I'll, tell you one thing that's classic. It may take hours and hours to do something, and then when you turn it in; it will get shot down out of the air. You just have to expect things like that.
It's also very time consuming. If I had a family, it might be a very hard thing to have to compromise. There's always a lot going on. We travel out of town a lot.
Another disadvantage is that this is a fairly risk-oriented position. If you're in a position to take risk, you're fine; but if you have five kids at home and are the only breadwinner, I think you might have a tendency to be risk averse. Maybe that kind of person shouldn't be in a job like this.
Most people say the main disadvantage is that we're held responsible for, but we don't have authority over, the support groups. I agree with this. I'm basically held responsible for what comes out of all departments, but they don't report to me either directly or on a dotted line. They're support groups, and they go up to their own hierarchy of management. Consequently, I'm motivating many different people in different groups, and they could just as well ignore me, for I don't administer their salary. You've got all these groups, and they're wonderful people, but you've got to know how to motivate them.
Q - What skills do you feel are critical for success as a product manager?
A - I think you have to have analytical skills, but you don't need to be a wiz at number crunching. I still only have my four-function calculator. The analytical skill you really need is to be able to pick out the big picture. You don't need to know 355 ways to do a regression, because someone else will do it for you. You need to understand enough to see ii something is unreasonable; to say, "Gee, this doesn't seem right;" to see why it doesn't feel right; and then to go back and be able to think it through us, a lot depends on conceptual skills.
The biggest challenges are organizing your time and setting your own objectives. If you don't set your own objectives, you're just going to respond to all the phone calls and memos you get. You're always going to be reacting. So, the challenge is to create a plan of action, which I do by setting out monthly objectives and reviewing my progress against those objectives at the end of the month. I try to keep that list down to a manageable number of roughly a dozen, so that I have three or four fairly major issues to be accomplished in a given week. This keeps me on track, so that, when I have to put out fires, I can put the fire out and then come back to my plan. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that you come in, and your whole day is thrown off. ^Overall, it is just impossible to underestimate the value of communication skills, especially being able to go into a meeting and aggressively pursue approval for your plan without becoming abrasive. lt's a fine line, and knowing when you've lost the battle is as important as fighting a good one. So communication skills are absolutely critical.
What's necessary is good communication skills, good analytical skills, and a problem-solving approach to business person should also be ambitious and aggressive but not in an obnoxious fashion. There are people who are low key here whom I would call very aggressive; they get the job done. And there are people who are more blatantly aggressive, and that's fine too. But the kind of person who just goes along with the flow too much is not going to get things done. There's just too much for us to do.
Because we are in charge of getting everything done in this business, we have to work very, very closely with staff groups. A successful person going through the brand management system must develop an excellent rapport with the staff groups. It's a cliché, and, like all clichés, it's really true. If you cannot work well with people, even if you are a smart, analytical individual, you're going to fail in the organization. You're going to fail in most organizations, because you'll get nailed. If you don't get the staff groups behind you, you're not going to get anything done, because a product manager's hands can be totally tied by uncooperative staff groups.
The first step is to understand which things have to get done. I guess one of the hardest things for me to accept when I was first starting out was that some things don't ever get done. When you're continually reassigning priorities on each of the projects you have and every day you're adding new projects, some projects stay at the bottom of the list and just don't get done. If something on my list doesn't get done for six months, I sit back and I say, "Maybe this thing doesn't need to be done at all and I should stop carrying it on my list if it's that unimportant."
Coming into this kind of a work environment, my first impression was you just have to work 600 hours a week and get everything done, which is ridiculous. You'll kill yourself that way. So the first step is to establish the one, two, or three big things you want to complete before your annual performance review comes up. Then you're going to be able to sit back and say, "Here's what I've accomplished, and here's how I've helped the business." Likewise, your boss is going to be able to present it up the line, "Here's what so-and-so's doing. In addition to all the little fires and normal day-to-day routine, three big ideas were accomplished this year." Those are the things that get you noticed.
