(2024-11-26) Procopio Is It Time For The Tech Industry To Rethink Product Management

Joe Procopio: Is It Time for the Tech Industry to Rethink Product Management? Going forward, product people are going to have to learn to do more with less, maybe even with nothing. I’m done. I’m out. I’ve lost the battle for the heart and soul of product management

Over the past several years, the product role has been severely degraded, to the point where it’s now more about getting an endless string of features out than making products more valuable. (feature factory)

The failure of product management is not the PM’s fault, it’s the tech industry’s fault.

There Are Two Types of Product Management People Now

I know this because I wrote a column a few weeks ago about how product management was(n’t) dead, and I got two types of responses.

The first type of response was from the new-school product managers and product owners. These are folks who usually come from the business side... They didn’t like what I had to say. They kept coming at me with their product management certifications. And each time my soul died a little more.

The second type of response was a series of “thank yous” and “attaboys” (are we still using “attaboy” in 2024? I’m generalizing and I’m old) from the OG product person set. These are the folks who, like me, fell into “product” by accident, former engineers and developers and scientists and, well, innovators who followed innovation like rats following the Pied Piper into the functional role where innovation made a difference in business.

They resonated the most with this line from my article: “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.”

I had a chance last week to speak to a friend of mine, a former engineer-turned-product person. ..“Today’s true product manager is going to have to be into IC,” he said.cThey’ll have to be an individual contributor.”

He’s absolutely right. I know this because I’ve been the IC product person and it rules. If they let you do it.

Strategy without tactical is a lab experiment. Tactical without strategy is makework.

the rise in the mainstreaming of product science has resulted in an equal and opposite decline in the thing it’s supposed to actually do — bring innovation into the hands of customers.

At Spiffy, a mobile on-demand vehicle care and maintenance company, I was hired to be the chief data science innovation strategy officer (CDSISO), so again, for convenience, I became the CPO. Only this time, I was an IC, dotted line to engineering, operations, support, success, strategy, and even somewhat to marketing and sales.

This was awesome, and I got so much done that contributed directly to the top and bottom lines, from $2 million to $60 million in annual revenue. Then a private equity firm came in and they were like “Whaaaaaaat?” and suddenly I was doing roadmaps and standups until our revenue became predictable and growth screeched to a modest but still reasonable number.

Case in point: When I came into my most recent CPO role, I had to dismantle a team and an organization that was so bloated and underwater, it took 73 days to make a simple text change to the app.

In Product Management, Good Is the Enemy of Perfect
I know that’s backward, but it’s right.

I had another conversation this week with a former colleague who is one of the best product people I know, but she’s currently out of work

She is disheartened by the lack of traction in her search but more so what she’s hearing when she does get the interview. The jobs are almost always building a product by adding random features,

I told her about the IC thing, and she was quiet for a second and then said: “But I spent so much time figuring out how to lead people.”

If you want to stay in product and you really want to do product, the less responsibility you have over other product managers and owners and whatever else they’re calling product people these days, the better off you’re probably going to be.

(Be advised, I took a look at those strategy and innovation roles, too, and they’re still mostly BS.)