Product Manager

The Product Manager Role

The Product Manager is the person responsible for ensuring that the product is successful in the market. They are ultimately responsible for the product vision, strategy, organisational structure and performance of the aligned Stream Teams. To achieve this the Product Manager works closely with their peers in the Product Team.

The Product Manager can be seen as the CEO of the product. Not from the perspective that everyone has to do what they say but from the perspective that they need to design and build a team that can deliver the product. This requires strong relationship management skills and deep insights into the needs of customers, the market and the state of the industry.

Key Responsibilities

1. Defining Product Principles: Defining the product principles that guide the work of the Stream Teams.
2. Defining the Stream Team Structures: Identifying the separate value streams, allocating streams to Stream Teams, staffing and funding the Stream Teams and the ongoing management of the structures. This requires taking input from all of the other Product Team members but the ultimate decision is the Product Manager's.
3. Securing Budget: Securing the budget required to deliver the product.
4. Setting the Product Strategic Direction: Creating a product vision and strategy based on deep understanding of the customers, market, industry and business. Setting and monitoring short-term Stream Team objectives to deliver on the strategy. This requires taking input from all of the other Product Team members but the ultimate decision is the Product Manager's.
5. Tracking Product Performance: Monitoring the performance of the product in the market and the performance of the Stream Teams in delivering the product.
6. Collaboratively Designing the Culture: Working with the other Product Team members to define, design and implement the culture of the Stream Teams.
7. Defining the Product Development Process: Defining the principles, vision and health metrics that guide the product development process adopted by the Stream Teams.
8. Running Projects: Deciding when to run a project instead of empowering teams to deliver the product. This is a last resort and should be avoided where possible so the decision to run a project rests with the Product Manager.

Key Artifacts Produced

1. Product Principles: A document outlining the product principles that guide the work of the Stream Teams.
2. Bounded Value Streams: A map of the core value streams of the product and the Stream Teams that are responsible for delivering them.
3. Value Stream Funding: The funding model for each of the value streams based on the strategic importance of the stream.
4. Product Vision: An overview of the long-term customer benefits that the product will deliver.
5. Product Budget: The budget required to deliver the product.
6. Product Strategy: A document outlining the current diagnosis of the market, the areas of focus and the actions required to achieve the product vision.
7. Product Roadmap: A collated view of the work being performed by the Stream Teams to deliver the product strategy.
8. Customer Working Group: A group of customers that the Product Manager, or Stream Team members, meets with regularly to get feedback on the product and the strategy.
9. Process Principles: The principles that guide the product development process.
10. Process Vision: The vision for how the product development process will improve outcomes for the team as well as stakeholders.

Single Threaded Leader

Unlike the other roles in the Product Team, the Product Manager is not responsible for people management in the Stream Teams. This means that they have more time to devote to understanding the market, the customers and the industry and developing the product vision and strategy.

Amazon, who were pioneers in the creation of autonomous empowered teams, found that the single best indicator of success was the presence of a single-threaded leader who was fully devoted to the success of the product. The Product Manager is this leader. They have the authority and influence in the organisation to remove any impediments that the Stream Teams face and to secure the resources that they need to deliver the product.

Why is the Product Manager not in a Stream Team?

As a product grows it will need multiple, often dozens, of teams to deliver the product. Part of the Product Manager's roles is to create the long-term product vision, define the strategy that will help the product to achieve its goals based on current market conditions, and manage relationships with key stakeholders across the business. The teams looking after the Search functionality or the Cart functionality or the Returns functionality do not need a separate vision and strategy. They need to deliver based on the over-arching product vision and strategy.

In addition, while the number of teams grows in line with the product, the same is not true for other business areas. Therefore if each team wants to manage relationships across the business, the business will be overwhelmed with requests for information and decisions.

This has led to a lot of confusion in the industry about the role of a Product Manager. Different companies have tackled this problem in different ways such as the anti-patterns below where the Product Manager is just a re-breanded Business Analyst or Project Manager. Or, in other companies, the Product Manager role is redefined such that there is a person in the Stream Teams who does not look after the vision and strategy but focuses on user research and identifying solutions and a separate role in the Product Team who looks after the higher-level items. The titles Product Owner and Group Product Manager as often used.

The ambiguity in the actual responsibilities of the role causes a lot of confusion for people and wastes time and effort for companies. That is why we have a clean separation of titles and responsibilities for the different roles in a Stream Team and a Product Team. The Researcher is responsible for interviewing customers, uncovering insights and works with the rest of the team to identify and validate solutions. The Product Manager is responsible for the product vision, strategy, organisational structure and performance of the Stream Teams.

There is an overlap in that both roles need to develop a very deep understanding of the customer and the market. But this can be managed by inviting Product Managers to attend the interviews run by all of the Stream Teams. Having other people organise and run the interviews frees up the Product Manager's time so they can attend the frequent interviews.

Anti-Patterns

• Business Delivers Spec to Delivery: Product, Marketing and Sales all drive different parts of the product development process. The different areas need to work together to deliver the product.
• Business Owner and Product Manager: Many companies like to keep the Business and IT divide by duplicating the Product Manager role. This leads to a lack of accountability and uninspiring products.
• Product Manager as a Project Manager: The Product Manager is not a project manager. They are responsible for the product vision, strategy, organisational structure and performance of the Stream Teams. They are not responsible for the day-to-day management of the Stream Teams.