360 Degree Audit: Framing the Questions

If you use a 360 degree audit to evaluate a product manager's performance, you survey the development, marcom, and sales teams to determine how effectively and convincingly the product manager has communicated an understanding of the market to them. What questions should you include in such a survey?

Whether you are a CEO, CMO, or VP of marketing conducting the evaluation, you should not ask the following question in a survey of these teams:

"How well do you think the product manager is doing her job?"

As we've noted in the context of conducting surveys of customers, the questions you want answered often aren't the questions you should include in a survey.

Here's a stab at some questions that might yield more reliable feedback. In parentheses after each question, I've specified for which department the question is appropriate.

"How well do you understand the problems that prospective customers of the product face?" (all departments)
"How well do you understand the different kinds of buyers of the product?" (sales, marcom)
"How well do you understand the product requirements, i.e. the criteria the product must satisfy to overcome the key problems the product is supposed to solve?" (development)
"How well do you understand the key themes and messages to use in PR and advertising for the product?" (marcom)

I'm sure you can improve the wording of these questions. I'm also sure that several more questions would yield informative results. The point is that these kinds of questions keep the "tactical expectations" problem from poisoning the performance evaluation.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

What Product Managers Can Learn from the Apple iPod

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardw

Cauvin

Search This Blog