6/11/12 Greg Geracie, President Actuation Consulting 2012 Study Of Product Team Performance Results

Transcript from June 11, 2012: Global Product Management Talk
Greg Geracie, President, Actuation Consulting, & Author
2012 Study Of Product Team Performance Results
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Access To The
Groundbreaking
Podcast:
http://bit.ly/JX15Oq
2012 Study of Product
Links: Team Performance Results
http://bit.ly/JjHGa4 Whitepaper:
http://bit.ly/M0kPBF

Greg Geracie, President Actuation Consulting, Addressed The Global Product Management Talk On The
Five Factors Common Among High Performing Product Teams And Other Results Of The 2012 Study Of
Product Team Performance Prior to Widespread Release

June 29, 2012 AIPMM WEBINAR:
Five Factors That Drive High Performance
Product Teams http://bit.ly/MRtBWL
Please visit our sponsor The Association of International Product Marketing & Management http://www.aipmm.com

Sponsor us http://bit.ly/gF0Tt3 Thank you.

@prodmgmttalk #prodmgmttalk http://www.prodmgmttalk.com/ 1


Host @CindyFSolomon

Cindy F. Solomon
Hi, This is Cindy F. Solomon coming to you today on June 11, 2012 with the Global Product Management
Talk in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Global Product Management Talk is a regular mini product camp
Socratic discussion of pre-posted questions with live audio of thought leader and co-host commenting. We
are designed for product managers and project managers and other product professionals that don’t get a
chance to leave their desks and participate in product talks in person so we come to you via Twitter and
podcast using the hashtag #ProdMgmtTalk. For more information please visit our website
http://www.prodmgmttalk.com

Introduction
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Thank you to our Sponsor, The AIPMM
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excellence in product management education and provides value to its individual members, corporate members, and
sponsors by providing training, education, certification and professional networking opportunities. The AIPMM Seven
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Cindy

Today I am delighted to be joined by Greg Geracie, and we are talking about a recent study of product team
performance results.
About The Study
The groundbreaking findings of the 2012 global study of product team performance conducted by Actuation
Consulting, and Enterprise Agility is being released early for the Global Product Management Talk community by
the Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM). The study, sponsored by the
AIPMM and a range of professional associations and organizations, showed that only 12% of product
organizations report that they bring products to market on time, on scope, and on budget.

Access to the groundbreaking 2012 Study of Product Team Performance Results Whitepaper are
available for purchase here: http://www.actuationconsultingllc.com/buy




Kindle version: http://amzn.to/KYFYAF

What do these organizations do differently or better than the other 88%?
The 2012 Study of Product Team Performance sheds light on common issues in product organizations and
surfaced five factors shared among the high performers. In the absence of these five factors, the likelihood of a
product team performing effectively is a dismal 2%! The likelihood of a product team performing at a high level by
having these five factors in place is 67%. The whitepaper details these five factors and offers suggestions for
how you can apply them to your own product development practices.

ABOUT GREG GERACIE
Greg Geracie is the President of Actuation Consulting, a world-class provider of product management advisory
services and training courses to some of the nation’s most well known organizations. Actuation Consulting
provides popular training courses for product managers as well as product teams.

Mr. Geracie is the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management© and the Editor-in-Chief of
The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge© (ProdBOK). This is an industry-wide
effort to standardize the practice of product management sponsored by the Association of International Product
Management and Marketing (AIPMM).

He is also an Adjunct Professor at DePaul University's College of Computing and Digital Media where he teaches
a course on high-tech product management. Mr. Geracie earned undergraduate degrees from the University of
Vermont and continued his executive education at Harvard, MIT, and the Wharton School.

Mr. Geracie is a Certified Product Manager (CPM) and Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM). He has
been nominated to the Certification Standards Board for The Association of International Product Marketing and
Management (AIPMM).

Mr. Geracie is a contributing writer to a wide variety of industry publications. Recent articles have been published
by the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, the Boston Product Management Association, the
Association of International Product Marketing and Management, the Project Times, asapm, IPMA and the
Business Analyst Times. He also actively contributes to webinars and blogs and speaks frequently on the subject
of product management and product team collaboration.

Cindy
I’m delighted to have you joining us today, Greg. Was there anything I left out of the introduction?

Greg
Hi Cindy, It’s a pleasure to be here today with you and your audience. In fact, you did such a fantastic job
doing my background that I don’t really have anything else that I can add to it.

Cindy
Great. Please provide some context for exactly what is this study and what led you to develop and conduct
this.





