Product Management By Any Other Name

Hi, I’m Head of Product. Long-time Product Manager, first-time blogger.

For my second job, they hired me to fill the role of Marketing Manager. I had no experience in marketing. This being 1999, there were no social networks and no viral posts. I figured I needed data before anything, so I set out inquiring what, to whom, where and when we sell. My boss handed me our product assortment: vas-y, Marco, dis nous comment mieux communiquer chez nos clients!

It turns out, I was lousy at marketing — still am. Instead, I took the assortment and went around the company asking: how well are we selling each of our products? When do people buy them? Do we know who buys them? Most of the time, the answer I got was, “Je ne sais pas”. Only the numbers guys were able to tell me where to find the sales figures, by the minute, real-time even. That was a start.

Soon, I learned that the colleagues using those numbers most were our purchasers. They used them as triggers for purchase orders: keep a tag on how much we ordered, monitor ongoing sales and as we reach a certain threshold, place another order. Simple.

If only; even in 1999, I was surprised to learn that they were doing this mostly on paper. Every morning, they would print out a one meter stack of paper, mark the pages that interested them and toss away the rest. Then, they would input sales figures, line item by line item, into their Excel file. Once they’d finished this tedious ritual, they’d know cumulative sales for each line item and mark those products that needed reordering.

Wait! Marco, I thought this was a Product Management blog. Also, weren’t you supposed to work as a Marketing Manager? What’s up with that?

Glad you asked: finding problems worth solving, that’s what’s up with that. I am no engineer, so don’t look at me for solving your problem. I am a Product Manager, so I’ll help you describe your problem in ways that make it worthwhile to solve. The fact that I was a Marketing Manager at the time is neither here nor there. As is the fact that I then proceeded iteratively to solve the problem as a one-man team until I got the budget to hire a capable Marketing Executive developer who helped me roll out a solution that enabled our entire Purchasing division to check their SKU levels in a matter of minutes.

If you want to know more, buy me a beer. In the mean time, happy problem finding.