I have done a bit of guest posting lately, and this week’s entry is about a new essay on Mike Smart’s Product Management 2.0 site. As long-time readers know, I’m a proponent of getting product management into the “big leagues” with better tools, and particularly, with a good system of record for the full lifecycle of product management. “System of Record: Why You’re in the PM Stone Age Without One” puts a stake in the ground about what product management needs to insist on to become a modern business process.
Almost no company has a legitimate system for product ideas and input, or front-end customer interactions (i.e., interviews, ethnology, market discovery and research). Likewise, typically there is no system of record for product marketing (i.e., value proposition, benefit statement, go-to-market plan). Instead, all of these are stored in various spreadsheets and documents, but not tracked or managed.
The benefits of tracking all the information related to product management – from customer interviews, to market analysis, to competitive positioning, to roadmaps, to the value proposition, to the go-to-market plan – are immense. They range from the obvious, like transparency and collaboration, to the subtle, like the fact that product managers have more time and attention to spend innovating and learning about market problems to solve.
I’ll be following this essay up with a post on this site about how to build a real system of record, even if you don’t have all the tools you’d like.
In the meantime, take a look at System of Record: Why You’re in the PM Stone Age Without One.