Why is Product Management so misunderstood?

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Sarah Bui

As a discipline, Product Management is talked about inconsistently across our industry. This is due to its recent and rapid increase in popularity. Companies are increasingly focused on return on their digital investments.

It’s also because it’s difficult to do Product Management really well.

This has led to an explosion in the number of tools, frameworks and approaches to support a Product Manager. But this has been (in a lot of cases) counterproductive. It has made it very difficult for a Product Manager to know where to focus their attention.

However, when you take a step back, the purpose of the discipline is simple and empowering:

Increase the chance of return on investment in you digital solutions by determining what the right thing to build is.

This means that effective Product Managers only allow ideas that have been validated commercially, technically and by the user to make it to market. This prevents wastage and ensures that the team is working on something meaningful.

The tools, frameworks and approaches that a product manager could use to achieve this are — to a large degree — arbitrary. Wearing a cowboy hat doesn’t make you a cowboy. If someone is not achieving better commercial outcomes, then they’re not doing Product Management.

Wearing a cowboy hat doesn’t make you a cowboy

The inconvenient truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all framework or killer tool for effective Product Management. It’s all about understanding the purpose of the discipline, having the right attitude and being flexible in your approach to individual situations.

There are a number of important factors that determine what the right tools, frameworks and approaches are in a given situation. These include

1. the existing technical infrastructure
2. the internal organisational structure; and of course
3. the goals of the product and the alignment of those with the overall business strategy.

My approach is to always start with that simple purpose of Product Management and I always structure my work by focussing on the two core tenets of the discipline:

1. Define a clear product strategy: Understand why the product should exist through a value-based approach. Align the entire team on this. Iterate when necessary.
2. Create and manage healthy roadmaps: Lead a cross-discipline discovery process to build a roadmap based on solving problems. Validate solutions with evidence.

I try to tailor the people and deliverables to suit each individual product from the wealth of tools available from the available expertise in UX, technology and business strategy. These tools should focus on:

• Defining a long term vision for the way we want the world to be
• Framing the problem right to understand what we’re trying to solve
• Planning and communicating a healthy roadmap of what outcomes to achieve and when
• Generating high quality and feasible ideas quickly
• Bringing those ideas to life through prototyping
• Testing and validating ideas against commercial, design and technology criteria

In this way, you will be able to create better commercial outcomes through digital solutions by determining what the right thing to build is.

If you would like to know more about Product Management please get in touch.

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