Greg
The Study of Product Team Performance 2012 was an idea that was generated between my partners Steven
Starke, who is an author of a book called Stop – The Product Management Survival Plan as well as David
Heidt, who is the president of Enterprise Agility and also the President of IIBA Chicagoland.

And so the history of how the study came together was really in a meeting between the three of us when we
were talking about the challenges that professionals basically have in really understanding the dynamics of
product team performance. The reason that we think that its challenging for people to understand this is
because almost all of us, regardless of our function, whether we’re a project manager, a program manager, a
product manager or a business analyst, engineer, product marketer – we tend to actually think within the
context of our professions and less interest or less training is actually given on those areas where there is
hand-offs between the various functions. As we were actually thinking about the challenges in terms of what
takes place with organizations in terms of producing successful products, we decided we wanted to focus in
on trying to get our arms around a cross-functional view of how product teams function – what are the
challenges, what are the opportunities for performance improvement. It started in a 3-way conversation
between all of us and what ended up happening was we hit upon the idea of actually looking at cross
functional performance – the dynamics of it – but wanting to work with a variety of industry associations
because we felt that while each of us could generate interest from our own followers or client bases – one of
the challenges we had (and that anyone would have attempting this) was trying to get that cross functional
view supported by the leading organizations.

Briefly overview the parties that helped sponsor the study:
AIPMM was one of our lead sponsors as well as IIBA Chicagoland representing IIBA, the Business Analyst
community and association and we had one vendor, Accept Software, as well as Diversified Communications
which is a large media and conference organization which publishes The Project Times and The Business
Analysis Time. All five of those organizations were the primary sponsors, so we were able to basically get 3
major associations to sign on as sponsors for the study and they helped push out email requests for their
association members to participate in the study which enabled us then to collect a robust cross-functional
view. In fact we ended up with 1150 responses from participants worldwide of which 607 completed the entire
survey and that became the basis for the regression analysis that we ultimately conducted.

To wrap up my answer to your question, Cindy, the genesis of the idea was really our view that it’s difficult to
get outside the boundaries of a particular profession and really look at product team performance dynamics.
And in fact to be able to successfully do that, we needed to work with strong partner associations as well as
vendors and publishing companies where we could work up a build up a big enough composite view of what
was happening across these various functions to get a statistically significant enough sample to then dive in to
the market dynamics. And that’s how everything came together.

Cindy
That’s something that I didn’t fully appreciate, Greg, is that this is a cross-functional study. And generally
when studies of this nature are done, its focused on one specific profession or one specific industry. Its so

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important to a product team performance, especially from the product management perspective since we’re
working cross-functionally.

Greg
Absolutely. If I might add on for a second Cindy; that is one of the things that makes this study I think truly
unique. I don’t believe there’s ever been - these 3 organizations have never before collaborated to the
degree that they did to help support the findings of this study. It is a truly unique experience for which I’m very
grateful for all our sponsors, and in fact – going into next year, because we’re going to conduct this study
annually, we believe we’ve already got 4 or 5 other organizations that want to help support and round out this
view. We feel very fortunate that, you know, we’re getting this type of support, not only within our respective
professions, but across them as well.

Cindy
Were you surprised at some of the results? I mean I assume you had some hypotheses going in.

Greg
From our perspective, we were actually going in with a set of assumptions that actually we didn’t walk out
with. Our assumptions were that we were going to actually get our arms around how the various functions,
you know the functional views, either aligned or contrasted with the other counterparts of part of the product
team.

Let me back up for a second, Cindy, and just briefly talk about the target group and then I’ll explain what we
ended up with and why it was different than our going-in assumption. So, in terms of the targets for the study,
we were looking at members of core product teams.

We defined core product teams as; product managers and product owners, project managers and program
managers, business analysts, engineers, user design, product marketing and brand managers. And the
reason we included brand managers is product management typically has two branches to the tree; one, you
know, moves in the direction of consumer products where product management is practiced a bit different, if
you will, then it is on the technology and services branch which is the other branch of the tree – so we wanted
to make sure that we got a 360 view of the brand manager, product manager and product owner perspective
from the product management side. So there was a robust group of targets that we actually went after.

So in terms of what we were going in after – we were going in after trying to understand every professions’
unique view of how they view the dynamics of their product team from their own functional perspective. And
we wanted to be able to compare and contrast the differences between how a project manager views the
success or failure of the things that are working or not working within their product teams vs. those of the
product manager or the product owner or any of the other members of the core product team. And so we
wanted to say “here are the commonalities of what people believed regardless of their roles, are working, and
here are the things that are not working.”

