Software product management
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Software product management is the process of managing software that is built and served as a product as opposed to a service
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[edit] Software products
A software product is typically a single application or suite of applications that is sold to multiple customers. So, companies like Oracle Corporation, Microsoft and SAP AG have products like the Oracle 10g database, Microsoft Office, and the SAP R/3 ERP software, respectively.
Historically, software products have been sold for a license fee, or for a price. This differs from the time & material billing of services-oriented projects by consulting firms like IBM Global Services, or Accenture. However, with the advent of hosted solutions, many software products are also offered as a "service" so that customers run the same application but utilise the hardware of the vendor and pay for their use on that basis.
[edit] The need for software product management
To develop, sell and support a successful software product a business needs to understand its market, identify the opportunity, develop and market an appropriate piece of software. Hence the need for product management as a core business function in software companies.
Hardware companies also have a need for software product management, since frequently operating system software needs to be installed on computer hardware before the hardware can be functional, and operating system software can be sold as a product separately. For example, Sun Microsystems is a hardware company, and is in the business of manufacturing and distributing Sun workstations (hardware) and the Solaris Operating System (software). Building and delivering Solaris as a product in the marketplace requires software product management.
[edit] Management of aspects of software development
Software product management deals with the following aspects of software development within a software and/or hardware firm:
- Idea generation on whiteboards for a new software product, or for the next version of an existing product.
- Gathering of business and/or market requirements from prospects, customers of earlier versions of the product, domain experts, technology visionaries, market experts, products / solutions from competing vendors, etc.
- Crafting of Market Requirements Documents, or MRDs, which synthesize the requirements / needs of various stakeholders as outlined above.
- Using the MRD as a basis, come up with a product requirements document or PRD, as an input to the engineering team to build out the product. Frequently, a PRD can be a collection of UML Use Cases, UML Activity Diagrams, HTML mockups, etc. It can have other details such as the software development environment, and the software deployment environment. For example, where as the development environment can be J2EE / Java IDEs, the deployment environment can be the WWW (worldwide web) or the Internet.
- Deliver the PRD to the software engineering team, and manage conflicts between the business units, the sales teams, and the engineering teams, as it applies to the software products to be built out.
- Once the software development gets into build / release cycle, conduct acceptance tests, if required by the firm / software manufacturer.
- Deal with the packaging of the product. This can vary from demonstrating the product to customers using web-based conferencing tools, to building a flash/captivate demo and deploying it on the company website, to other placement and promotion tactics. Frequently, in Silicon Valley, these two aspects of marketing, and sometimes also pricing, are dealt with by Product Marketing Managers, as opposed to Product Managers.
- Once the product is deployed at a customer site, solicit customer feedback, report software bugs, and pass these on back to engineering for subsequent build / release cycles, as the product stablizes, and then matures.
- Perform competitive analysis as to how this product is behaving in the market, vis-a-vis other products catering to the same / similar customer segments. In the software space, this might require the product manager to take the opinion of analysts, who can come from name brand market research firms like IDC, Forrester Research, and Gartner Group.
- Solicit more features and benefits from the users of the software product, users of competitive products, and from analysts and craft / synthesize these requirements for subsequent product build / release cycles, and pass them on to the software engineering team.
The above tasks are not sequential, but can co-exist. For a product manager to be efficient in the above tasks, he has to have both engineering and marketing skills. Hence, frequently, Silicon Valley firms prefer engineers who are also MBAs to do software product management.
[edit] See also
- Product management
- Product life cycle management
- Product planning
- Software licensing
- Requirements management
[edit] References
- Dan Conde, Software Product Management: Managing Software Development from Idea to Product to Marketing to Sales (Execenablers), Aspatore Books (2002), ISBN 1-58762-202-5
- Alyssa S. Dver, Software Product Management Essentials, Anclote Press (2003), ISBN 0-929652-01-0
