Why product management sucks.
At least in France.
Many people should re-read their job titles once in a while, and product managers are part of this demographic.
Why product management sucks in 90% of companies.
The sad truth is that most product managers want to do good and help their teammates create great products.
The real problem is the people defining the job.
Most of the time, the ones who have the time to talk about it are not the ones who do it right. These people who shape the landscape of product management and advocate for it are now more interested in selling the concept to others than in making it pertinent.
So, we recruit product managers that want to do good but were fed product management bullshit by product management gurus.
This leads to the problems most companies experience:
- a lot of pertinent information is lost forever due to playing the telephone game
- product managers micromanaging designers and developers
- product managers enforcing a chain of command, making everything slower to justify their own work
Once again, it is not their fault!
The problem doesn’t lie in the willingness of product managers to do their jobs right but rather in the understanding, articulation, and execution of what a product manager should and should not do. And so what they should and should not be.
We must clearly define what we expect from product management before making memes about those who try.
Then, we can make the memes anyway because it’s still funny 😂
What is real product management?
The job title says “PRODUCT manager,” not “Other people’s calendar and tasks manager,” so product managers should only manage the product.
Now, the good question to ask is:
What is managing a product?
The easier way to answer the question is to understand what management is.
Thankfully, humanity crafts, shapes, and improves words by defining them in big books called dictionaries and keeping a log of the updates in etymology books.
Manage — Origins:
Latin > Italian > French > English.Manage — Definition:
To handle, direct, govern, or control affairs, resources, or people effectively and efficiently, often in challenging circumstances.
So a product manager should:
handle, direct, govern, or control the product effectively and efficiently.
This means making decisions about features, scale, and the final product. The product manager coordinates many inputs and ultimately makes critical product and marketing-related decisions because they’re deciding what the product is.
How to make product management great again.
The product managers are the architects, the movie directors, and the real estate developers of digital-product-based businesses.
Like movie directors, they should not explain to actors how to do their jobs but guide them to do the right things at the right moment.
Product managers should:
- of all the other people in the company, have the best understanding of their product by understanding:
- their product’s market
- their product’s business model
- their product’s pricing system
- their product’s marketing angle
- their product’s sales angle
- their product’s customer support insights
- make meaningful decisions based on a great understanding of the product’s challenges, context, and users
- decide whether or not to:
- add a feature
- remove a feature
- enhance a feature
Product managers and the CPO should:
- decide how much of the effort should be allocated to “new stuff making” and to “existing stuff maintenance” for specific timeframes.
Other people in the company should:
- come to product managers to ask questions about the product’s macro picture
- have faith in the reliability of the info given by product managers
- elect a lead product manager based on one’s pertinence and how high their standards are
This lead product manager’s only added responsibility is to set the standards for the product and the teams and ensure that nobody lowers them.
If the lead lowers the bar, re-elect someone with higher standards.
PS Many people will say the CPO should bear the lead product manager’s responsibility. They are not wrong. But be careful. Giving the captain’s armband to someone else is easier than replacing the team’s coach.