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But in fact, our going in assumptions - while we have the data to be able to do that - it was during the period
where we handed the data over for regression analysis to an outside professional statistician – in fact a
Wharton trained statistician – who went through and actually looked at the data and came back with a
staggering finding – that in fact none of us actually believed was there in the first place. We weren’t looking for
this and as you had mentioned earlier in the set up for the piece, it was really in the discovery of those key
five factors that were in fact common across high performing product teams that was our number one shock.
In fact, as you mentioned earlier, what we found was that the likelihood of a product team performing at a high
level is 67% if all five factors are effectively in place and a miserable 2% if they’re absent. And this was not
something we were looking for – in fact it was sort of akin to we felt like we had found a secret sauce when we
discovered it.

While there’s a lot of other really important information that this study turned up, one of the other things that I
would point to as a very valuable piece of information was we took a very close look across these 607
organizations at the different methodologies that were being used by organizations. These included lean
methodologies to produce the product, Agile – even though Agile represents a broader, iterative, incremental
set of processes; extreme programming, Scrum, etc. – we bracketed them as Agile for this year’s study, and
then we had blended methodologies and Waterfall. And one of the other findings that we had that sort of runs
a little bit counter, I guess, the buzz that one would expect based on the amount of noise about Agile – the
actual statistics that came back from the study actually indicated that pure Waterfall organizations, in fact
there are more of those than there are actually pure Agile organizations. And we were not absolutely stunned
to find but we were shocked by how dominant blended methodologies had actually become. In addition, Lean
methodologies remain relatively constant except when you get to the larger size organization. And so there’s
a lot of information and we broke it down actually in the white paper you were mentioning earlier – breaking it
out by methodology and size of company. And it’s really interesting to see the evolution of these
methodologies because going forward in our next study, now that we’ve established the base line, we’ll be
able to track how the adoption of these methodologies continues to evolve.

So I point to those two, but to be honest, there’s probably ten or more really salient points that you can’t find
anywhere else that sort of emerged out of the study that are rather eye opening.

Cindy
One of the things that is exciting to me in terms of who you invited to participate, in all of those different titles,
I’m calling those people “product professionals” and I’m seeing that as organizations are becoming more and
more flat, that the title of the person is less important than what their focus is or their interaction with the
product at its various stages. When I talk to various people from program managers to brand managers,
they’re managing the product to a certain extent…

Greg
Yeah, would you like me to add on to that, Cindy?

Cindy
Please!

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Greg
Well, first of all, we share your view of this - in fact my view of this is while – and I may be biased because I
come out of the product management profession and have been a nearly lifelong product management
professional. I’ve done a stint in marketing and in sales before getting into product management and business
development. Most of my career has actually been in product management so I admit my bias upfront. But,
from my vantage point, I agree. What our organization actually believes is that product managers are really
the leaders because they’re the only ones that actually stay with the product throughout the entire product
management lifecycle from conception to its ultimate retirement. But the fact of the matter is, and in fact all
our training courses from our organization are based on this concept, that product managers can’t succeed
alone. You can be the most proficient product manager in the world, but if you don’t have the support of your
team behind you, you’re never going to be able to deliver the results that the organization and your customers
expect. So we very much hear your vantage point, Cindy, about the importance of the entire product team.
And in today’s environment, as you know, product managers generally, for the most part, drive the majority of
their results through influence and through shared organizational goals and objectives.

So product managers are one of, I would say, a series of leaders that are equal. I would also call out the
program or project manager as sort of being the vertical leadership aspect and product management being
the horizontal leadership aspect of how product teams should jell and the types of leadership that’s required
for successful teams. But one of the study’s findings was that a shared sense of ownership that was organic
to the team – was not imposed from the outside – is critical obviously for the successful release of products.
And the more that that can be cultivated within the team itself, the higher likelihood that you’ll have that your
products will succeed in market and be more successful in terms of however the organization chooses to
manage performance. So I’m a big believer in what it is that you’re saying – we’ve seen this hold true with our
customers and clients and its been my experience also when I was practicing as a 3 time VP of Product
Management – this is a very important dimension of successful product teams.

Cindy
I think you’re saying, it takes a village to birth a product.

Greg
I would agree with that entirely – and they all need to be singing off the same sheet of music.

Cindy
Yes. How did you extrapolate this information? What methodology did you use for those five factors to be
showcased?

