Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Just finished reading Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble, and parts of it made me shudder. Particularly these words from the CEO:

“I’ve spent a significant part of my career fixing things,” he said.  He has slashed $400 million in costs over the past year, even eliminating paper cups in the break rooms. Iannuzzi also lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4.

I hope that cost cutting, more sales overhead, and fixing a fundamentally broken website aren’t the extent of what Iannuzzi considers “fixing things”.  Incremental improvement is too little, too late.

Monster’s got advantages – huge name recognition, tons of data, lots of customers to talk to.  Here’s how I’d suggest they use those advantages.

1. Harness your data. Release some interesting trend data, such as “where the highest concentration of Job Title X is being posted” or “most commonly requested job skill requirements by profession.”

2. Ruthlessly test and analyze the competition. Look at Jobvite, Simply Hired, Indeed, LinkedIn to understand what they’re doing that works and doesn’t work.  Survey current users of these services and look for what to steal.  (Remember, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso)

3. Build a better job seeker. Set a skunkworks team loose on interviewing job seekers at various professional levels.  What does their job seeking process look like?  What are they doing right? What should they be doing that they are not?  Prototype what it would look like if you built a site from the ground up to build a better job seeker.  This is a big one, so there are some sub-ideas.

4. Be more social. Make it dead-simple easy for job seekers to add links to their LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook profiles.  Partner with BackType or a similar technology to aggregate blog posts and comments and pull them directly into the candidate’s profile.  This gives job seekers an opportunity to differentiate themselves; gives HR folks a chance to get more background into a candidate.
5. Remind. Offer reminders to help job seekers remember to send follow-up notes, to keep their profile updated, to stay in contact with their network (partner with LinkedIn to access users’ social graphs)
6. Promote offline job networking groups. Identify job seekers with similar skillsets in the same regional area so it’s easy for them to form offline Meetups and resume reviews.   It’s harder to monetize, but the PR and goodwill you’d earn will build loyal users.

7. Build a better job search. Set skunkworks team #2 loose on interviewing job seekers and HR professionals.  How are jobs being posted and advertised?  Where are the greatest mismatches between job and candidate?  What criteria are job seekers/HR looking for that may not be represented in any job search formats today?  Prototype what it would look like if you built a site from the ground up to build a better job search. This is a big one, so there are some sub-ideas.

8. Recommend. Work with a recommendations technology platform (such as Loomia) to show similar jobs (“people who viewed this job description also viewed”).  Behavioral data is a better filter than a simple text-matching filter.
9. Add transparency. Submitting your resume to a job listing is like throwing it into a black hole.  Offer job seekers the ability to see if their resume was scanned, downloaded, or rated.  Give HR folks a one-click option to send a “position is filled” notification to everyone who applied to the position.Even a little illumination into the process would be a huge relief.

10. Real salary data. Other sites, such as indeed.com, offer salary data, but it’s based on the few jobs that list salary ranges in their description.  Monster has millions of email addresses to survey – it would be easy to get anonymous but REAL salary information on what currently-employed folks are making at their job title.  (Whether Monster chose to release this to HR only, or make it public is a different strategic decision.)

And please, if you haven’t already, read up on disruptive innovation.  (The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials), The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
) You’re going to need it.

If you start recruiting via social networks and social media, talent will expect you to respond more rapidly. Different modes of communication have different expectations of “real-time” response.

If your initial business model assumptions were incorrect, you will need to adapt your execution plan. It may be possible to still succeed if you can provide a lesser version of the product/service but with lower costs, faster time-to-market, higher scalability.

If you collect people’s personal data, you will need to clearly communicate what you do with it and what will happen to it if your company doesn’t survive. If you suddenly close up shop with no warning, you’re going to have a lot of angry, alarmed ex-customers.

“If someone’s going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses.” – Getty CEO Jonathan Klein (Getty Images acquired iStockphoto, a crowdsourced low-cost stock photo provider).

If your code fails the “random person test”, then the only people who can point out flaws in your assumptions are other engineers. At a previous company, a lot of engineers complained about the effort involved in converting our entire codebase to Model-View-Controller.  They complained a lot less when they realized I and other product managers could see potential pitfalls when 10% of the code was written instead of 100% done.

If you change your environment, be prepared for your environment to change. “Professional” changes can move you away from the grubby-but-effective roots that got you to launch products and close deals.

If you want something done but there’s an obstacle blocking you, there’s usually a way around it. Funny story about looking beyond the obvious.

These are not books that tell you how to do product management. Rather, these books are full of ideas that will challenge you to work smarter, communicate better, and get in the heads of your users. Read them, share them with your cross-functional teams, and put them into practice.

1. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Consumers by Geoffrey Moore

   
   Realization: You can get early customers to love your product, but you can’t use those same methods to convert enough more people into customers to build a business.

