The curious language of Product management
I’m currently writing a presentation that will enable the sales team at Made Tech to be more able to talk about how Product management capability fits into an agile project team.
Here’s Scott Colfers neat statement describing what Product managers do (within the UK Civil Service);
“Product managers run ‘things’ like they are mini-businesses, with the goal of optimising the value of that ‘thing’.”
Ok, before I simply drop this in a big font on a slide and let my audience ponder the deep meaning for themselves, let’s unpack it (my interpretation);
Things
The way things are done is gloriously ambiguous, however since the projects I work with are delivered to UK Government Service Standard, this means user first and agile (meaning Scrum, then Kanban when the team is able)
Things are also a way of neatly avoiding the eternal discussion about products and services. Things describe tangible artefacts that are the outcome from effort. Sorry, that’s worse. Things are our products. A product could be a tube of toothpaste, a car, or the ability travel (relatively) freely by having a UK Passport.
Value
We’re called product managers despite the fact that we’re not charge of the product, but the value the product has to some people. A product that no one wants/needs/desires (or ‘the potential user can achieve their goal by alternative means’) has little or no value, and is called a failed product. We claim to learn from failed products and we should, but let’s not kid ourselves, getting it wrong makes us unhappy, so the key job of a product manager is to reduce the likelihood of this happening.
Some people
Though not in Scotts description, some people is really important. Notice I talk about a discrete collection of people. We may group them by some form of similarity, they may have the same ‘role’, or indeed share a defined ‘goal’. However your teams research defines some people, the product manager takes this group of people, and ensures the product has value to them. This is called success, everyone like this because it makes them happy.
Mini business & Optimising value
I’m lumping these elements together, as I believe their root is the same thing. In my mind a mini business is synonymous with the lean startup movements overarching goal of ‘behaving like a startup’ (the good bits, not the poverty & 12 hour days). A lean startup is defined by what they don’t don’t build. Think about special editions of sports cars, you’ll hear how (insert motoring journalist of choice here) will describe a car that’s more costly than the standard car, but with less features. No electric windows, air conditioning or stereo means less weight — meaning more speed and agility. I imaging the product managers on projects like these saying; “well you can have electric door mirrors, but not having them means we’re 5 kilos closer to the target weight reduction”. The product manager is defending some peoples needs from this thing, the engineers, stylists and wind-tunnel engineers will all have to adjust their mindsets.
Takeaway
Product management is like any other domain of expertise within the world of digital engineering. We don’t have the legacy of an industrial revolution, or Roman empire to have formed and tested over millennia the practices and methods we use. We rapidly embrace practices like ‘kanban’ and ‘kata’, but occasionally we almost get to a point of clarity like Scotts description.
