Last week I attended NASSCOM Product Conclave 2010 (http://www.nasscom.in), which focused on how product companies can change India’s future and how NASSCOM is trying to bring up an ecosystem, which will help existing product companies to expand their business as well entrepreneurs to start product ventures. What I must say is that this year’s Product Conclave was well planned to achieve the objectives of bringing the entire software product ecosystem together under one roof to introspect and look ahead at the evolving landscape and the next set of challenges.
During the conclave I had pleasure of meeting Mr. Gabriel Steinhardt, a recognized international high-tech product management expert, author, lecturer and developer of practical tools and methodologies that increase product managers’ productivity. Incidentally Gabriel also heads BlackBlot (http://www.blackblot.com) a top product management services companies worldwide, which specializes in helping organizations to evolve their product management professionals.
I also attended a session where Gabriel talked about Product Management & Marketing maturity of the organizations and then demonstrated a spreadsheet based tool to ascertain Product Management Maturity of the organization. What I could gather was that the maturity Product Management of an organization will eventually impact the business growth and customer satisfaction. The parameters used to ascertain the maturity of Product Management function were as follows
Figure: Product Management Maturity Assessment Parameters
On the above parameters you could rate your organization using either 3 point (High, Medium, Low) or 5 point scale (Very High, High, Medium, Low, Very Low) and easily understand how matured your Product Management & Marketing function is. Of course, it wouldn’t matter what your Product Management Maturity is unless you are making your numbers profitably year over year but that can be a topic for another discussion J. The bottom-line is that the more matured Product Management function you have the higher the chances of your organization making your numbers profitably.
I know you won’t believe me just like that so let me quote what Ms. Carol Bartz (CEO, Yahoo!) said on Product Management during the same NASSCOM event and I quote
‘To be a market driven company we (Yahoo!) believes that Product Management is very important…‘
What do you think?