The tension between experienced product managers and industry experts

I recently put out a poll where I asked people a simple question: Given the choice of two otherwise identical Product Manager candidates, which would you prefer, the one with more PM experience, or the one with more related industry experience?

Overwhelmingly, product leaders (VP of Product, CPO, Director of Product, etc.) preferred the candidate with more product management experience. Everyone else (including non-product management executives) preferred the one with more industry experience. I don’t exactly know what this disparity means, but what I’ve felt in most of the organizations I’ve been in is that non-product management professionals don’t value the expertise product managers bring to the table, and see us as more of a communication function than a knowledge/strategic center. I don’t know why that is, but I have a few theories.

Non Product Managers don’t understand the product management skillset… and I don’t blame them?

It’s not easy to explain the product management skillset succinctly. It’s not as simple as a salesperson saying, “I’m really good at convincing people to buy things”, a marketer saying, “I’m fantastic at positioning our company correctly” or a developer saying, “I can program things in an efficient, maintainable, scalable way”.

I could say, “I’m really good at translating vague non-technical requirements to something actionable by a development team,” but then someone could say, “but wouldn’t an experienced engineering manager be able to do the same?”

I could then say, “but wait, it’s not just that. I’m really good at using quantitative and qualitative information to figure out the best product strategy,” but then the immediate counter is, “but wouldn’t Jane Smith who’s been in the industry selling the product for 20 years be better?”.

I could say, “I can not only figure out the strategy, but get buy in from all major stakeholders also,” but then someone could point out, “couldn’t a cross-functional team of project managers, engineering managers, and sales people do the same thing without the involvement of product managers? Aren’t they kind of superfluous middle people?”

I could then add, “But the market is always changing and evolving and someone needs to be at the steering wheel, making adjustments and weighing tradeoffs to ensure that the product continues to maintain product/market fit!”

But at that point the conversation gets too nebulous and abstract and we’re back to square one.

Sigh

Industry experts think their industry is special?

I think non product managers are generally confused about how product managers can make strategic decisions without being experts in their industry. They don’t understand how someone who’s freshly new could understand the unique challenges that customers have.

Here’s the thing. While every industry of course has its nuances, which are really important when validating the solutions that product teams come up with, every industry has similar processes, issues, and functions.

I’ve been largely a B2B product manager with experience in the medical products, chemical, automotive, payments, and mobile marketing industries along with a few others, and none of these industries felt so different from one another that it wasn’t possible to quickly home in on the most important problems to solve. The goals of B2B software in these industries have always fallen into one of 3 categories:

1. Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the business’s offering
2. Increase revenue
3. Reduce Costs

Once I figured out which category of problem the software was solving and learned the company’s business model, I was about 70% of the way to coming up with a good product strategy. The other 30% was filled in through reading documentation, competitive analysis, and speaking to the industry experts. A good product manager doesn’t need to come into the company with a lot of industry experience to be an effective strategic leader; just an ability to ruthlessly identify problems and work cross-functionally to solve them.

People love to hear their own opinions repeated back to them

If a company primarily has industry experts in their leadership team, those leaders might be biased against opinions that contradict their own. They’ve built up a ton of expertise, only for someone new to tell them they’re wrong. This might cause these leaders to instinctively dismiss strategic direction given by product managers with less industry expertise without even considering whether it could be useful. I don’t think anyone does this deliberately, but I’ve seen this attitude creep into a lot of hiring and strategic decisions.

Following the advice of product managers might mean huge investments that the company wasn’t prepared to make

Like anyone else, leadership teams are prone to status quo bias, and aproduct manager with less industry experience is more likely than an industry expert to disagree with the direction the company is currently taking. This could be a good thing; product managers aren’t beholden to the groupthink that industry experts develop after being in the industry for a long time. With their outside perspectives, they bring fresh ideas on new product lines, new markets to enter, or new ways of serving existing clients better. Unfortunately, new often equates to expensive, and many leaders aren’t prepared for that.

Here’s the thing…

I don’t have a neat bow with which to tie up this blog post. If you are a non product manager and reading this made you a somewhat uncomfortable, a or just bit angry, then that’s the point. Industry expertise is important, but it doesn’t replace product management skill, and many companies (including at least one that I’ve worked at) learned it the hard way.