Product management in the large technology companies such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Google, et. al. is well-established, taken for granted and unquestioned. The role of product manager in those organizations already has proven its worth and is a regular part of the business value cycle.

It is a different story when you find yourself as a product manager in a small or medium size technology company, or a technology start-up. In many instances, small technology business will be driven by the latest & greatest cool things that the development team has cooked up or has added to an existing product line, without the protocol and process of a product plan, requirements and specifications.

Although this is quite common, there is a method to add value to that business model from the position of product manager by bringing order to the chaos, structure to the madness and the clear vision of a roadmap.

Certainly it has been my experience that having a technology background is very helpful in these situations. It helps to be able to integrate with the core development teams and speak the lingo. Begin by spending time with the developers in informal settings both at their desks and outside of the office. This is not the time to talk about adding processes, overhead to their daily overwelmed schedules or about your vision. Instead, find out what their favorite programming languages are, ask if .NET has better garbage collection than Java, and find out which XBox game they play in the evening.

Although I am only speaking of initial relationships with development for this posting, it should be noted that a good product manager makes a point of fostering and building solid company-wide relationships with ALL groups throughout his or her career. No matter what the size of the comany, your job of building product strategy with product plans and requirements mandates a full & complete understanding of your company's sales, services, support, strategy and development needs. We'll touch on customers and partners another time.

A good strategy for putting rubber to the road after taking the time to creating trust and understanding with development is to take all of those inputs from your meetings and coalesce them into a product plan. This document is best free-form as opposed to using a software technology product at this point. Save those data entry efforts for requirements, specs and version tracking.

The output of a product plan will result in your walking-around product vision presentation. This should be vetted with your product group first, approved by the execs and then take an hour with a lunch in the office with development leads. Present the vision as a draft, make it informal, and gather feedback. Your next step will be to dress it up and lock it down.

Bottom-line: in technology companies that are not currently market-driven, creating a strategy and implementing a product manager's vision is a daunting challenge and must be approached from the perspective of slowly building a product infrastructure from the ground-up. It will take time, patience and persitence. But remember to gain the organizational trust and respect by listening and incorporating all feedback.