The Web Product Manager: Quality via Product Management

We've been spending a lot of time thinking about what makes a good Web team, and we feel that a Web Product Manager is key.  The basic idea is that someone is looking at your Web presence as a product in its entirety: from Web applications to corporate communications pages, from APIs to RSS feeds, from a user perspective to overall quality and maintainability.  One sure-fire way to tell if you don't have good product management (or product management doesn't have sufficient authority) is that the user experience on your site is disjointed.  For example, if your external site visitors have multiple logins for different applications (for instance, newsletters and email alerts), then the Web site probably isn't being managed as a product.

Ways to product manage (as opposed to project or program management, also important) your Web presence:

• Think Broadly.  As mentioned above, whenever considering a new site section or functionality, look broadly at how this impacts the rest of your Web presence.  It might be helpful to create a checklist of the different "flavors" of presence (for example, a publications database, email newsletter, and your blog) you have on the Web and make sure to at least consider the impact on each. 
• Boldly Set Direction.  When you're in the middle of discussions (or more vigorous forms of communication!), there are all sorts of ideas flying around.  The Web Product Manager needs to consider all these details but clearly articulate the direction of the Web.  For instance, perhaps you set focus of your Web presence in the next three months to be implementing an API to your data -- that will help everyone rally around the one idea, and potentially put pet issues as less urgent in everyone's mind.  
• Discover vs. Gather Requirements. (See Stacey Weber's blog post with a similar title.)  Users don't know the Web site like you do as Web Product Manager, so they may not even be able to articulate exactly what they want.  The Product Manager needs to dig deep in the details, consider other relevant requests from other users, and often come up with creative approaches that were never explicitly articulated.
• Consider the Entire Web Lifecycle.  If you're managing your Web presence as a product, then it's not about making the next deliverable on time, on budget, and within scope (which is more along the lines of the project manager's role).  You need to consider the Web presence over the long term, over multiple iterations.  This also includes thinking about what happens with content over time (ROT, archiving, etc).   
• Saying No.  In many ways this may be the most important, and it's so counter-intuitive.  You want to make everyone happy, right?  Well, as a Product Manager it's more important to have a coherent Web presence than a fifty-headed monster, with different sections of a site behaving in wildly different ways.  Does the ipod have all features someone could want?  No. (For instance, no FM radio.) But, it's a coherent product. Remember though that you're not just Saying No, but discovering requirements that users may not even know to articulate.  
• Differentiate Your Stakeholders.  Related to 'Saying No,' make sure you differentiate between your stakeholders, and try hard not to just grease the squeaky wheel.  

If you're interested in learning more about the concept of product management in general (not just the Web Product Manager), here are some excellent resources:

• How To Be A Good Product Manager: blog
• On Product Management: blog / twitter
• Strategic Product Manager: blog / twitter
• The Cranky PM: blog / twitter
• Tyner Blain: blog 

Feel free to comment below or tweet me if you have any feedback.