By Stacey Weber
A few weeks ago, we were on a roadtrip – heading home from Arizona to Wisconsin. It was already dark when we reached Colorado, driving north near the eastern border of the state on some highway that shall remain unnamed. It looked desolate, and then the music stopped as Pandora lost signal.
The minutes stretched to miles, and the conversation rambled the way it does in the middle of a 27-hour drive. Inevitably, one of us would say, “let’s Google it,” only to be reminded that we couldn’t. We tried the radio. Nothing. I tried singing, but no one encouraged me to continue.
This isolation lasted 120 miles. One hundred and twenty miles of no music, no phone, no Google……an isolation we were not expecting, thick and dark and mostly quiet.
Product Management is like the internet. When it’s there, we barely notice – even if we’re using it all the time. Sometimes I get asked what the value of Product Management is; when it’s working, no one seems to notice all the research, coordination, and cheerleading that happened in order to get the product out the door.
Walking into a company without Product Management is kind of like forced internet isolation. Inside these companies, people feel utterly isolated. They feel disconnected from other departments, and the “market” is some mysterious group that exists “somewhere else”. Mistakes are made, the churn is high, and profit is often elusive or under-whelming.
In the beginning, the founder was probably studying the market and informing the company of what was important – but as the company grows, the founder gets distracted by all the minutiae of managing the business.
Product Management fills that gap, forming connections across the company. We connect the dots between all the buyers and users in our markets, reading the tea leaves to determine what problems they will pay to solve.
We use those market facts to predict financials and show the business opportunity to leadership, providing real market information to impact spending and strategy.
Furthermore, we tell the story of our market’s problems to internal teams, so they can get their jobs done. Design, Engineering, and Quality Assurance need “requirements” – stories about the problems they’re tasked with solving for users. Marketing needs Positioning – stories about what the product will do for each of our buyers. Sales needs to be armed with stories about successful buyers, and the tools to show that value to prospects.
When Product Management is connecting everyone, companies see increased profit and efficiency….unfortunately, leadership doesn’t always recognize the relationship between that success and the efforts of Product Management.
Product Management is like the internet – we don’t always notice it, until it’s not there.
Our workshop helps Product Management and Product Marketing professionals build the skills they need to connect with, understand, and inspire their markets, their customers, and their teams. Check it out!
