Product Management Tips: Use a Wiki for Product Management

If you aren’t using a wiki for product management already, start now. Using an enterprise-internal wiki has enormous benefits for product managers in particular and for their company as a whole.

New series: Using a Wiki for Product Management. This week we’re starting a series of posts about the benefits of using a wiki for product management and how to use a wiki most effectively.

A Wiki Provides Transparency from Product Management to the Company

Generally speaking, product management should have no secrets. Product management’s overriding goal is to have everyone companywide on the same page so that engineering, QA, product management, sales, marketing, and support are all cooperating smoothly in the service of customers, the company, and its mission. Therefore, except for very rare situations (such as prior knowledge of an upcoming layoff, for example), a product manager should be eager to share everything they know with everyone in the company who’s willing to listen. The wiki is an efficient way to do that.

A Wiki Increases a Product Manager’s Productivity by Preventing Repeat Questions

The product manager is like the conductor of an orchestra. He or she has to make sure everyone knows what songs to play in what order, is playing from the same musical scores, and is coordinating among themselves to achieve a harmonious result. For this reason, people in other functional units are constantly asking product management questions. Engineering wants to know how important various customer bug reports are. Sales wants to know what new features will be available when. Marketing wants to know how much emphasis they should put on each feature. When product managers are diligent about putting information in the wiki and pointing people to the wiki when the ask questions in person, by phone, or by email, people learn to check the wiki for answers first and the amount of time the product manager spends on repeat answers to questions is reduced.

A Wiki Increases EVERYONE’S Productivity by Making It Easy to Find Answers

In a properly organized and maintained wiki, anyone can start at the top of the wiki and quickly browse their way to find the answer to any question whose answer is contained within the wiki. Because anyone can edit the content of any wiki page and its links, wikis facilitate the emergence of a folksonomy for organizing and categorizing information in a way that the target audience finds natural and intuitive. Instead of relying on a central ontologist and that person’s own beliefs about how information should be organized, a wiki gives everyone the power to add links on a page to other pages they consider related and thereby to influence the ultimate folksonomy.

Because a single wiki page can link to and be linked to by more than one other wiki page, it’s easy to flexibly cross-link among pages, making quick discovery of related content easy. In traditional taxonomies (and in operating system and content management system directories that were commonly used when documents were posted directly to internal web servers), an entry was ideally supposed to exist in a single category. This caused problems for categorizing and finding items that naturally “fit” into more than one category. (Is a flying boat a plane or a boat?) In a wiki, the “plane” and the “boat” pages can both link to the “PBY Catalina Flying Boat” page, which can in turn link to the page on FAA certification, the pages on air and water safety, the current list of open issues, and so on. Because people with no knowledge of HTML can easily edit a page to a add a cross-link, it’s much more likely that such helpful cross-links will emerge in a wiki than on a traditional HTML-based controlled intranet.

A person should also be able to use the search feature to quickly identify the page with the information they are seeking. So wikis support both those who like to browse and those who like to search.

A Wiki Encourages Participation By All

An enterprise-internal wiki makes it easy for any employee to correct an error on any page or add new information. There’s really no excuse for failing to get involved in editing, maintaining, and improving the wiki. You just read, click, edit, and save. You don’t need to know HTML. Therefore, adopting a wiki helps to create an empowered, participatory culture within a company instead of a top-down command and control culture. In reality, for various reasons, a fraction of your employees will tend to do most of the editing, but everyone will know they are empowered and feel free to edit when they wish to.

A Wiki Makes It Easy to Train a New Product Manager

A product manager joining a company must learn a vast amount of information almost overnight. They have to understand the products, their features, the benefits the features provide, the target market for each feature, the competitors and their products and features and the competitive positioning for each, the needs of current customers and prospects, known issues and the state of each one, the product road map, and so on. When the team has been diligent about posting relevant information into the internal wiki, it’s easy to train new product managers. You start by pointing them to the wiki!

A Wiki Eases Handoffs When a Product Manager Transfers or Leaves the Company

In larger companies, product managers sometimes transfer internally from one product to another, creating a need to hand off responsibility for their previous product to another product manager. Responsibility for products and components are also sometimes reassigned within a team. In these situations, having all the information captured in a wiki can speed the previous product manager’s transition out and shorten the time for a new product manager to become productive.

The departure of a product manager from a company can create enormous risk and cost if the product manager kept all the important information about current issues in their head. When a product manager is diligent about putting information into the wiki, they can leave for their next role with a clean conscience knowing that others will be able to smoothly take over the work they were doing.

A Wiki is Great for Capturing the Current State of an Issue

Any time a new issue comes up (e.g. “we need to improve scalability / performance / error handling …”), the product manager can create a new wiki page to track that issue. Investigations on complex, low-priority, or ongoing issues often last a year or more. Capturing all your thinking in the wiki means you can always go back to the page for that issue, quickly refresh your memory, and pick up where you left off.

A Wiki Scales Without Limit

Over time, the number of your company’s products may increase. The number of releases per product will grow. And the number of issues being tracked per product will grow. The number of employees who need to learn about all of these things will grow. A wiki scales on these and all other axes beautifully. You can just create a new page for each product, release, or issue as needed.

Get Started with a Wiki Now!

Numerous hosted and on-premise wikis are available. If your company hasn’t started using an enterprise internal wiki already, start now! If your company has a wiki but your product management organization isn’t taking full advantage of it, dive right in.

Related Posts

• Product Management Tips: Write It Down and Share It!
• Taking Over a Product Management Team: Your To Do List

For More Information

• Seibert Media has written an excellent post “111 Reasons why you need an Enterprise Wiki.” Read it!