It’s true — objectively, your job title is meaningless! In most jobs, you would be able to look at the job title and have a reasonably good understanding of what that person is responsible for — it’s much trickier in the world of products.

What’s in a name?

The roles of Product Manager, Product Marketer and Product Owner (if they all exist in your company) will all vary depending on what senior management have seen before, what other roles exist, the types of product and the size (or maturity) of the company. A Product Owner in one company may purely work on requirements within Scrum sprints. Whereas, in another company, the role is expanded to be the expert collaborator that binds the whole product team together.

This dissonance between title and role doesn’t happen as much in other disciplines. For example; in a smaller company, a Java Developer will have pretty much the same core activities as they do in a larger company. They may be required to pick up some additional activities not generally associated with that level — but the core activities remain the same. While the size of a company may add to a developers’ workload, the size of a company can change the entire nature of what a product manager does! As companies get bigger product roles typically become much more specialized.

Our 2019 Product Management Survey shows how complex the reporting lines within Product Management can be, with well under half (38%) reporting directly to board level as an independent function. The rest (62%) are split over multiple business areas, including Development, Marketing and Sales. These different reporting lines can lead to different priorities for a product manager. If you report into Sales, guess what, you spend much of your time on sales calls and updating the roadmap. If you report into Development, you will find the priority is feeding the development teams with requirements.

All these variables mean that you can’t look at a title within a product function and automatically understand what someone does.

So, does it matter if your job title is inherently meaningless? Rather than slumping into a period of existential ennui, it’s an excellent opportunity to clarify exactly what you should be doing and improve your effectiveness.

Product Activities Framework

Our Product Activities Framework is a logical and straightforward way to analyze what product-related activities need to be carried out in your organization, and where these activities should sit. No single role is responsible for all 20 activities, but they should all be happening somewhere in the business.

The framework splits the activities into three main areas: Strategic; Inbound and Outbound. Strategic activities focus on working out what the right product is for the business. Inbound activities focus on delivering the product and Outbound activities focus on helping the business sell the product. Sometimes, the split between inbound and outbound is characterized as “getting the product on the shelf” and “getting the product off the shelf”.

You may be in a role that’s geared towards strategic activity, as demanded by the needs of your company. Or you may be heavily involved in either inbound or outbound activity. You won’t necessarily be involved in all three. Understanding where the different product roles fit in this matrix is essential to make sure everything is covered.

There are real benefits to understanding, clarifying and interpreting what your job title means within your organization. If you can sit down as a product team and carry out the exercise together; even better! You need to work out who owns each of the product activities shown in the framework (you can download a copy from our website here).

The Benefits:

Clear up confusion — You were given a job description upon joining the company, right? So, you know what your core activities are. While that may be the case, it can still be tough for others within your organization to understand what you do. Generally, we are only given our own job description and not those of the rest of the team.

As part of our flagship 3-day training course, we discuss how confusing it can be working in a product function. On one of our recent courses, a participant stated that knowing who to go to in their organization was, “hard as there are so many crossovers.” In a large number of organizations that we come across, it’s often not clear who owns what.

Avoiding firefighting — We all know what it’s like to be that one person who everyone comes to with product related queries. Although some firefighting is inevitable in any product management role we know from our 2019 PM Survey that many of us spend more than half our time firefighting — which is way too much. It’s easy for colleagues who don’t know what you do to assume that any product-related problems can be passed on to you. And if you’re not clear on what the priorities for your role are it can be hard to say no.

Through a clear understanding of who does what, you can focus on the more important strategic product activities and push-back on the firefighting. If this sounds familiar, we published a blog on some useful methods to stop firefighting.

Minding the gaps — Product teams rarely grow in a structured way. Most have organically developed over time, with responsibilities shifting around as various staff members leave and join and products come and go.

Product teams often ‘grow up’ alongside an established company. In a start-up, the CEO might have handled a lot of the product elements initially, alongside the development and sales team. As the company matures, the need for a product function grows, often this is one person coming in to take the overspill from the CEO. Six months later, another joins and takes elements away from the development team. Before you know it, you have a burgeoning product function! In these situations, it’s clear to see how complexity within a product function can develop as a result of natural company growth. Rarely would you hire a fully functioning product team with clearly defined roles right from the start.

For the efficiency of the team, it’s vital to ensure that all necessary product activities are covered and there are no significant gaps or duplications of effort happening.

Building a team — On those occasions where you are tasked with creating a new product team the Product Activities Framework allows you to group activities in a way you think is logical and use this as the basis of distinct job descriptions. These will help when going out to hire new team members.

The more you understand the activities within your team, the better understanding you will have on areas that need extra resources. This will avoid the trap of having ‘cookie-cutter’ job descriptions with long ‘laundry lists’ of meaningless ‘must-haves’ and responsibilities. This is a great approach to ensuring you hire an effective, lean, value-adding team.

Bringing a new hire up to speed — It also allows any new starters to understand their responsibilities and expectations right from the outset clearly. As well as their own responsibilities, it will enable you to give new starters a comprehensive view of who does what in the team already.

With the differences in product roles across different organizations, it’s essential to be clear about expectations and responsibilities from the start of any hiring process. Expectation setting makes it easier for the candidate to decide whether the role is for them, reduces the risk of making a ‘bad hire’ and highlights areas of development your new starter may need.

Peace of mind

So there we have it — your job title is meaningless! But, don’t worry — it’s actually an excellent opportunity to ensure that you have a value-adding, efficient and well-structured product team.

A team with clarity of responsibilities are a team that spend less time bogged down with firefighting and quarrelling with other areas about who should be doing what. Therefore, a team with clarity is a happier team.

If you’d like further help on how to maximize your effectiveness as a product professional or team, we run our weekly public training course in major cities around the world. Product Focus also carries out private training courses at your place of work and provide a comprehensive review service for your product function.