Product Management as a Service? Is that a thing?
Decisions relating to your product have to be made every day, and people in the company are taking time away from their role to make them.
Product management is being done in your business, even if you don’t have a product manager role. Decisions relating to your product have to be made every day, and people in the company are taking time away from their role to make them (all part of the ‘wearing many hats’ routine in the life of a startup). There is probably no coordination, commonality or even visibility of what decisions are made, how, or even the outcomes. This is understandable in a startup where the PM is rarely an early hire — hiring makers rather than managers is usually the priority.
However, there comes the point often quite early on in the life of a startup, when product activities and decision-making tasks start to get in the way of strategic business growth work that your team needs to focus on. The people doing the surrogate PM have to direct their energies in their area of the business. This is where PMaaS coms in.
Everything and everyone needs to be aligned and focused on delivering a product that adds value to your business and to your customers
What is it then?
PMaaS is external, ad hoc, product-focused resource that you can call on. Resource dedicated to removing the barriers to product success.
PMaaS is about keeping everything and everyone aligned and focused on delivering a product that adds value to your business and value to your customers.
Identify and prioritise the tasks that will add the most value
How does it work?
After a short audit of where you are with your product fundamentals (the BIG GOAL, value proposition deep-dive, success metrics, roadmap priorities and so on), together we identify and prioritise the tasks that will add the most value to the business (that phrase again). These could be things that haven’t been done, need doing again, or need validating. Or the process could uncover some other priority activity.
Your PMaaS resource then works with your team to execute one or more of the priority activities. This could be time-bound or be for the life of that activity. And it could be any number of days per week. It’s a service. You decide.
Your product is your business
Why and when should I use PMaaS?
- You don’t have the budget for a whole PM
- You want your team to focus on their roles and on growing the business
- You want your product to be successful because your product IS YOUR BUSINESS
- You know that your product will only be successful if the essential and fundamental product activities are correctly and fully executed
PMaaS is there to get the things that need doing… done. It’s also there to give you the confidence that these activities are being given the focus and attention they need. You trust the outcome.
Your product is now further down the road to success.
You can get the self-assessment product audit worksheet here. Let me know if it’s useful.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
