As part of a restructure of the engineering team last week I was moved into a product management role, focussing on our ready-made integrations with third party products (eg: our Alfresco integration) and to be formally in charge of LiveWorks! There’s a bunch of details regarding what the new role entails that I’m still not completely clear on, but I’m sure they’ll be worked out soon enough. I expect there will still be a fair bit of technical work so I’ll still be hands on to a reasonable degree, but what I currently see the job being about is community. There are a number of aspects to this:

• Identify and integrate with existing communities for third party products, both commercial and open source. This is both a technical integration (make our products work with theirs to improve both) but also a community integration. There’s no point in creating a technical integration if you don’t also have ties into the third party community so that people hear about that integration and understand the value it adds.
• Build up communities around our products. LiveWorks! is the very early beginning of a developer oriented community, but we also need to find ways to build communities from all levels of people who use or make decisions about our products. We need to find ways to help content authors, our end-users, get the full potential out of our products (or in Kathy Sierra speak, get out of P-mode and kick ass). We need to find ways for CIOs to get together and talk about how much more productive their content authors are when you give them a brilliant editor etc.
• Listen to all those communities, and people who for whatever reason aren’t taking part in the community, to find out how we can improve our products, integrations and what new things we should be integrating with.

Of those, listening seems to me to be the most important – you can’t build a community unless the product solves a problem for its users and you can’t solve problems if you haven’t listened to find out what they are. Of course, there’s a bit of chicken and egg here as well, it’s very difficult to listen to your users if you haven’t yet built up a community – partly because you may not have any users and partly because it’s so hard to track them down and talk to them if they don’t hang out in one spot. So building community for a product manager is as much about making it easier for them to listen as it is about getting users to help each other get the most out of the product.

One of the advantages of being in charge of integrations, is that much of the community build is already done with active communities around already around the third party product. The challenge there is to become a part of that community – not just to sponge off of it, but to be a valued part of it, to add value to the product and the community. A couple of posts promoting your fancy new integration isn’t going to get people to pay attention. Integrating with the community, being a part of discussions about your area of expertise and suggesting the best options regardless of whether or not they involve your product is the key to success. It builds up trust with the community and does more to promote your product than even the best worded PR post could. Besides which, if your product isn’t the best solution for a problem, you’ve just discovered a key opportunity to listen, find out why it’s not the best and potentially improve your product so that it is.

I’m sure my thinking on this is going to change and refine over time, but this feels like a good way to start. What I really need to get a grasp on is how to do this with commercial products instead of just open source. Open source products are generally so much better at building community and making it accessible than commercial products are – probably because the open source products depend on the community to exist whereas the commercial ones don’t. The communities do still exist, they’re just harder to find and harder to get in touch with – I need to learn how to do that.