PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
hail to the product #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
Product managers exist in part to free up the specialists to do their thing
Being the point of contact with senior executives and stakeholders tends to also make you accountable to them
Specialists’ expertise is needed to wield a tool effectively, even if it’s easy to use
hello
“One of the reasons a lot of designers I’ve spoken to are pushing back is because they felt that seven or eight, nine years ago, they were getting into the room with executives. They were facilitating workshops. They were being seen as a valuable participant in that.
“And now product management has stepped in and now they’re doing it. They’re being the facilitator, but they’re not facilitating using the techniques we do.”
Andy Budd speaking in ‘Q and A with Haroon Aslam and John Cutler at SofaConf June 2020’, Clearleft
If Andy Budd’s comments from a few years ago are anything to go by, there’s a bubbling resentment among designers that product managers have usurped their position in organisations. Designers feel they used to be the ones with direct access to the senior executive team, who conveyed user needs and created alignment of purpose through sensemaking, stakeholder empathy and effective group facilitation.
The truth is that there is a great deal of overlap between what a product manager should be doing in an ideal sense, and what other professional specialisms do. However, the difference is that a product manager is meant to be a generalist, intersecting with the various skill sets needed to turn an idea and an opportunity into something of value both to users and in turn, the organisation.
This overlap creates a tension. Many organisations perhaps see developers as necessary (for the time being, at least), product managers as dispensable, and designers and user researchers as a luxury. Product management may not be in the best place job-wise right now, but it could easily be worse.
Salaries are expensive, and it’s usually easier for a department head to pitch for hiring someone with a more direct line to revenue generation than to hire someone whose value is harder to associate directly with money. Rightly or wrongly, in the current scheme of things, product managers are less directly associated with revenue generation than sales or marketing roles, but more so than designers and researchers.
It’s not a plot by the product managers, honest #
Product managers shouldn’t be conducting user research or designing the product any more than they should be writing code. But without specialist designers and user researchers in an organisation, either some combination of the product manager and the development team are expected to handle the research and design of the product (with suboptimal results), or the organisation simply fails to do either at all.
Unless the product person or developers were formerly designers and user researchers in past roles (it happens occasionally), they’re at best going to be able to go through the motions of user research and design, and perhaps achieve some superficial results, but they’ll always lack the depth of understanding that comes from someone who is a specialist in one or other of those disciplines.
The reason these situations occur so often and persist is precisely because design and user research is often seen by senior executive teams as a box-ticking exercise, rather than something intrinsically of value and which dramatically increases the odds of product success.
The exec team thinking goes:
“Why hire additional, expensive specialists when the existing team is ‘covering’ it?”
And on the product manager and development side:
“We need research and design but we’re never going to get budget to hire, so let’s do the best we can with what we have. Even if it’s not great, it’s better than nothing.”
It’s hopefully not a stretch to say that most rational product managers and developers would jump at the chance to have dedicated designers and user researchers permanently on their team. Rather than doing a half-assed job of design and research themselves, product managers have a vested interest in seeing those activities performed expertly and being aligned to whatever goal they’ve set or been set.
Having a ‘seat at the table’ is not always what it’s cracked up to be #
Another point of tension is that, even in the product trio (product manager, lead developer, designer), the product manager is seen as ‘first among equals’:
“The VP of design reports to the head of product. Wait, that’s not equal. That’s not fractal. That’s not like the three amigos. It’s actually a triangle with the VP of product on the top. And then that goes and it works for a year or two or three. And then the tension starts to build, you know, then there’s the insurrection from within the organisation and some people leave, some people stay and fight it out.”
John Cutler speaking in ‘Q and A with Haroon Aslam and John Cutler at SofaConf June 2020’, Clearleft
Product managers may look like they’re in a relatively desirable position to designers and researchers, but really ‘a seat at the table’ is often more like this:
Although product managers have existed in some form, if not in actual name, since at least 1931 (see Neil McElroy’s ‘Brand Man’ memo), many teams functioned perfectly fine prior to the emergence of what we would recognise as modern product managers in the early 2010s. That was almost certainly the case because other roles – the designers, researchers and the developers – had to handle all the ‘socio-business’ activities that we now typically associate with the role of a product manager. Of course, the more time they spent on those activities, the less time they could spend on their own respective specialisms.
In short, there are two trade-offs for teams without a product manager:
1. Spending less time on one’s specialism because someone has to communicate with the senior executive team, interact with stakeholders, update on progress and future planned work (whether or not you call it it a roadmap), and all the other socio-business distractions.
2. Being accountable for the success or failure of the product to meet the expectations of the senior leadership team, the board, investors and shareholders (if you have them), regardless of whether the product actually solves a valuable user need. If (or when) it all goes south, someone’s going to have to take the hit.
Even if it starts out as a shared responsibility, over time one individual will probably become the designated point of contact for the senior executives and stakeholders. Once your team reaches that point, that person might as well be called a product manager, while also still being expected to fulfil their obligations in whatever specialist role they started out in.
Let’s assume specialists in design, research and development want to spend the majority of their time working in their respective areas. To free them up from the socio-business distractions, it’s almost inevitable that a generalist role that looks, feels and smells like a product manager will emerge to take it on. And with that role comes the accountability for the product.
