5 Things Product Management Isn’t
Jeff Gothelf
Teaching executives to simplify prioritization and decision-making by putting the customer first.
Product management as a profession has grown up and become a critical part of modern digital product development practice. There is a fluidity though around what a product manager is and what we should expect of them on the job. In reality, each organization molds their product managers to fit their domain, industry, market, corporate politics, regulations, technology and culture. The result is that a product manager from Citibank doesn’t look exactly like a product manager from Zalando who, in turn, doesn’t look exactly like a product manager from Netflix. This does not, however, mean that there aren’t similarities between the company-specific roles. These similarities manifest in the various things we expect product managers to do. There are an infinite number of articles on those similarities. This month’s newsletter will focus, instead, on the explicit things product managers should NOT be expected to do, regardless of corporate culture or environment.?
PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE NOT PROJECT MANAGERS
Project managers, in the traditional sense, are tasked with putting together a predictable plan for an initiative. They scope out budgets, timelines, necessary resources and combine that into a visualization (Gantt chart anyone?) that provides a level of comfort for leaders of when the work will be completed and how much it will cost. In contrast, product managers deal in the reality of digital product development. They embrace the uncertainty that comes with building continuous systems in a market defined by continuous change.?They manage to outcomes ?– not a predefined set of features – ensuring that the positive impact on customers is the ultimate measure of success. Like project managers, they work to set proper expectations but unlike them, they regularly inject doubt into these plans.?
PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE NOT JIRA JOCKEYS
A product manager is responsible for helping the team prioritize their work. The tool the team uses to prioritize their work, be it JIRA, Trello, a physical board, spreadsheet, etc, is irrelevant. It’s a means to an end. Too many organizations define product management as the management of the project management tool (I know, that’s a lot of “management” in there). The value of a product manager should not be measured by how many cards they can move into the “Done” column (or the “Done Done” column?).?Their goal is not to drive the velocity of delivery . If a product manager’s worth is defined by how well they can manipulate Azure DevOps, the organization has lost the thread on why they have PdM’s in the first place.?
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PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE NOT PRODUCT OWNERS
PM? PO? What’s the difference anyway? The truth is there shouldn’t be a difference at all. You’ll often hear a company say, “Our PO’s are internally focused while our PM’s are externally focused.” This just means that there is a handoff from the people who do market research and speak to customers to the people who do the delivery of the work. Why would we separate those two responsibilities? Scrum gifted us the role of Product Owner without reconciling it explicitly with the role of product manager. PM’s are not PO’s because the role of PO is extraneous on a modern, cross-functional team.?
PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE NOT ACTUAL MANAGERS
The word “manager” in the job title should indicate some level of authority. In the case of product managers, it doesn’t. Product managers don’t lead with authority.?They are not the “CEO’s of the product.” ?This is one of the hardest parts of being a PM. You have to lead through influence, data, evidence and?compelling storytelling . If you’re taking a PM role because you think it will give you management experience, you’ll be disappointed. It will, however, give you leadership experience and that is far more valuable.?
PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE NOT FORTUNE TELLERS
“Tell us what to build! You’re the PM after all.” Many PM’s feel this pressure. Once someone has the title “product manager” we expect them to know, without a doubt, what features to prioritize, the best way to go to market and how much ROI we should expect. Sadly, PM’s are human. They cannot predict the future. The best they can do is make an educated guess. We should expect that from them. We should expect?hypotheses driven by market and customer research . What we shouldn’t expect is a 100% success rate. If we expect that, we’re setting our product managers up to fail.?
Product management is at an interesting inflection point. It’s a key component of modern digital teams and yet the variability between companies and responsibilities is still enormous. If we can’t agree on exactly what a product manager does because of that variability, at the very least we can agree on the things we don’t expect our PdM’s to do. This was the beginning of that effort. What else would you say Product Managers shouldn’t be expected to do? Share your thoughts in the comments.?
Senior Product Manager at Massive Bio | Spearheading product launches with a fusion of engineering and marketing insights.
7 个月“Product managers are not project managers” This is a real black hole. Although the outcomes and responsibilities of these roles are different, companies not defining the roles clearly contributes to the confusion. Managers who criticize product managers for their project management skills, or the other way around.
Head of Technical Product Management @ Amazon | Ex-SVP at Goldman Sachs | NYU Professor | Book Author
2 年Nicely said, Jeff! A lot of familiar anti-patterns there. What about Product Managers are not status reporters? Development team pushers? Roadmap schedulers? Customer pleasers?
AI Product Leader @ Zendesk ? Building autonomous AI agents for customer service
2 年I believe there is a set of underlying principles and practices that define a modern product management ideal. Many of those are referenced in your article. And they are what allows product managers to move between industries and sectors, and operate in vastly different environments, with the obvious caveat that some areas require specialist knowledge or are highly regulated (e.g., government, medical tech, hardware, manufacturing, etc.). On top of those, however, come the expectations of these varied businesses that demand narrow specialization & often seek to impose a way of working that is misaligned with these core principles and practices. Sometimes this is a matter of habit, so companies will treat product managers as backlog managers because that's simply what they're used to from before. Other times it's a serious lack of knowledge and awareness on the management level, where no one has had real exposure to product management work. For example, this often leads to businesses seeking to promote or hire "subject matter experts" into product management roles, with the tacit understanding that domain experts are best places to, as you reference, tell people what to build.
Senior Director Product Management at Aptean
2 年True! Product Manager is not a management role rather a leadership role. While they are not Project Managers or Product Owners they also wear many hats in small companies just like everyone else.
Author | Educator | Principal Consultant | Enterprise Architect | Program/Project Manager | Business Architect
2 年Let's divorce the role from the actor. People focused on what you identify as within the purview of the PM are doing product management. However, successful initiatives require something akin to project management, as well as any number of other disciplines. Isn't it possible (if not probable) that someone with PM and technology skills could add more value than someone with only one of the two. When so much effort needs to go into ensuring constructive collaboration, eliminating a link might add value.