January 18, 2019

Talk to enough product managers, and you’ll hear some complain that their companies don’t understand product management. They signed up to be a PM because they wanted to own the product lifecycle from ideation to launch and beyond. They wanted to live at the intersection of design, engineering, and business strategy. They always fancied themselves multi-talented, and product management seemed like a great way for them to exercise their various strengths.

Instead, they find themselves:

• Sitting in meetings with frustrated stakeholders, some of whom can be quite senior and ready to escalate issues to their peers in the org chart
• Talking to engineers telling them that Product has been missing requirements and adding scope, that the business is imposing unreasonable timelines on them, that they need to slow down and pay off tech debt
• Shipping products that barely seem to work, much less delight users
• Questioning their own abilities to lead, wondering if they’re too uncharismatic, not technical enough, or otherwise inadequate

Are these PMs bad at their jobs? Have they read Inspired? Did they choose the wrong career? I don’t think these are the best questions. Some struggling PMs might be dealing with bad luck, but many of them are not. Some of them are just below median quality, as half the people in any field are. That’s not something to be ashamed of. Half the players in the NBA are below median quality, but they’re still valuable to their teams.

I think the main problem for many struggling PMs is that they think about their jobs in terms of what they get to do every day instead of why their jobs exist in the first place. Why do companies spend money on a product management team? Are we even going to have product managers in the future? Engineers, designers, and salespeople have highly specialized skills, yet they sometimes also go and do PM-like things. It happens all the time.

Before considering whether we really need product management, I’ll pause to offer a definition of the job: product managers own the success of their products the same way people managers own the success of their teams. My definition is really just a rephrase of a line from the famous Ben Horowitz piece on the subject: “A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product.”

People managers don’t control everything that affects the success of their teams, but they are still accountable for their teams’ output. Product managers aren’t “the mini-CEOs” of everyone working on their products, but they are accountable for the success of their products nonetheless.

Does that mean we have product managers so that we have someone to blame when things go wrong? Someone to “fill in the gaps” missed by other functions? Someone to “gather the requirements”? Nope. We have product management because products succeed when they optimize against all the constraints of the company.

Engineering has technical constraints; sales has numbers to hit; everyone has too little time and too few people and too much work. Product managers make products work within those limitations. One day that means building trust with a stakeholder whose work needs to be deprioritized; the next day that means helping an engineer fix an urgent issue. Some days, it means figuring out what you really need to be doing, which is not always what everyone is urging you to do.

None of this is easy. Being a good PM involves much more than just “really listening to the customer” or “translating the needs of the business to the engineers.” It takes hard work and practice just like anything else. Sometimes, when a product manager is in a hard situation, it’s because the company is bumping up against a severe constraint, not because the company misunderstands what product management is or because the PM is simply incompetent.