Why All The Hate For Product Managers And How Do We Fix It?
I focus on stakeholder management, buy-in, leading without authority, compromise, negotiation, and persuasion in my Data and AI Product Management Certification course. When product managers don’t have those capabilities, it’s easy to blame them for setbacks.
There’s a mentality that agility and rapid delivery are a substitute for product strategy. When results don’t materialize, product managers become scapegoats. If you’re ready to solve these problems and move your career forward, enroll for my next instructor-led Data and AI Product Management Certification cohort today. Space is very limited.
It’s increasingly common to see people classify product managers as impediments. Recently, Snap laid off 20 product managers to increase the speed of decision-making. Before that, Airbnb’s CEO was famously misquoted as saying the company had eliminated the product management role. While the story wasn’t accurate, the support the decision received from social media is telling.
This isn’t a new trend. Startups don’t see the need for strategy. Founders want to iterate quickly and ship new features. They spend significant time on sales calls and working with early adopters. Those are best practices, but getting too close to customers removes decision-makers from the bigger picture and long-term view. Founders demand rapid response to support current customers and acquire new ones but miss the opportunity costs.
In businesses, small to large, the same challenges have different root causes. Business leaders get conflicting signals from the market, customers, internal stakeholders, competitors, and investors. They are under pressure to be more agile and innovative, which creates the same move-fast mentality. Process and prioritization get thrown out the window in favor of rapid delivery.
Results don’t materialize, and opportunities are missed. There’s an expectation that delivering what customers ask for will lead to growth and improve retention. In a move-fast environment, quality suffers, and features are aligned with perception vs. customer needs. The highest returning decisions are overlooked in favor of the most obvious decisions.
The more frustrated product managers get with being ignored, the more objections they put up and the harder they push back. When results don’t materialize, founders can blame themselves for poor planning and prioritization or blame the product managers for slowing delivery. Many choose to blame product managers.
Developers and data scientists also prefer to work without constraints. Product managers are seen adding non-development tasks and gates to the process. Time not spent building features feels like a waste, so these tasks are called overhead or bloat. Bypassing product managers and working directly with customers or stakeholders is easier.
How Do We Fix The Problem?
One of the overarching themes is product managers trying to fix significant business problems and running into resistance against the solution. That happens when the business doesn’t see the problem or understand its impact. Product managers need to build relationships by fixing problems the business understands.
It’s tough to do. Product managers try to get in front of problems and prevent them. While that sounds like the proper approach, business leaders and technical teams want staff to solve the problems they feel most acutely. Those are what product managers need to tackle to get traction and support.
They also need to start with small changes and improvements. Change doesn’t happen quickly in most cases. Be ready if the business is receptive and wants to accelerate, but expect changes to be incremental.
Turning a business around or making a step up the maturity ladder takes 12-18 months at a large company and about 6 months at a startup or small business. These transitions happen in small slices. Trying to do too much can derail the process instead of fast-tracking it. Think about transformation or maturity like a product.
Few version 1 products are perfect, and version 2 rarely fixes every issue or includes every requested feature. Look at change the same way. Most product managers inherit a business in the alpha or beta phase. We can’t wait until the business is perfect to deliver, and we can’t fix everything in a single improvement cycle.
In this case, leadership is the customer. If the business’s leadership doesn’t see a problem, putting the fix into the next version doesn’t generate value. Working with business leaders and technical teams follows the same tenets as working with customers and other stakeholders. Give them what they’re willing to pay for and get them connected with the brand. Once they trust both, then go to the next level.
Pushback And Stakeholder Management Done Differently
In my Data and AI Product Management Certification course, I teach an approach to pushback that leads to partnerships instead of confrontations. Compromise is a consistent theme for product managers. In a compromise, no one walks away with everything they want. The goal for a product manager is to achieve incremental improvement.