Product Managers for the Digital World

An excerpt from the forthcoming book “Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products” by David Fradin with RN Prasad.

The role of the product manager is expanding due to the growing importance of data in decision making, and increase in customer and design focus, and the evolution of software development methodologies like agile according to McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey says product managers “are the glue that binds the many functions that touch a product—engineering, design, customer success, sales, marketing, operations, finance, legal, and more. They not only own the decisions about what gets built but also influence every aspect of how it gets built and launched.”…

“They wear many hats, using a broad knowledge base to make trade-off decisions, and bring together cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment between diverse functions. What’s more, product management is emerging as the new training ground for future tech CEOs.”

And now as companies from outside of the digital world go through the digital transformation, they need product managers to get the product right.

McKinsey argues the product manager thinks like a CEO.  But there is a problem there.  Unlike Procter and Gamble’s “brand manager” whose model Hewlett Packard copied to create today’s product manager, the brand manager had budget authority.  They paid for the market research that is needed and for the advertising.  So it is hard to think like a CEO when a product manager does not have control of the budget.  That is why I argue elsewhere in this book that the product manager should have the budget authority over marketing and market research.

Data is becoming even more critical and enables the product manager to monitor a product’s success across engagement, retention, conversion, usage and more. 

Product management is also becoming more agile in planning for the next feature release and the long term product roadmap.

McKinsey writes that products are becoming more complex, thus making the product management role more difficult.  Customers are looking for new features, frequent improvements, and upgrades after purchase. More product bundles are happening, different pricing tiers, dynamic pricing, up-sell opportunities, and pricing strategies.  Plus identifying and owning key partnerships.

McKinsey says there are three types of product managers: technologist, generalist and business-oriented based on their interviews. In my experience, I agree. 

The technologist type of product manager tends to be involved in back-end platforms or highly B2B products.  In my opinion, they tend to lean towards being the product’s architect.  The generalist is more customer-focused.  The Business-oriented product manager tends towards B2C products.

As the digital transformation accelerates, reliance on data and analytics become increasingly more important.  Add to that the 15 perfect storm technologies discussed elsewhere in this book; these technologies will produce a lot of data.  Figuring out what it all means will also challenge product managers.

Product managers of the future will apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand the data gathered. 

McKinsey thus says that future product managers must have a computer science foundation and design.  While this is true for some products, overall I think it is wrong,  If the time and effort of a product manager are pulled into architecture and design, who is going to do the other 32 things that must be done in the product market strategy for product success?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:49 — 7.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More