A Decade of Product Management

I've been reflecting on the last decade in Product Management. We've come a long way but we still have far to go. These are a few of my observations and personal experiences.

Not every company has seen all these changes, but by and large I think it's been a positive push forward and I'm proud of where we've come from and where we have gotten to.

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2014: "I do not need Product Managers, I can run my company myself. I have the strategy."

2019: "How do I hire a Chief Product Officer? I need them yesterday."

Founders realizing they can't do it all on their own, that Product Management is a career, and an important skill for the executive team.

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2011: "You are crazy for joining a startup, Melissa. What are you even doing there? What is Product Management? You should have stayed at Barclays."

2019: "I'm going to get my MBA so I can be a product manager."

Product, and especially product in startups, is now the hot job.

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2014: "We don't need Product Management help, we need design help. Can you just teach us UX?"

2019: "I have 800 Product Owners who have never done the role before, can you help train them?"

With Scrum came the POs, and with the new POs, came the interest for real Product Management.

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2013: "My ppl are not allowed to talk to customers. It is too risky. We will get sued. We know what we're doing."

2019: "Duh, of course I want my people talking to customers. Get them out of the building."

Executives realized the importance of being close to their customers in order to build great products.

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2013: "We don't do experiments here, Melissa. We are a real business."

2018: "Can you teach people how to do MVP experiments? How do we write hypotheses well? How do we run it in B2B"

Managers are less afraid of experimentation. They started to see the value.

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2011: "Product reports to the VP of Engineering."

2019: "Product reports to the CPO."

We started seeing the need for product leadership, even at the largest of companies.

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2011: "What is a user story?"

2019: "How do I write a good user stories that can get into Jira correctly?"

We still haven't quite gotten down "outcomes over outputs" yet, but it's moving in a better direction.

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2013: "What is this #Agile thing? It sounds like something we should be doing."

2019: "If someone says 'that's not #agile' one more time I'm going to quit"

We took some things a little too far, without really understanding them. There's work to be done.

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2016: "I want a product manager who can be great at writing specification documents. We need PRDs"

2019: "I want a PM who is good at strategy, and can help us realize our business goals. Where do I find them?"

We started to realized that product management was not just about specs.

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2013: "We should build this because I said so."

2019: "Do we have data to prove that is the right way to go?"

Teams and executives turned to data-driven decision making, and the tools and software followed.

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So what does that mean for the next 10 years?

Here are my predictions:

• Strategy and product management will become more connected and synonymous, especially in SAAS/ other software companies. Product Strategy = Company Strategy in this case. As more enterprises turn digital, this will become a stronger need for them. Most companies do strategy poorly, product managers will need to step up and given the room from executives.
• There will be more CPOs and leadership positions in product, but not enough people to fill them. There will be many first time CPOs who are excited for the challenge, but do not have prior experience and don't know what they don't know. We will need to help these first time product leaders understand how their role changes in this new position, and they will need to be willing to learn to be successful. By the end of the decade, the people starting in product now will be taking on these roles, and we'll see some very interesting and successful software companies with great product organizations.
• Product Operations will be critical component to scaling product organizations. Once we have nailed the interactions between teams down with agile, we'll need to enable good decision making of those teams to escape the build trap. Supporting infrastructure will be needed to disseminate market research, and customer feedback to teams.
• There will be a lot more Product Managers in the industry who need a place to learn now. We'll need to build training programs inside companies, make sure we hire good experienced people to coach. By the end of the next decade, these current product managers will be the product leaders, helping to shape great product-led companies. Ensuring they start off strong now will be critical.
• We will see more segmentation in the role of the Product Manager - not a one size fits all. There will be technical PMs, consumer facing PMs, people who specialize in internal tools vs B2B. We'll have a better way of articulating what type of product manager, and product leader, we need for our companies and have a language around communicating that.

What are your predictions? What have you seen change, and what do you see changing in the next 10 years? Comment below.

For more posts on Product Management, sign up for my mailing list at produxlabs.com. Article originally posted on my blog here.