(2024-10-22) Procopio The Untimely Death Of Product Management

Joe Procopio: The Untimely Death of Product Management. I’ve known her since she founded her startup while still in college in the late 2000s

She’s not tech. She knows how to create, innovate, and sell, especially in the consumer market, with all its complexities and shifting priorities.

In other words, she knows what the people want and how to bring it to them.

In the sense of “product” – product science, product development, product management – this is, like, must-have skill number one

she had never thought of herself as a “product person.”

“I’ve been doing fractional work around brand and product strategy for the past two years,” she told me. “I’ve recently become interested in moving more toward product in tech.”

tech product is dying.

The product role has evolved again and not in a good way ((2023-09-09) Itamar Gilad On Linkedin Why Did Airbnb Kill Product Management)

I’m an entrepreneur who has sold companies and an innovator who holds a patent. I know how to get shit done, and I have a background in software development and an education in systems and data. But my top skill is that I know what people want and how to bring it to them.

the product role stumbled into existence with the expansion of software from business to consumer, from desktop to Web to mobile, and from corporate-driven to innovation-driven.

Not that software was never that, but in the mid/late 2000s it was becoming a lot more of that very quickly. Someone needed to shepherd all that innovation from the company’s collective brain into the users’ collective hands, almost literally.

From those early days, most corporations (BigCo) outside of the startup world didn’t have a handle on how to make the product role work for them, so the conflation of product management with project management was born.

What I do mind is that when people who have no sense of innovation, no understanding of customers and markets, and who consistently prioritize timelines above top and bottom lines start thinking they can do the product role.

About a month ago, I wrote a column called “The Slow, Painful Death Of Agile and Jira,” in which I asked when Agile stopped being an optional methodology and became a religion. The only negative feedback I got – in an overwhelming landslide of positive feedback – was for calling Agile a methodology, thus proving that I didn’t understand it. (2024-09-26-ProcopioTheSlowPainfulDeathOfAgileAndJira)

Naw, man. It’s a methodology now. That’s my entire point.

It’s not just the crushing misinterpretation of the Agile manifesto or the constant stop-start-stop pace of Scrum or the horrible micromanagement UX of Jira turning product management back into project management. Over the last couple of years, it’s become a misinterpretation of the product role itself.

Experimentation is being deemphasized for the sake of an unbending roadmap. (Project-oriented Roadmaps are counter-productive for Software Product Teams)

Innovation is being pushed out in favor of consistent recurring revenue, even if, over time, the overall numbers are smaller, as long as they’re predictable.

Go-to-market is becoming another methodology unto itself, with flywheels imagined as perpetual motion machines, product-market fit sought for an ever-expanding collection of unnecessary features, and target audiences the size of a broad side of a barn. All of this leads to a lack of mechanics to, you know, narrowly define the target market, properly fit it, and spin the flywheel until you get traction.

This kind of thinking ultimately led to an unfortunate but inevitable outcome.

Product got kneecapped in the great tech RIF

if software developers got slapped around hard in the mass layoffs of 2023 and 2024, “product people” got just plain decimated.

Executives can make a case that AI can replace human ingenuity for tasks like developing a roadmap and sticking to it, hitting and maintaining consistent recurring revenue targets, and finding increasingly efficient and cost-effective ways to reach deeper into ever-broadening markets.

If you were a “product person” sitting in front of Jira and Confluence and spreadsheets all day, you likely felt the ax, or at least the rush of air as it came down.

this might not be so much a demise as it is a reset, just like I believe it is in software development.

So now that we’ve crash-landed back on the bottom floor, it’s probably a pretty good time to get in.