Alternatives to Product Managers
Although less common, you can run a successful product org without the specific Product Management function.
- Unanswered questions
5-person startups probably don’t need PMs. 5,000-person scaled orgs probably benefit from them (counterpoint: Apple, Airbnb). What size warrants a good PM? Is “what size” even the right question? Maybe a function of “having PMs make certain things easier/harder given other variables.”
Founder- or Stakeholder-driven product management
Marty Cagan
The most common alternative to product managers is that the founder/CEO (in a small company), or the stakeholders (in a medium or large company), are taking responsibility for the product management (the value and viability of what is to be built), and the product teams are just there to build out the roadmap features and projects (i.e. they are feature teams).
Another common manifestation of essentially the same dynamic is that there are business owners that cover the product management, and the product owners just cover the backlog management (serving as the interface to the engineers).
The inconvenient truths about product development:
- Most product ideas don’t work
- Product ideas that do work require multiple iterations to deliver the necessary value
Founder/stakeholder-driven product management usually fails for one of two (or both) reasons:
- It’s really hard to not do waterfall when product discovery is owned by a centralized group.
- Engineering talent is underutilized. They’re often the best source of innovation but they’re brought on too late.
- Agile methodologies are only used for delivery, not for product discovery.
- The approach is project-centric instead of outcome-focused. Output over outcome.
- Design is brought in too late, long after product discovery. They’re tasked with “putting lipstick on a pig.”
- Product management becomes project management and requirements gathering.
This is one of the most expensive and slowest ways to try out new ideas. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of what the team could have been doing instead.
Successful examples
TODO but probably worth mentioning all the startups that start like this.
- Glose
- Projector
Limitations
Founder-driven product management requires exceptional leadership that can build great products and build a good company. This puts a lot of product responsibility on leadership. Beyond a very small startup, these leaders have a lot of other jobs to do. The tension between building a business and building a product can lead to decreased psychological safety for ICs and passionate product leaders. Could risk squashing good ideas in favor of founder ideas.
See Product Fail (Marty Cagan, SVPG).
Another team member steps up
Unanswered question…
Can this be forced/designed or does it only happen naturally or because of a need?
While it’s possible for team members (especially designers and engineers) to take on product management responsibilities, it’s not a scalable long-term solution due to the extensive workload involved.
Marty Cagan
There have always been examples where either the designer or one of the engineers steps up and covers the product management responsibilities. No real reason it couldn’t be another team member, but it’s usually the designer or the tech lead.
To be clear, I don’t mean covering the product owner role, which is not hard for someone else on the team to do. I mean doing the work to learn the customer dynamics, the product data, the competitive landscape, and the many business viability constraints in order to cover value and viability.
I admit to having a real appreciation for the ambitious people that put in the work to tackle this dual role (and especially those rare few that learn the skills to tackle all three – product, design and engineering, known with real admiration as “triple threats”), but this has never been a scalable or sustainable solution because it requires the person taking on essentially two full-time jobs at once.
Product Leader-driven product management
Product Leader-driven product management happens when product management responsibility is covered by skilled product leaders.
Successful examples
Apple
Marty Cagan
The most important thing to understand about Apple is that they have three very different types of products. They have a small number of consumer devices that dominate their business and product strategy; they have a few major operating systems that power their devices; and they have a large number of more conventional consumer services and applications.
Consider for a moment just how different each of these three are from the others. I’ll save a deeper dive on the differences between the three for a future article, but for now, we need to talk about their alternative to product managers.
If you talk to people working at Apple, most of them will tell you, usually with thinly disguised pride, that while they have world-class designers and world-class engineers, and they have strong program managers supporting these people, they don’t have product managers.
They do have product marketing managers, but while these people do help significantly on go-to-market, they are not really covering the core of product management – value and viability – and they are not the basis of their alternative to product managers.
At Apple, the people covering the true product management responsibilities, and in my personal opinion the most under-appreciated aspect of Apple’s version of the product model, is that they have a remarkable number of the best product leaders I’ve ever seen.
Their product leaders are exceptionally strong, deeply knowledgeable, true product people in the best sense of the term, deeply engaged with the product teams on value and viability, as well as product vision, product strategy, team topology, all on top of being responsible for coaching and developing the talent on their teams.
This alternative approach does mean that these product leaders can be bottlenecks on decisions, and it’s not a coincidence that Apple is not known for moving quickly.
But if you consider consumer devices, where the outcome depends so heavily on many different product teams contributing to a seamless whole, then this model has very real advantages.
While this alternative works quite well for consumer devices (a small number of very complex products), there are some real challenges when it comes to the large number of diverse services and applications, and this is where you’ll find more examples at Apple of strong individual contributor product managers collaborating directly with product designers and engineers.
Limitations
- Great product leaders who are also great ICs that are not already Product Managers are rare. They exist, but they’re hard to find.
- Requires a lot of these product leaders. The value and viability risks are still required of them.