Is the Product Manager Actually The Intelligence Officer of The Company?
As a child, I loved reading fiction books such as “The secret seven”, “The famous five”, “Hasamba” and such.
I also loved all the Agatha Christie books and movies.
As I was a curios kid (and today curious man), I used to learn and read about a variety of subjects — from history through science and nature. I just loved data. Growing up, the repertoire has widen to thrillers such as “Bourne” trilogy, Tom Clancy etc. The intelligence stories and mystery solving have always intrigued me.
As I joined the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces)— it was clear to me that I want to be part of an intelligence Corp, but also a combatant. So, naturally I drafted to a LRRP (Long range reconnaissance patrol) unit.
After 4 years in the army I’ve moved on to the civilian life, while continuing to serve in the reserve army. The year was around 2002.
Little did I know then, about software development nor about product management.
Why this long intro, you might ask, and what the hell it has to do with product management?
Well, when I think about the Product Manager — I always feel he is like a case officer or an intelligence analyst putting the pieces together.
Why?
Well — let’s see:
First — Data
I like to say — there’s no such thing as too much data :).
Same as the intelligence officer — we need the data to do a better job.
The intelligence officer uses the data gathered from different sources (sounds familiar) and fuses it into an intelligence map.
This map is used to understand the enemy’s capabilities and limitations, most likely course of action and most dangerous course of action.
The above, enables the Intel officer to formulate a recommendation to his commander how to react, where to attack, what will happen if he will do A And Not B and more.
Let’s take it to our product world — by simply changing the word enemy with users and competition, commander with product/CEO and course of action with roadmap.
We use the data we gather to try and understand what our users want, need, do.
We also use this data to analyze the features we’ve released, and how they impact our product — like in the army we use three letter acronyms — KPI/ROI.
We analyze our competition based on data we gather — at times predicting their course of action, strategy, pricing.
We try to predict how our strategy will effect the competition/market — Sounds familiar?
Second — Puzzle solving
In the end the intelligence officer solves puzzles on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.
The data gathering is continuous and sometimes overwhelming, and still he analyzes the data, trying to find patterns, trends, risks. He is creating building up the puzzle, while continuously searching for the next piece of the puzzle, the next Intel to gather.
We as product managers do exactly the same. We gather the feedback from our users, sales, R&D, UX and based on that we build our product’s puzzle:
- What should we do next — build the road map
- New features — What is the new capabilities we want to add
- Innovation — How can we create something never seen before to gain a competitive edge
- On boarding — what is the on boarding process which will add and retain more users
- Pricing — what is the correct pricing to set
- Prioritize — What should we do first — what is the risk we take by NOT doing something.
Third — Course of action and validation
When the data is gathered and the puzzle created, the intelligence officer builds the Most likely course of action And most dangerous course of action. Another output which is even more important is the recommended course of action for the commander.
Based on the intelligence puzzle created from the collected data and an analysis of different aspects such as:
- Enemy forces status
- Enemy’s morale
- Past behavior
- What specific units are doing or might do
- What is the civilian mindset
Taking it to the product world, we always try to understand what should we do next.
As we need to define or recommend the company’s/product’s vision and strategy, understand what are our users expect from the product how to achieve these goals.
Same as the intelligence officer — we go over the data we collected, the puzzle built, and analyze it.
From this analysis we create the strategical road map and course of action. But then we encounter the next challenge: what should we do first. The answer is in the fourth section
Fourth — Priorities
As usually your resources are limited, and you cannot gather ALL the Intel you want, the intelligence officer has to prioritize. It is more a game of what NOT to gather and invest your resources at.
The priorities will result in the additional data which will be gathered, the puzzle being more complete and whole, and so on.
This is one of the hardest and demanding tasks one is required to handle. This is always done based on the first two steps — based on the data we’ve gathered and the puzzle we’ve created from it.
It is hard, as the result of choosing the wrong path will makes us build the wrong puzzle and this can mean loss of resources in the best case and lives in the worst.
As a product manager you always have limited resources and limitations. This means you always need to set the priorities. We set the priorities of almost everything:
- What to measure
- What to build next
- What is the strategical goal we have for the product
- Which competitor we need to put more attention to
The risk of taking a wrong decision:
In the best case — we spent time and money on something which yielded no results.
For the worst — we enabled our competitors to gain a substantial edge, which can affect the business, revenue and in extremes — the existence of our product or company.
Summary
To summarize, there is a saying that the Product Manager is the “CEO of the product”. As I partially agree with it, I think that the Product manager is more the Intelligence officer of the company and the product. His role has many traits that can be found in the intelligence officer, and mastering them, makes you a better product manager.
I’m sure there are more aspects which correlate between the two roles, and I’d love to hear what you think.
In the next articles, I’ll elaborate more about each part, and share some own experiences.
