Protect Your Product Management Team

One of the exciting and challenging aspects of product management is the variety of organizational responsibility hats that are worn. At their core, PM's need to understand their marketplace, customer problems, product SWOT, product strategy/roadmap, customer commitments, customer enhancement requests, product backlog, sprint direction and planning with engineering - the list goes on.

PM is also often asked to help other business areas, such as the sales organization with key customer opportunities, work in partnership with marketing to convey the product reasoning and benefit, and the finance department for budget planning.

However, it is easy to stretch your PM team too thin, and ultimately, they do not get enough time to focus on what the organization needs them to be doing - building outstanding products!

One area that can bring considerable benefits to the PM team is involving their organization's technical sales teams as partners - thinking of them as an extension of the product team. Often called System or Sales Engineers, they are highly skilled in understanding your product and customer problems. They are actively demonstrating and selling your products to customers. They have a current view of your product's strengths and weaknesses and have some of the best ideas for enhancement requests from their customer interactions.

Product management often fears that sharing too much information with the technical sales team will cause problems with the over-communication of roadmap and possible associated revenue recognition issues. Of course, there are raw aspects of product planning and strategy that need to remain within PM until ready, but I've found technical sales teams to be trustworthy and responsible in understanding what to share and what not to share.

I recommend that PM be proactive with communication and ensure that a product strategy and status page are updated. In addition, ensure you have a product Q&A system where content is actively refreshed and expired. A Q&A system is also an excellent opportunity to partner with technical sales champions. Also, meet regularly with key representatives of the technical sales team.

Ultimately, one of the main benefits of PM embracing a strong working relationship with the technical sales team is they are enabled to do their jobs and be more self-sufficient with your products with customer interactions. PM is then more time-protected to focus on building best-in-class products