TextWise

I’ve worked in Product Management for years, and for years our battles were ones with well-known, battle weary opponents.  The battle lines had been drawn, strategic alliances were made and broken, and weapons were fired (i.e., fingers were pointed) if a product flopped, forecasts weren’t met, or the “biggest prospect ever” walked away.

Sales blamed Marketing, Sales blamed the Product Manager and vice versa, Developers blamed the Requirements Analysts and QA (bad requirements and bad QA people for not catching the bugs prior to launch), and the CEO blamed everybody, but always came back with donuts and cookies for us to enjoy as we licked our collective wounds.

I hate using the whole war/battleground analogy because in the end we’re all on the same team, working toward the same goal.  And if your company is in the business of selling products and services, the goal typically boils down to the bottom line – profitability.

Just over a year ago, I embarked on a new path in my Product Management journey.  I’m now working as a Product Manager for a company whose underlying technology is semantic web technology.  This means we’ve got PhD’s and patent holders with specialties in things like informatics, search engine technology, information retrieval and relevance testing.  So in addition to engineers wanting to continually improve the system and its architecture, I’ve now got scientists who want to (and rightly so) continually improve the core technology, the algorithms.  Tweak, tweak, tweak.  They go to conferences like SIGIR and come back fired up, ready to go. They’re like a new battalion that has shown up on the battlefield and I have to size them up quickly in order to protect my precious project timeline. “Are you friend or foe?”

So I find myself with an interesting dilemma.  How do you tell a scientist to think faster, come to a conclusion faster, improve the technology but get it done NOW so we can get the product built and out the door?  How do I get the engineers to wrap it up? Is it research or is it a project?  I need an answer, and what I keep hearing from all camps is, “It’s both!”

I can hear you Product Managers and Project Managers saying it now.  Just continue with new product development and merge the R&D advancements into the products as they’re ready.  I used to say and do that too, and it worked.  But that was before I landed in a place where what works for typical Web data doesn’t quite work for patent data, and none of it compares to that elusive Holy Grail called the medical domain.  And even tweaks in certain parts of the engineering code can potentially affect relevance and skew the results.

Have I given up on my beloved project schedules, my requirements documents, my product development lifecycle tools?  NEVER. I’m a Product Manager at heart. But just like the ever changing world of the semantic web, and the scientists and engineers I interact with daily, I’m tweaking my process as I go.