The many paths of a product manager
Nietzsche and the career plan
My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and the bureaucratic process can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.
What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merits and contribution.”
(Ben Horowitz — The Hard Thing About Hard Things)
At Latin American travel technology company Almundo, we believe that leaders are responsible for the people, whether that is via one-on-one meetings, career opportunities, company culture, or employee satisfaction. So, it was natural that we should want to develop a talent growth plan for our people. This is how we did it.
Each month we send out an NPS survey to assess whether the company is being a great place to work, but a few months ago I also sent Google’s manager feedback survey to my team of 10 product managers. All of them are accountable for a squad (about five developers and one user experience professional).
The Google manager feedback survey is about a dozen statements with a Likert scale (1–5) to measure if they agree or disagree with the statements.
The results showed that they wanted better (and more frequent) feedback on how to further develop their product management skills.
It was clear the team needed a talent growth plan. Therefore, as a goal, we decided we wanted every product manager to be able to answer these two questions:
- Where do I want to go?
- How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there?
Every journey begins with the first step
To set the competencies, we needed to understand what is expected from a product manager. What is its role, it’s responsibilities.
Martin Eriksson’s Venn diagram shows product management as the intersection between UX (usable), IT (feasible) and Business (valuable). But, as one digs deeper, the lines start to get blurry:
- Does a PM need to know how to code? Does he need to know how to build an app or just be able to speak technically with a developer?
- UX is about being customer-centric, or you should be able to build a high fidelity prototype or run JTBD interviews?
- Do you need to know about online marketing, brand building, comprehend a P&L statement, understand machine learning algorithms?
- Is the PM someone with great responsibility but no formal authority as stated by Dan Olsen or is the CEO of the product?
Welcome to the Cynefin Framework
We choose to use the Cynefin Framework to decide which path to take. The main idea is to classify the problem at hand within four different categories:
- Simple: few factors, well understood → best practices
- Complicated: many factors, well understood → good practices
- Complex: many factors about which little is known → emergent practices
- Chaotic: many interacting factors, urgent, unpredictable → novel practices
We put the skills growth endeavor somewhere between the complicated and complex domain. Since this is virtually what we do every day, we believed we had a decent understanding of the multiple factors involving the subject. However, we were sure that we needed to investigate and iterate since there is no plug-and-play solution that we could implement.
Deep dive: expert analysis & benchmark
We set out to uncover all we could about how others addressed this topic. We analyzed dozens of job descriptions from leading companies (Airbnb, Amazon, Booking, eBay, Expedia, Instagram, Intercom, LinkedIn, Netflix, PayPal, Spotify, among others) and we were able to differentiate hundreds of distinct skills and responsibilities.
Mixing the words, key responsibilities across companies started to emerge:
- Define product vision and strategy
- Team execution and development
- Define/research/deliver customer experience
(I’d love to read about your feedback and ideas in the comments section)
Next, we looked if others had already built a development plan. Most of what we found were several skills matrixes broken down by seniority. The PM career path at XO and the ‘levels framework’ from the book ‘Org Design for Design Orgs’ (by far the best book I’ve read on UX management) were amazing and helpful resources.
Reviewing how the information was usually structured, the team and I made our first decision: we would use a matrix but for talent growth discussion and not to set organizational hierarchy. Therefore, the extensive and binary matrix where one has to check several to-do’s to get a promotion would not be our track. We wanted to be objective but also flexible. We aimed for a small matrix with general skills that could foster healthy and insightful conversations.
Seeing the big picture
Argentine philosopher Mario Bunge holds that everything is either a system or a component of one. He defined a system as the conjunction of its composition and structure (C&S), the environment (E), and the mechanisms (M) that make it yield results.
The richness of the model relies on defining the individual attributes that a product manager needs to have while also highlighting the critical importance of their work as part of a team. Systemism rejects the myths that the individuals are not important (holism) and that the system is just the sum of its parts (individualism).
