This article was written by the original owner of startupguide.com, Ryan Allis, and published on his website in 2012. Read more about why Ryan was happy to hand over his website domain to us here.

In addition to setting up key systems and establishing standards of practice for managing your employees, you need to learn how to make the most out of your product. In this section, we dive into several systems that can help you not only manage your product, but improve upon it in real-time.

Product management is the process of defining what you’re building in advance of building it, assembling the team and then building that product. As a profession, it employs many people. You might see hundreds of product managers in a company like Google or Microsoft, and maybe even thousands.

From my experience as a product manager/CEO at iContact for the first few years, and then here at Connect, I’ve learned that there are two management-style extremes in product development.

On one end, there is the controller, the maniacal dictator who says: “This is my vision and nothing else will be taken into consideration as I build this product.” Then, on the other, there is the “design by committee” approach where there’s no strong leader at all and all the decisions are made in a ten-, fifteen- or twenty-person committee.

At that stage, you often get very little innovation as you end up aligning with the lowest common denominator, with no real inspired thinking.

The goal of a great product manager is to be at the right place in the spectrum between those two extremes: between the maniacal, singular, controlled vision and the gathering input from multiple stakeholders vision.

Read also: How to be a great leader

As a product manager, you want to be in what I call the “green zone,” where you have strong, focused leadership and strong, focused vision, but you also take the time to incorporate feedback from the right people.

Who are the right people? The right people are the particular examples of customers who may be using your future product, and the select people within your organization who can contribute to your ability to create a great product. But it’s important to keep those numbers few, and keep your leadership and vision strong in order to end up with a truly innovative product.

It’s also important to define and understand the external personas that you will listen to as you build your product.

For example, if you’re building an email marketing product like we built at iContact, you would define four or five key personas who might use it. We would often give them names. One of ours was a small business owner who had maybe five or six employees and often tried to do the marketing himself or herself.

When you create your personas, you need to understand the demographic and psychographic factors and give them human identities. As you develop your products, you can ask yourself, what would Joe, or Betty, or Bob think about this?

Who are the right people? The right people are the particular examples of customers who may be using your future product, and the select people within your organization who can contribute to your ability to create a great product. But it’s important to keep those numbers few, and keep your leadership and vision strong in order to end up with a truly innovative product.

It’s also important to define and understand the external personas that you will listen to as you build your product.

For example, if you’re building an email marketing product like we built at iContact, you would define four or five key personas who might use it. We would often give them names. One of ours was a small business owner who had maybe five or six employees and often tried to do the marketing himself or herself.

When you create your personas, you need to understand the demographic and psychographic factors and give them human identities. As you develop your products, you can ask yourself, what would Joe, or Betty, or Bob think about this?

With product design, you want to be slightly right of center – a little bit closer to the maniacal side. It’s better to have a strong vision and be slightly controlling than to be completely unsure about the product you’re trying to build and the change you wish to create with it in the world.

But you also want to have a little balance.

The next part of product management is understanding that a great product owner must be absolutely passionate. Great product development only happens when the person who is owning that product and seeing it through to reality is absolutely passionate about the change they wish to manifest in the world.

When passion is lacking in products, a company’s sales will go flat. When a CEO, a leader, is no longer passionate (or perhaps was never passionate) about the company’s mission and purpose, the sales results and that company’s profitability and stock price will go flat or go down.

To me, the leading indicator of a lack of success in a company is a lack of passion at the executive levels. If you can build a company where the executives are passionate, and the CEO and board and investors are passionate about the change they’re trying to create, you will see amazing shareholder return if you can combine that passion with execution.

One of the most valuable things we ever did at iContact was put in place real time, visible dashboards. You can use tools like GeckoBoard or KissMetrics, or more complex tools like Salesforce.com. Here are the main dashboards we had at iContact:

Within our Salesforce.com CRM tool we had over 30 dashboards, ranging from marketing dashboards to a dashboard tracking our volunteering activities through a tool called VolunteerForce.

At the very least, you should have a dashboard that is displayed on a flat screen TV somewhere in your office that shows basic information like how many customers you have, your monthly sales, and how many new customers you added that month.

If you don’t know how many customers you have and how many customers you added per month to date, you should start tracking this most basic data. Even in a brick-and-mortar business like a florist shop or a restaurant, you should know how many new and repeat customers you get in a month.

When iContact acquired the event marketing tool Ettend.com in April 2010 from entrepreneur Rick Reich, the first thing I asked Rick to do after the transaction was put in place an improved dashboard that could show me at a glance how the business was performing.

I’ve found there to be a correlation between companies that have real-time, or near real-time, visible metrics displayed in their office and companies that are wildly successful and reach lists like INC 500 and can raise outside investment capital.

Set up your system of dashboards while your company is small so that you can manage the business effectively as you grow.

By the time you get to six employees, it’s time to install a basic tool for keeping track of your customers and contacts. At iContact we used Salesforce.com for our CRM tool as well as our Sales Force Automation (SFA) tool.

Other options include Nimble, Zoho CRM, Highrise, SugarCRM, and Batchbook. You can also use your email marketing tool as a basic CRM system.

Regardless of what you use, your customer list and prospect list is gold. Make sure you are collecting information on who your customers are – whether they purchase through the web, by catalog, or at a store.

To grow your business, you need to be able to get in touch with your existing customers and find out how to convince them to spend money with your business.

Finally, we’ll talk briefly about building great software. I have a lot to learn still about building great software, but I’ve learned some great lessons from building up iContact to 300 employees, and at one point having a ninety-person tech team.

In my experience, great software is built using a methodology called “agile development,” in which you’re able to be responsive and reflexive to the customer’s needs and the demands of the marketplace, and you’re able to release updates at least every two months, if not every month or even every two weeks. In some companies, they release every day.

This is a departure from the prior methodology of product development known as “waterfall,” where you would write a very long product requirements document (PRD) and then take six, nine, or twelve months to come out with a new iteration of the product.

Agile development is also made possible by the internet, which allows you to deploy software overnight in just a few minutes instead of having to ship out a bunch of CDs.

You also want to make sure that your code is test-driven and has quality assurance built in and automated throughout it. You want to do your programming in something called “object-oriented” (OOP), where you create templates and you’re able to make those templates talk to each other rather than creating long scripts that are very complicated to understand or bring new developers and engineers into.

You also want a development team that under-commits and over-delivers and factors in the time it’s going to take for bug tracking, bug fixing, quality assurance, scalability, and security.

Finally, you want to make sure you have clear code that’s easy to understand for new developers that you bring into a project, and standards that any engineer can understand.

Main photo: Unplash/ Kaleidico

*This article was originally published on October 17th, 2018 and updated on December 10th, 2018.