Greg
That’s a great question. I wish I had our professional statistician on the call to specifically answer how the
regression analysis was conducted. I’m not a statistician and I can’t pretend to be so let me at least give you
my layman’s view of how this was conducted:

What happened was, after we had gotten the 1150 responses we met with the statistical analysis
organization, with their lead statistician and handed over the database to them.
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We said, “Hey, here’s our going in assumptions in terms of what it is that we’d like to see come out of this.
Now, you may find something different in the data as you conduct regression analysis, but here’s what our
thoughts are based on our experience.” And after a 45 minute meeting, basically where we laid out what we
thought we’d find in the data, because we came in prepared with our top five theories, the statistician went
away with the database and our hypotheses and came back about 3 weeks later.

He said, “Hey you know guys, I can give you what it is that you’re looking for, but in fact what we found
through the regression analysis is more powerful than what it is that you were actually looking for. How does
this sound?” And then they walked us through the regression analysis and the five factors and the way that
they were weighted, all the analysis that had been conducted to support that.

They said, “We would recommend that you focus on this theme for the white paper. Obviously, we can talk
about these other things if they’re important…” But quite frankly, the white paper ended up being about 20
pages and there was so much data that we couldn’t actually fit it all into the white paper, so I’ve been doing
some of the roll over information in blog posts or in webinars and in a variety of other formats because there’s
more interesting information than we could contain in the white paper. So what we basically ended up doing
was relying heavily on our third party statistician who had been a Chief Research Officer for a major
organization and took his recommendation to focus in on the five factors which has become the core of the
white paper.

Cindy
In terms of going back to the people that participated, did you find that there’s groups that you would like to
generate higher levels of participation in next year’s study, now that this will be an annual endeavor?

Greg
Cindy, that is the best question you’ve asked me so far! And the reason why is, the answer is, YES!

If there are any user design professionals that are listening, we’d really love to get you more actively engaged.
We only had about 1% of the responses come back from the user design community. In large part, if you think
about it, its because our sponsors were primarily in the product, program, project, business analysis
communities and we had very robust participation from those groups. In fact approximately 25% came back
from the product management community, 26% came back from the project management community, about
16% came back from program managers, and I don’t remember the exact percentage, but I think it was
something like either 12 or 14% from business analysts – and then there was a smattering of I think 4% from
product owners, and the rest from sort of mixed with the other focus areas.

But we really believe that the product design group in particular is going to be a group that we’re going to
focus on for next year, and we didn’t have the support of a design association to help drive participation to the
levels that we think would be valuable. Next year, we’re going to make a real heavy effort to try to encourage
more participation from that community in particular.

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We’d also like to see more involvement from engineering groups. We had more engineering support under the
“other” category than is actually reflected when you look at the engineering bar in and of itself because many
of the people that fell into the engineering world actually viewed their role as different than a true engineer in
the purest sense of the word – so they rolled themselves up into the “other” category.

And brand managers were also relatively low and we’d like to get more involvement from the brand
management community as well. But our primary target for next year, the goal that I’ve set for us, is to really
get more active engagement from the user design community.

Cindy
Great, because we’ve had several speakers on the Global Product Management Talk who were UX people
and from their perspective, they see themselves as the product managers, and certainly in small startups, the
UX people will be incorporating design thinking from the beginning of the development, but then they are
tasked with everything else that we would think of as product management just from a resource point of view.
And that’s something that I’ve been seeing converging especially in light of some recent blog postings about
“Do we need product management?” because they think that UX is doing product management. Sitting in their
shoes, it does look like they’re doing product management but from a traditional product management point of
view, we see everything else that needs to be added to contribute to the success of that product.

Greg
I would agree with you, Cindy. As you say, in startup organizations in particular, its not unusual to see design
professionals actually taking on more responsibility than they might otherwise in a more mature organization.
But its rarer in my experience, anyway, that user design professionals actually stay with the product all the
way from conception to retirement, which I view as the primary responsibility of a product manager in terms of
optimizing results and not only creating, but maintaining, the optimal balance of value throughout the
product’s entire life. So based on that definition, I really don’t see user design folks going the full distance
although they play a critical role in many organizations particularly in creating the initial products for an
organization. In fact, in many of the organizations where I was a VP of product management, we used to
couple a very strategic product manager with a user design person in terms of building out particularly new,
disruptive, innovative products – we found that to be the optimal paring. So, I think, both functions have their
specific value, but working together they create more value than either party could create alone and that’s
what I’d like to see more of.

