We work with many early stage startups in which the early and critical product phases including discovery, prioritization, specification and the later equally important product phases including product validation (am I getting the results I expected?) are either not performed well or sometimes not performed at all.

Sometimes the company feels that it doesn’t have the money necessary to fund a team of product professionals and attempts to limp along using the entrepreneur’s early vision with the help of some intrepid engineers. Sometimes the company feels that product professionals simply aren’t needed, even going so far as to cite agile methods as the reason (see later posts to explain why agile doesn’t eliminate the product manager position). Oftentimes the company just hasn’t had the opportunity to realize the benefit that a real product professional can offer to their product development lifecycle.

For those of you hoping for a quick and simple answer to the question above, we’ll give it to you right now: Yes – you need product management and you need to staff that team with product management professionals. Marty Cagan does a great job of describing what a product manager’s responsibility is here.

We are of the belief that building the right product is every bit as important as building the product the right way. The former is accomplished by having a disciplined product selection process that is informed by a professional product management team which in turn analyzes the customer needs, competitive landscape and strategic benefits of different options within the product portfolio. The latter (building it the right way) is an engineering responsibility informed but ideally not limited by the specifications that an professional product management team creates.

Equally important is the need for a product discovery phase. This phase is often ignored within many product development lifecycles and includes determining whether there is a product that can succeed within your target market as well as exploration on the topic of what that product might need to do to properly capitalize on the market opportunity.

Ensuring consistent vision through a single organizational owner of the product is yet another benefit to having a professional product management group early. Continuity helps ensure that lessons are both recognized and hopefully retained through organizational muscle memory. Evaluation of product results as measured within the business metrics creates a continuous process improvement feedback loop that helps grow those organizational muscles over time.

Finally, creating a sufficient backlog of product specs within an organization separate from engineering helps to ensure that engineers stay focused on creating shareholder value through implementation rather than specification.

So yes, you should have a product organization and yes they are a team separate from your engineering team. Build one now and help your company grow!

Obviously Youtube and other video sharing sites have changed the way we entertain ourselves. Who doesn’t like silly monkey videos or people getting hit in various parts of their anatomy, or even the way we educate ourselves such as studying philology from Ms. Hotforwords?

How as software developers can we take advantage of this? Well, the folks at 37Signals who brought us Ruby on Rails and some very cool products like Highrise, use video to promote their new versions of software. We think this is a pretty clever idea that goes so far past the standard release notes that it really sets a new standard for other software shops. Besides being a way to promote the new features to existing customers it also serves as a marketing message for new customers. Another example of how video is changing our world comes from Johnny Lee at TED who has had his Youtube video seen over 4 million times in six months resulting in 500,000 downloads of his open source software.

Yet another example of high potential online media is a product called Goldmail.

Are you using video to promote yourself, your product, or your ideas? If so let us hear about them.

From the “C”-suite offices to the product manager’s desk, everyone seems to be frustrated with time to market as measured from the initial idea to the launch of the product. At one level, the frustration is understandable as nearly every organization has something they can do to improve time to market.

That said, unrealistic expectations stemming from a frustration over why things can’t happen overnight is an all too common problem that can be damaging to an organization. Unrealistic expectations can cause low morale and frustrations that ultimately lead to employee turnover, delays in product schedules and lost opportunities.

In our experience the problem behind unrealistic expectations often stems from a limited understanding of the product development process, and the misguided notion that the combined phases of product discovery, product engineering and product release should somehow take less time than the time it took to generate the initial idea: “I explained my idea three weeks ago. Where is the product and when do we launch?” This notion often isn’t stated out loud and if discussed in a group it even sounds ludicrous, but it exists nonetheless in the minds of many C level executives.

Good ideas are extremely valuable, and yours might be so brilliant that it creates significant strategic differentiation; creating barriers to entry for competitors and prohibitive switching costs for customers thinking of moving from your products. Your idea may be the result of endless hours of analysis and insight – but you must recognize that your idea and the desire to implement it is a form of demand generation for services from your product and engineering teams.

This “demand” generation is akin to deciding that you want to build a house with certain amenities. While we all understand that it takes time to build a house when considering the discovery phase (is our house feasible on the plot of land and with the local regulations, and is there a builder who can build it to our expectations?), architectural phase (a combination of designing the house and planning for the construction) and building phase (the engineering or construction of the house), we somehow have a hard time understanding that these concepts apply to your products and services as well.

None of this is meant as an excuse to have low standards, or a reason to not hold your team to an aggressive schedule of shareholder wealth creation. In fact, we argue for just the opposite. But understanding that even the most brilliant of ideas costs much less in time and money to “ideate” than to explore, specify, implement and deploy in systems and software is a good step towards creating aggressive yet realistic targets.

Ask for detailed plans and question the details until you are comfortable. Drive to the earliest possible date, but create that date from good analysis and good planning, and drive and challenge your team to create the best possible date from good data. Remember – if your idea can be implemented overnight, it can probably be copied in 2 nights by your competitors. True value creation can take time.