(2023-11-28) Cagan Alternatives To Product Managers

Martin Cagan: Alternatives To Product Managers. I doubt anyone is surprised to learn that many people have been asking me about Brian Chesky’s recent comments. ((2023-11-14) Brian Chesky's New Playbook)

I’ve been hesitant to write about this topic for two reasons: First, I didn’t want to provide oxygen to this topic, as I consider this interview one that creates as many questions as it answers. Second, I like to write about topics that I think will endure

Many leaders are frustrated with their product managers, and while I’ve warned about that before, this interview gets many of these issues out on the table.

So my intention here is to write a series of two articles, this one on the alternatives to product managers, and the next on the alternatives to product leaders

Before we dive in, there are two important points to remind people of:

First, if you have not yet read the article on Product Teams vs Feature Teams, then I’d strongly suggest you pause here and read that carefully. ((2019-08-29) Cagan Product Vs Feature Teams)

Second, keep in mind that my work is all about sharing the practices that try to give you the best chance of product success. I always try to explain that there is no one right way. ((2022-08-26) Cagan An Svpg Process)

There really isn’t an alternative to product management – someone is doing this one way or another.

I have long warned that if you have feature teams, then eventually the company’s leaders (if they’re paying attention) come to realize that the people titled product managers are really project managers.

Or even worse, if you have Agile-trained product owners in the seats where you need product managers, then what you really have are backlog administrators. ((2021-06-09) Cagan The CSPO Pathology)

But the real point here is that neither the feature team product manager, nor the Agile product owner, are providing the necessary product management, so something else must be going on, and that’s what we’ll discuss here

The most common alternative to product managers is that the founder/CEO (in a small company), or the stakeholders (in a medium or large company), are taking responsibility for the product management (the value and viability of what is to be built), and the product teams are just there to build out the roadmap features and projects (i.e. they are feature teams).

This alternative model has been around forever, and the limitations are well known (see Product Fail). ((2015-06-05) Cagan Product Fail)

There have always been examples where either the designer or one of the engineers steps up and covers the product management responsibilities... I mean doing the work to learn the customer dynamics, the product data, the competitive landscape, and the many business viability constraints in order to cover value and viability.

I admit to having a real appreciation for the ambitious people that put in the work to tackle this dual role

but this has never been a scalable or sustainable solution because it requires the person taking on essentially two full-time jobs at once.

However, there is another alternative that I think in the right context can be extremely effective: this is when the product management responsibility is covered by skilled product leaders. The most famous example of this working at scale is Apple.

while they have world-class designers and world-class engineers, and they have strong program managers supporting these people, they don’t have product managers

At Apple, the people covering the true product management responsibilities, and in my personal opinion the most under-appreciated aspect of Apple’s version of the product model, is that they have a remarkable number of the best product leaders I’ve ever seen.

This alternative approach does mean that these product leaders can be bottlenecks on decisions, and it’s not a coincidence that Apple is not known for moving quickly.

But if you consider consumer devices, where the outcome depends so heavily on many different product teams contributing to a seamless whole (coherence), then this model has very real advantages.

there are some real challenges when it comes to the large number of diverse services and applications, and this is where you’ll find more examples at Apple of strong individual contributor product managers collaborating directly with product designers and engineers.

If you’re a CEO or GM, you might be thinking that instead of trying to recruit and develop strong, true product managers, maybe you’ll just do like Apple and skip the product managers, and you’ll just take responsibility for value and viability yourself?

Many of Apple’s product leaders have 10-25 years of experience building world-class products at Apple.

Just like countless CEO’s fancied themselves to be the next Steve Jobs, only to find out they weren’t even close, unless you have truly strong product leaders, don’t expect the same results. (You Are Not Steve Jobs.)

I certainly believe that true product managers (not feature-team product managers or product owners) are the most scalable and sustainable solution to driving consistent innovation on behalf of our customers.