Cindy
To complete the theme, I’m told by UX people, young people in startups here in San Francisco, the UX people
have had a rigorous education around UX issues and around product development and they don’t see that
there’s an equal availability of rigorous product management educational opportunities at the university level
anyway. And so that’s something that’s frustrating for me but also is an opportunity because as I meet more
and more product management thought leaders and thought leaders in this arena, I see that there’s all kinds
of educational opportunities available for product management but again not reaching UX people, not
reaching other people who don’t think of themselves under the product management umbrella.
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Greg
Yeah, I think you’re pointing to something that I know to be true. I’ve done a little bit of research on this and
what I’ve basically found is that to my knowledge anyways, there’s only 3 undergraduate programs, or
colleges that teach undergraduates the principles of product management. One of them is DePaul University
where I teach a course on High Tech Product Management for their College of Computing and Digital Media.
There are 2 others on the East Coast, although I don’t know the names of the specific colleges off the top of
my head. In fact I was informed by someone in the AIPMM about the other 2 programs. I believe there’s only
possibly 3 programs that are actually in place at the undergraduate level for training emerging product
managers regardless of whether they’re coming out of, let’s say, focusing on the user design space or any
other of the various adjourning professions that generally create newly minted product managers – so that is a
challenge.

Shifting gears just briefly for a second from the study, I believe that part of the problem that we have is – if you
look across at the other professions, particularly the project management profession where PMI has created
their PMBok, or the BA (business analysis) community where they have BABok, or any of the other ones
where they put their cornerstone, their BOK (Body of Knowledge) in place that defines the boundaries of the
profession, it’s a lot easier for academic institutions to then adopt a standard, an industry standard, that
becomes a text book for training emergent product managers. But even though we’ve been around, I would
argue for around 70 years, the product management profession has yet to actually lay down its cornerstone,
and as you alluded to earlier, AIPMM has engaged me as editor-in-chief to help ensure that we do lay this
cornerstone down. I’m confident that in the very near future, we’ll be able to help facilitate academic learning
by putting a consensus standard, for lack of a better term, in place that will help guide academic training for
future product managers.

Cindy
I didn’t want to take the focus off of the study, but for me, this is all part and parcel of the importance of the
study and the direction that its pointing to for product teams – the Global Product Management Talk is
providing the vehicle for debate around these things also.

Greg
Well, what I would say is I’m not so sure we necessarily strayed too far off topic because these things are all
connected. The more that we can understand the vantages of our various partners in terms of creating value
and sustaining it for organizations whether its understanding the perspectives of the other parties or making
sure we’ll the best product managers that we can be and that we as an industry are creating better product
managers because we’re now enabling academic training before they step out and are forced to learn by trial
and error which is how most, or by trial by fire might be a better term, how most product managers learn
today. So these things aren’t completely divergent – there is a connection between both pieces.

Cindy
You asked 26 questions in the survey, and of those 26 questions – which is quite involved – that was a
commitment required of the respondents to have taken at least 45 minutes to respond, because I’m assuming
that they were also thought provoking questions that weren’t a Yes, No, True, False, answer.
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Greg
That’s true. So let me back up a little bit, because we’d obviously like your audience to help support next
year’s study as well. We’d be happy with having a couple thousand responses next year. Let me just briefly
overview the amount of time that was required and the types of questions in terms of format that we asked our
respondents.

So there were 26 questions; 22 were closed ended and 4 were open ended where we asked things such as
key things that differentiate your successful product initiatives from those that have failed or struggled – that
was one of the open ended questions. So that was an example of the type of open ended questions that we
got and then we basically were able to derive from the statistical sample about ten themes that emerged from
concentrations if you will, in terms of responses. We got some fantastic verbatims that people had produced.
Some of them actually made me laugh when I was reading them. The study was anonymous and people
really took that to heart. We didn’t collect any email information, no identifying information whatsoever. So the
responses were exceptionally candid. At some point I’m going to do a bloopers list from some of the
responses because they were so humorous, I think other people will enjoy them as well.

So there were 26 questions in all; 22 were closed ended, 4 were open ended and the amount of time,
because we were able to track this through the survey tool, that it took was on average about 22 minutes to
complete the study. I suspect the reason for that is largely that we had so many closed ended questions
where they could select from a range of options as opposed to having to go free form that it allowed them to
get through the study more quickly than you might have thought, Cindy.

Cindy
So which areas of the study generate the most dialogue in your presenting – because I understand that you’re
almost on a tour of presenting the findings to a wide audience.

