Establishing an Effective Product Management Culture is Hard Work
Lessons learned in regard to building a product management function from scratch.
At an early stage startup, how product work is conducted will be dictated by the founders. If the founders have a background in product management, then the company culture will be infused with product principles. But if they don’t, then at some point the absence of product leadership will be felt. Establishing an effective product management discipline and culture is hard work, particularly when starting from scratch, and early decisions will play a big role in how this happens.
My journey to product management
A year after I joined Pack Health, I became the company’s first product manager. At the time, Pack Health offered a coaching service and the product was seen as the toolkit we shipped to our members to start their program. Over 6 years, we evolved from a services business to a technology-enabled patient engagement platform that was eventually acquired by Quest Diagnostics, with multiple cross-functional product teams working on different aspects of the platform.
As the first product person, I was responsible for establishing Pack Health’s product management culture, including setting the norms around how the product management function worked with the other parts of the business. Due to our early stage, my actions set the stage for how the company defined the product management role.
Five lessons from building a product management function from scratch
Early in this journey, I was focused on learning and execution, and I wasn’t thinking too much about how my actions were setting these implicit definitions of what the product manager’s role was. But looking back, this early stage was crucial to setting the degree to which product teams were able to shape strategies, operate with autonomy, and focus on outcomes over outputs.
If you see the need for a true product management culture at your company, then you have an opportunity to make a big impact on how your company delivers value to its customers. But it’s not for the faint of heart. Here are five lessons I learned by walking this path.
1. Prioritize relationships
When you are the first product manager, you will likely have to gently but assertively counteract a number of misconceptions about your role. People who are unfamiliar with what product managers do will rely on their mental model for a role that seems close enough — perhaps that’s a project manager, or a business analyst, or a narrowly-defined product owner. The only way you can correct these misconceptions is by building relationships with your stakeholders. Rather than telling them they have things wrong, show them how you can help them. Ask them what challenges they face, and what keeps them up at night regarding the business.
Often, the most novel aspect of the role — the part that is most foreign to the mental model a stakeholder may have of what your responsibilities are — is the level of strategic thinking you should be aspiring to. By showing a finance person that you understand the financial constraints and opportunities of your business, and showing how Product can influence these things, you can help that person understand the scope of your role. The same goes for other areas of the business.
Building great relationships with stakeholders in other business functions creates trust which you can use over time to make bigger bets and advocate for greater autonomy for you and your team.
2. Avoid jargon
Pretty much any business activity comes with a whole load of jargon, and product management is no exception. Avoid absorbing this jargon and regurgitating it to your colleagues to make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. Instead, identify the couple of key product principles that you think will be most crucial for your company to understand and internalize, and then get good at explaining them in simple, clear language.
For example, if your company tends to make decisions without talking to customers, you might want to focus on product discovery. If your company always has a dozen initiatives going on at once, then the principle might be prioritization. Whatever it is, describe it in a way a child would understand, and then frame it in terms a CEO would care about.
At Pack Health, we framed product discovery as learning about your customers’ needs (simple definition), so we could reduce the risk of investing in products that don’t create value (business rationale). We also worked to demonstrate that focusing on one thing at a time allows you to make progress faster than if you try to do everything at once, and framed this in terms of our strategic goals.
3. Advocate for design
If you’re the first product manager, there’s a good chance your company won’t have made investments in product design either. Remember that product exists as a trio: product management, engineering, and design. Don’t let one of those parts stay missing. Introducing product design has an almost instantaneous payoff because it is so visual: people see, and feel, its contribution. This is true even if your company has ‘related’ roles like graphic design. Don’t buy the argument that this role can be done with existing resources. You need a true product design partner.
4. Hire well
This is a principle that applies to any managerial position, but it’s particularly true in this context. As you start to demonstrate the value of product work, you should reach the point where you can start to build out a team. Make sure those early hires are exceptional. Find people who want to help you build a high-performing team, who are comfortable with ambiguity and are willing to persevere.
Sometimes, you can find people who have experience in product management, but are frustrated that their current company is not following the empowered team model. For these people, describing the culture you are trying to build can be a huge selling point. If you think this person is a good fit, be prepared to invest time in coaching them (as you should with any person reporting to you). Practicing good product management is hard, particularly when your skills have been honed on the more tactical elements (such as grooming a backlog).
5. Expect a bumpy road
Culture change is hard. Expect to take one step forward and two steps back from time to time — a stakeholder you had a breakthrough with one week might demand you build a feature for them the next when a sale is on the line. Use this as another opportunity to build relationships, and remember that you can’t win every battle.
Product is hard, but it’s also rewarding
The truth is that product management is messy and involves give-and-take, judgment calls, and art as well as science. Reflect on, and learn from, each interaction that doesn’t go the way you intended, but evaluate your progress over longer time horizons. It’s more important, and realistic, to see change over 6 months or a year than it is to see changes in behavior from week to week.
Success means focusing on relationships, taking a long-term view, and keeping things simple. If you can do this, you’ll have an amazing impact on your company, so dive in. Establishing a new product culture is hard, but an immensely rewarding journey if you can do it.
If you have other tips you think I missed, or have questions about what I wrote, I’d love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me here or on LinkedIn.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
