The specialisations in product management
A common question I get from new product managers is to what degree they should specialise in their discipline. There are many indicators that there is a growing specialisation going on, considering for example the excellent Reforge article explaining the four general types of product work (link). You can of course focus on many aspects ranging from the functional area of product management, for example doing only growth product management or to the industrial area, for example doing only product management in the B2C travel industry. But this does not necessarily have to mean that this is a must for every product manager and also the often true but not satisfying answer “it depends” might not be the right one here. But before giving concrete advice, we have to reference some important sources.
One important source that is often quoted when thinking about becoming really good at a certain discipline is the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The core idea is that you have to spend a certain amount of time practicing a craft in order to become an absolute expert in it and consequently become better than most of the competition. Gladwell goes as far as even specifying this amount of time to 10.000 hours in total, establishing the 10.000 hour — rule. Of course there are several exceptions that do not really fit into this model created by Gladwell but it is definitely a way of thinking about success because natural talent or genius does not matter too much but it is rather about continuous practice and dedication to become really good at something. Also for our initial question this type of model is not fully working.
A more interesting and maybe even a contradicting idea is laid out in the book of David Epstein called Range. In this book Epstein argues that specialisation is helpful and needed in kind environments. With kind, he means that there are very specific sets of patterns that you have to follow every time you are performing in this discipline. An example for these environments is golf, since here you always have to hit a ball with a golf club and certainly this game is more complex than that but in essence this is what happens every time you play this game. Epstein calls other environments wicked and means that these environments are way more complex, have way more variables and are just very different to predict. An example could be the stock market where you also have to either hold, buy or sell but the interconnectedness with the world is extremely complex and requires understanding many connections in order to be successful.
As you can see, there are arguments for both trying to become a generalist and a specialist in something. I always encourage young product managers, I am working with to aspire to become both. A concept that describes this aspiration is the idea of becoming T-shaped people. The letter T consists of two bars. The vertical bar represents the depth of skills in a certain area and the horizontal bar describes the ability to work together with experts from other areas, using the knowledge in these other areas while doing so. This notion also has the consequence of never stopping to learn new skills and disciplines even if they are not in your own area.
This concept is certainly not new and was already used by McKinsey in the 80s but applying this concept to the real-world and also using it for making conclusions about how we should approach our career development often gets lost. Applying this concept to product management and how we want to develop our career in this discipline, helps us to understand that also here it is neither a “this or that’’ nor it is an “it depends’’. In order to become a successful product leader, you really need to focus on both, especially early in your career. Think about how you already need to understand what designers and engineers do in order to do successful product management.
You can broaden this even more because for a successful launch of a new feature or for fully understanding the entire user journey before and after using this feature you also need to understand even more disciplines. You need to understand how users initially came to your product and dive deeper into the existing marketing channels, you need to understand if you might adjust these channels and even challenge your marketing department based on how these users interact with the feature you just shipped. You also need to understand their current problems, maybe they currently cannot track the things that they want to track or there are some gaps in the attribution that they can only fix with product support, only if you really understand their discipline, their pain points and what success looks like for them you can make sure that you really work together as an aligned team.
You can extend this even more and think about CRM measures that are currently being worked on in your product by the CRM team. What email or notifications do users get before coming across your feature or after having used your feature. Could you maybe even use CRM measures to support your feature? How can you as a product manager make the work for CRM managers easier? Do they have all the tracking events that they need? In order to understand that, you also need to understand the tools that they are using and the dependencies that they have and also support them with some product initiatives.
Also Ian MacAllister who famously wrote the article about the top 1% of all product managers (here), recently mentioned in the podcast with Lenny Rachitsky that “Thinking Big” as a product manager also means that you need to have a broad view on your product and adjacent disciplines even though not everyone is directly reporting to you (here). Thinking also across these disciplines and taking ownership of their success is what really successful product leaders do.
Only if you really dive completely in all these adjacent disciplines, will you be able to become a good product manager that knows every single measure he or she can take to improve the product overall but also the individual feature that he or she is working on. That means, there is no escape from learning about these disciplines or working in silos and just delegating tasks. But the good news is, it is interesting to learn about these disciplines! Marketing or CRM for example will exist in most companies where you will work as a product manager and they will most of the time have the same pain points. Once you really understand their standpoint and view, you can help them a lot.
