We keep complaining that nobody else understands Product Management properly — but what misconceptions, misunderstandings, and fallacies to which we fall ourselves?
This came out of a discussion with Saeed Khan on LinkedIn (I highly recommend that you follow him). I’ve covered the Responsibility but Zero Authority before, but here is a list of other topics that often come up — and that need to be questioned, before we get entrenched in thinking about it the wrong way. I’ve roughly divided them into topics and added a short note, but please let me know if you’d like me to expand on any of these!
Empowerment
Empowerment is binary
You’re either in an empowered team or not! Or are you? There are many grades of freedom to act. Guidance and guardrails from executive management is expected in keeping the business aligned. Your job is get the team enlightened as a first step.Everyone wants to be empowered
Go on, tell your developers they are now empowered to talk to customers. See the enthusiasm in their eyes.You are the CEO of the product
No, you’re not. Get over it. Even in fully empowered teams. Even if this product was your idea and you got some allocated developers to build and launch it. Not unless you want to assume all the business responsibility of a CEO and found your own company. See discussion on responsibility and authority.
Product-led
Product-led means Product-led Growth
Product-led growth is getting new customers via the product itself. It certainly does not suit all markets and products. Product-led doesn’t mean product-management led. It also means something else to salespeople (leading with the product/demo). A product-led company just puts product/market-fit at the core of everything, always testing and increasing the value the product delivers to customers.Product is what Engineering makes
While the tech build by your developers is a crucial component, it’s not the sum total of the product. A ‘product’ is a vehicle of value exchange, so Go-to-Market (GTM) — how you get the product in the hands of the users and how you capture the value back (get paid) — is just as important of the technology. That’s why product-led mean the whole company is doing ‘product’ (and why it’s so hard and rare).But the <insert name> book says to do it that way!
TIMTOWTDI. Just because a well-known author presents an idealised, potentially best way to do something, doesn’t mean it’s the only way, or that indeed that that idealised version actually works in (your) real world. Concepts over dogma any day.
Discovery
You must fully discover the problem
Unless you’re the founder of a new startup or otherwise trying to come up with a new product idea, chances are much of the problem space is understood. While you need to learn it deeply, many others in the business might already do. Sometimes, you need to understand the nuances of a specific problem, not the whole problem space.Experimentation is the only way to discover solution
Experimentation is there to validate solutions, not to discover them. Your capacity to experiment will vary wildly based on your market: you may read about B2C experiments for companies with millions of users, but you may operate in a B2B market with a few thousands at best. There are more ways to discover solutions (ideation) and validate them then running high-traffic experiments.Feature factories are the death of innovation
Just because you’re not doing the discovery, doesn’t mean no one else is. It’s not ideal for sure, and your goal is always to increase the context around the company — bring in the pain points and brainstorm possible solution. The way to get more freedom isn’t by standing on a soapbox, but by changing the conversation and building trust — which often requires demonstration of execution.
Execution
Product Strategy is the epitome of Product Management
To quote Sun Tzu, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat; strategy without tactics is the slowest way to victory.” There is nothing mystical about product strategy, but more importantly strategy without execution won’t get you anywhere.Process is evil, but this framework will solve our issues
Every time you plan to copy someone’s distilled knowledge and expect to apply it verbatim and be successful, you’re wrong. A lot of discovery that isn’t talked about comes under the “viability” heading — can we get our business to operate in a way that makes business sense?We need more Agile
You’re probably working in some ScrumBanFall chimera, and dream of being “agile”. Remember that Scrum is agile compared to waterfall, but it’s just still waterfall if you break a 3-month project into two week sprints and only deliver it at the end of the quarter (*cough*SAFe*cough*). Agile is relative, is a mindset, and the principles are more important than any specific implementation.None of it matters though. What matters is business agility — the ability to adapt quickly to shifting market conditions. Constantly testing the water, learning, and responding quickly.
Bonus: we can demonstrate our value
One of the key difficulties in product work is the time distance between cause and effect. Bad product management practices won’t kill your company (it’ll be a slow road to obscurity, paved with good intentions). Excellent, top-shelf practices will make you an overnight success — after 8 years of hard work.
We know we need to speak the executive’s language (eg see Kirsten Mann’s talk), but how can we? We understand the concept of proxy metrics, but does our business? How long can we wait? Will we even be able to attribute it? No wonder so many are sceptical when we get on our high horse and preach about the cruicial nature of modern product management.
Conclusion
Product Management is hard. It’s hard because it’s a complex discipline, with many interconnected, ambiguous elements, and it operates in a volatile, uncertain world. Much of your work will be adaptive in nature — observing, testing, and responding in an attempt to get things done (read up on the Cynefin framework, until I get around to writing about it).
If I ever do get over product management frameworks being evil and publish my own, it’ll be called “common sense” 😝
Profoundly accurate. Thanks for sharing Assaph.