Product Management: The least-defined job in tech

By: Kim Goodwin. You’ve probably heard about the new Ambition Empower track for product managers that starts in January. One question I’ve been getting is: which kind of product manager is it for? This is a great question because, in my experience, the PM role is probably the most variable job in tech.  

First, there’s the question of who pays for your product. Is it sold directly to consumers, to businesses, or to consumers via businesses? Or maybe your revenue is ad-based, or you have a non-revenue product that’s evaluated based on cost savings, instead. And is it subscription or upgrade-based? The PM’s job changes quite a bit in each of these cases.

In B2C markets, you’re betting on features that will appeal directly to users. You need to be best friends with the marketing team as you both experiment to optimize your conversion funnel and your retention or upgrade numbers. Your integration concerns probably focus on tools for email campaigns and other engagement levers. Getting market feedback on changes is relatively easy; juggling the needs in a potentially vast and diverse market is not. 

B2B product managers — especially those selling to large customers — need to be hand-in-glove with the enterprise sales team to make sure pilot projects and contracts align with the product’s actual capabilities. The biggest accounts expect to drive the roadmap, whether that makes sense for the overall market or not. In less mature organizations, there may be pressure to have development teams act as enterprise integration providers. It can be hard to make space for user-facing features when enterprise infrastructure, security, and compliance concerns take so much time. And when you do get to work on user-facing things, the sales team may be concerned about letting you into those big accounts for research — after all, you might say or do the wrong thing.

If your focus is on users but the real customers are advertisers, there is constant tension between eyeballs-on-ads versus a good experience that makes users want to come back. Or if your model is B2B2C, you have the challenges of both worlds–making a product that appeals to end consumers, while addressing the demands of your biggest distributors.

PMs who manage internal tools, shared platforms, and other non-revenue products may struggle to get resources for their products at all. Measuring ROI can be complicated when cost savings are the focus. Managing internal customers who are your colleagues can, in some ways, be more difficult than handling external expectations. 

Then there’s the maturity of your product and your organization. Managing the creation of something new — in an ill-defined market, with the growing pains of a startup — is very different from optimizing a well-established product, or from trying to innovate in an older company that’s fallen behind the market. Early-stage PMs need the skills to build a team culture, define a product strategy, and find product-market fit. Later-stage PMs need to be great at optimizing the machinery, helping habituated users accept change, and looking ahead to avoid stagnation. 

These and other differences — industries, regulation, organizational culture, seniority, and more — make every PM role unique. That’s why our track will spend time specifically on these issues — both to make sure we’re covering what matters in your current role, and to help prepare you for what might change as you take next steps in your career.

That said, every PM role requires a core set of skills, too, like communication, collaboration, problem definition, and ruthless prioritization. As we address these, we’ll do so with an eye to how your environment affects the nuances of each.

Product management is always a new puzzle — which is what makes it fun, right?

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Check out Kim’s new Product Management track, and join Ambition Empower now!

Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book Designing for the Digital Age. For the last 14 years, she has been helping product teams, managers, and leaders succeed. Earlier in her career, Kim was the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco, for 12 years.

Ambition Empower is a subscription service where thought leaders within UX, service design, and product design help you and your team grow. It is optimized for busy organizations, allowing members to spend as little as one hour per week and still stay ahead of the competition. Sign up and join Ambition Empower here.

New track! Product Management with Kim Goodwin!

Kim’s Design Leadership track has been a complete success ever since we started Ambition Empower. For the last 14 years, she has been helping product teams, managers, and leaders succeed, so when we went looking for someone to head a new track for Product Managers, we went straight to her. The track is ideal for PMs who wish to enhance their skills and grow within all the diverse challenges of product management.

Kim! We’re so happy you agreed to do a Product Management track with us! What would you say are the most essential characteristics and skills you need to succeed as a Product Manager?

– I think this varies depending on how the PM role is defined in your organization, the life stage of your organization and product, and the scope or seniority of the role.

– Regardless, I think PMs at any level need to understand their users and customers, the business strategy, and the forces that affect their market. They need the leadership skills to get the most out of a team. They need empathy and negotiation skills to juggle a wide range of stakeholders. It takes excellent communication skills to ensure everyone is clear and aligned around the goals and requirements.

– I think, above all, PMs need to take in a huge range of opinions and data, know how to filter those for quality and relevance, and involve the right people to get the best decisions made. Note that I didn’t say “make the best decisions” because, in my view, the best PMs approach many decisions in a collaborative way.

That’s quite a tall order. What are great ways to learn those skills?

– In my experience, the best PMs start with curiosity, a growth mindset, and an awareness that everyone else on the team is more expert in something than they are. They read voraciously, seek feedback frequently, and experiment not just with the product but with the way they work. They take courses not just in product management but in adjacent fields. And they learn a ton on the job, ideally with good mentoring—things like good judgment and relationship skills take years of conscious practice.

I’ve talked to many PM’s over the years, and sometimes I’ve thought that they’ve taken on an impossible task. What would you say are the most significant challenges among PMs, and what are effective ways of dealing with them?

– The challenges definitely vary based on the role. In startups, PMs often have the impossible task of defining and building a product when the business strategy is still up in the air—maybe we’re going after a different market this week than we thought we were aimed at last week. When the product has a big enterprise customer base, PMs can struggle to make any change at all without upsetting people. But there are universal challenges too. Stakeholder management is always one of them.

– Lots of PMs want to empower their teams but have to take feature wish lists from their execs. Being asked to do too much with too little. Or being caught between development teams with a strong push to be agile and senior managers who want two-year roadmaps. I see some early to mid-career PMs struggle with where their role ends and where the architect’s or designer’s or researcher’s role begins.

– Senior PMs often try to figure out how to transition from doing everything themselves to delegating among a larger PM team. As for effective ways of dealing with them…well, that would be a long answer! We’ll dig into all those things in the track over the next year.

Finally, what are you most looking forward to when you start the track in January?

– It’s been pretty clear in the design leadership track that it’s not just me teaching people “right” answers. There’s a ton of wisdom in the group, and it’s great to hear people share their own experiences and strategies. Also, this is a new track—I think we’ve got a solid outline for what to cover, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing where people want to go and adapting as we need to.

Thanks Kim! We’re really looking forward to doing this together with you!

Checkout Kim’s new Product Management track, and join Ambition Empower now!

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Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book Designing for the Digital Age. For the last 14 years, she has been helping product teams, managers, and leaders succeed. Earlier in her career, Kim was the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco, for 12 years.

Ambition Empower is a subscription service where thought leaders within UX, service design, and product design help you and your team grow. It is optimized for busy organizations, allowing members to spend as little as one hour per week and still stay ahead of the competition. Sign up and join Ambition Empower here.