For years, SmartMoney had project manager(s).  This was more of a necessity during our early years, when projects were large 9-12+ month long beasts.  Our projects were managed in a more classical software development approach commonly used at the time. Projects had weekly status meetings, pages of specs and documents that were always in need of updates. In other words, projects had a lot of busy work.

Those days are over. Projects are now smaller and more iterative. Because of this change, I feel instead of a traditional project manager the web now needs product managers.  In this role, the product manager is someone who works for the side of the product itself.  They do not simply setup meetings and coordinate between groups, rather they are knowledgeable in the web and the product being developed.

A product manager may be a technical generalist. They are familiar with modern usability requirements, and testing  They know SEO, web analytics, and know how to monitor a products successes and failures.  If it is a larger sized project or product, they should also become that products evangelist.  They are responsible for getting a product marketed and featured to ensure its successes. They are involved in developing a complete strategy for the product. This means they are not only responsible for getting the project to completion, they play a large role in monitoring and making the product succeed. Now this doesn’t mean they would be marketing geniuses also. In many companies it simply means they would coordinate with the correct marketing resources to help the product succeed.

This is a very important but overlooked role in technology.  With teams getting leaner and more agile, developers are usually not able or available to monitor a project’s success once deployed.  At SmartMoney, we move onto the next iteration or project almost immediately after deployment (usually simultaneously).  Beyond monitoring the errors and making sure a product physically runs, the development team does not often watch how it performs, or if users are having difficulties.  We rely on usability testing and user feedback through email and customer service to tell us how a product is being received in the real world. A product manager would be able to analyze the usability, and determine what features or areas need a second round of design and implementation.

Some companies may have dedicated SEO, analytics, usability, and marketing departments.  I find this rarely works.  This generates a lot of reports and emails that get passed around but never looked at. Passing around reports creates an illusion of agreement. Just because you create and send a report to 5+ managers, that doesn’t mean people really agree to its contents. But because of the inevitable lack of feedback, the sender usually feels that no response implies consensus. One good hardworking generalist who understands the web and the product you are creating, who is in direct contact with your technology teams is worth more than many departments of specialists to me.   If you don’t have this person where you work, consider retraining someone who shows an aptitude towards these talents.  As you move towards more iterative projects, you will find this position really fits in with the overall success of effective development methodologies.

Joel on Software has a great article on this topic, which he describes a similar role he calls program manager: How to be a Program Manager. Its not exact as he talks about the role in traditional desktop software development mostly, but a lot of principles apply.

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philosophy, thoughts by bill breen