The ABC of Product Management in my ideal organisation

Strong opinions, loosely held(if your challenge is worthy)

Please take it with a pinch of salt, this is my personal opinion and view derived from what I have heard, seen, read and listened to over the past couple of years. The reason for this writing is actually that we as a product community could start to a little bit align the understanding of what product management is all about. There have been many books written about it, so it is only fair that in the land of unicorns we will have a community driven hunt for a common understanding of what the fuss is all about.

This article is written in a way that there are ten questions that will be answered and they will give my understanding of it. The questions are very basic, but I’ll try to go a bit further with the explaining.

My ask to you: Please read the answers of the questions and if you strongly disagree with any viewpoint, please challenge it in the comments!

What exactly is a "product"?

Our brains are funny, that when a somewhat abstract & subjective word is used, we will all associate it with very different things. For me the definition of product = “Value driving mechanism”. The beauty of using this short definition is that you can substitute it into a sentence and then it makes so much more sense.

Value driving mechanism manager.

Value driving mechanism roadmap

Makes a bit more sense, doesn’t it? Now when we put it like that, a value driving mechanism is anything that will drive the value to the customer.

Why do we need product management at all?

Product management is not a job per se, it is a function that exists when we are trying to provide value to customers. As the organisation grows from two people to ten and from there to a hundred, we need to make sure that we are actually driving value.

The organisation is quite often capable of aligning on putting out fires. So to say reactive work. Sales people sell, customers get onboarded, customers complain about things, we have our engineers fix things and so it goes…

Product management as a discipline in its extremes is there to draw the boundaries and make sure that the organisation is moving forward, even if there are some fires left behind. PS! Don’t worry about the 127 bug reports, we are going to sunset this product by end of March anyway.

What fundamental problem does product management solve?

While the engineers and designers are trying to figure out how we are going to solve the problem, product management is all about understanding all of the problem-space(a collection of problems) and bringing attention to the problems worth solving.

So the fundamental problem is, that while most of the organisation is looking either in front of their eyes or is dreaming, product management is the one scouting making sure that the organisation moves in the correct direction.

Who is a product manager? (role definition in simplest terms)

A value driving mechanism manager. This person is here to make sure that what we do actually provides value to the customer.

I believe there are numerous types of products, thus they require a different “product manager”.

0 to 1

Companies do not launch new verticals or new products within the vertical that often. Usually what I have seen is that this is handled by the founders, as they were the ones figuring out the initial product, but in bigger organisations it already is with a specific product manager. Starting a product and getting it from 0 to 1 requires a lot of decisions and many of them are not even what we traditionally call “product decisions”. There is no discussion of what you are optimising for, it is about getting to 1 as fast as company standards allow.

Internal / backend

Most companies have some kind of operations. Whether it’s due to regulatory reasons or just servicing the customers, building for internal customers is very different, because the work is towards cost-efficiency & quality.

General

These people are general managers of the product. Everything that revolves around their product, they are capable of understanding and making sure that everybody else understands as well.

Efficiency & quality

When you scale fast, the product might get really sluggish, as it’s pretty much a constant fire extinguishing every day. At one point in order to start going for break-even or turning profit, there needs to be a vision on how to making things efficient and higher quality, so they do not break down.

Customer-facing

Although customer interviews are the backbone of product management, not all product managers get to build products that are customer facing. This requires a great understanding of user experience, eye for detail and the capability of putting yourself in the shoes of the customer. Not all can do it…

Most probably there are more types of product managers. Let me know what other types do you see there are!

PS! When you are in a smaller company, you might have to do everything and it will be chaos. Enjoy!

What is the core essence of product management work?

I believe there are four pillars of product management work:

• Business

• Customer

• Design(User experience)

• Engineering(solution)

Whoever is the leader of the product in the organisation, needs to make sure that what we are building is something that the customers are willing to buy, brings them value, is usable and it works.

I deliberately set the bar very low. The expectation that a single product manager can nail all aspects of the product is ridonkulous.

I would even go as far as to say that a good product manager is mediocre on all of those aspects at best, but the combination of being mediocre on all of those aspects is what makes it a killer combo.

How does a product manager create value?

Product managers create value by enabling others to create value. There is quite a lot of maker’s work in the daily life of a product manager, whether it is interviewing customers, rolling sleeves up to dig deep in the data, visualising the prototype, crunching math behind the product… but it all comes down to if all of that maker's work will enable designers to visualise a beautiful solution that the customers will want and help engineers understand how it will work for the customers.

What makes product management different from other business functions?

I would say that product management is the glue between all of the business functions that helps deliver the value to the customer. Somebody needs to make sure that everything around the product makes sense. The maker’s work so to say is about making sure that there is enough glue and duct tape where tearing is most likely to happen.

Why can't organisations succeed without product management?

Tech organisations very well can succeed without a product manager, but not without product management. This means that the discipline itself is split and divided over all areas impacting the product.

In such cases usually the scouting and understanding of where we are going is coming much more from the founders. I like to say that engineering in such cases is the last line of defence. They have to ask a lot of questions & challenge the person who is scouting - is this what we are building actually going to solve a problem for the customer or not.

What does success look like in product management?

Janika said it really well - “But the end goal is to make sure things are in a better place than they were before you”.

Even if you come in like a wrecking ball(sometimes necessary), it’s the question of whether things are better than they were before you started working on the product. When there is great product management in presence, everybody will feel it, it’s the reasoning and understanding of why we are doing it and an overall greater responsibility in front of the customer.

A good easy metric is that with great product management if you ask around, the people should be saying that they are feeling that they are close to customers and are actually solving real problems.

How does product management bring customers and business together?

The backbone of product management is customer interviews. This is the main source of insight for the whole organisation and it is the responsibility of product management is to first of all make sure that these interviews are done and then that they are actually analysed and thought through from the aspect of what it means for the business.