Greg
That’s a fair point. Between webinars and actually road show like presentations, I’ve been quite busy. We
were at the Orange County Product Managers Association two weeks ago, I was at the Chicago Product
Management Association last week. We’ve got 6 webinars lined up - overview of the study’s findings. We’ve
been quite busy – there’s a lot of interest.

In terms of the areas that are the most compelling in terms of the live discussion – the two areas that really
stand out are around the methodologies. For example, when we ask the question about “which product
development methodologies were the most prevalent” – this generates almost 30 minutes worth of question
and answer every single time that we do this. Its because, as I alluded to earlier, I think a misconception
about how deeply penetrated Agile, pure Agile, actually is. If you listen to industry social networking or
marketing materials – things along those lines, you walk away with the perspective that pure Agile is actually
the dominant methodology that’s in play out there. When in fact that’s not the case – or at least as far as the
study’s findings came back. With blended methodologies, meaning that organizations are attempting to
combine Waterfall and some variant of Agile within the context of the organization. What’s interesting is when

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you really dig under this data, and look at this grid that I was alluding to that’s in the white paper or in any of
the presentations – many of the presentations that we do – what you basically see is that blended
methodologies remain constant almost across all sizes of organization from less than 50mil to 499mil up to
2bil or across 2bil – the number is statistically the same basically. This generates a lot of conversation
because while I think that many people probably instinctively sense that this is the case – that organizations
haven’t either been able to successfully make a clean cut to Agile because of all the things that are required in
terms of retraining the organization or displacing existing methodologies or perhaps that Agile might not be
the right methodology as you get bigger for very complex enterprise wide projects and it might be more
difficult to be able to go fully Agile with those types of scenarios.

So the other thing that actually generates a lot of interest is the fact that Waterfall, even though its sort of
become a dirty word, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but its like product managers or product
management professionals almost don’t want to own up to the fact nowadays that their organizations are pure
waterfall because its got this old school connotation. But the fact of the matter is that there really are more
organizations today that actually are practicing pure waterfall than pure Agile based on the survey responses.
So you can imagine the types of conversations that take place as people try to understand the dynamics that
underly this data. One of the exercises that I do, when I do this live, is to ask for a show of hands from the
participants based on methodology. Almost every single time – there’s only been one slight variation where
we were off by about 4 or 5 people where they wouldn’t own up to being Waterfall or they weren’t Waterfall –
the numbers tie out almost exactly. I’ve used this as a gut check because I’ve had one person challenge this
– they had asked for a show of hand from the audience and thankfully it tied out almost exactly.

That’s been the number one discussion point – it takes about 30 minutes generally to answer all the questions
that emerge just from those 2 pieces of information – the bar chart that basically shows the demographics of
how people responded and my attempt at statistical analysis underneath it where I put this into a grid and
then broke it out by size of company and methodology which is really fascinating to actually see and will form
the baseline for the future.

And then the second area where we get into a lot of discussion is the five factors themselves because
organizations and the people that I’ve been talking to innately ask themselves,
“Where are we on this continuum as an organization? How many of these factors are we truly doing
effectively? What kinds of things can we do or are there ones that we should target specifically that would
help us reach higher levels of performance?”

Let me back out for a second on this. One of the other findings from the study was that only 12% of
organizations self reported that they were indeed operating at a high level in terms of high performance. 88%
of organizations acknowledged that there was either room for improvement or that they were missing more
than they were hitting or performing less than optimally. So there’s a lot of room for improvement based on
the respondents’ responses and these 5 factors are another one that kicks up a lot of sand and as people try
to understand what they are and how they can more effectively implement them. Sorry to be a bit long
winded, but those are the two areas that generate the most conversation.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________




Cindy
I can understand whenever you’re talking about Agile or Waterfall, I think that we could spend a whole hour
talking about those findings and perhaps we should schedule another time to just go deep in that regard. But
while we’re still talking generally, can you share - maybe just highlight, what those 5 key findings are – you’re
alluding to them, but I’m not sure that you’ve identified them, and perhaps you don’t want to identify them. I
know that you have a webinar coming up on June 29 with the AIPMM where I assume you’ll go into depth –
since there’ll be the visual component where you can identify those key findings. But could you please give us
a taste of what they are.

Greg
Sure, so on the webinar that we’ll be doing, by the way, we’ll be doing more of a cross functional discussion
with some of the other white paper authors on the subject matter so it will be more of a cross functional view
than really the snippets that I will give you in our conversation today. So it will be more of an in depth
conversation just so the audience has a reason to come visit us the next time around.

