What’s the Business Value of PM? Podcast Episode 7

In this podcast I go into a bit more detail about a topic I covered a few weeks ago in The Astonishing Financial Benefits of Improving PM Effectiveness, namely, the “business value” of product management. (By the way, I was happy to see this concept mentioned in Janna Bastow’s post on ProdPad this week – How Much is a Product Manager Worth? Setting Product Management KPIs.)

There’s a very big number involved – $41,000 per day. Or $10 million per year. In the podcast I talk about the implications of that number. If you can improve your performance against this number, the results go almost straight to the bottom line. ([tweetthis hidden_hashtags=”#prodmgmt”]When u improve your performance as a #prodmgr the results go straight to the bottom line -[/tweetthis])

And I set out some guidance on how to use the number to assess your product management organization and analyze your performance. I describe an action plan to hit that giant number, some of the key steps of which are:

1. Find big market problems by doing constant discovery.
2. Dozens or hundreds of conversations yield a handful of insights.
3. You need a “market problem” pipeline – just like the sales pipeline.

(By the way, you’re not going to have time to write a lot of user stories.)

Once you’ve found and validated important market problems to solve, and selected the best one or few to focus on, then you need to guide the creation of excellent solutions to those problems. And you need to prepare sales and marketing to go out and find and close the people who have those problems.

Summary

• Product managers have a number.
• You can use the number for assessment, analysis, and guidance.
• Becoming more effective goes straight to the bottom line.
• Being more effective is mostly about the problem, not the solution.
• Better problem leads to more revenue.

A PM’s stock in trade is important market problems that people will pay to solve. If that’s not what we’re working on, we’re probably not going to hit that big number.

And to whet your appetite for some upcoming topics, here’s a chart I created recently. Not all market problems are the same. The ones you come up with on your own are worth, generally, a lot less than the ones you discover. But discovering real big market problems requires a lot of listening for very “weak signals” – that will be a topic for an upcoming podcast.

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