The scope of product managers

Does product management need to be redefined as it is today (2024)?

I personally believe we got the product manager role wrong as it stands today. We tried to fit a full function into a single role. We attempt to describe the job of a product manager the way you would that of a salesperson or an accountant. But there's a big difference: most people agree on what the typical responsibilities of a salesperson or an accountant are. They commonly have a very clear beginning and end, and while there may be variation from company to company, for the most part the core of what they do is something most of us agree on.

The same is not true for product managers. If you put a group of product managers together or recruiters trying to hire one or managers trying to decide whether to promote or fire a product manager, they will very likely disagree on the aspects to assess. I think this is why we find so many analogies out there attempting to simplify the definition of product management, but let’s be honest: there’s nothing simple about product management.

My least favorite analogy and the most frequently heard is that the product manager is the mini-CEO of the product, but this definition is like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Yes, both roles, the product manager and the CEO, work amidst a lot of uncertainty. One important difference is that the CEO has more wiggle room to play around with options and decisions and, yes, sometimes they do report to investors, but this is not always the case. The product manager, however, is always an employee with at least a level of management above them (often more) that they are accountable to. 

Overworked Product Manager trying to get ahead by the illusion of multitasking. [This image was created using Copilot Designer for Bing.]

No wonder so many product managers are cutting corners. They are the square pegs. In my opinion we see this manifested in different ways. Most commonly, we see product managers with an unchecked egos making decisions without being well informed, and without trusting their peers in their specific areas of expertise, when instead they should be building relationships to work with all the functions that are involved in making a product successful. Another way in which we see it is in decent humans trying to make do with what they are given, and the consequences are poor health individuals burning out. A third way in which this is manifested is product managers resorting to decisions by committee, and the outcomes are products that try to solve all problems and solve none well (I have been at least 2 of these if not all 3).

Simply search for “product management memes” and you will see what I’m talking about. I think this is what happens when you give an employee the responsibilities of a CEO without the power (or reward$).

So what is the solution to this problem? I think we need to take a step back and redefine the function of product management. I suspect that in the process we will find ourselves with a scope of work that would be better off split into different roles.

If we all agree that the responsibility of product management is to identify market opportunities and to build solutions for these opportunities in the form of products that solve market problems that make a business feasible, you will see that we're talking here about is the reason  why a business exists… So should we call the product manager a business owner, instead? 

That is perhaps why I can align more to the idea that a product manager is more like a general manager, and perhaps why many believe that great product managers tend to be people who have built businesses themselves.

Now, one of the challenges this presents is in the typical position the product manager occupies in an organization and its relationship to other functions. A business or general manager typically has other functions reporting to them, but the product manager doesn't. Is that why successful product managers tend to be highly emotionally intelligent individuals with great business acumen? Because they are able to empathize, negotiate and align others even without a formal reporting line? 

In the face of these issues I have two alternative solutions to propose (theoretically, that is, as I am currently not leading a product management team to experiment with these ideas):

1. We redefine the skills required for product management to be centered around soft skills just like you would with a CEO, a role that requires skills such as adaptability, negotiation, decision-making, emotional intelligence, etc. In the process of adopting these we drop the overly simplistic idea that product managers are people with a set of skills where design, engineering and business overlap, and we put at the center of the technical skills required for product management market analysis and corporate finance, and add, as a bonus, specific industry knowledge. 

2. The alternative thing to do is stop treating product management as a set of activities that can be performed by a single individual and instead divide them into, for example, a combination of market researchers, project managers and delivery managers. 

Let me end with a set of questions to, hopefully, get us to debate:

Does product management need to be redefined as it is today? Should we split the role into a variety of existing roles and see what gaps are still left to be filled? Do we need to create new roles? Or do we need to empower existing product managers more and increase the scale of risk they can take together with the rewards they could rip off?