Why Product Management is more important than ever
Product Management as a role has moved on in leaps and bounds over the past 5 years. As the number of people at our Mind the Product conferences and in our global ProductTank meetup community proves — it’s a skill and a job that more and more companies understand, appreciate, and seek out.
But why is that?
It was also five years ago that Marc Andreessen first posited his famous statement “software is eating the world”.
I think we can safely say this has been borne out in reality: The world’s largest hotel, Airbnb, owns no property. The world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, carries no stock. The world’s largest phone companies, Skype and WeChat, build no infrastructure. The list of examples goes on and on — you’ve all seen them.
“Software is eating the world”— Marc Andreesen
So software is eating the world. But what does that really mean?
It means our interface to the world around us is changing — and I’m not just talking about UI. What I’m talking about is a fundamental shift in how we interact not just with technology, but with each other, and with the businesses and services we use.
This new interface builds on a combination of huge leaps in technological capability, innovative new business models, and a design and user experience discipline that has finally made technology human centric instead of constantly having excuses made for it.
Product management is more important than ever precisely because these new innovations intersect business, technology, and design. No one discipline can solve all the challenges that all three face, and all three are needed to build that new interface.
We are all product people
Whether we’re product managers, designers, or engineers, we are all product people and that intersection is where we live.
At Mind the Product we therefore implore you to ignore the semantics of job titles and the endless debate of who owns the interface, the code, or the user. Who cares?! We all own the product together.
That’s why we bring together not just product managers, but designers, psychologists, investors, engineers, founders, and even the occasional economist too. Insight into all of these disciplines is necessary, critical even, to be able to innovate and to lead in this fast changing environment. All of these disciplines are needed together to build products people love.
And that’s why great product management is about teamwork, communication, and leadership.
What about the next 5, 10, or even 15 years?
For one thing, the rate at which software is eating the world is increasing.
5 years ago Uber was a black car service in San Francisco, today it’s a global company valued at a faintly credible $66 billion.
10 years ago ExxonMobil, General Electric, and two banks were in the top 5 companies of the S&P500.
Today the S&P500 is completely dominated by technology firms.
Disruptive new companies, technologies, and products are springing up every day. Some simply capture our imagination for a short while, others, such as Pokemon Go, Oculus Rift, and AlphaGo point to exciting new futures — which may or may not disrupt how we do everything.
At the same time, as product people we’re being asked to do more, faster, for less. As always, our organisations want some magical unicorn combination of fast, cheap, and amazing. We get stuck into our work, we put our heads down in our silos, and we build, and we build, and we build.
When are we supposed to step back?
When are we supposed look at the bigger picture?
When are we supposed think about the context of our products?
When are we supposed learn new approaches or tackle new ideas?
We all own this craft together
That’s why engaging with the wider product community is so valuable.
Because in such a fast-moving field there is no one right way to do things, and there is certainly no time to develop a definitive practice.
We can only learn and we can only improve our craft by coming together as a tribe and sharing our experiences, lessons, and insights.
Because whatever the next 5, 10 or 15 years hold I bet our jobs will look very different again. And it’s only by working together as a tribe and learning from each other that we’ll be able to manage so much change.
No matter what happens though — one thing is for sure:
We will be here … together … minding the product.
Get involved in the product community, through the world’s largest product management slack channel, your local ProductTank meetup in one of 90 cities around the world, or at the world’s largest conferences for product managers: Mind the Product in San Francisco and London.
