Revenue Is Product Management [audio]
thisisproductmanagement.com
thisisproductmanagement.com
I very much think that there is a role for these sorts of people, but being called product management has always seemed like an odd label to apply and something it seems everyone either struggles to define or outright ignores others definitions.
No. Not everything is a design problem. No. Not everything can be solved with "design thinking".
As Product Management becomes more popular we'll start to see the rise of the product "guru". The design industry is filled with self-help, anti-intellectual money grubbers that have never actually built anything of use. They bolster their guru career with the fact that they worked at Facebook for six months. The same thing will start to happen to Product Management.
I mean the process is literally:
1. Understand the problem. 2. Define the problem. 3. Come up with ideas for solutions. 4. Test the solutions.
And iterate 3 and 4 until you have something you are happy with. It's hard to imagine how you can arrive at a solution in any other way.
edit: And this isn't to say that I'm defending design thinking, I personally don't like the term or the buzz around it, but I can't fault the process itself. I'm sure many people use it already.
And there is your answer. It's not "design thinking", it's straightforward problem solving that's been used by engineers (and others) since forever. In the best case, re-branding it "design thinking" adds nothing. More typically, it subtracts significantly.
I credit much of it to the rise of people like Marissa Meyer doing similar things to the PM world as people like Jonny Ives did in the UX world.
Individuals making that big of a splash significantly alter the perception of their field.
Product Management is much more than "gets things done but doesn't have direct reports".
If you've worked with great PM's and been a part of A+ product teams, you would see that the set of responsibilities is actually much more meaningful.
Looking at past episodes of this OP podcast (https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/) the following are, amongst others, aspects of product management:
R&D
Building Human Machines
Employee Experience
Building APIs
Consulting
Pricing
Customer Experience
Venture Capital
Now I don't disagree with that at all, and have been involved with those things and many more, but at some point the definition becomes overly broad as to not mean anything outside of a specific organization being referenced.
1. Figure out a what success means for your venture 2. Come up with a strategy that leads to said success 3. Get your team to execute on that strategy (and never forget that you can be wrong about the strategy, but you can’t fuck up the execution...since otherwise you will never find out if the strategy works)
Now implementing this is far less straightforward...