   Things to remember: As a startup, you can’t do multiple things well. As a business, you need to focus on the most desperate needs of your customer (which means you must choose your the customers who have desperate needs.)

2. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

   Realization: You don’t need to compete on the same features and benefits that your competitors value.

   Things to remember: Don’t take the vectors you compete on for granted. Map yourself against the competition. Explore what would happen if you changed things.

3. Four Steps to the Epiphany by Stephen G. Blank

   
   Realization: This is your job: First, reduce risk. Next, prove value. Continuously validate. Don’t try to skip any of these steps.

   Things to use: Clear checklists for how to create a market, and a product and get customers. If any of your plans require outlaying tons of money and resources up-front, you’re probably wrong.

4. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

   Realization: Technology products need someone advocating for the user, and that someone is not going to be the engineers who build them.

   Things to use: If you’re in an organization where user experience design is nonexistent or under-empowered, this book lays out examples to help the product manager to step in as user experience advocate until the permanent resource is in place.(Can be heavy-handed and most of the examples are outdated, but still a great read.)

5. The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton Christensen

   Realization: Listening to your customers works great for releasing new product versions… until it doesn’t. You can’t predict where markets will emerge.

   Things to remember:The key to your success will, in the short term, be incredibly destructive. In short: stay on your toes and be ready to experiment on barely-formed ideas rather than waiting for them to fully form.

6. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Bruce M. Patton, William L. Ury, and Roger Fisher

   Realization: Negotiating instead of giving in doesn’t make you mean, it makes you effective.

   Things to remember: People want to feel heard and understood more than they need to ‘win’ in most situations.

7. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Stephen J. Dubner OR Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions by Dan Ariely

   
   Realization: People generally don’t understand cause-and-effect, don’t behave rationally, and worry about the wrong things.

   Things to remember: You (and your coworkers fall prey to the same competitive traps that your users do, but knowing this can help you avoid them.(Both books are good, but you probably don’t need to read both unless you’re a psych/socio hobbyist.)

8. Why Decisions Fail by Paul Nutt

   Realization: Really smart companies and people make decisions that seem ridiculous in hindsight.

   Things to remember: Recognizing potential problems can help you avoid them. If it’s too late for that, a more informed postmortem leads to better learning for next time.

9. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres

   Realization: Nothing measures user behavior better than … measuring user behavior. Online, everything is measurable.

   Things to remember: Make sure what you’re measuring is as close as possible to the results you want. As I’ve said before, make sure you I your KP. Remember that your competitors probably have more data than you do and be appropriately concerned about that.

10. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp

    
    Realization: Creativity doesn’t just happen, it requires hard work and tons of practice.

    Things to remember: Staying out of bad habits and ruts is a constant process.

“A marketing launch establishes your positioning. If you don’t know what the right positioning is for your company, do not launch… When you launch with the wrong positioning, you have to spend extra effort and money later cleaning it up.” (Lessons Learned: Don’t Launch)

“It’s okay to expose these customers to the wrong product, positioning, and funnel as long as you learn from them. In fact, that’s the only way to test your hypotheses.”  (Don’t Launch? But the New York Times is on the Phone!)

Given how cheap online user testing and social media channels are for soliciting feedback, there’s really no justification for the traditional “launch”.  Even if you think you have your positioning nailed, you almost certainly cannot scale to handle that first-day traffic.   Why risk exposing that burst of new users to a negative user experience when your servers slow to a crawl?

“Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep.” (Streams, Affordances, Facebook, and Rounding Errors)

Most people are non-technical, and as such, they take their cues about “what’s possible” from the technology they’re using.  If that technology gives them a limited sandbox, the product manager can stand back and watch and consider if it helps the business to expand that sandbox.  They may demand more; often they won’t.

“There’s a big advantage to thinking about profitability from Day 1 of the business.  You can still decide to do things that are solving for growth, but you should at least be mindful of profitability.” (Startup Lessons from the Underpants Gnomes)

“Innovation and creativity are value-destroying activities unless they are carefully contained.”  (Why Are So Few Companies the Hotbeds of Innovation that Everyone Thinks They Should Be?)

Think big – within constraints.  A lot of devil’s advocate-ing can help here.

“Design the single, comparable metric to be as close as possible to the problem being solved.”  (One Metric to Measure Them All)

I’ve been commenting on a bunch of Facebook posts this week, most of which are taking the side of “Facebook users are a bunch of whiners”.  None of them seem to be asking “what is the problem Facebook is trying to solve with this redesign?”

And so none of them can really make an intelligent analysis.  First identify the problem, then measure the results.  Maybe Facebook is just trying to get people to Twitter about them, in which case: they are succeeding magnificently.

I said, “I don’t know. And if I tell you what I think we’ll just have one more uninformed opinion. But what we need right now is some facts. (SuperMac War Story 2: Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within – So Get the Hell Outside the Building)