Tom Grant has started a blog to go along with his new Product Management practice at Forrester. As a product manager, of a product for use by product managers*, it’s great to see the analysts paying attention to our little – but very important – world.
I’ve often said that product management is the last discipline in the modern product organization to be automated. Developers have integrated development environments (IDEs such as Visual Studio or Eclipse, and Emacs before them), product designers have CAD and Photoshop and Illustrator, business people have SAP and their accounting systems, tech support has help desk systems, and the sales force has CRM.
But product managers, at least 90% of them, use only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And maybe Visio. Brave souls have implemented, typically on an unused desktop machine, a wiki for a small amount of collaboration. Unlike their peers, they don’t have a central repository, they don’t have change control, they don’t have analytics, they don’t have reporting. (I say “they,” because I do have those things, thanks to the product I personally manage and of course use every day.)
In my previous life I was in charge of NetIQ’s AppManager, a leading – and well-loved – system management solution. I first encountered the product I manage* because I was looking for a better way to manage requirements and planning for the AppManager product line. In the end, I was so excited that I joined the company.
My hope is that Tom’s and Forrester’s participation in the product management space will help steer more organizations to the realization that their product managers are under-automated, and hence not as productive as they could be, and not building the best products they could.
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