When you DON’T need product management
Sometimes, leaders in companies look at product management as a holy grail that will fix all their problems, and establish rocket-fast growth overnight. Whenever someone wants to build a product management function, I ask them what they expect. The more companies I talk to, the more I see that the most important problem to solve often lies a bit elsewhere. The good news is, that the solution is cheaper and you don’t need an additional person to fix those. I will discuss 3 of these situations below.
1. We know what we need to do, we just need someone to execute it
Then you’ve done most of the product management work and you don’t need product management. Product managers are not about execution (that’s project management). You simply need your engineering team to (better) execute. You should not hire product managers to hide/solve your engineering problems. In this case, you need to figure out why your engineering is not executing the way you’d want to. If you hire a product manager, they will be forced to become a project manager to be successful, but the true product management work will be lacking. In this case, the person to talk to and solve the problem with is your engineering leader.
In some of these cases, companies are missing a design element, to figure out the solutions to the outlined problems and figure out the details, work closely with engineering. Product management is about figuring out which problems to solve, so if you’ve already figured that out, you’d be hiring someone to do the work you did yourself.
Note that having a list of features to build is not the same thing as having a list of problems to be solved. If you have a list of features, you might still need to hire a product manager, but fix your execution problems in the meantime.
2. We don’t know what to do next
In this situation, a product leader can come in, setup product culture, product discovery, hash together a roadmap, and if they are a bit senior, they will have a go at product strategy. However, this problem runs much deeper. This is a sign of not having a strong product vision and a lack of company strategy as such. A strong product leader can help you get there, however, it would be much cheaper for the existing team to have a stab at these and set a course for the company to give their product management hire a head-start. More importantly, you will set up your company towards a much larger success by knowing and sharing with your team where you go next. This can run as deep as market analysis to understand your TAM/SAM/SOM, understand the opportunities and see where you can take the company next. Hiring a product manager will trigger these questions, but these are too big to be answered by a single new hire.
3. Developers never deliver on time
While this might look like another engineering issue, in reality, this often runs up the food chain and the problem is, sorry to say, you. This is a classic symptom of a feature factory model, where the management asks for features to be developed, usually based on what sales claims will make them sell the next deal. Product management is not about features, but about outcomes (aka problems solved), and outcomes are achieved when those are achieved, rarely that happens on a date that someone promised under pressure several weeks ago.
But mainly, if you have a strong expectation of something changing through delivery on a specific date, and you don’t feel the engineering team is working towards this super hard, there is a chasm between you and them, most of the time a gap in shared context. In such a situation, there are two options of how the product management hire can fail.
a. They will come in and do project management job instead, to ensure timely delivery. The product management job is still with you, you most probably still communicate in features and deadlines and the true outcomes are hidden to the team, there’s just one more person layered on.
b. They will come in and do product management job, so they will find the context, talk to customers, understand the data and communicate outcomes to the team. However, your context will not be the same, so the chasm might be smaller, but it’s still there and has just shifted, keeping you disappointed.
What’s context? Everything that explains why is problem X so pivotal for your business to focus on solving. And part of that context stems from your PnL, much of it stems from understanding your customers really well. When engineering knows what’s important and why, they are smart enough to get there without anyone standing behind them, asking “are you there yet?”.
You can hire product managers when you fix these
You might still need product management even if you’re dealing with these symptoms, but whether you set up product management or not, you will need to fix those. The issue is, that if you hire a PM for these reasons, for a while, you will consider these issues (being) fixed, but in reality, those are now just hidden from your sight for a while, and you’ll be fixing them at a larger scale, in a more expensive setup.
