What is Product Management?

These short blog posts are intended to target start-up leadership that may be unacquainted with product management as a business discipline. The content isn’t intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. It’s intended to touch on points I’ve seen in my own experience working with startups that either lack product management or are attempting to implement it.

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Product Management Core Competencies & Functional Responsibilities

In the above image, thicker lines and darker colors represent product management's functional core competencies and responsibilities within a start-up organization. As you move from the center [product management], thinner lines and lighter colors represent functions that stray progressively further from those core functions. Grey means you're off-track entirely. If you find your PdMs facilitating implementation or doing documentation, you need to step back and re-evaluate. Saddling your product people and groups with objectively non-product tasks is an anti-pattern to a responsible product management deployment. You will not get the full value out of product management if they are only able to intermittently focus on product's core competencies.

Product management is a business function primarily focused on the conception, development, and continued growth and nurturing of a product. Nested under these business activities are several other typically-product management sub-responsibilities, but many organizations will divide these responsibilities across departments. To me, a traditional product manager is responsible for the following (not intended to be an exhaustive list):

Listening to the Customer

Collecting customer data through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and other channels

Developing Product Plans According to the Customer's Feedback

Customer feedback should drive the strategy and planning for a product. Without it, you're guessing.

Deeply Involved in the Design and Execution of that Data

Yet again, with customer feedback, the PdM designs or otherwise prototypes possibilities and then validates them with customers. The PdM is also deeply involved in the development phase, where they inform engineers/developers of high-level requirements.

Constructing and Executing Launch Plans

The PdM, along with marketing and other groups, participates in the development of press releases, release notes, support planning, and other launch activities.

Checking in with the Product aka Managing its Lifecycle and Business

The PdM then owns the lifecycle, which includes the conception and retirement of products. Knowing when to retire a product is a skill.

"Business" in this case refers to the pricing and costing of a product, the P&L.

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Of course, there is more to product management than this. And indeed, many organizations will add entire roles on top of the PdM function. Many times PdMs are also product owners and project managers. I understand the business logic behind this, the tried and true we-don't-have-enough-money-to-hire-for-these-roles-so-let's-consolidate-them-under-Product. This approach is troubling as the role of product is already a big one. Yet, the tendency is to add more responsibilities and then act surprised when your product group is stretched thin or not giving enough attention to one of their many other responsibilities. There's something to be said about doing a handful of things at an A+ as opposed to doing 50 different things at C- to D+ quality.

If you're serious about becoming a product organization, you need to give PdM the bandwidth to do their job. Engaging with customers is their single most significant, most important, most critical responsibility. If they don't have time for this because they're focused on project management or other business activities, then you're fundamentally missing the mark.

If you're a younger company, a start-up, this is a burning question. In the tech start-up scene, you've likely heard of product managers. You've also likely heard that they're critical pieces to any organization. All true.

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Prevailing Narratives and Misconceptions

The Product Manager is a Mini-CEO

This one gets peddled around a lot. I've never personally loved this idea. And it mostly has to do with how I've seen the PdM role deployed. A PdM can be a mini-CEO of sorts only if the organization allows them to be. Far too often, though, especially in start-up land, a PdM org is rolled out before the CEO is ready to cede that level of control to another group. Until the CEO is ready and willing to do so, your PdM deployment will flop. Guaranteed.

Why? At its core, the introduction of a PdM group is intended to act as a buttress between the CEO's ideation and the reality of your market and resource constraints. It is likewise designed to be a liaison between the business side of your organization and the product development side.

Product Managers Only Manage a Product

Productization can be done to anything in your organization. I've been a product manager over services, internal tools, and even finances. Productization is simply wrapping something in product discipline, which includes giving the "product" a strategy, a roadmap, and a set of customer-driven deliverables.

Product Managers are Part of Sales or Marketing

Sometimes it seems the PdM function is naturally a sales activity. I suppose that's true if you're a purely sales-driven organization. Other times, PdM is embedded in marketing. I don't know if where PdM sits entirely matters so long as PdM is permitted to function independently of those groups. Product management represents the customer. Much like a lawyer representing a client, Product represents everything the customer wants; they fight for them; they speak on their behalf. If embedding the PdM group with sales or marketing disrupts or otherwise compromises PdM's ability to do this, then you need to reconfigure. The flow of information should look like this:

Product Managers vs. Product Owners

I see confusion with this every day. I regularly receive emails from various recruiters, soliciting my interest in product owner roles. This seems to show a fundamental misunderstanding as to what a PdM does and what a PO does. A product manager is your strategy-maker, and your PO - who is typically closely aligned with the PdM - is the executioner of that strategy. The PdM says *what* to do while the PO generally says *how* to do it. I recommend against consolidating the two roles as both are responsibility-laden enough to be more than one full-time job.

Only Product Orgs Need PdMs

This is not true. Any organization has a use for product management. This includes government agencies, school districts, and other entities one may not typically think of as needing product management. If you think about the offerings of these groups, you'll readily see that a city, for example, could benefit from a product management discipline surrounding their IT department, their forestry department, even their police department. Again, productization is taking a thing and giving it the Product treatment, which includes a strategy, a roadmap, and customer-driven (both external or internal) deliverables.

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If you're a start-up that's thinking about adding a product team, beware of these pitfalls in your implementation. If you're a start-up that isn't quite ready for a full team, but you need some product execution, contact me and let's talk about your organization's needs.