The scientist-turned-product manager

Having spent the better part of my professional career in product marketing, its always nice to read articles on how important product managers are for success, just one of many excellent posts at Tyner Blain. The article talks about the strategic role of product managers, and how important it is to get a good product manager for a specific product.

One of the common threads in product marketing at my company is that they all have Ph.D.’s. In my experience, this is true for most companies that sell software into the pharma/biotech industries. That makes the role of the product manager almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, there are core business issues that need to be addressed. These range from coming up with product release roadmaps to developing value propositions to product growth strategies. On other days, we put our scientific hats on, discussing fundamental scientific issues with our customers, academic collaborators, R&D and application scientists. Not surprisingly, sometimes those two personalities have opposing needs. The successful product manager is the one who learns how to balance those two personalities and make sound business decisions. As long as we can answer the questions “What will make our customers succeed?” and “With the resources that I have, what is the best solution that we can provide”, the results are usually positive. Happy customers are engaged customers, and are more willing to share their needs and the directions their research is going. That helps the product manager identify growth areas, while maintaining a core user base. Never the easiest task in a fickle, divided market, but a fun challenge, especially when your customers are a bunch of smart, extremely opinionated scientists.

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