The State of Product Management

What we learned from conversations with over 100 product leaders

We recently had a 100+ conversation with product leaders, and we’d like to share some of the things we learned.

We’ve broken the themes into five sections: (1) Challenges, (2) Responsibilities, (3) Practices, (4) Tools, and (5) Recommendations.

This is not enough data for these concepts and ideas to be definitive, but they came up enough to be worth noting.

Enjoy!

Challenges

1. The most common challenge and frustration mentioned across our interviews is stakeholder management. Product managers seem to spend more time with internal stakeholders than with customers.
2. PMs feel that their roadmap is being driven more by the demands of executives, sales, customer success, etc. than by customers.
3. PMs want more customer interactions (e.g., interviews) but face internal barriers (e.g., controls on who can talk to customers, leaders not creating time and space to make it happen).

Responsibilities

1. Product Manager responsibilities vary widely from company to company. The two primary dimensions that drive this variability are (1) stage of product and (2) size of the company.
2. The title of “Product Manager” is occasionally used to make two “older” roles more appealing: project manager and business/product analyst.
3. In many companies, Product Managers have increasing responsibility and impact, but this increased responsibility is not matched with increasing authority, making the role draining and especially challenging for some (more in our next email).

Practices

1. Most PMs are focused almost entirely on the customer as the source of product innovation, and very little to no emphasis on competition. We think this is mostly the right.
2. Companies are transitioning (probably still too slowly) from “feature delivery” focus to “value delivery.” This transition is being led by product leaders, not other executives. We suspect a downturn might hasten this transition.
3. Forward-thinking PMs are pushing back against roadmaps (i.e., commitment around a specific order of sequenced priorities and dates). We think this will continue and view roadmaps as one of the final commonly accepted remnants of waterfall.

Tools

1. PMs feel like they are using tools that were not designed with their workflows in mind — JIRA being the top complaint receiver
2. PMs want to have to use fewer tools to get their work done, and they expect better integrations
3. PMs want analytics tools to move away from single event-tracking to job-based tracking. FullStory does this, but is there a better way to digest this data without having to watch minute-long videos?

Recommendations

1. Argue for power: Make the case that product strategy and experience are central to your companies success (they are). Argue that if you’re going to be responsible for them, you should have the power (i.e., budget and authority) to deliver.
2. Drive value, not features: Organizations that value delivery-oriented PMs perform well on feature delivery often at the expense of everything else (retention, NPS, adoption, usage). So unless feature delivery is the main driver of value for your company (it’s probably not), build a scorecard around the metrics that do and tell whoever you report to that you now want to be held accountable to these metrics.
3. Embed users in your operating system: “The closest to the customer wins.” Every product leader knows this, but when you look at the day-in-the-life of PMs, they’re spending way more time in internal meetings than with users. To change this, (a) role-model spending time with users (e.g., reading feedback, responding to customers, conducting interviews), (b) build the skills of those you work with (e.g., how to interview, how to analyze feedback), and © implement reinforcement mechanisms to encourage this behavior (e.g., blocked times, personal performance metrics, incentives).

Are you hearing these themes too? Are there any you disagree with? We’d love to hear from you.