Software product management
Encyclopedia
Software product management is the process of managing software that is built and implemented as a product
, taking into account life-cycle considerations and generally with a wide audience. It is the discipline and business process which governs a product from its inception to the market or customer delivery and service in order to generate biggest possible value to the business . This is in contrast to software that is delivered in an ad-hoc manner, typically to a limited clientele, e.g. service.
or Accenture
.
Examples of business software products include the Oracle 10g database
by Oracle Corporation
, SAP R/3
ERP
software by SAP AG
, QuickBooks by Intuit, etc.
Examples of consumer software products include Microsoft Office
by Microsoft
, TurboTax
by Intuit. Since the late 1990s, many software products have been offered as a service, so that the customers - businesses or end consumers - run the same application without installing the software on their computers. Examples include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software by Salesforce.com, consumer shopping comparison software by Shopping.com, various web search tools offered by Google, Yahoo!, and the auction marketplace by eBay. Even though these applications are not packaged in media that can be touched and felt, they are software products nonetheless, and require the same product management rigor as packaged software do. In fact, they do require more rigor since the product manager must now be concerned with operational concerns such as service availability and third-party relations.
as a core business function in software companies .
Hardware companies may also have a need for software product management, because software is part of the delivery: for example when providing operating systems or software embedded in a device.
Here is a short list of topics how software product managers can deliver better results:
Within these five phases it deals with the following aspects of a software product within a software and/or hardware company:
The above tasks are not sequential, but can co-exist. For Product Managers to be efficient in the above tasks, they have to have both engineering and marketing skills. Hence, frequently, Silicon Valley firms prefer engineers who are also MBAs to do software product management.
):
Product (business)
In general, the product is defined as a "thing produced by labor or effort" or the "result of an act or a process", and stems from the verb produce, from the Latin prōdūce ' lead or bring forth'. Since 1575, the word "product" has referred to anything produced...
, taking into account life-cycle considerations and generally with a wide audience. It is the discipline and business process which governs a product from its inception to the market or customer delivery and service in order to generate biggest possible value to the business . This is in contrast to software that is delivered in an ad-hoc manner, typically to a limited clientele, e.g. service.
Software products
A software product is typically a single application or suite of applications built by a software company to be used by *many* customers, businesses or consumers. The mass-market notion differs from custom software built for the use of a single customer by consulting firms like IBM Global ServicesIBM Global Services
IBM Global Services is the world's largest business and technology services provider. It has over 190,000 workers across more than 160 countries...
or Accenture
Accenture
Accenture plc is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It is the largest consulting firm in the world and is a Fortune Global 500 company. As of September 2011, the company had more than 236,000 employees across...
.
Examples of business software products include the Oracle 10g database
Oracle database
The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
by Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
, SAP R/3
SAP R/3
SAP R/3 is the former name of the main enterprise resource planning software produced by SAP AG. It is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes such as order fulfillment or billing.- History of...
ERP
Enterprise resource planning
Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...
software by SAP AG
SAP AG
SAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...
, QuickBooks by Intuit, etc.
Examples of consumer software products include Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, TurboTax
TurboTax
TurboTax is an American tax preparation software package developed by Michael A. Chipman of Chipsoft in the mid-1980s. TurboTax became an Intuit product as a result of the 1993 acquisition of its creator, San Diego-based Chipsoft. Chipsoft, now known as Intuit Consumer Tax Group, is still based in...
by Intuit. Since the late 1990s, many software products have been offered as a service, so that the customers - businesses or end consumers - run the same application without installing the software on their computers. Examples include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software by Salesforce.com, consumer shopping comparison software by Shopping.com, various web search tools offered by Google, Yahoo!, and the auction marketplace by eBay. Even though these applications are not packaged in media that can be touched and felt, they are software products nonetheless, and require the same product management rigor as packaged software do. In fact, they do require more rigor since the product manager must now be concerned with operational concerns such as service availability and third-party relations.
The need for software product management
To develop, sell and support a successful software product a business needs to understand its market, identify the opportunity, develop and market an appropriate piece of software. Hence the need for product managementProduct management
Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle....
as a core business function in software companies .
Hardware companies may also have a need for software product management, because software is part of the delivery: for example when providing operating systems or software embedded in a device.
The role of software product manager
The product manager leads and manages one or several products from the inception to the phase-out in order to maximize business value. He is working with marketing, sales, engineering, finance, quality, manufacturing and installation to make his products a business success. He has the business responsibility beyond the single project. He determines what to make and how to make it and is accountable for the business success within an entire portfolio. He approves roadmap and content and determines what and how to innovate. He is responsible for the entire value chain of a product following the life cycle and asks: What do we keep, what do we involve, what do we stop?Here is a short list of topics how software product managers can deliver better results:
- Behave like an “embedded CEO”
- Drive your strategy and portfolio from market and customer value
- Be enthusiastic on your own product
- Have a profound understanding of your markets, customers and portfolio
- Measure your contribution on sales (top-line) and profits (bottom-line)
- Periodically check assumptions such as business cases
- Take risks, and manage them
- Foster teamwork based on lean processes
- Insist on discipline and keeping commitments
- Be professional in communication, appearance, behaviors …
Content of software product management
Software product management covers all steps from inception of a product to its end of life. It consists of five major phases in the product life-cycle, namely:- Strategy
- Concept
- Market Entry
- Development
- Evolution
Within these five phases it deals with the following aspects of a software product within a software and/or hardware company:
- Idea generation (e.g. on whiteboards) for a new software product, or for the next version of an existing product.
