Why Tools Are Not the?Answer

As a proud member of the startup nation, startups are all around me. I see them everywhere, and apparently, they see me too. Every now and then, early-stage founders approach me to hear about their product idea and give them feedback. This mostly happens with products related to the product space itself — products for product managers and product teams.

I have recently seen a significant increase in such requests. It could be that now is the golden age of tools for product people — either because of the economic situation which puts efficiency and effectiveness back on the map, or even as a byproduct of Marty Cagan’s book ‘Empowered’ that sets a new standard for product teams. Or it could be that these ideas were always there and I just get exposed to more of them nowadays. Either way, I feel that many people are trying to solve the problems of product teams.

On the one hand, that’s great. My mission is to help product leaders and their companies grow, so I’m happy to see that others are contributing to this as well. But on the other hand, this is a risky direction. Putting tools in place could make you feel as if you are making progress in the right direction, but if you just add tools you might be treating the symptoms and not the disease.

This is what I tell the founders that consult with me — that to really solve the problem that they are looking to solve, a tool is not enough. Tools alone cannot be the answer. Here are a few reasons why.

The Product Manager’s Job Is to Think

That’s what makes the role so great, and so hard. There is no right or wrong answer. We need to look at multiple inputs, with many unknowns, and decide what to do despite the complexity.

Tools can help us do that. They can help with giving us inputs that we don’t necessarily have otherwise (for example find a correlation between data points or give us easy access to data that we otherwise wouldn’t bother digging). But tools cannot replace the hard part.

Tools, for example, can highlight correlations, but not causations. Understanding what the data tells us and what it means moving forward is still on us. Adding structure with a productivity tool is great, but if the team doesn’t work well together, the tool will not resolve that.

This is even riskier: A tool might make you feel as if you are doing your job just by working with the tool. For example, if your user stories are all in place and adhere to a certain structure, you might think you are done. But the real work isn’t with the tool, the real work is what happens before and after, and stirs the decisions that you need to make (and then reflect in the tool).

The product manager’s role isn’t keeping things in order. It’s making sense of things, and that’s a huge difference.

Not Everything Can Be Modeled in Data

Data is a major factor in your ability to do your job — no one questions that. The more data the merrier, up to a certain point where it adds more noise than value. A tool that gives you more data, easily, and helps connect the dots might be extremely useful.

But here, too, a tool in and of itself won’t do the trick. First, the product manager needs to understand that they need to look for data in general, and for data of that specific kind so that they even want to use the tool. For example, let’s imagine a tool that digs into customer communication and gives you insight into specific things they talk about. Unfortunately, many product managers don’t realize that qualitative data is important no less and sometimes more than quantitative data. So to even want to use the tool, you must first understand that this kind of data could be useful for you. Just having the tool in front of you won’t do that.

There is another dangerous pitfall here too: with so much data at your fingertips, you might think that you are making the decision with full knowledge. But in product management that is never true. If you treat your data as if it represents the world accurately and fully, you will make a decision based on wrong assumptions. To use data smartly, you must understand its limits. Tools usually won’t help you understand the boundaries, the opposite might be true.

One specific important example is to always remember that data cannot come instead of talking to customers directly. Even if I get a digital brain dump of all the conversations that anyone else in the company had with a certain customer, as a product manager I would still be getting only part of the picture. The questions we ask and the depth we get into in customer conversations are almost never well-represented when people in other roles talk to these customers. It’s not because they are incapable, it’s because they come with a different perspective and a different goal, and so would take the conversation in other directions than the ones you really need as a product manager.

Company Culture Plays a Big Role

The real problems of product managers and product teams are rarely a lack of a tool. The problems are much bigger. The role is a complex one by nature — because of the nature of the decisions we need to make, the fact that we depend on others to succeed, and that they don’t have to do what we say.

Moreover, we live in an organizational ecosystem that is larger than the product manager’s own perspective. If the company is growing, for example, there is a good reason to add more processes, but that by nature conflicts with flexibility and speed. If there is bad blood between departments, it impacts your ability to achieve your own goals, etc.

Tools cannot change any of that. If teams don’t communicate well, for example around the roadmap and plans, putting all the information in a tool won’t solve the problem. A tool can come in handy if they know how to talk to each other and need to formalize it. That’s a very different situation.

Don’t get me wrong. Tools are great, but they are means to an end. If that ‘end’ doesn’t exist, tools alone won’t do the trick. If you are a product leader and want to start using a new tool, make sure you know what is the real problem you are looking to solve with it, and give it your executive sponsorship to make sure everything else that needs to happen to make it a success really does. Don’t implement a tool too soon, because it might make things worse. If you are a founder of a startup for product management tools, it’s important that you understand the large ecosystem your tool would live in. To make sure it’s a success, everything needs to work together, including the motivation and means to solve the real problem, not just the symptoms.

My free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook

Originally published at https://infinify.com on February 16, 2023.