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Blog Articles
Viewing entries tagged with 'management'
Thriving in Large Companies
Many of my readers work in large companies, including Adobe, Amazon, AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, and Yahoo, and two of the most consistent themes from your questions and comments are: “how do I get things done in a large company?” and “how do I innovate in a large company?” In this issue and the next I want to tackle these two related topics, as I have worked in several large companies, and while it’s not easy, I do believe that those that figure out how to leverage the considerable resources of their company bring a substantial advantage to their product.
Strategy vs. Execution
It’s funny how often I’m asked whether I am a “strategy guy” or an “execution guy.” I completely understand the reason for the question, as I think it’s true that most people prefer one or the other; in fact, they often very strongly prefer one or the other, or regardless of their preferences, their personality is only suited to one or the other. Yet for product leaders, it has always been very clear to me that you must be skilled in both in order to actually get good products launched.
Succeeding With Remote Development
One of the most common situations today is where the product manager is in one location, and the engineering team is somewhere else. I don’t only mean outsourcing to India either – the remote development team might be a consequence of an acquisition or merger, or possibly your organization is large enough where the developers are centrally located in a facility somewhere you aren’t.
Meeting Hell
Do you ever feel like you come in early, work frantically until late in the evening, day after day, week after week, yet at the end of the month you didn’t get anything important done? Is your day packed with back-to-back meetings, with bursts of e-mail in between? If so, you’re not alone. Especially in larger companies, the life of a product manager or designer can be meeting hell.
Product Management vs. Product Design
The last note discussed the different types of user interface design – interaction design and visual design – and tried to make the point that both are required for a good user experience. But the response surprised me. So many people wrote to me to complain that their company essentially doesn’t do either type of design, and they know their product suffers for it. Most said that the UI engineers just did whatever they could and that was the design. Sometimes the product managers waded into the design waters and did what they could. Some companies try to outsource some visual design at the end of the process, just before the product goes into QA. Some people that wrote to me said they had no idea what any of these roles were.
Product vs. Marketing
In many product organizations there are problems between product and marketing. The problems might range from mild friction to downright dysfunction.
Where Should Product Management Live?
The single most frequent question I get from product leaders in companies both large and small, is where should product management live? The choices are most often engineering or marketing. While if you have the right personalities, it can work in either place, I’m actually not a fan of it residing in either.
The Smartest Guy in the Room
As product people, we’re first and foremost in the idea business. We have to come up with great ideas and then make them a reality. While this takes skill and practice, the main ingredient is something that I don’t know how to teach. We depend on smart people for the smart ideas. Sometimes these ideas come from ourselves, but if we depend only on ourselves for the smart ideas, we’re severely limiting our potential.
Growing Pains
In the last newsletter I spoke about the differences between large and small product companies, and how different they are and how different type of people thrive (and struggle) at each. However, I did not talk about the case where a small company quickly grows into a large company.
Does Size Matter?
Two questions I get a lot are: “Is now the time to join one of the cool new startups?” and “The startup I’m at isn’t doing so well, should I join one of the big guys that’s hiring so aggressively right now?”