- Collection and prioritization (see below) of business and/or marketMarketA market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services in exchange for money from buyers...
requirements from prospects, customers of earlier versions of the product, domain experts, technology visionaries, market experts, products / solutions from competing vendors, etc. - Crafting of Marketing Requirements Documents, or MRDs, which synthesize the requirements / needs of various stakeholders as outlined above.
- Using the MRD as a basis, come up with a product requirements documentProduct requirements documentA product requirements document is a document written by a company that defines a product they are making, or the requirements for one or more new features for an existing product...
or PRD, as an input to the engineering team to build out the product. A PRD is generally not the same as a functional specificationFunctional specificationA functional specification in systems engineering and software development is the documentation that describes the requested behavior of an engineering system...
since it specifies what a product should do, but not how the product should do it. Frequently, a PRD can be a collection of UML Use CaseUse caseIn software engineering and systems engineering, a use case is a description of steps or actions between a user and a software system which leads the user towards something useful...
s, UML Activity Diagrams, HTMLHTMLHyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
mockups, etc. It can have other details such as the software development environment, and the software deployment environment (client-server, web, etc.). - Deliver the PRD to the software engineering team, and manage conflicts between the business units, the sales teams, and the engineering teams, as it applies to the software products to be built out.
- Once the software development gets into build / release cycle, conduct acceptance tests.
- Deal with the delivery of the product. This can vary from demonstrating the product to customers using web-based conferencing tools, to building product demonstrations, to other placement and promotion tactics. Frequently, in Silicon ValleySilicon ValleySilicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
, these two aspects of marketing, and sometimes also pricing, are dealt with by Product Marketing Managers, as opposed to Product Managers. - Once the product is deployed at a customer site, solicit customer feedback, report software bugSoftware bugA software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
s, and pass these on back to engineering for subsequent build / release cycles, as the product stabilizes, and then matures. - Perform competitive analysis as to how this product is behaving in the market, vis-a-vis other products catering to the same / similar customer segments. In the software space, this might require the product manager to take the opinion of analystsBusiness analystA Business Analyst analyzes the organization and design of businesses, government departments, and non-profit organizations; BAs also assess business models and their integration with technology.-Levels:...
, who can come from name brand market research firms like IDCInternational Data CorporationInternational Data Corporation is a market research and analysis firm specializing in information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology. IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group...
, Forrester ResearchForrester ResearchForrester Research is an independent technology and market research company that provides its clients with advice about technology's impact on business and consumers. Forrester Research has five research centers in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York; San Francisco, California;...
, and GartnerGartnerGartner, Inc. is an information technology research and advisory firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, United States. It was known as GartnerGroup until 2001....
Group. - Solicit more features and benefits from the users of the software product, users of competitive products, and from analysts and craft / synthesize these requirements for subsequent product build / release cycles, and pass them on to the software engineering team.
The above tasks are not sequential, but can co-exist. For Product Managers to be efficient in the above tasks, they have to have both engineering and marketing skills. Hence, frequently, Silicon Valley firms prefer engineers who are also MBAs to do software product management.
Prioritization
A key aspect of Product Management is the correct prioritization of enhancements. Here's a method that works well (borrowed and adapted from Joel SpolskyJoel Spolsky
Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...
):
- Identify the panel, i.e. whose opinion you are going to seek
- Make a list of all items
- Estimate the effort required (either in days or in money) - this needs to be very rough and approximate
- Add up the total effort, call it E
- Give the panel members a budget of 0.5 × E each - they can place this any way they like, including all on a single item. You should disclose the rough estimates to the panel, as it may influence their vote.
- Rank the items in terms of the ratio Votes / Estimate
- Do as many of the items as the actual budget allows, respecting the sequence
See also
- CCU DeliveryCCU DeliveryCustomer Configuration Updating is a software development method for structuring the process of providing customers with new versions of products and updates production. This method is developed by researchers of the Utrecht University....
- Product managementProduct managementProduct management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle....
- Product life cycle managementProduct life cycle managementProduct life-cycle management is the succession of strategies used by business management as a product goes through its life-cycle. The conditions in which a product is sold changes over time and must be managed as it moves through its succession of stages.Product life-cycle Like human beings,...
- Software licensingSoftware licensingA software license is a legal instrument governing the usage or redistribution of software. All software is copyright protected, except material in the public domain. Contractual confidentiality is another way of protecting software...
- Requirements managementRequirements managementRequirements management is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project...