Chris Pratley Explains Program Management

If you read one Microsoft Blog (okay, other than mine...), it's gotta be Chris Pratley's.

I've commented to a couple of people that this is the kind of writing I wish I could (or should decide to) do more of. Chris is opening the window on why some of us make the decisions we do, and he has some very interesting insight into the marketing and development machine at Microsoft. He speaks from his experience. He speaks from his heart. And he's (so far) more uncensored than most of us. This is good stuff.

I love this post about Program Management and Product Marketing.

"Long ago, before there were any program managers (PMs), there were just developers, testers, and marketing people. The developers would build software they thought was interesting, and the marketing people would dive-bomb them every little while with the latest hot issue from a customer or magazine reviewer that had to get added or fixed. The developers found this frustrating, because it seemed like they were getting randomized a lot. The marketers found this annoying since the devs seemed pretty unresponsive and did not seem understand the customer or business issues.

Today there are many flavors of PMs. In some parts of the company, they define the APIs and write the technical documentation. In other parts, they are in charge of getting web sites updated every day, week or whatever interval. In Office, there are "design" PMs who mainly work on designing the products, "process" PMs who mainly work on driving processes that make sure we get things done, localization PMs who are sort of like process PMs but also sort of like developers in that they sometimes produce code and make bits that ship in the product, although usually by running tools that generate localized (translated) code, not by writing code.

I'm not sure where this saying came from originally, but one way to describe PMs is that they not only "pick up and run with the ball, they go find the ball". That really defines the difference between "knowing what to do and doing it", and "not knowing what to do, but using your own wits to decide what to do, then doing it". That means as a PM you are constantly strategizing and rethinking what is going on to find out if there is something you are missing, or the team is missing. You’re also constantly deciding what is important to do, and whether action needs to be taken. The number of such decisions is staggering. I might make 50 a day, sometimes more than 100 or even 200. Most of the time there is not nearly enough hard data to say for certain what to do, and in any case almost all these decisions could never have hard data anyway - you need to apply concentration and clear thinking."

I started in marketing at Microsoft back in 1990, just before Windows 3.0 launched. And I concur with everything Chris is saying here. In my four years as a Product Manager, I worked with some very talented PMs (most of whom went on to become Business Unit Managers). These guys ran the show, and earned their pay. And for the most part made my job as a marketer much, much easier.

And for the record, it's a job I would never, ever want... :)