Don’t Get Caught With The Soccer Ball In Your Hands : Product Management vs. Software Product Management

What happens if you are an ‘American Football’ player in a Soccer game (what is known as football in the rest of the world)? Many of the athletic abilities and skills of the Football player will, I am sure, help you . However, kicking the ball with your legs instead of passing with your hands, different defense tactics, scoring, stamina to run the field without many pauses, and other characteristics of the game will probably make the athlete feel like a ‘fish out of water’! Now there may be some athletes that are able to navigate this situation very successfully. However, they may be rare!
Similarly, product managers trained in other industries may find the software industry difficult to tackle (pun intended), or may not be able to perform at high level in the ‘game’ of product management. They may not know or be able to effectively take advantage of certain characteristics of software products to increase the overall business value. And so the hiring managers rarely, if ever, hire software product managers with only non-software product management experience.
Managing software products requires a different mindset, or a different way of thinking about the product, its life cycle, ecosystem, competition, and most importantly, optimizing the value for the business over its entire (and often much shorter) life-cycle. When comparing software products to other more tangible products (such as hardware products) in general, many critical differences exists when it comes to product management.
The main characteristics of software products, by definition, is the flexibility it allows in developing and launching product features and updates. Additionally, the pace and scale of software development and deployment also offers a tremendous potential to rapidly satisfy the market demands. These characteristics provide business opportunities the software product managers must take advantage of as they build their products.
Some examples of these advantages are: ability to perform market testing with MVP, collect amazing insights and metrics about product usage, perform limited A — B testing for a set of features before launching them, anticipate and rapidly respond to customer, ecosystem, and competitive demands. Such advantages requires the product manager to be nimble (another word for agile), and be able to think big and ever ready to take advantage of market opportunities!
Software products also do not have to be “perfect” at launch (with some exceptions) in all aspects, including comprehensiveness of all the features. New versions and updates can be quickly released for most non-critical software and roadmaps are planned accordingly to incrementally add features in subsequent versions. This is now a very common practice for all software segments, and completely expected by the customers. In fact, some customers may think something is wrong if they do not get a periodic update from their software vendors.
Effectively managing software products, therefore, requires a specific set of skills, along with relevant perspectives and mindset. Most product managers tend to gain this perspective and mindset through experience over a long time. However, just as an athlete would train, develop and hone skills for their specific sport, whether its American Football or Soccer, so should software product managers hone their skills for their industry. This can provide the necessary mindset and perspective, along with the right skills resulting in higher performance, to effectively steer their products to market leadership and contribute greater value to the business.
Devang Thakkar is a Managing Partner and President at InnoTivum Consulting, a firm providing training, interim management, auditing and consulting. He is also an ISPMA Fellow, ISPMA-certified and a Software Product Management trainer. Upcoming training opportunities calendar is here. Follow Devang at @SPMFellow
