ITXtreme with Paul Ryan | InfoWorld | Where Have All The Good Product Managers Gone? | July 12, 2006 10:53 AM

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Where Have All The Good Product Managers Gone?

July 12, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Where Have All The Good Product Managers Gone?

Sometimes I feel as if I am in the song. "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" from Van Halen's classic album Diver Down.

Where have all the good times gone?
Once we had an easy ride an' always felt the same
Time was on our side, we had everything to gain

Let it be like yesterday
Is that me or Happy Days?

Except, I'm usually changing the chorus to "Where Have All The Good Product Managers Gone?" Every week, I get calls from frantic recruiters, friends in startups, VCs, that are looking for 'good' product managers. I generally reply by asking a basic question:

What do you mean by 'product manager'?

Do you really want:

A) An Engineering Manager, or

B) A Brand Manager, or

C) A Design Visionary, or

D) A Project Manager

Since in this obfuscated, overheated, hype-laden mushuggeneh Internet bubble 2.0, a 'product manager' can refer to any of the above.

Wikipedia has a thoughtful summary of the various concepts embodied in product management. Such thoughtful approaches are doomed to failure, however. Because, when people are desperate for 'product managers', what they really are desperate for is a clue -- a clue about what product to sell and build.

What ever happened to the marketing discipline of assessing consumer needs, identifying gaps, and designing a product to meet the gap? This has all been turned around (and I know this is heresy for a technology guy) by the latest buzzword ('user generated content', 'community', 'social networking', blah blah blah) or technology ('peer-to-peer', 'Ajax') or combinations of the above ('a peer-tp-peer community collaboration with Ajax based web delivery'). Sound familiar? It should - it describes part/all of the past year's 'breakout successes' on the Internet.

Here's a case in point -- the success of the Apple iPod vs. any other mp3 player. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, did not invent downloading music (even legally), and did not invent cool clients to organize and manage your music (remmber WinAmp?). What did the product people at Apple do? The analyzed where all of the current product offering were weak, and came up with a relatively short list of things that the new product had to do:

1) It had to be easy enough to use so that your mother could rip CD's, buy music, and listen to music.
2) It had to provide an end-to-end solution to the whole musical experience (really, part of objective #1), and
3) It had to be cool.

Yes -- there were some really impressive human-interaction design approaches (the click wheel), cool color choices (you can chose any color as long as it's white), and neat ads showing people actually USING THE PRODUCT (wow -- what an idea). But he core insight was the system (the player, software, online store) that was required to make the music experience better. That was based on a consumer needs analysis -- nothing more, nothing less.

I think all of the 'good' product managers haven't disappeared (or haven't all been hired by Google) -- they never really existed. There really should be Engineering Managers, Brand Managers, Design Visionaries and Project Manager in every company. And maybe a Jobs-like person to insist on excellence at the top. That's what we should focus on -- satisfying consumer needs, regardless of how old-school that sounds.

Posted by Paul T. Ryan on July 12, 2006 10:53 AM

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COMMENTS

ugh... Van Halen? 'Scuse me, young whippersnapper, but that's "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" by _the Kinks_ to those of us old enough to remember...

Posted by: Will Cate at July 12, 2006 09:16 PM

Hear hear! Having worked as a product manager at a couple of household-name internet companies, only to see my job quickly degenerate into "process manager," where the objective was to "organize" the process onto gigantic spreadsheets--regardless of whether we ever actually built the product or anyone used it--I can only say amen, brother. Companies need to stop sweeping their management confusion under the product management rug, figure out what they really want, and then develop an appropriate job title and description.

Posted by: Chris Blake at July 14, 2006 11:01 AM

In my book, Turn Around!, I comment that the job of product management is the most difficult and important in a startup -- its role often played by the founding CEO.

Research on successful product managers contrasting the success of the Japanese and US car industries suggests that successful product managers tend to be more empowered, have more credibility, be more entrepreneurial. In contrast, less sucessful product managers tend to be coordinating in role. And as we all know, a horse designed by a committee ends up looking like a camel.

The challenge I see in technical organizations is the product manager needs to be have sets of skills that are difficult to achieve in one person - technical, marketing and design skills. Many Silicon Valley companies use a two person team, a product and a marketing manager to overcome this problem. But of course, they have varying degrees of success.

A larger problem for most high tech companies is illustrated by the success of Apple where product and service innovation come together. Many high tech firms are uncomfortble with services and solution selling. Their bias towards Moore's law pushes them to box-only solutions.

The Apple example is instructive in that it took a CEO to launch an integrated approach to the market.

Posted by: Alistair Davidson at July 17, 2006 01:06 PM

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