The Fallacy of Product Management

My thoughts on what product management is and what it’s not

It’s hard to imagine building a product without a product manager. Blasphemy, I tell you! I tried to think of what kind of a team would that be and I shuddered at the sheer thought it.

Without a product manager, it’s highly improbable that the team wouldn’t crumble to chaos. A product manager helps guide the team through every stage of product development- brainstorming, wireframing, design, development, testing, and takes it to its launch date. Imagine doing all of that with each team member responsible for it.

I don’t intend to say that it’s impossible. Anything is possible if you have the right people in your team. But even a pack of wolves needs a leader.

The early days of product management focused on just the growth of the product. The role of a Product Manager emerged in 1931 when Neil H McElroy of P&G felt that they need somebody to take the responsibility of the brand in entirety. They wanted one person who would take responsibility for improving sales, managing promotions, managing the product along with doing field testing and interacting with users.

After that, HP carried this idea further and interpreted this role as being the voice of the customer. In fact, it is said to be one of the key reasons for HP’s 20% year on year growth for about 50 years from 1943 to 1993!

However, the trend nowadays has changed. Now product managers are associated with literally everything under the sun. If you’re an avid reader, you would have read numerous posts about what a product manager should be. Some of them go and call product managers with fancy names such as-

• Strategist and visionary
• Researcher and analyst
• Communication champion
• Expectations manager
• Technologist (in some way)
• Designer and art lover
• Data cruncher
• Storyteller

In short, a SUPERMAN!

But isn’t that highly unrealistic? To expect all of that from one person? From my point of view, this puts unnecessary pressure on the PM and it makes them feel incompetent if they’re unable to deliver results. I have often seen peers talking about the exasperation they felt- “If this is what PMs are supposed to do, I’m in deep trouble.” 😮

So, I dedicate this blog to talk about what product management is not. I hope future and present product managers learn from it and find it useful.

Product management is not like running a company

And you are not the mini-CEO of your project.

Ever since Ben Horowitz wrote about good product manager, bad product manager and said that “a good product manager is the CEO of the product”, people have begun to build their own theories around it. Although I agree with Ben’s other comparisons, this one, I beg to disagree.

Even if you consider that it’s just a figure of speech and jump to defend that he essentially means that just like CEO is responsible for running a successful company, the PM is also responsible for running and building a successful product- I would still stand against it.

CEOs have a much different role and responsibilities from that of product managers.

👆 A CEO is responsible for setting the overall strategy for the company. Product managers don’t do that for the product; the product stakeholders have that ownership. Most of the times, PMs just follow or help in building the strategy.

👆 A CEO is responsible for setting the vision of a company and making sure that everyone is aligned with it. Product managers don’t do that for the product. Most of the time, it’s the job of founders or CPO to set the vision for the product. Product managers take care of the vision and make sure that the team understands it.

👆 Product managers have no say in building the team. They can’t decide on who stays in the team and who doesn’t. They can just give their feedback to the team members regarding performance and raise concern in case the team member isn’t performing well. A CEO, on the other hand, decides who stays in the organization and who doesn’t.

Apart from that, PMs do not decide on the budget and resources that are needed for certain initiatives. They generally receive them from upper management. And, they have to make things work in the ambit of those. Also, while they have the responsibility of steering the product towards success. They have no control over engineering, marketing or any other function. Product managers have to wade through various people challenges all by themselves.

Product management is not product marketing

It’s not a product manager’s job to worry about how the product will reach the market, what promotional strategies would make it a hit among users, or what should be the right pricing and messaging of the product in the market. While keeping an eye on the big picture is good, the product manager’s job should be more towards ensuring that the product they are making is technically robust and the team is progressing in the right direction.

One example could be- user research. Doing user research is more into the domain of product marketing rather than product management. Only a skilled marketing specialist would be able to deliver the right data points which can help make the product better.

The product manager can provide many valuable inputs like which web pages or CTAs should be tested, but it’s the job of the marketing team to conduct the research and pass on that knowledge to the product team.

Product management is not about delving into analytics

A common misconception is that the role of a product manager is to collect data and discover actionable insights from it. While the latter part is true, what people don’t understand is that the role of a product manager is to interpret the data, not collect it. PMs need to have an analytical eye which can work out what the product is lacking just by looking at numbers.

A product manager’s job is to decide which data should be collected and ask questions that can be answered through data. The “how to collect data” part should be left to data analytics experts.

So for example, the PM notices that people are dropping off from the checkout page? The PM would then ask data experts to fetch the session time, session duration, and exit pages. From that data, he/she would decide if they should change the page’s design or not.

Similarly, if the question is why there are no repeat visitors on the blog then PM would look at data points and say that probably the content isn’t engaging and we must research what our readers like to read.

I wouldn’t deny that a product manager needs to have a breadth of skills. But here’s the catch- Breadth, not depth.

The scope of product management is incredibly broad and varied and product managers have to be on their toes to run everything smoothly. They need to know what exactly needs their attention and how they can remove blockers for the team to perform well. But that doesn’t mean that product managers have to step in everywhere.

Product Management is about setting the vision of the product and aligning your team with it. Product Management requires you to do a lot of research- about your market, your users and the problem you’re trying to solve. Your job is to assimilate huge data inputs — be it feedback from clients, or data from Google analytics, research reports, market trends, and statistics — basically everything about your market and your customer.

I hope this blog helps you understand the difference between what product management is and what it’s not. And, gives you the strength to say no to things you shouldn’t be doing.

Happy product managing!

I wrote this blog for our Medium Publication- Unboxing Product Management. The publication is a weekly column by people of Quovantis to share their learning.