The impossible expectation of the Product Missionary
It would be amazing if we could actually follow Cagan’s words, but the real world have different rules.
Being a missionary means, first and foremost, that you are a religious person. You are so religious, in fact, that you feel compelled to make others believe in your faith as well. If you were to be considered a Product Missionary, then Product is your creed and your goal is to spread the culture.
Product Managers all around the world are often faced with the bitter dilemma of being missionaries and saying “no” to pressing demands at the cost of termination or accepting being mercenaries and “betray” the creed to keep their jobs. Much like the early evangelizers on the fringes of the Christian world, the choice is between the stake or damnation.
When Cagan quoted John Doerr, he meant that a Product team should build what they must, not what they are told to. The team should buy-in the product vision and act as an independent, startup-like structure. The irony behind the idea is that Doerr does not work with Product Management, but profits from it. He is a venture capitalist (one of the biggest in the Valley) and he is more interested on having a good payback from the companies he invest in rather than actually building a cohesive Product Culture.
The Product Missionary is a clear situation of opposition between expectation and reality.
Book of Cagan 12:25, “Thou shallt be a missionary, not a mercenary”
“Inspired” has attracted a lot of criticism from the community lately. Not just it, but almost every book from the first wave of Product Management such as “The Lean Startup” or “Measure What Matters”. The growing choir of critics point out the utopian portrait of reality and the presumed seniority of teams involved.
I won’t repeat what so many have said already. Instead, I want to focus on the burden that all Product Managers carry within themselves, the need to evangelize their organization and exercise a strong product culture despite company’s interests.
Product Managers have bills, family, ambitions, insecurities… They are people that work not necessarily out of love, but because they need to make a living like anybody else. The same way an accountant has to deal with toxic workplace, unprepared leadership, top-down decision making; so does a Product Manager. You don’t go about hearing that “accountants should be missionaries, not mercenaries”.
Are Product Managers responsible for preserving good product culture? Cagan himself has a very good video on this topic where he lines up the pitfalls that companies get stuck in when adopting digital transformation. You’ll probably notice that your employer is adherent to almost all of those traps. The idea behind the presentation is cristal clear: transformation is a job for the CEO. Why the hell does the Product Manager has to be the missionary then?
“Inspired”? More like “Deluded”
The books I’ve mentioned earlier were all written with some very specific companies from the Valley in mind: Amazon, Google, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb… most of those companies practices became the source of truth for Product Managers thanks to the gospel of people such as Cagan. Product Management is not a theoretical field, it’s a practical one, and knowledge is built based on observation and propagation.
The thing with those companies is that they didn’t follow a recipe, they created all of those rules from the ground up with very specific challenges and culture in mind. Maybe it’s not unrealistic to be a missionary inside a newly formed BU at Netflix, maybe Amazon expects from you to be the product CEO. Unfortunately, outside this “tiny” corporate community, culture is different, challenges are different, reality is different. Top companies from the Valley are far from the global truth when it comes to product development.
When you read Doerr’s quote, it’s implied that he expects missionaries from all companies the same way the companies under his belt have. He is extrapolating a rule that was written by few on a wishful fashion, as it was possible to ask for a little bit of Google from every tech business. It’s not.
If you are lucky enough to have the space to build what matters with full autonomy, you do it! But if you don’t, does it mean that you are wrong? Does it mean that your company is wrong for not giving you that autonomy? Is it your responsibility as a Product Manager to fight for this autonomy or else search for a company that allows you to be a missionary?
I don’t think so.
Mercenary with a mission
You want to build products as envisioned by the books, but you can’t work at the biggest start-ups of the world. You want to follow the words of our lord and savior Marty Cagan, but you are faced with the sinful ways of Command and Control management… what to do?
The first thing you have to do if you wish to work with Product Management is accepting that A) It’s not your job to transform anything and B) if you want to keep working, you’ll have to sell out eventually. Every single one of us had to, at least once, build a Gant diagram, define a delivery as an OKR, accept a feature request from sales with no data behind it. The earlier you accept that those things are going to happen, the happier you’ll be, and the faster you’ll be promoted.
That’s it? You give up and become part of the problem?
If you are a seasoned Product Manager like myself, you know that to “give way” is different from “giving up”. Maybe the strongest feature a Product Manager from the real world can have is resilience. Knowing which battles are worth fighting for is not only very important for your career but it’s also great for your product.
Being a Product Manager at a start-up in its early rounds of investment will impose a lot of constrains and force your hand in a lot of ways different from the ideal. Likewise, working at a company with thousands of employees spread across several countries with over 30 years of existence will pose a whole ‘nother set of limitations to you product exercise.
Egos, immature management, lack of funding, spread out teams, difficulty to hire, changing market trends, Covid, the war in Ukraine… The Product needs to grow, it needs to be loved by users and it needs to be ethical. Your job is to ensure those things are going to happen, whatever the cost.
If I may, I would change Doerr’s quote
“We need teams of heroes, not teams of mercenaries”.
Here in Brazil, we have a saying that, translated, would be something like this:
The ones unhappy should move out - os incomodados que se mudem
Despite what I’ve just said, sometimes we reach our threshold and selling out for the company becomes betraying what you believe in. Don’t sacrifice your career because your employer thinks Product Management and project management are the same thing.
There are a lot of great organizations with strong enough product culture so that you can feel comfortable and grow at the same time. They are everywhere on the globe and they need talents. Best of all, they are not necessarily the most famous ones.
Build a network, talk to your peers and discover the business that can make you thrive if you are not feeling accomplished at your current address. Burnout is serious and you can not sell out your own sanity.
I see you next week.
