Case for a product manager at eCommerce companies

Depending on the size of a company, every day/week/month/quarter/six months/year, discussions arise about "buy or build". Business and IT staffers, in meetings, go off on tangents and start talking about software utopia. The reality is both approaches have their pros and cons. However, with the advent of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 software companies are creating much better than the in-house development team. In general more features, more customization options are becoming the norm of third party software products, whether it be licensed or SaaS.

One of the reasons for third party software products being better than in-house products, is that they employ "Product Managers". Typically product managers have their ear to the customer needs. They interact with all constituents that use the product in a proactive way. It is almost like a shepherd watching over his flock. Care is exercised in developing new features, fixing bugs, along with financial responsibility.

In eCommerce companies and departments you may have all folks such as business directors, IT directors, project managers, developers, enterprise architects, User Interface architects. However, a product manager is lacking. To ask the business director, or the Vice President, or the project manager to play the role of product manager for a few hours a week does not do justice to the website.

Somebody, ideally in the product manager, should be dedicated to watching over the evolution/development of web site and over navigating the difficult "conversion/increased revenue" waters.

Recently read a neat article in Inc magazine about how Reid Hoffman the CEO of Linked In hired Dipchand Nishar from Google to free him up, so he could focus on being a CEO. Reid left the core product development to Dipchand. If Reid can do it every eCommerce shop should hire a product manager!

More cool and useful features on a website equal more ka-ching, and a good product manager is invaluable in the mix.

Urgent need for enterprise twitter

All companies large or small, public or private, run projects. Complex projects with muliple parties involved start off well but some time degrade into a chaotic mess. The immediate managers get involved. The conference calls keep getting bigger with more and more invitees added to calls.

Emails start flying by and the emails threads start becoming one endless book. Then something else goes wrong and the person at the very top of the chain gets involved.

Then come the infamous words, "we want daily and some times hourly updates" on the status of the project or issue.

It is great to have a tool like Twitter within the enterprise. Sending compact 140 character messages is a great idea to manage projects gone wild.

In worst case, if greater detail is needed, atleast enterprise Wiki URLs can be sent out as updates and details can be written on the enterprise Wiki.