Technical Product Management

Open Product Management Workflow TM 9

INTRODUCTION

Please note: Before you read "Technical Product Management", it’s very important that you have read and
understood the “Strategic Product Management” book, as the knowledge and the results from Strategic
Product Management are dealt with further in Technical Product Management.
Many problems in Technical Product Management can be traced back to the lack of preparation from the
Strategic Product Management. So if you want to be better on the Technical Product Management side, please
first delve into the Strategic Product Management.

Even when I, Frank Lemser, was studying Business Information Technology, I always had the feeling that there
was a conflict within me. On one side, there was this business administration specialist who was all about
business management with its wonderful tools; On the other side, there was this computer scientist who liked
information technology, where everything is logically structured and interconnected.
The business management professors were not able to get across to us students how the results, which were
obtained with the help of business management tools, could be transported into everyday working life. They
told us just as little about how the results related to each other and what dependencies and interactions there
were - something which didn’t sit well with the computer scientist in me.

Over the course of the years, I have repeatedly and intensively grappled with this problem. In the course of
this, I have come to the realisation from experiences from my working life that many of the problems that exist
in Product Management, as well as because of it, result from the unstructured recording and transfer of
information.
Consequently, the image of an assembly line came to me, on which you place ordered information at the front
and the individual departments receive the relevant pre-assembled information. All other departments could
then use the pre-assembled information at their work station and install their part in the product. At the end, a
clearly arranged product would exist which customers need and which has generated few discussions and little
pain within the business.

In addition to the image of the assembly line, I developed the idea of a funnel into which all information on the
product is collected at the beginning, and then prioritised in line with market requirements to then be sorted to
land on the appropriate part of the assembly line.

From the images of the funnel and the assembly line, we have now created numerous tools, the Open Product
Management Workflow, these textbooks and our software for Product Management to simplify the daily work
for you and all other Product Managers, so that you save time and a lot of hassle and create products that
other people want to buy.

When I began in Product Management at SUSE Linux in 2000, I was really lucky that some of my colleagues
were able to explain to me what Product Management actually is. Most Product Managers who I meet tell me
that their responsibilities are not really clear and that they see themselves as a “Jack of all trades”.
There is often just one position created in a company which is then called Product Management. When you
start working there and ask what you should actually be doing, everybody around you just shrugs their
shoulders around and says: “Just get on with it.” So, you start to improvise and feel your way around.

Author: Frank Lemser - Last updated December 2023

This book is teaching material of proProduktmanagement GmbH - Deutschherrnstrasse 6 - 90429 Nuremberg - Germany
( +1 716 800 7312 + [email protected] 4 www.pro-productmanagement.com
10

The “Technical Product Management” section according to Open Product Management Workflow deals with
the following topics:

• Technical Product Team: Who belongs to it and who does what?

• Creation of user personas
• Importance of user scenarios
• Requirements Rating based on market facts
• Definition of work packages, taking into account dependencies
• Assessment and documentation of time and costs
• Advantages and differences of pretotyping and prototyping
• Review meetings and technical release of products

In the “Technical Product Management” section we will also use the Open Product Management Workflow
method, which we developed, to show you step by step the tasks that need to be done in Technical Product
Management. As in the "Strategic Product Management" section, you will learn how to apply our Product
Management tools that you receive in our Product Management training.

You can download and print Open Product Management Workflow from our website, so that you always know
which point we are explaining.
Download Open Product Management Workflow:

www.pro-productmanagement.com/opmw

Author: Frank Lemser - Last updated December 2023

This book is teaching material of proProduktmanagement GmbH - Deutschherrnstrasse 6 - 90429 Nuremberg - Germany
( +1 716 800 7312 + [email protected] 4 www.pro-productmanagement.com
 Technical Product Management
Open Product Management Workflow TM 11

The following image is a simplified representation of how the three parts of Strategy/Innovation/Business,
Technical and Go-To-Market build upon each other.

The experience we have had over many years have shown us again and again that the field of Technical Product
Management is very time-consuming and that many Product Managers spend most of their working hours on
it.
Time and again we experience the fact that the discussion about what should come in the next product can
take several weeks and involve many important as well as well-paid executives in the company. Nevertheless,
after this costly phase, it always comes to this typical situation:

• Management and Sales try to interfere with a feature or the preview of the next version
• Sales can’t sell anything until the new version is finished and discusses delaying the next version
• Project Managers complain that the requirements are constantly overturned
• Developers explain that the requirements are not specific enough

Product Managers tell us again and again that they feel that they have no real control over the project and that
their product will seemingly never be ready.

Author: Frank Lemser - Last updated December 2023

This book is teaching material of proProduktmanagement GmbH - Deutschherrnstrasse 6 - 90429 Nuremberg - Germany
( +1 716 800 7312 + [email protected] 4 www.pro-productmanagement.com
12

Over the years we have observed and experienced the following:

• Customers and many departments in the company impose requirements on the product, but Product
Management struggles to consolidate and evaluate them
• There are very long lists of requirements
o The answer to the question: “What does the product have to have?” is emotive, takes a lot of
time and combines numerous resources
o In which order must requirements be processed? Here, too, emotional and time-consuming
discussions take place.
• Product Managers write long and detailed specifications, design user guides as well as interfaces,
create a wide range of models
• Development emphasises again and again that the time and cost estimation is very difficult because:
o There are inaccurate specifications
o Projects are changed again and again
o There is not enough staff
• Sales and Marketing regularly ask: “When is the new product coming?"
• Quality Assurance always want to know: “What shall we actually test?”

A member of the Management Board of a software company once told us the following:

“We have developed an excellent software technology that can do everything. Unfortunately, we don't know
which markets we can sell it to.”

A Product Manager from the mechanical engineering sector said:

“As a manufacturer of machines, development failures for us are much more expensive than software
development and yet we don’t have an evaluation system which we can use to evaluate the requirements in line
with the market, so we keep on making costly mistakes.”

Product Management colleagues from the electrical industry told us:

“Our portfolio has grown so large that we ourselves and our customers have lost sight of the overview of the
individual products. Sales demands certain functionalities for individual customers and hopes to be able to sell
the product to other customers. However, this mostly remains applicable to this one customer.”

... And above all there is the question: Are there solutions that help Product Management?

The simple answer is: Yes there are.

The prerequisites for the functioning of the solutions that we introduce in the course of this book are created
in the strategic part of Product Management according to Open Product Management Workflow.

Therefore, at this point, here is a brief overview of the tasks of Strategic Product Management:

• Conducting interviews with each type of customer

• Identifying and quantifying problems, scenarios, personas
• Analysis of the market
• Review of the business
• Derivation of strategies as well as the market message
• Consolidation of all results and creation of a decision proposal
• Preparation of market information, informing the business as well as the teams

Author: Frank Lemser - Last updated December 2023

This book is teaching material of proProduktmanagement GmbH - Deutschherrnstrasse 6 - 90429 Nuremberg - Germany
( +1 716 800 7312 + [email protected] 4 www.pro-productmanagement.com