I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

There used to be a time when a product manager was a good thing. If you don't know what one is, fear not. They are the behind-the-scenes people responsible for all aspects of a product you buy. If you bought a mercedes, they'd be worrying over the curve of the seat to your behind, whether the 1800 number worked when you called it whilst being stranded in the desert, and they'd sweat over whether you thought this year's 'blue hue' was truly a hot color...or just another rendition of 'seafoam'.

At McDonald's, product managers worry about how to price their menu items, what to pair them with, and how to promote them so you'll think they're a nice, happy company that wants you to be happy too, and buy their products. They'd like you to forget that you are paying for a nice happy meal so you can gain weight, eat artery-clogging artificial food, and achieve new levels in heart disease. This is the fine art of product management - how to position the product and promote it in such a way that you'll be delighted to pay them for greasy potatoes, a thin patty of electrocuted cow ensconced between two buns made of bleached, stripped, and denatured flour, decorated by some tomatoes blended with sugar...and to wash it all down, how about some liquid chemicals flavored with nutrisweet? Doncha' love it?

In high tech, product management vacillates between being moderately effective and absolutely ridiculous. Sun could make servers look sexy like no one can. Motorola's gotten pretty good at the phone thing - the Razor - who doesn't need one of those? Cisco, in selling routers, projected the image that they had a lock on world peace with the "are you ready?" campaign, featuring suitably smiling Asian and brown faces from nice communities across the globe.

Those are good product management maneuvers. Good products. Good pitching. Good promotion. We need routers for world peace, or at least to make us aware there are other people on this planet, and *gasp*, help us realize we someday might be connected to them. We need sex and servers. This is all good.

But in some of the smaller startups, product management is something less desirable. It's often a guy who thinks he knows what to build, some engineers, and a sales guy who thinks he can sell it. Later, they realize they need a product manager to put the 'shrink wrap' on the product, and price it, promote it, etc. In my own experience, some product managers in high tech spend all day on product design, dreaming up new features, getting excited about tricks and bells and whistles, fretting over the competition....and end up building ridiculously complex products that no one can actually figure out how to use. When I ask if we should perhaps 'test drive' the product, and experience what the customer experiences, from end-to-end....

blink..blink....cue the crickets...

"Why would we do that?"

Hmmm. I guess it would be like taking 2 years to design and build a Mercedes' Mercedes, and once it's ready, say, 'gee, I guess we don't need to test drive it. We built it. We know what it does."

Well, what about when they have trouble? What happens then?

Here's the good Product Management Answer:
They will be routed through a phone system to a live person that will have access to materials or experience to help them successfully resolve their problem. We will have good documentation and procedures for escalation and problem resolution. The customer can also click a button from anywhere in the system and be routed to an online trouble reporting form that automatically creates a ticket for us to work, or they can have a 'chat' session with one of our techs from the same button.

Here's the bad Product Management Answer:
They'll call a 1800 number that's routed to a... voice mail...oh that's not good. Now it's routed to a cell phone. We just carry it around and hand it off to whoever's got customer support that day. Hopefully, the battery will never run out. Or hey, they can log a ticket in Salesforce.com. Too bad the programmers don't use that and have a whole other bug system which isn't connected to Salesforce. You know, maybe we should just do it all by email. We've only got 30-40 customers, after all.

This is but one example of the chaos created by Bad Product Management in the world of High Tech. Watch for it, coming soon to a bad application near you.

Reporting from the non-Silicon Valley...