Therefore:
- Composition and structure would be how we group ourselves into squads, squads into clans, and clans into tribes, mimicking the Spotify model
- Mechanisms would be our processes used to translate the company vision into product strategy, prioritize and set each clan’s backlog and to get it done sprint by sprint
- Context would be externally the travel industry and travelers in Latam, and internally our vision and mid-term strategy
Adding the skills and responsibilities, we define three elements with three skills each. This is the backbone of our talent growth matrix:
Holistic comprehension (E):
- UX: Deep user understanding. Design thinking mindset (empathize, define, devise, prototype, evaluate).
- Business: Mastery of key metrics, trends, best practices and main players in the market.
- Product thinking: User-centered product development, iteration, and MVPs, backlog management, scalability, execution.
Processes (M):
- Strategy: Translation of the mission and vision into a coherent product strategy.
- Agile: Product owner role, software development, team cadence, delivery.
- Data-driven: Decisions based on objective criteria. Mastery of web metrics and tools. Knowledge of data visualization, mining and statistical inference
Management (C&S):
- Leadership: Influence, develop and guide the team towards strategic goals. Ability to delegate, manage and motivate.
- Communication: Transmit ideas with clarity. Achieve consensus. Active listening.
- Proactivity: The willingness to act between stimulus and response. Getting things done. Ownership.
Nietzsche and talent development
With the skills agreed upon, the next step was to define growth across each dimension. As we said before, we didn’t want the skills matrix to be seen as a ladder but as a web where each person could focus on developing the best skills for his product and aligned with his interests.
This way, you could have an excellent Design System Product Manager and an outstanding Personalization Product Manager with quite different skills charts:
Moreover, you could overlap the shape of all your PMs and find out where are your strengths and weaknesses as a team.
To improve, each competency will develop from knowing to applying, to master, to teaching. It will go from the ‘how’ -execution- to ‘what’ -decision- to ‘why’ -understanding-. From dependence and supervision to independence and interdependence.
As we learn and improve each skill on its own, seniority will emerge as a result of its mastery, strategic thinking, and long-term vision.
As Nietzsche said in ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’: the product manager will become a camel, the camel then a lion, and the lion, at last, a child…
The camel
There are many heavy burdens for the spirit, the strong burden-bearing spirit in whom there dwells respect and awe: its strength longs for the greatest burden, for the heaviest load. What is heavy? So asks the burden-bearing spirit; then it kneels down like the camel and wishes to be well laden.
In life, we reach late childhood bringing the moral burden of how we were raised: moral values, family traditions, religion, social pressure. We carry the load with pride trying to be an overachiever and the joy of our loved ones.
The same could be said about product management. The inexperienced product manager demands its burden. Its backlog is nurtured top-down by multiple requests from every team in the organization. With its head held high, the ‘camel’ PM says ‘yes’ to every new feature. Over time, this demand-based backlog becomes unmanageable.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying NO to 1,000 things.” ― Steve Jobs
The camel relies on his will to get things done. It is focused on execution and not on user problems. He knows how to do the job but he needs a senior PM to provide guidance and focus on what matters most. He can plan a few sprints ahead but still can’t see the long term.
The lion
Here the spirit becomes lion; it will seize freedom and be lord of its own desert. What is the great dragon which the spirit will no longer call Lord and God? “Thou shalt” is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion says “I will!”
My brothers, why does the spirit have need of the lion? Why does the beast of burden, renouncing and reverential, not suffice? To create new values — not even the lion can accomplish that: but to create the freedom for itself for new creation — that is within the power of the lion
Now, the adolescent PM rebels. Rooted in a deeper knowledge about IT, UX, processes, and business, he craves independence. He wants to decide, to choose his own fate.
The lion PM understands the user’s pain points by relying on discovery research. He balances delivery and discovery tracks within his product. Decisions are not Hippo-based but achieved by prioritization methods (ODI, Kano, Impact/Effort matrix, RICE) and data analysis.
