The Devolution of Product Management
I have worked in technology, exclusively in Silicon Valley, for nearly 18 years. I started as an entry level product manager, and while I have had many titles over the years, product management has been core to my working DNA, and a key factor to my success. Whatever my focus area in my career, most recently accessibility, I always introduce myself as a product leader. For me, product management means thinking, feeling, and advocating for the consumer. When I introduce myself to other tech professionals, a series of questions have come up recurrently, all bemoaning the state of product in our industry:
“What happened to product management?”
“Why are product managers so bad?”
“What does product even mean today?”
These questions are not surprising. Through all the ups and downs in our industry, especially the most recent wave of lay-offs haunting the technology sector, there has been a clear devolution of product that no one wants to talk about. Now don’t get it twisted, this brief history of the devolution of product is not definitive. Nor does it mean that all product managers are inherently bad. But, pointing to this somewhat secret narrative and highlighting it will hopefully give language to something most everyone sees, but very few understand.
First of all, unlike other functional roles in technology, like design or engineering, product is consistently ambiguous. It is connective tissue. It is an advocate for consumers. It is the heart to all the analytical and technical minds also contributing to and end user experience. But because it is ambiguous, it has been commandeered and morphed into reduced definitions that reduce the full impact product managers should be bringing to teams.
Early in my career, roughly in the late aughts to the early teens, product management became an increasingly technical field. A role for engineers and developers that did not want to code, but set the vision and roadmap for their teams. While this seemingly innocuous statement seems harmless, it is missing the heart of product: the consumer. Not wanting to code and set direction is not enough. While a key part of product management, the foundation has to be advocacy for the consumer. Without this advocacy, and consistent informed research combined with what some call “consumer DNA,” these overly technical product managers will find themselves filling technical gaps instead of keeping focus on what is shipping to customers. This trend continues to this day. It is not bad to be technical, especially in product. But it smacks of the imbalance that Steve Jobs warned our entire industry that, “Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.” After 18 years in technology, yes, I have become fairly technical. But my foundation was the liberal arts, humanities, literature, pop culture, the visual arts, and design. It is a distinguishing feature that I see as an increasing rarity in product, and rarely if ever sought by hiring teams when seeking product managers, whether entry level or executive level.
This lack of respect for the humanities and liberal arts in technology created another hideous head of the product management chimera: growth. This followed and overlapped with the rise of technical product managers, from the mid-teens to late teens. With teams overly focused and invested in the technical, it became increasingly difficult for products to grow their audiences. The lack of focus on the customer did not come into focus. Instead of focusing on existing industries or disciplines, like marketing, social, or SEO specialists; instead growth became a new part of product management. I recently interviewed with a startup seeking a Director of Product. I loved the founder, really believed in the product, and presented a layered portfolio and presentation demonstrating my knowledge of not only retail, but how to differentiate the product to customers. I checked all the boxes for the founder, but what she realized is she actually wanted a product leader that specialized exclusively in growth. Yes, growth is a specialized discipline, and can be valuable to companies seeking rapid growth. But it misses the point yet again: if you focus on the consumer you will find a path to growth. Additionally, it should be the responsibility of specialists, not a sub-category of product, to fuel audience growth. It is a risk for all of product management to fail the consumer if the focus is growth instead of experience.
Focusing on the consumer also means owning an experience end-to-end. How the platform and backend connect to the front end and design and how the sum of the pieces should be intuitive, delightful, and enjoyable for the consumer. But that is not how product works today. More often then not products are divided into smaller and smaller feature sets, with product managers assigned to these “pieces of pieces,” and it is what has defined product management in the twenties. This means a holistic experience is impossible to deliver to consumers. Without product driving an entire experience, the pieces of pieces caters more to the accumulated dysfunction of product become technical or growth focused, and again, not focused on consumers.
If you find yourself a technical, growth, or pieces of pieces product manager; it doesn’t mean you cannot be consumer focused. But when I look to the products I use every day, whether digital, mobile, streaming, or even physical devices; it is clear that there is a devolution of product. Things just don’t work, and are far from delightful. While it takes a village to deliver these products to market, there is one person that should be responsible for delighting customers that clearly is not expected to do so anymore: the product manager.
