I dream of Unicorns
The Future of Product Management?
Since the get-go it has been common to hear Product Managers complain that their job is too broad to get their arms around. Required to ‘take a long term view’ but be all over the details at the same time, we often find ourselves pulled in too many directions to really be effective.
Ellen Chisa and Dave Huffman have written about the phenomenon of the Unicorn Job spec. You know: the one that’s looking for 15+ years of Android and iOS experience (for a major consumer brand), an MBA, a degree in Software Engineering (or a related technical discipline), a passion for UX and design, detail-driven but a ‘big picture’ person…oh, and a proven track record of defining and executing digital strategy as well.
If you work for Apple or Samsung perhaps your role as a Product Manager is not going to change too much (hardware products with single price points will remain so for the foreseeable future) but, for those of us in the digital Product sphere, things are going to get much more complicated.
Fjord may well have coined one of the most insightful predictions about the future of Product Management in their annual Future Trends piece for 2014.
“Every product is a service waiting to happen.”
Many years ago (2007 to be exact), Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path gave a series of talks entitled ‘Experience is the Product‘ in which he advocated moving beyond thinking about Products to thinking about the experience we want customers to have and then working backwards into the design. He has continued his crusade through the years and now speaks about Product Management as a legacy from a bygone era of manufactured goods. Service Management, says Merholz, should the be the role of the future.
Most organisations, however, are culturally and organisationally unable to execute along these lines.
When I was Head of Product at a large UK media company I concluded that Merholz was right. It was clear that we didn’t, in fact, sell digital Products. We sold subscriptions to content bundles that were experienced across a variety of touchpoints by our customers in the course of each day. The content (and the subscription) were the real Products. But our so-called Product Teams were aligned against channels and were prioritising their backlogs independently of each other which lead to a fragmented, highly frustrating customer experience. I fought many battles trying to convince the management to realign everyone around the customer journey. I advocated redrawing the roadmap along these lines so we could clearly identify (and measure) where each activity was adding value.
This received no traction whatsoever. Retrospectively, I realise this would have meant dissolving divisions between the acquisition team (Marketing), the retention team (Marketing also), the social media team (Editorial), the Product Team (Technology) and Engineering (also Technology). A massive transformation piece that no one had an appetite for, even if conceptually they conceded my point.
When you look at most of what we call digital ‘Products’ they are almost always touchpoints in a broader service-ecosystem. And it’s the service that the customer is actually buying. Within this context, it is counter-productive to have Product Managers focussing exclusively on a single ‘Product’, roadmap and backlog. They need a solid understanding of what role they play within the overall customer experience to be effective. Which means that the experience of registering, forgetting my password and filing a complaint are every bit as important as using the ‘core’ Products themselves. Often more so.
If you want an example of how a really smart company responded to this then look at how Airbnb developed their ‘Snow White‘ methodology and re-organised the business around it. Very smart but very challenging, even for a startup, to execute on successfully.
Your Product is your Marketing
As everything shifts to digital, another key question is where marketing now starts and ends in relation to Product.
For most corporations, marketing was the first function to dabble in digital; long before Product Management was a glint in someone’s eye. Thanks to decades of exposure to an avalanche of spurious claims from brands that failed to deliver much of any substance, consumers these days are cynical and wary of marketing tactics. The competitive sphere is now the Product experience itself. With barriers to entry effectively zero, competition is infinite. If your Product doesn’t deliver on its promise then people will move to another option in a heartbeat.
The debate rages over the credibility of that nebulous title the Growth Hacker: a semi-legendary individual who combines Product Management, marketeer, data scientist and programmer in one role. Love it or hate it, the concept of the Growth Hacker is gaining serious momentum and doing much to dissolve legacy archetypes and functional roles.
Why is this relevant? Because most tactics required for Growth Hacking and digital marketing now occur in the Product itself. Consider the following:
- User Onboarding
- Free trials
- Split testing
- Customer Feedback tools (such as UserVoice or Intercom)
If you’re in the business of SAAS, or pay attention to the prodigious output of Lincoln Murphy, you’ll be familiar with the bewildering variety of tactics that must be deployed as prerequisites for success by a Product Manager in this field. In a single blog post, Lincoln will typically traverse digital marketing, growth hacking, customer development, conversion rate optimisation, Product Management and a ton of data analysis and test/learn experimentation. If your Product is a digital service then all of these capabilities seem to merge into one.
Implementing, supporting and optimising these features can easily consume a Product backlog, or at least a portion of it. And Product Managers need to be able to quantify the value of each and ensure that they are accurately interpreting the data on an ongoing basis. And you really, really need to understand data analysis these days — all digital Products are vehicles for unprecedented customer insight so you better know your cohorts from your segments or you’ll never capitalise on this opportunity.
A world without Product Managers?
Some have kicked the hornet’s nest and argued that the future is no Product Managers at all — the rationale being that an Agile approach to Product development means there is no need for one person to ‘own’ the Product anymore. With little or no need for lengthy specifications and a methodology of continuous delivery, Product Management becomes a ‘capability’ or state of mind for engineers and designers who ALL function as the customer champion.
If Product Managers didn’t exist today, would we need to invent them?
An excellent debate chaired by Hunter Walk kicked off on Branch about this a couple of years ago with opinions polarised but most conceding that attempts at abandoning Product Management completely had generally been a step too far.
Right now it feels pretty good to work in Product — the world seems to be waking up to the importance of what we do and former-Product Managers are being hailed as the CEOs of the future.
To achieve a greater public awareness of where we’ve come from is a great thing but hazarding a guess as to where it’s all headed is something else entirely. As the digital landscape develops in real time, it feels like the scope of the role, the skills, and the experience required are changing on a daily basis.
