by Reena Kapoor
Product Management is a key function in any company involved in innovation; and that includes all the tech companies I have the opportunity to advise. And often I ask myself this question: where in the organizaion should this function reside? More often than not the choice posed is: Should product management report into Marketing or Engineering?
In my view the answer unequivocally needs to be: Product Management should be a part of Marketing. And I say that for only one reason i.e., it's the best way to ensure that all functions in the company are aligned in serving the customer. Which is not to say that politics won't get in the way. It often does. Sometimes however I run into situations that are doomed from the start because the structure of the organization is all wrong i.e., product management reports into engineering. As a result the incentives for various functions — marketing, product management, engineering, etc. — are so misaligned that what the customer wants or needs gets lost in the shuffle.
I have a few key reasons for how and why I came to this conclusion and I want to share them with you. I will share the first one in this blog post and it has to do with the fact that the role of marketing is often misunderstood — or worse underestimated.
Marketing misunderstood: Strategy first!
In many hi-tech companies, Marketing is often misunderstood, sometimes even mistaken for being only marketing communications. But marketing should be much more...it starts with helping you define what business you're in, who you're selling to, what your offering is, how does it create value....and only then the nitty-gritty of promotion tactics you may employ. Of course you may decide that you can think through these important strategic marketing questions all by yourself. But whether you do it yourself or get help, you're indulging in marketing, properly defined, whenever you do so. More often than not it pays to understand and address these questions in a disciplined fashion. Successful companies know that these questions are the basis for their business plan -- for even the coolest of widgets.
What this means is that a person who can act as a strategic marketing sounding board should be intimately involved in your efforts before one serious line of code is written. Of course I fully understand the need for inventors to develop prototypes and show them around to gather some momentum before they seriously get behind an idea. But the sooner a sound strategic marketing brain is part of your team the better. One of the first orders of business for this (marketing) person would be to conduct a strategic assessment of the market you're going after — as well as of alternate markets and uses your technology could be applied to (I will talk about the content of such an assessment in another post). This exercise will only make your plan stronger and help you alter course if needed, while it's much easier to do so.
Following this marketing should be responsible for developing a solid market requirements document (aka MRD) which reflects the voice of your future customers — their desires, (unarticulated) needs, wants and aspirations — and not what engineering can build. That trade-off is critical but comes later. That's a key role for marketing: ensure that the voice of the customer is reflected in any product planning. And this is the second factor I want to talk about. Look for my next post very soon.... In the meantime, please write to me if you agree or see things differently.
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