Perversely product managers seem to relish the socio-business stuff that serves as a distraction to the specialists. And while I’m sure that some product managers enjoy dabbling in adjacent disciplines, on the whole they would prefer not to have to wear multiple hats at work either, to devote more brain to longer-term thinking than firefighting. There’s plenty for a product manager to do without them also being expected to be the designer or user researcher.
While there will always be counter-examples, for the most part I don’t think product managers are intentionally trying to exclude designers or user researchers from ‘a seat at the table’.
Using a scalpel doesn’t make you a surgeon #
There’s often a confusion between the simplicity of a tool and the ability of the person wielding it: just because something is easy to use, it doesn’t automatically make the user an expert. Using a scalpel to cut things is easy, but using one doesn’t make the user a surgeon. It takes the years of medical school and vocational training to know not just how to cut, but where and why (and the rest).
Similarly, the goal of many technology products is to make tasks easier to perform for the user. You might find it easy to get started with CapCut (a video editor), but you don’t automatically turn into Ridley Scott when using it. Despite this, product people can fall into the trap of thinking they’re a competent user researcher because they can run a usability test or interview people, or that they’re a UI designer because they knocked up some wireframes.
The same is happening with generative AI tools. Suddenly, significantly more complicated tasks can be completed using a few prompts to an appropriately trained large language model. Whether it’s knocking up a visual design, coding up a prototype or scripting some content, it’s even easier now to achieve a credible result without the background in the corresponding discipline. However, there’s still a vast difference between knowing how to pull a metaphorical lever that spits out a result, and knowing enough to understand what a good result would look like and why. You still need expertise to wield the tool effectively.
I wrote a piece last week over on the main blog about how developers were devaluing their own profession by making the same false equivalence between an easy result and a good (informed by experience) result. And when the people making the hiring and firing decisions don’t have the domain experience in corresponding specialisms to tell the difference between an easy result and a good result either, then it becomes very hard to justify the expense of experts to them. If you don’t know what ‘good’ looks like, any old crap will pass muster.
There’s a risk that product people will find it easier to request generative AI tools from their managers than to keep lobbying to have the specialists they truly need on their team. It’s an enticing trap because we love solving problems, feeling we’re in control, and getting sh*t done. The danger is that we swap professional humility for delusions of grandeur and start to believe that we’re all qualified surgeons now just because we have access to a scalpel.
For you this week #
After their respective talks at SofaConf 2020 (here and here), Haroon Aslam and John Cutler chat with Andy Budd about the division between designers and product managers.
Next, a recent article from Scott Colfer examines the overlap between designers and product managers and offers his personal take on how the apparent tension can be resolved.
Erika Hall chats with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz about what it means to be a designer, the reasons why designers are kept away from strategic decision-making, and how designers need to apply their expertise to internal organisational design as much as to the products.
Lastly, Elena Verna writes on her Substack about how AI-native startups are disrupting more traditional SaaS companies because they can get more done, show value more quickly and move more nimbly than their competitors. In return, they’re seeing their annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow far more quickly also.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Q and A with Haroon Aslam and John Cutler at SofaConf June 2020
“I think that one of the superpowers designers have is their sort of fixation on understanding user needs. So, I’m constantly surprised how infrequently we use those same powers to understand our stakeholders. And often, we end up having arguments that seem to completely neglect the need of the business, often in favour for some perceived need from the users. So, I’m just kind of wondering what we can do to turn that around and consider both business needs and user needs in some more harmonious balance.”
[VIDEO] “A lot of product managers are just pretty full of themselves”
[Andy Budd, Haroon Aslam & John Cutler / Clearleft]
Service Design Vs Product Management: Rewiring the Lights while Keeping the Lights On
My colleague is a Lead Service Designer and he says: “So Scott, what actually is the difference between Service Design and Product Manager?”. It’s a great question. At the time my take went something like this. “We’re similar professions. I’ve seen product people do service design. And service designer [sic] do product management. But ultimately, in a multidisciplinary team with a product person and a service designer, there are crunch moments where they should have usefully different perspectives.”
[Scott Colfer / Product in Service]
The business model is the new grid, and other mindbombs (ft. Erika Hall)
On today’s show, veteran design consultant Erika Hall of Mule Design Studio, author of the books Conversational Design, and Just Enough Research joins us to talk about whether designers are truly ready for that coveted seat at the table, how to build those crucial cross-functional relationships, and the relationship between design and capitalism.
[PODCAST] Designers should use their tools of ethnography on the organisation
[Jesse James Garrett, Peter Merholz & Erika Hall / Finding Our Way]
Why AI startups are blowing past revenue milestones that old-school SaaS could only fantasize about.
I recently joined Lovable and my mind is blown. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI and we’re racing past $70M ARR – just 7 months in. How wild is that? And we’re not even alone in this trend. DeepSeek is rumored to have reached $200M ARR in under a year, while Cursor has hit $100M.
Why old-school SaaS is on a ticking clock
[Elena Verna / Elena’s Growth Scoop]
recent posts
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So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me
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Cloud computing for non-technical product managers
To understand how cloud computing works, we’re going to start with the basic building blocks and work our way up.
And why is it a cloud anyway? (All is revealed)
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Navigating your product management career
Ross Webb and I have been chatting about product management career progression.
We cover topics including:
» Thinking of visibility as a strategic competency, not self-promotion
» Controlling your narrative through regular updates
» Building cross-organisational relationships deliberately
» Mapping your stakeholders’ preferred communication styles
A roundtable chat on moving into product leadership
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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from homemade chimichurri.