Abstraction

There’s a well-known (but probably apocryphal) story about Larry Ellison being introduced to the first product manager hired by Oracle. “I don’t get it,” Larry supposedly told the hapless new employee. “You aren’t building something, and you’re not selling something. So tell me again why you should be working for me?”

As Ken Norton points out in his excellent essay, a product manager is the one job that an organization can get along without. Without product managers, sales people can still sell products, and engineers can still develop products.

So what good is a product manager? Truth is, if the company is very new, very small, and has a very specific and well understood product and target market, a product manager probably won’t add a lot of value. In such a company, keeping customers happy by getting builds done, tested and out the door is all the matters.

It’s the next step that matters. Problems begin when an established technology company wants to move beyond their initial success and grow the business. So much effort has been placed nurturing initial customers and growing the customer base, so much blood sweat and tears have gone into developing the first product, that it becomes difficult to see the big picture and recognize opportunities for growth. This is especially true if the initial product launch was very successful.

The more successful an initial launch, the more likely the executive team will develop an unrealistic view of their powers and their market knowledge. They believe that they can will markets into being; they believe that a product strategy is a good one because they thought of it. It’s just not true, though. Research has shown the second and third products introduced after an initial success almost do poorly. The company has stopped listening to the market in favor of listening only to their own customers and to their own ego.

This, then is what product managers do. They bring balance to a company and help guide product strategy by listening to the overall market with an understanding of the potential for technology to address that market. They help a company grow to the next level.

Incidentally, this requires an unusual balance of skills. A product manager must have the ability to understand both a market and how technology can be used to solve problems within that market. A person that can do this well is rare, and makes hiring a challenge (see Ken Norton’s excellent post referenced above).

Software is abstract. From a product perspective it doesn’t exist in the sense that, say, an automobile exists, or a laundry detergent.  Software is ephemeral—so we can’t touch it, we can’t directly measure it, and we can’t see it.  This makes marketing and managing software products different from managing “traditional” products; it’s much more challenging, especially if the product is new or if it performs behind the scenes (such as a middleware product). The challenge means that product management or marketing is a rewarding career. It also means you’re probably going to screw up a lot.

This blog is about the things I’ve learned over the course of more than a decade of screwing things up.