As a consequence of this bottom-up approach, communication starts to be essential for maintaining stakeholders informed and in the loop. He does not longer require direct supervision although is not yet capable of seeing the big picture besides his product or area. The lion enters the strategic planning game focusing his effort on long-term value
The child
A child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel that propels itself, a first movement, a sacred Yes. Yes, for the game of creating, my brothers, a sacred Yes must be uttered: the spirit now wills its own will, the one who had lost the world attains his own world.
Adulthoods always comes with crisis. He who has won freedom must now create new values and beliefs. With the mastery of its craft and deep context understanding, he can reshape the high-level company processes. He enhances the work of all other PMs by defining backlog management practices, setting OKRs, establishing meeting cadence, and standardizing the use of tools and techniques. He can build a new path.
The child PM emerges as a mentor for more jr PM in the company. He cooperates and aligns strategy with multiple teams. His scope is no longer his clan or tribe but the overall product and long-term vision.
Product management management
When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised. If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn’t talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, “Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!”
Tao Te Ching — Verse 17
Finally, we tried to define the role of the product manager Manager. As the teaching of Tao says, the goal at this stage creating and improving the framework and methodologies being used, boosting the team’s work, helping others achieve their goals, and by doing so contribute to the company strategy. Leaders are not responsible for the job, are responsible for the people.
He manages up showing results, dependability, and reliability. He has to be proactive with the executive team helping define the company strategy and vision, focusing on high impact initiatives, and keeping directors in-the-know.
He manages across working with all other departments in the company and aligning goals. The PM leader must solve dependency issues, strategy misalignments, and foster an environment of collaboration.
He manages down leveraging on the ‘child’ product manager skills. Being a team player, communicating the company strategy, practicing active listening. He has to teach and mentor other Product Managers, define the organizational structure, set salary banding, keep subordinates focused with OKRs, and establish an atmosphere conducive to trust and loyalty. In short, he is responsible for building and maintaining a highly motivated and performing team.
The skills growth matrix
After many cycles of feedback and iteration this is what our forever work-in-progress skills matrix looks like:
The talent growth matrix is now being used by all product managers at Almundo (there are 18 of us). The UX team (12 product designers) also make use of a modified version of the matrix (with UX skills).
Since we presented the matrix, we’ve been able to unify criteria across different processes like recruiting, feedback and promotions. We’ve done the first evaluation of every product manager against the matrix and set half-year action plans focusing on main opportunities. We’ve also improved our interviewing process by using an empty matrix to objectively assess new candidates.
Summing up, we have achieved our goal of finding common ground within the team on the skills every product manager needs to have and what should be accomplished to develop them further.
Take-aways
- We develop the skills matrix as a tool for talent growth and not to set organizational hierarchy. We wanted a framework over which we could debate, guide, listen, discuss progress, and find growth opportunities.
- We set the skills by conducting extensive research and iterating based on our team feedback. Then, we broke them down into groups using a systemic approach.
- Seniority emerges as a result of the skills mastery, area of influence and the time-horizon of decision making.
- Talent growth goes from learning to practicing to mastery to teaching.
- The matrix allows unifying criteria across different processes like recruiting, performance evaluation and feedback.
The statistician George Box said that ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’. Here is our path towards building a PM growth framework, not good nor bad, but ours. I hope you find it useful, and that you also find yours!
A testing and a questioning hath been all my traveling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however — is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy.
“This is now my way — where is yours?” Thus did I answer those who asked me “the way.” For “the way” — it doth not exist!”
Reference and inspiration
Books
- Thus spoke Zaratustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Requisite organization — Elliott Jaques
- Emergencia y convergencia — Mario Bunge
- Org design for design orgs — Peter Merholz & Kristin Skinner
- Inspired — Marty Cagan
- Rework — Jason Fried & Heinemeier Hansson
- High Output Management — Andy Groove
Articles
A shorter version was originally published on www.mindtheproduct.com on December 18, 2019.
