Spider-Man, Uncle Ben and Empowered Product Management

Uncle Ben famously told Spider-Man “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” when Spider Man was struggling to deal with the changes coming over to him. He was in troubled mental space and Uncle Ben in his kind loving way was trying to give him perspective talk in a car parked on a busy street.

(Here is the actual Spider-Man and Uncle Ben movie scene if you wish to revisit it!)

Uncle Ben’s lines, always intrigued me as a Product Manager. I had great decision making power over the product but felt powerless often. “Where was the Power?” The Product Manager as CEO of Product narrative, had failed me desperately.

Different stakeholders and their opinions and agendas would be pulling me in several ways making it hard for me to keep the Product going in the right direction. I looked for my Uncle Ben moment which eventually happened when I was mentoring a Product Manager. I became Uncle Ben.

I have mentored and spoken to hundreds of product managers. They all face the Spider-Man dilemma.

Uncle Ben to Product Managers

For Product Managers Uncle Ben would say “With Great Responsibility comes Little Authority”. Engineering does not report to Product management. Nor does Sales, Marketing, or Customer Support. Everyone can pretty much do their own thing that impact the product. Everyone can pretty much do things that make them look good but fail the Product agenda.

This is how it may play out:

Anyone can go tell CXOs their narrative about how a certain decision is hurting business or hurting delivery and that their opinions about right action are going to be the best one. Decisions get taken behind closed doors, without involving the Product manager. Engineering reporting into the CEO is told to execute and the Product Manager is bypassed. Then the product fails and the Product manager is blamed. Sounds familiar?

Mental Health and Product Management

With Great Responsibility, comes Little Authority and blame for failure. This in a nutshell is what hurts the mental health of Product Managers. Burn-out in Tech and Product Management is an open secret.

The “Leading with Influence”Adage

It also not okay to try and trivialise these issues by stating “Leading with Influence not Authority must be learned.” That is a truism. Everyone has to learn it. It is a life skill. We need to dig deeper here. Or we are saying we want good Product Management for the success of our company, but the burden of making it successful is on Product Management function. That won’t fly. Not any more.

Product Management is a New-Age Cross-Department Function

Product Management works across functions to make the customer have a great experience while making the company money profitably and technically viable ways. The burden is shared. Because Product Management deeply touches multiple functions. It is a new-age function. In the Industrial era it was not required because unlike software, hardware wasn’t morphing continuously.

What’s at Stake?

Scale at which we can create and multiply Product Companies successfully is at stake.

Amazon, Adobe, Google, Microsoft create great Products that have scaled globally. Excellent Product management is at play in such companies.

It is critical to understand what’s at stake. Unless we have thoughtful conversations and action taken on this challenge of Product management we will fail to create good Product Companies at Scale.

Early Stage Start-up Challenge

Lots of startups fail. Good Product Managers can help startups gain Product-Market fit and scale but most startups find only churn and trouble when they hire seasoned product managers and the hand-over from founders to this role fails. If you talk to some VC friends they will tell you that one of the highest churns seen in any function at startups is with Product Management.

Large Company Challenge

Large companies many often struggle to define the Product org and respect its sanctity. It gets placed under Engineering because any which ways features have to be coded and requirements are known. What else is there to Product management? How large can be the Product team? It will always be a small percent of the Engineering Org. (This btw, is “Product Management as Feature maker” thinking.) So it might be easier to take this direction and not deal with the patient org building pains that come with building true product culture.

Self-Sabotaging Product Management after hiring

Companies hire Product Managers and then self-sabotage this role. They often don’t do the hard thinking work of really understanding what problems this function solves and how not having it creates more problems than they realize. David Pereira recently wrote about Bullshit Product Management being a problem.

Unlocking Spider-Man Powers for Product Managers

We have to unlock the super powers of having an empowered Product Team. “The purpose of a product team in this sense is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.” We want customer centricity and visionary product building. Rather than a feature team. Yes. We want that. Then we have to really problem-solve through an ecosystem level dialog.

Please do share your thoughts and perspectives. Any lessons you learned that can be of value to others?

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