In terms of the five factors, the first factor that we found that drove high performance and was common across
these product teams, was unwavering executive team support. And I just want to point your attention to the
word “team” because what its really alluding to is broader engagement, if you will, from the executives, rather
than sort of management by crisis or having an individual stakeholder. I will draw the line at factor one at that
level but really active engagement from the executive team or members of the executive team, not just a
single stakeholder was the first statistically relevant factor.

The second one was strong product team alignment. This has to do with the tighter the alignment the product
team has with the company’s overall business goals and objectives, the more likely the product team is to be
successful. And what we basically found is there are significant gaps in terms of the tools being used by the
majority of product teams particularly at the strategic level that don’t enable the optimal alignment that should
occur within product teams and product management organizations that back up to the company’s business
goals and objectives. The tighter that alignment and the deployment of those tools- that they’re in place helps
insure tighter alignment - the more likely the product team is to be high performing and to succeed.

The third factor…

Cindy
Can I just interrupt you for a second – so, could you give me a summary of that second factor because there
seems to be several aspects to it.

Greg
Sure, the core finding is high performance teams insure alignment with the company’s business strategy. But,
for example, the majority of organizations today tend to rely on tactical product roadmaps – that was the
number one response from all our respondents in terms of tools that are being used to insure appropriate
alignment with the company’s overall business goals and objectives. But the word “tactical” sort of stands out.
So there is a whole strategic set of tools that is actually missing that lie between the company’s business
goals and objectives and the tactical product roadmap. For example, I’ll name one of them – it could be
_______________________________________________________________________________________________




portfolio management of products, or it could be multi-year product strategy, for another. So these types of
tools have very low adoption rates by the majority of organizations. In fact, I would argue that there’s a
strategic void that’s missing between the company’s goals and objectives and the way that teams are
attempting to align themselves towards those goals – they’re doing it at a tactical level and not a strategic
level. And there’s a big hole in the middle that actually, we would argue, should be filled by other strategic
tools that would help provide better guidelines, if you will, for the team over longer periods of time to ensure
that they’re not only linked back up to the strategic goals and initiatives but are able to look more into the
future and less on the 6 or 12 month timeframe.

So there’s a heavy reliance on tactical activities by the majority of teams today and they’re either not
deploying consciously or don’t understand the importance of the other strategic tools that could add significant
alignment value and ensure their success.

Cindy
That is yet another huge topic area just to not only to identify those tools but you’re pointing to things that are
outside what I think product teams might think are within their jurisdiction.

Greg
That’s true – but if you think about it this way –if, for example, let’s say that you’re an organization that
actually has a multi-year product strategy, right, and your roadmap should be moving concurrently as you
move through, let’s say, your 3 year strategic plan, so wouldn’t it be helpful for the product team to understand
the context by which the product is actually being guided so that they can make better decisions not only at
the tactical level in the 6-12 month time frame, but over larger time frames, they actually have the context to
understand what the product team is trying to achieve over the longer term. If you understand that, you are
more likely to be able to make informed decisions both around resources, people, deployment of the right skill
sets to insure that you are more efficiently using the resources of the organization in ways that are aligned
with the overall company’s business goals and objectives. Because the strategy should link to that and then
cascade down into your roadmaps. It’s almost like teams are acting without the necessary context in certain
instances to be able to understand how to make the best decisions which we would argue that having a
longer term view, even if it’s an adaptable one page slide, as opposed to a 20 page planning document – we
find that being able to put something like that in place to guide the team’s decisions adds a lot of value and
also reinforces the linkage back up to what the organization’s attempting to achieve and it becomes more
apparent to everybody involved what the linkage is.

In terms of factor 3, the third factor was post product development focus and this really is all about the
transition of a product from development into market launch and on-going operational support. Basically,
because we’re running short on time, I’ll just give a brief snippet. What it basically means is that somebody
needs to bring singular focus to these activities and often there isn’t one person that’s held accountable for
driving this in many organizations. And in fact, the survey basically pointed to program managers as the party
primarily responsible for doing that – but as we’re talk about on the webinar – not all organizations have them
and we’ll suggest alternative methods for managing that effectively.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________




The fourth factor is assigning core team members. While many organizations, 42% basically report they do a
good job of assigning core team members based on the skills needed – the reality is 67% of respondents
report that projects would be more successful and more profitable if the team was left together after a product
comes through development and goes into launch meaning they either stay with the product over its entire life
cycle, which is rare, or they stay through launch to ensure its success.

