A great Product Manager is a spork - a combination spoon and fork. A heady mix of superior analytical and planning skills, and a mesmerising persuader and presenter. Someone who can take a clinical view of a product plan and tear it to shreds.
Someone who can standup and inspire a bunch of cynical engineers to work all God's hours and change the World. Good ones are rare. But they can be grown - if you plant them in fertile ground, feed and nurture them, give them some sun and gently introduce them to the harsh commercial world.
What is fertile ground? How does a brand new Product Manager get a good grounding? If I think someone in my organisation has the potential to be a Product Manager but lacks the experience I start them off with competitive benchmarking.
Why?
The Product Manager is responsible for defining and profitably managing the product lifecycle, and the key skill within this is USP development. You want your sales guys to be merely order takers & allocation managers, and to refocus the marketing department because the new product is so good it's selling itself. If your Product Manager is doing their job properly your new product or service will be so rich in USPs that customers will be flocking to you and you'll have a job keeping up with demand.
Benchmarking is about understanding both the market and your competition. It's not all about looking back to plan the future.
On the one hand benchmarking is about inspiration and creativity - and on the other about careful, detailed competitive analysis and prediction. Both are vital. Your Product Manager is going to analyse what your competition has done and then predict (at least as far out as your own product launch) what they might do next. You want them to thoroughly understand the market you're operating in and how the competition behaves. They are going to develop a set of key drivers that define those attributes of the product that you must excel in to be able to compete. Those key drivers are going to be quantified by developing experience curves. So when you launch your product or service it is demonstrably better than anything that's out there or coming in the immediate future.
As a business owner I don't want to spend £millions developing a product or service that is entirely speculative. Of course, every new release has an element of risk but the role of your Product Manager is to define the product you're going to sell and the business that flows from it. To do that effectively they need a clinical view of the market they're operating in.
When it's time to step away from benchmarking and into a fully fledged Product Manager role they will be better prepared to profitably manage the lifecycle.
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