Infrastructure Needs Product Managers
The storage, networking and compute environments that make up the Infrastructure of a company with more than 100 people needs product managers. These environments are crucial to run your business. The roadmap of these environments and features should take the path of a product lifecycle.
Assigning an internal product manager to the compute, storage and networking vendors allows the opportunity to to align with the vendor product managers that are focused on the future releases associated with the product. Your internal product manager can build upon the release schedule from the vendor product manager.
The role of the internal product manager can be fulfilled by a team member in the compute, storage or networking area that is not responsible for daily administration tasks. A team lead or manager role can provide the product management tasks. This person should have the ability to present material and “think” beyond the day to day fire drills that occur in the environment.
Assigining a team member to the product management role needs to include training. Product Management has a number of characteristics to execute to make the role successful. This includes their ability to interview their customers, document features, priortize features and draw roadmaps. You should not assign a team member the token product management role without a commitment to the training needed to take on this role. One of my favorite training classes for product management is Pragmatics Marketing. This five day course can help a team member learn about product management and how the leading technology companies approach product management.
The Product Manager also needs security training. Every product needs to focus on how it delivers the service with a focus on security. This characteristic needs to be at the forefront for any feature that is delivered in the compute, storage and networking environment.
Your infrastructure Product Manager needs tools to execute the role. Merely using Visio for product roadmaps does not create a robust environment and appealing presentation. You need to spend the money on the tools to make your product managers successful. Example tools could include: Confluence, Aha.Io and Pendo. If your approach to product management includes Excel and Visio, then you may not be ready for Product Management in your organization.
Assigning a product manager to your storage, compute and networking environment ensures that somebody is thinking years in the future and aligning critical infrastructure for your business with upcoming vendor features.