just doesn’t know what to say. The digital world does not yet have a common language, not to mention a common way to think about approaching problems, and unless this hurdle is taken, change will only happen slowly.