Top 5 #fails about Product Management

Anyone in Product will recognise that familiar feeling of awkwardness when confronted with the question: “What do you do?”

Product Management remains hard to describe and frequently misunderstood. The infuriatingly generic name doesn’t help.

Rich Mirinov recently observed “Most hiring teams have never met an actual Product Manager, so resort to a job description blender.” And he’s right. Product Manager can now mean almost anything. I’ve gone for roles and felt like I was interviewing for the wrong job.

Often we’re caught between two extremes in terms of expectation. Either far too much or way too little. As such, I thought I’d compile the top 5 most common #fails I encounter about the Product Management role .

Fail #1: It’s obvious.

It is a classic #fail to assume that Product Management is simple gut intuition about what we ‘should’ do next. In fact, as someone who genuinely believes in Product Management as a craft, I have come to realise that much of it is entirely counter-intuitive.

Just as advanced motorists are taught to accelerate around corners and into skids, the way to spot an experienced Product person is the degree to which they challenge obvious thinking. Less is more. Constraints are beneficial. Slow down to speed up. These notions are non-obvious and must be learnt the hard way.

Fail #2: It’s about features.

The most common advice most Product Managers receive is a list of new stuff that, ‘if you just added’, would make the Product a whole pile of awesome.

Despite what people might say, adding one more feature is rarely the answer. If someone won’t use the Product as is, then either they’re the wrong audience or you’ve built the wrong Product.

It’s hard, hard, hard to convince non-Product people of this. Presenting a roadmap without new features is the equivalent of suggesting the team stand still. However, a good Product person should be able to counter with a good list of anecdotes and case studies. This (in)famous Microsoft case-study is a good starting point:

“In a recent customer survey, we asked users what features they wanted from the new version of Microsoft Office. More than 90 percent asked for features that were already available in Office.” — Takeshi Numoto, 2006

The market is now beginning to acknowledge the importance of Product focus. The recent unbundling of Facebook Messenger and Swarm are a recognition of the shortcomings of Products that try to be Swiss Army knives.

Fail #3: It’s easy.

Some phrases are like Kryptonite to a Product Manager. Some take the form of a question (as in “Surely it’s just a few lines of code?”), some a recommendation (as in “If you just add X, then everyone would buy it.”).

My personal bête-noire is any question that begins with “How easy would it be?”

I get that this is a fundamentally polite way of enquiring, but the starting point is entirely wrong. The response is always ‘Nothing is easy and nothing great is anything other than very hard.’

Steve Johnson shared a great quote recently that resonates with anyone at the coal face:

“Everything is easy to those who don’t have to do it.”

Talking about doing stuff is not hard. Actually doing it is hard, and most people don’t have the attention to detail or the patience to wade through the layers of problems that emerge at every hesitant step you take.

Another Steve, Jobs this time, made a similar observation in 1984:

“When you first attack a problem, it seems really simple because you don’t understand it. Then, when you start to really understand it, you come up with these very complicated solutions because it’s really hairy. Most people stop there. But a few people keep burning the midnight oil, and finally understand the underlying principles of the problem and come up with an elegantly simple solution for it. But very few people go the distance to get there.”

Fail #4: It’s about the Big Idea.

I’ve written in the past about the disease of ‘Big Idea Thinking.’ This refers to the assumption that the idea is 90% of the challenge and requires the heavyweight players whereas actually doing the work is detail best carried out by a compliant team of worker-bees. It infects most organisations that are ‘grown-digital’ rather than ‘born-digital’ and some that aren’t.

Big Idea Thinking is the bane of many Product Managers’ lives. It’s not hard to freestyle a dozen things that we ‘could’ do in the safe confines of a meeting room or as part of an ‘Ideation Brainstorm.’ It’s even possible to knock up some initial designs of what the solution ‘could’ look like, and then present the output (in a flashy deck, of course) to an audience who naturally assume that most of the work is done.

Despite appearances however, the real work has barely started. The analogy I am fond of using is the machine that cures cancer. Thinking of and designing a machine that cures cancer, and presenting it in a deck, has not moved you any closer to actually curing the disease.

Fail #5: It’s a panacea.

I encounter this a lot and only just dodged the bullet each time. The executive team is divided over what to do next. Engineering says one thing, marketing another, sales a third. All of them swear their need is urgent and no one wants to back down. The backlog is never-ending and the team is deadlocked.

This is often when the team decide that hiring a Product Manager is the solution. Except that it isn’t. Product Managers don’t have magic wands. They can’t magically create order out of a situation that is inherently dysfunctional.

As I warned in my earlier post about Why Product Teams fail, it is the role of the leader (usually the CEO) to provide the vision and the direction and to work with the Product Team to execute it. Too often, Product Managers are set up to fail by the CEO delegating their responsibilities and their shortcomings downwards.

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