What are you doing?

It’s a great time to be a Product Manager, and there’s a huge amount of theory on how to do it well. But how do you manage when theory meets reality?

Product management is among the most popular, convoluted, exciting, complex roles in modern business. Few roles outside of executive and C-Level positions can make the same promises of influence and impact in a business and out into the wider world. At its best, product management allows you to define, shape and influence the technological direction of an entire business, the way people work and live in your company and out in the world. 

Despite, or perhaps because, of the promise and complexity of pulling this off, I’ve always found it difficult to find a path and direction in how to proceed. I had no idea that Product Management was a thing when I started my career, and didn’t find out for a while that what I was doing had a name. I was pretty far off the mark on this, I’m sure, but as I’ve continued in Product Management I’m yet to meet anyone who got into the job in a traditional “vocational” way. Many find the role later on, or stumble into it, or are caught up in project management transitioning to a more Agile way of working. 

For me (and I hope this doesn’t become too anecdotal), Product Management came out of time working with data and listing items in an ecommerce setting. Items such as Garden sheds, Sofas and kitchen clothes all need data and information – weights, dimensions, colours, images and descriptions, to be able to successfully sell. From there, my interest (and at times frustration) in how content was displayed to customers, how those customers found their way around the websites I worked on to reach all of those items which had been listed, drove me forward. After enough time asking questions and making suggestions on how things could be done better, I was lucky enough to be invited to take a more active role in what I would later understand as the foundations of Product Management. 

Across my career I’ve been lucky to work with some excellent Product Leaders, I can’t say that many have come in through normal means – working with Saunas, Search Engine Optimisation, Warehousing, Local Radio, University Admissions, have all been routes people and gotten into the job. Others have come in through more related fields, such as software development or Business Analytics, but that doesn’t change the underlying problem which what follows aims to provide: there’s not enough out there on how to do this job all in one place. 

Books on Product Management are often focused purely on the Scrum Agile “Product Owner” role, which doesn’t cover a lot of what a person in a Product Management role needs to accomplish in many roles. Other content and courses are still very focused on specific parts of the product development lifecycle, or we need to go further afield into Project management, Lean and 6Sigma and other corners to glean the best of different processes. 

All of this is valid, relevant, but tends to miss the point – business expectations of a Product manager are intense, multifaceted and tend to require much more in reality than the scope laid out in most courses, approaches and other materials.

Especially in smaller businesses you may be one of very few people asked to bring a new product to life. You may be asked to speak to customers or stakeholders, design interfaces, discuss and consider technical processes, work with development teams and celebrate their successes and manage their misses and to generally smooth the way to make product decisions a reality, and that’s all before we get to defining a roadmap, building out consensus for what you know to be the right thing for your customers. 

What follows aims to be a number of things, at different times, depending on need. 

For those interested in starting a journey in Product Management, I hope this gives an overview of the kind of skills and approaches to consider to kick start your trajectory. 

For more experienced Product Managers I hope that the following acts as a more practical set of tools to bridge some of the gaps which exist in practical Product Management roles, and to act as a way to examine and iterate on how you practise Product Management. 

The following chapters act as not just philosophical and “ideal world” information but also give some “how to” and troubleshooting information of as much of the Product Management environment as possible. Product Management, Development, working with stakeholders, and Delivery is rarely straightforward and frameworks rarely land neatly, how to influence and exceed in implementing processes as well as products is often what leads to ongoing success.