New roles like Product Manager
Defining the essence of product management
Prologue
Back when I started my career in 2015, Product design was all the rage. It was a nascent domain. We were designing interfaces using the Adobe suite. Invision was popular for prototyping. Remember, Invision? They were championing the cause of building maturity of businesses in product design.
I caught the bug and spent my first year of work as a business development person learning product design. I was also outlining the scope of a large scale document digitsation system for a port terminal operator. The number of internal and external stakeholders were greater than 20. The services company I was working for didn't have a product designer instead they had a solution architect. So, me and him gathered the requirements. I attempted to design the product. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get my hands dirty designing ugly and usable interfaces.
The folks in the design community were always public about their learnings. They penned 100s of blogs and I read all of them. It was not just the how to do but also the nuances of finding good taste.
Since then, I went on to transition into a full fledged product designer who designed multiple B2B apps in the logistics and transportation field, usable and aesthetically good as well. I ended my stint of product design when I hired a better designer than me at Subjimandi.app, Vignesh NV.
Eventual transition
You would have seen this coming from the title itself, I transitioned into Product management. Building products in Subjimandi.app and Pipehaul where I got the real opportunity to dig deep and learn along the way.
It’s been a couple of years of startup building and an year at my current organisation where my mode of operating was through product development. I can now safely say that I understand the messy process of building products and navigate it through few fundamental concepts.
The current state of PMing is crowded with too many people writing “how to be” a PM then focus on the “what to build”.
Back when I got into product design. The book that helped me the most was titled “Lauch It“ by Shane Mielke. He is a renowned designer who wrote a short book distilling all his learnings about design in simple concepts.
I was never the most proficient with design tools like the shift nudge guy, MDS. But, I had clarity on “what to design” thanks to following Shane’s advice and listening to podcasts like Design Details where industry folks used to talk about craft of design. Couple these lessons with your own act of designing. I got decent at it over the time.
Novel Title for new roles
Just like Product design in 2015-2017 phase. Product Management became the hot role in the startup space around 2019. The title became catch all for anyone remotely wanting to work at the intersection of technology and design but also take responsibility for the overall product.
Big monies were being offered to people who were deemed worthy of handling this title. Articles telling people “How to be PM?” started pouring all over the internet and startup blogosphere.
To this date, PM in one company is different to PM in an another company. Tell me about it. I was a PM for 8 months without developers and designers to work with. And still, articles are being written every day trying to define it for people who are looking to get into product management.
I recently found an old talk by Cantlin who studied design, worked as a software engineer before becoming a Product Manager. He delivers the fundamentals of product management in a short 20 minutes video.
Riffing on the talk
This section is where I riff on the lessons shared in the talk. I strongly urge that you see the talk as well to understand “What is product management?”
Cantlin mentions why did Product management become so critical role at this point of time. The organisations started moving towards outcome oriented.
My experience in both the domains I worked, control-oriented management still persists. Legacy domains have a penchant to stay same. The reason why building products in these domains is so much of change management as well. I wrote about it in my previous post on understanding systems at work.
In sectors like logistics and agriculture which are filled with complex workflows. The critical skill of the product person comes from doing step 1(business/domain) and step 2(recognising the workflow) in product building workflow mentioned earlier. It helps in providing the right optionality before moving to the final step 3(product development).
A good product changes the workflow and engagement of people in the workflow. The product lead acts and operates as a change agent advocating about the progress for the people involved while executing their own workflow.
Moving on to what are the components of a good product. Cantlin uses the work of famous Marty Cagan and his 4 dimensions.
The inconveniant truth is that building good product is really hard. We are unsure about how things work in the first place. For a product to work we need to focus on making it work across four dimensions that impact the success of a product. And the 80% of the time. The odds are stacked against you succeeding.
- Valuable: Is the product valuable to the customer we are building for?
- Usable : Is the product usable for the customer we are building for?
- Feasible: Is the product can developed within the timelines and budget with the people we have onboard?
- Viable: Can we build it with the set of constraints ?
While being outcome focused, you are in charge of managing two different set of functionalities. The discovery and delivery of problems and product respectively. You promise results to and derive goals from the leadership.
Defining the product role
By laying out the 4 concepts introduced by Cantlin on 2x2. We get to the essence of the product role.
The role of PM revolves in these 4 quadrants. Cantlin mentions the work that needs to be done in each quadrant.
Let’s start from the top-left and go clockwise.
- Inputs x External: Your input is to be responsible about what to ship while prioritising a balance between multiple factors.
- External x Output: You achieve it by sharing context around the product, identify value for the customer and sync with the leadership team.
- Output x Internal: You are responsible for ensuring the team developing the product is aligned at all times and building towards the intended goal.
- Internal x Inputs: You are the voice of product. You communicate the benefits of the product and champion what the product development team is building.
Essence of product management
There are already 1000+ articles defining Product management for the masses. I had to write one because too many people want to be product manager without wanting to do product management.
A new and upcoming stream will be AI prompt designer/generator. It will be a new creative title where the next flock of migration will happen. It will be highly paid as well. I am just putting it out there for the folks who are thinking of career shift.
Just as when I experienced it as a product designer. Many articles will be written by the help of ChatGPT defining how to design prompts and get desired results from ChatGPT. But the fundamental concepts of the role will be as simple as the ones Cantlin outline in his product management talk. The way you get better at it or start to enjoy it is by doing it 100 times, at least.
It’s an effective mantra. Try it out 100 times. See if you are getting better and still enjoying. Then, all you need to do is change how you introduce yourself. Voila!
You are now a product manager or whichever new role you are pursuing. Simple.
Signing off till the next time,
Vivek, introducing myself as Product Manager.