The Future of Product Management — A Panel Discussion

What does a product manager do? What will they do in the future?

These seemingly simple questions where the basis of a panel discussion I facilitated for Academy Xi on the 1st of February 2017. The panel was packed with a diverse set of Sydney-based product managers:

• Magda Cortez — Senior Product Manager at eBay/Gumtree
• Matthew Ho — Product Manager at Atlassian
• Chris Nheu — Head of Product at MadPaws
• Merissa Silk — Product Manager at Vivant

At the start of the session, I polled the audience of the panel to see what kind of backgrounds they were from. The audience was split between people who were already product managers, and people who wanted to be product managers. The audience also had a small pocket of User Experience (UX) attendees hiding in the back.

Some great insights

How do I become a product manager?

The first question centred around each of the panelist’s backgrounds, and how they came to becoming a product manager. None of the panelists started off with product management in mind.

The beginning of Chris’ Product Management career, for instance, started when he was engineering solar hot water devices. After he finished, his boss asked him to start selling the product he just designed.

The diverse beginnings of a Product Manager’s career trajectory is consistent amongst all the panelists: Magda’s started her career in user experience, Matthew in finance, and Merissa in Women’s Studies and International Development.

The Product Manager role

We then moved on to discuss what a Product Manager does.

The panelists all mentioned that they spent a considerable amount of time coordinating with people all around their organisation. Additionally, there seemed to be a consensus that working with a cross-functional team was important. Matthew talked about how, at Atlassian, the triad of people who help define his product: the product manager, an engineer, and a designer.

The most important thing is to say ‘no’

Merissa indicated that she says no many, many times a day. There are so many ideas out there, and it’s hard to take all of them into account to make a cohesive product.

Dual-Track Agile

Magda mentioned that they use something called Dual-Track Agile (or Dual-Track Scrum). Dual-track agile is a concept popularised by Marty Cagan whereby a scrum team not only works on current functionality and features, but also assists with any validation required for upcoming products and features.

The product manager is the boss

Well, no…not really. Merissa mentioned that the product manager was a bit of a strange role because you need to make decisions, however, you aren’t the boss. This means that you need to make things happen with influence. If you use numbers to justify product decisions, then the numbers will stand on their own.

Elon Musk vs Lean Startup

In the final Q&A, someone from the audience asked about how the panelists reconciled reduced risk products and releases (as popularised in Eric Ries’ Lean Startup, whereby we test really small increments of products early (MVPs) and often with customer) and big, moonshot types of products like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla’s endeavours.

The panelists then discussed how their Product Management styles contrasted from those of someone like Elon Musk — who‘s huge endeavors like SpaceX and Tesla seem like the antithesis to the incrementalism of Lean Startup.

Matt talked about how, even with a very large product, you can create a roadmap and move incrementally to your end goal.

Chris then chimed in saying that Musk has always had a 10 year vision to accelerate the world’s shift to sustainable energy and revolutionise transport. When Musk started Tesla, he didn’t tell every potential buyer about his vision. Instead he opted to make the fastest, safest and most energy efficient electric vehicle in the world. To him the Tesla Roadster was his “MVP” to a much much bigger product plan.

Magda capped off the discussion by talking about how it depends on how much risk you want to take. If you’re willing to take big risks to do great things, then you need to have deep pockets.

What’s next in Product Management?

The view I observed from the panel was that there was a need to pick up the pace of how we design products. This will require enhancements in data collection, analysis and data processing and perhaps even machine learning. While the Product Manager role will evolve over time, there will always be a need for a Product Manager role throughout product discovery and development.

Parting thoughts

As an outsider, I really had a great time facilitating this panel on Product Management. Specifically I enjoyed hearing about all the differences in approaches and experiences of the different panelists.

I left the discussion with a deep appreciation for the the deep amount of thinking and diversity of skills required to be a good Product Manager.

My other takeaways include:

• Being a people person is really important. The role involves a lot of communication with others to be successful
• You don’t need to have a title called “Product Manager” to be the product manager. A Product Manager could be anyone in the organisation who has a vision and authority for design of a product.
• There wasn’t really a clear distinction between Product Owner (from Scrum) and a Product Manager.

Special thanks to my colleague Lorenzo Schiavello who helped me remember some things that I had forgotten for this article.