The Product Manager’s Hierarchy of Needs

Early in my career, I listed questions to ask potential employers — how is the product team structured? What features or capabilities drive the most impact to key metrics? How are decisions made?

The diplomatic answers were never satisfying. I was reaching for an explanation of product team culture that I didn’t know how to ask for.

Years later, interviewing people for product leadership roles, I saw a different set of questions being asked:

Is this a product-driven company?

Who makes the proposal — and owns the decision — to create a new line of business?

How is the incentive to maintain product quality (or lack thereof) baked into the business model?

What are the target metrics for the product team… and what are the business metrics they ladder up to?

These candidates were politely alluding to common issues that fundamentally set the “PM ceiling” at your company:

• Is the product team just taking direction from executives or sales, without real autonomy or customer insight?
• Is the company focused on growth to the detriment of quality? (Will I spend my time churning out short-term box-checkers without regard for stagnating end-user value?)
• Does product leadership understand the role that product plays in supporting the company’s success, or are we chasing vanity metrics?

In other words, how good a PM can you be at this company while playing by the rules?

Hearing too often about unhealthy product team cultures made me think… what does a product manager’s hierarchy of needs look like? In order to be the product person that everyone wants to work with — that proactive, strategic thinker identifying new business opportunities and driving them to completion… what does a PM need from its team, leaders, and company?

Basic needs

What do PMs need to get the minimum job done?

The #1 foundational need I see is for an accurate, shared definition of a product manager’s roles and responsibilities. Without it, you’ll spend most of your time litigating what kinds of decisions you’re allowed to make, how teams should be composed, and if you’re necessary at all — it’s certainly possible to succeed with enough trust and relationship-building, but you’ll pay a heavy tax with your time.

A widely accepted definition of roles and responsibilities helps lay the groundwork for other basic needs:

• Appropriate cross-functional resources
• Minimum definition of processes by which candidate opportunities are identified, evaluated, and acted upon
• Visibility into strategic context with impact to the product/roadmap

Acceleration needs

What do PMs need to move beyond delivery and help accelerate business impact?

You have a functional product team — the mechanics are there, they’re delivering work. But it feels like they could be doing more. The most common issues I see at this stage are:

Product strategy — your team may be delivering, but are they delivering the right things? Are they simply writing up requests that land in their inboxes into JIRA tickets, or copying competitors out of fear of falling behind? Product leaders must model and reinforce what good strategy looks like.

Trust — can your team have difficult conversations about strategy, process, or people? Can PMs escalate issues without fear of retribution? When problems are identified, are they addressed? Without trust within the product team, issues can fester and degrade both product quality and delivery velocity. Team members leave problems unaddressed (because they can’t be openly acknowledged), or move in their own direction outside of company strategy (because resolution can’t be reached).

Fulfillment needs

What do PMs need to reach their full potential?

The two biggest issues I see holding back organizations with otherwise-healthy PM teams are:

1. Focus — Healthy PM teams feel like they can take on the world… but a healthy product strategy means focus on the handful of bets most likely to improve your business outcomes. Peanut buttering PMs across too many initiatives ensures quantity over quality… and unfortunately the details of product quality — how good the first time user experience is, how well-thought-through the go to market plan is — can make or break a product’s success. Bottoms-up, individual PMs can advocate for a reasonable workload — but this also requires upper management to play a shielding role, turning down executive pet projects and other tempting but non-critical initiatives.
2. Following, not giving lip service to, the product development cycle — Many product teams “know what to do,” but due to resource constraints, overly aggressive timelines, or short-term incentives (e.g. custom client requests) don’t actually pursue customer insights, and don’t iterate on products once the initial version is delivered. Great product leaders recognize these traps through tools like product reviews, and can help nudge teams onto the right path by evaluating their problem statements, hypothesized solutions, and goals. Great product leaders know how to use tools like timelines to appropriately timebox exploration and encourage teams to ship, while giving team members sufficient time to do quality work.

In crafting this hierarchy of needs, it’s interesting to note what is missing. Nowhere on this list are flawless cross-functional partners, great managers or mentors, robust analytics tools, perfect company OKRs… product managers are often very successful in suboptimal situations. But as the discipline matures, I believe that candidates will seek out organizations that understand how to support great PM work. They’ll look for product leaders who define and defend the role of their department, establish trust, enable focus, and balance a desire for process and rigor with one to deliver quickly against company strategy.