And the final factor was onboarding product team members. In fact, what we found was 50% of respondents
said only the product manager or the product owner are the only parties that stay on with the product
throughout its entire product lifecycle, but high performance teams take a more proactive approach to
onboarding new team members and put a systemic approach in place for both documentation and domain
knowledge transfer. So in fact, those are the five factors, Cindy.

Cindy
I want to thank you Greg for joining us today.

Greg
It’s been a pleasure.

Cindy
I didn’t realize how deep the study goes and how far reaching the findings are. It’s far more than just how to
increase the effectiveness of the product manager. The findings go across the entire organization which is so
important because from a product marketing point of view and a strategic point of view, you certainly have
uncovered data that points to the importance of thinking across the full product lifecycle.

Greg
I’d be honored to come back and contribute in any way that I can, Cindy.

Cindy
Thank you! Thank you so much. Again I want to invite the audience to join us on June 29 where Greg will
discuss with other people the Five Factors that Drive High Performance Product Teams.

You can find that webinar by going to the AIPMM website: http://www.aipmm.com
 read tweets from the webinar http://bit.ly/LVWqPS
 review background articles http://bit.ly/MRtBWL
 For Advanced Access To The Groundbreaking Findings Of The 2012 Study Of Product Team
Performance: http://bit.ly/M0kPBF
 Kindle ebook version: http://amzn.to/KYFYAF

I want to thank the AIPMM for sponsoring us today and invite you to join us next week when we’ll be talking
with Rob La Gesse @Kr8tr. He’s the Chief Disruption Officer at Rackspace. He’ll be talking about “The Value
of Fanatical Support™” Background links: http://bit.ly/LgC2Gx

_______________________________________________________________________________________________




I suggest that that’s yet another piece to add to the studies going forward of how important customer support
is to the product team performance and expanding what my definition is of the product professional. Actually,
Rob has the engineers do customer support which will be very interesting. Listen here: http://bit.ly/LSDZvx

For further discussion, please view the website at http://www.prodmgmttalk.com to see upcoming speakers
and to see when Greg will be joining us again to go deeper into these five factors and other findings of the
report. As well, you can get the white paper that goes into depth right now, by going to
http://www.actuationconsultingllc.com/buy You can download the Study of Product Team Performance 2012
today!

Thank you again, Greg, for joining us. Please follow us at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prodmgmttalk This
podcast will be posted and more information will be available about everything that we’ve mentioned and links
as well as Greg’s book, Take Charge Product Management: Take Charge of Your Product Management
Development; Tips, Tactics, and Tools to Increase Your Effectiveness as a Product Manager

Also, I forgot to mention that this past weekend in Boston was Product Camp Boston – you can see content
from that product camp and other product camps by going to Storify.com/prodmgmttalk

 #PCampBoston content #Storify bit.ly/KpqYpM

 Slideview bit.ly/MWjXE5

The Global Product Management Talk covers product events and makes them available – curates the content
to make them available to busy product professionals who don’t have time or aren’t able to get to these
events in person. We make the content available for you to consume in whatever is convenient for you.

Thank you again, Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting, and I look forward to continuing the
conversation with you.

Greg

Thanks so much Cindy.

Cindy

This is Cindy F. Solomon signing off with the Global Product Management Talk. Please visit our sponsor at
http://www.aipmm.com and follow us at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prodmgmttalk

Have a great week!

_______________________________________________________________________________________________




Recent Global Product Management Talks:

June 18 The Value of Fanatical Support™ w/ Rob LaGesse @Kr8tr Chief Disruption Officer @Rackspace
Listen now: http://bit.ly/LSDZvx

June 25 Discussing Two Recent Books About Business Models w/ Therese Padilla, President @AIPMM
Listen now: http://bit.ly/NRaux3

StartUP Talk Radio Jesper Thomsen of Roozz.com Named 2nd Most Innovative Startup on the Planet
Discusses How Roozz Implements A Radical Business Model For Changing The Way Software Is Consumed
And Used Listen now: http://bit.ly/LK1Xe1

Coming Up:

July 16: Centralized vs. Decentralized Product Management w/ @HakanKilic Product Management Expert
RSVP: http://bit.ly/Lrh4o0 Resources: http://bit.ly/KKIJW3

Global Product Management TalkTM is a weekly mini-product camp Socratic
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6/11/12 Greg Geracie, President Actuation Consulting 2012 Study Of Product Team Performance Results

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