My friend, Alex, is a product manager represented by Aquent's Boston office. He was a product manager in the biotech world for the last 9 years and when I spoke with him about the evolution of his career the other day, I learned a thing or three about managing products on the cutting edge. Here they are:
1. "Customer Support " knows more about the product than you do.
Alex is a scientist by training and was doing "bench work" at a company that made thermocyclers when it became clear that they needed someone to take over their customer support team. By dealing with customers and their challenges day-in and day-out, Alex got to know the the company's main product top to bottom and found himself serving as the main liaison between the end-users and the engineers crafting the next iteration of the product. In fact, it was via his time in customer support that Alex became a product manager. Who says you need an MBA?
2. Cutting-edge products need a lot of support.
When you are bringing products to market that are "first generation," you quite often haven't worked out all of the kinks (particularly if you are following the "ship and fix" model of product release). You need to have a strong support team in place to handle the inevitable calls from your customers who can't get the machines to do what they need for a variety of reasons - ignorance, manufacturing defect, design flaw, etc. As mentioned above, the efforts of the support team can play a pivotal role in the product development cycle.
3. The "Cutting-Edge" is a moving target and sometimes you fall off.
Sometimes you're developing a product based on current best practices and standards, and then a competitor introduces a new process (which may or may not count as a "disruptive technology," though some contend that such technologies are mythical) that effectively makes your product obsolete. Depending on how much money you've sunk into the product, the sales effort, the support infrastructure, etc., you may still bring it out and hope for the best. Still, the fact of the matter is that a "trailing edge" product is living on borrowed time.
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Of course, if you have a successful product, then chances are you will get acquired at some point and, as Alex learned, managing one or two products for a small-ish company is different from managing a lot of them for a large-ish one. There are also complications that arise from working with a sales force in a company where there are competing product lines or categories. Etc., etc.
In other words, I learned a bunch of other stuff from Alex but, since this is "just a blog," I'm going to stop sharing at this point. If you want to know more, contact me and I'd be happy to put you in touch with him!
Image courtesy of lizjones112.
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