Why Product Managers Vary So Much
Developing better understanding of PM discipline through a product lifecycle
There is a view that Product Management is vaguely defined and that at every company a Product Manager’s job would be different. It is hard to disagree with this as indeed you can interview your own network of Product Managers and realize how different their jobs are. In this article I want to visualize and demonstrate where this difference is coming from. Through this exercise hopefully we shall see that it is not the definition of Product Management as a whole that poses the problem but the scale and the viewpoint.
Product Lifecycle
For the sake of this exercise let’s consider the following picture that captures potential states of almost any product in its lifecycle:
A few notes:
- we have the time axis and we have the value axis that features positive value which product generates (e.g. revenue, customer satisfaction) and negative value that product creation effort consumes (cost) over time
- blue line represents possible random scenarios of how product value behaves overtime (zero or so customer value during development, ramp up, growth, pivots, sunset etc)
- orange line depicts the cost changes over time (investment into development/marketing, cost reduction efforts, scale down, additional investments etc)
The above is of course hypothetical and all the terms here are used very broadly. Also the scale of the graph above is intentionally ‘undefined’ (meaning we can imagine that what you see in the picture could happen within a quarter, a year or even a decade, while in terms of the value we might be talking about 1k $ or 1Billion $ businesses).
So when we say “Product Manager” we often imply someone capable to manage a product across the lifecycle (and often not linearly): from the…