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Why is Product Management so misunderstood?
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.
