How Product Managers Are Changing Nonprofit Technology

Steven St. John, for The Chronicle

Technology projects at nonprofits often follow a well-worn pattern. Leaders develop a set of requirements, hand them to a contractor, and then have to live with the decisions they made — right or wrong — until it’s time to rebuild the website or database and start the process all over again.

But a few innovative charities are short-circuiting that tendency to take on the same unwieldy project every few years. They are adopting a strategy that’s standard at technology companies: product management.

Product management looks at technology as a living thing, always changing, requiring constant upkeep, but rewarding you for your labor, says Rey Faustino, founder and chief executive of One Degree, a nonprofit that operates an online social-service directory.

“It provides for you,” he says. “You provide for it.”

The methodology combines management philosophies popular in software development, like Lean and Agile, that aim to quickly launch and then continually improve a “product.” A product manager — while not necessarily a technical person — leads a team of engineers, designers, and other staff to determine what would best serve the people who use the technology, weigh the value of new features, and guide technical staff to build and release what’s most important, using limited resources for the most good over time.

Having a product manager on staff allows everyone in an organization to focus on what they do best, says Sam Dorman, a technology consultant who started the website the Product Team Approach to spread the idea among nonprofits. A product manager is able to take a holistic view of what matters most to the organization and frees fundraisers, communications staff, and program officials from leading technology projects from the side of their desks.

“It’s so common-sense, but it’s not common,” says Mr. Dorman.

Product managers are responsible for seeing how different parts of the organization work together on a set of technologies. That perspective can be their greatest contribution to the groups they serve. Having one person who understands how each decision affects the organization’s goals gives nonprofits with product managers a single point of accountability for strategic technology decisions and ongoing improvements.

The Center for Action and Contemplation, a Christian education nonprofit, saw those benefits firsthand when it hired a product manager last year as the group moved its donor and customer databases to a new system.

“Normally we would just outsource that to some firm who would build it, and every once in a while we would pay an arm and a leg in getting it updated,” says Michael Poffenberger, executive director at the center, which has an annual budget of $3.2 million.

Instead, the center brought on Ananda Robie to oversee the transition and determine what each department in the 25-person organization needed from the new system. She developed the order in which departments would adopt the new software, based on which would get the most benefit immediately.

First up: the customer-service department, which went from a single, shared email box to a system that includes automatic responses, issue tracking, and templated answers to common inquiries.

Those changes halved the time representatives spend on each inquiry from a customer, says Mr. Poffenberger. The new system allows the customer-service department and the organization’s leaders to see inefficiencies and quickly adjust for even greater gains.

Ms. Robie says this success — and the likelihood of replicating it in other departments — wouldn’t have been possible without someone in her position coordinating the effort.

“We wouldn’t have had the staff investment,” she says. “People really are ready. There’s a huge amount of pride and ownership” in the new system and its success.

Working for ‘Every Department’

Roles like Ms. Robie’s, though, can be fraught. Product managers’ hardest task often isn’t overseeing development of a new or improved tech tool but rather setting priorities for what to develop to achieve both immediate impact and long-term benefit. That can be challenging: Projects that staff or leaders are passionate about may get put on the back burner.

Often, product managers don’t directly oversee staff or belong to any one department. That’s why communication is key, and being territorial can bring about disaster.

“I view myself as a member of every department at this organization,” Ms. Robie says.

The good news for nonprofits that want to add a product manager to their staff is they may already have an employee who fits the bill.

“It’s really identifying the people who are asking the right questions about their technology, even if they wouldn’t describe themselves as technologists,” says Jacob Worrell, former chief digital-product officer at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Mr. Worrell, who’s now with Provoc, a marketing agency that works with nonprofits, came up through IAVA’s digital-engagement department and became product manager for the website, supervising two other product managers working on membership software and the organization’s database.

While a basic understanding of technical architecture and development is necessary, he says, a view of the whole organization, a hunger to learn, and an eye for creating efficiencies are more important requirements for the job.

A key example is how the veterans charity — which reported about $7.3 million in revenue in 2014 — changed how it presents its annual member survey and other research, Mr. Worrell says.

Not long ago, the group would conduct the research itself, then pay $20,000 or more for a contractor to build an online presentation of the results. Each year, the process would be repeated, creating web pages that didn’t connect to the rest of the organization’s site and, over time, became “liabilities,” Mr. Worrell says.

Taking a product-based approach and thinking about the reports as an integral part of the existing website, he built a tool so anyone on the communications staff could quickly publish research in a common template. The data is now collected on one page. As the need for additional capabilities arises, the nonprofit makes a small investment of $1,000 to build a new tool rather than paying much more for a one-off presentation.

“We’re not only saving the organization money on web development over the long term, we’re making the organization more efficient,” Mr. Worrell says.

That’s why Paul Rieckhoff, the charity’s founder, says he’s willing to spend about a seventh of its budget on technology and the product teams — and he’d like to spend more: “The product teams are an incredible return on investment, arguably our best.”

Assembling a Team

The technical talent needed to execute a product manager’s vision doesn’t come cheap, and Mr. Rieckhoff and other nonprofit leaders say finding donors and foundations willing to pay for product-management and developer positions can be a challenge.

Organizations handle staffing for technical labor in different ways. The Center for Action and Contemplation, for example, hired Ms. Robie full time to make some fixes and set work priorities, but it contracted out heavy development work to Mr. Dorman, the technology consultant, and his firm. (The center has since concluded it was better off going all in and added six new full-time staff members to its product team.) Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans has a four-person development firm on retainer to do 50 hours of work each month on the group’s main site, with full-time employees and consultants working on other products.

At One Degree, Mr. Faustino made his first hire a chief technology officer — not an easy call for what was, at the time, a one-person outfit.

“I wanted to bring on someone who had the technical skills and the ability to build products but was enough of a generalist to work on the design of it and the product management — but more importantly, someone who could be a visionary,” he says.

Stretching Tight Budgets

Since then, the team at One Degree, which has a budget of $1.2 million for its current fiscal year, has grown to eight people, including a second engineer and a user-experience expert.

“We say we don’t hire until it hurts,” Mr. Faustino says. That’s partially because of fundraising but also to make sure the organization maintains peak efficiency by only adding the position that’s most needed and only when the time is ripe. And it means making hard choices on priorities — there’s no shortage of new ideas, but there is always a limit to what the group can do.

That’s ultimately what product management is about, and it’s not just for web-based start-ups like Mr. Faustino’s. It’s taking limited resources and applying them to continually improve what you have, learn what works, and make the most efficient use of development resources. A donor database that’s never tested or improved, or any other service that’s built and forsaken, quickly loses its value.

“The minute you stop investing your time and your money and your focus, it starts to die,” Mr. Dorman says. “It hampers your ability to have the kind of impact you’re trying to have.”