Haunted by Product

Product management is a strange way to spend one’s days, isn’t it? The career defies categorization; it even resists definition. Product management is technical; it is business; it is marketing; it is design; it is leadership. It is also not technical, not business, not marketing, not design. And as for leadership? A product manager needs to be a strong leader, surely—but of systems and missions, not of a corner of an org chart.

You think you understand product management’s boundaries, but when you reach for it, it is ungraspable, like a ghost.

A product manager coordinates, but is not a coordinator. A product manager makes, but is not a maker. A product manager researches, but is not a researcher. And product management, as a set of practices and responsibilities, exceeds the product manager’s job, much like customer service exceeds a customer service rep’s job.

Perhaps the best analogues for the work are orchestra conductor, gardener, shepherd, or expert guide. But of course, no sheep-herder ever tended a garden while guiding a tour and cueing the string section for its second movement entrance.

I think product management is a job for systems thinkers who are deft communicators, curious polymaths, and skeptical optimists. Product managers operate within tensions. You need ambition, but don’t let that devolve into ego. You must genuinely like people, but you should be willing to defy them. You should be flexible on many things, and really stubborn about a few others. Your head may be in the clouds, while your hands are in the dirt.

If you can hold contradictory ideas in your brain at once, if you can zoom into details (why isn’t that button following the pattern we’ve established?) and zoom out to broad strategy (how could we adapt our product to serve this adjacent market?), then product management is a role where you can thrive.

Done well, product management is one of the most important functions in a contemporary company. Done really well, it might even dissolve into the company, so that the product manager’s skills and ways of operating are activated within the more concrete roles on a team. Sometimes I think the ideal product manager is not one skilled person on a team of many skilled people, but a spirit who haunts the entire team. Perhaps that’s the best analogue of them all.

On to the garden,

Around the Garden

The organization as a blob

Check it out: A simple model of constructivism in organizational change, from the Expatriate/Ex-patriot blog 

The phrase “model of constructivism” from this article’s title might give you flashbacks to a social sciences Gen Ed course you barely passed as a college freshman. But the article is actually a refreshingly accessible analysis of how an organization’s members create that organization’s structure and decision-making paths.

The writer, an agile coach and organizational effectiveness consultant named Heather (her blog doesn’t indicate her surname), notes that she “like[s] applying theories of political science to patterns of development and management in companies, especially when it comes to agile practices and change management.” Her blog is populated with excellent reflections on this theme.

In this recent post, Heather argues that an organization’s actual systematic functioning is less rigid than its formal structure, as depicted in org charts or process documents. In fact, the members of an organization are the ones who continuously create the organization’s structures and processes. In other words, the members “construct” the organization, in a shape that’s more amorphous than the formal structure.

While this post never mentions product management, it does explore ways to navigate change, overcome resistance, and optimize for value—which product leaders need to do often, and well. So we can apply Heather’s constructivist approach to the challenges of implementing a product model.

That application looks something like this:

• An org attempting to deliver value through product will not succeed by merely mandating product methods from the top or dropping in new roles or frameworks that a consultant recommends.

• Instead, to implement a product operating model, a product transformer should inspire new thinking and ways of working through stories and culture.

• By doing so, a product transformer can influence an organization’s members so that they construct (conceptually) a product-driven org.

• To do this well, look for places where the documented org structure and the “constructed” organization are incongruent. Work on those incongruencies to overcome resistance to the new model.

It’s an intriguing way of approaching any kind of organizational change, including a change to product models. Has any Pollinator reader tried such a technique?

A newsletter series we’re tracking: product anti-patterns

Check it out: 10 anti-patterns for product managers, by Marcus Castenfors

In August of this year, Stockholm-based product coach Marcus Castenfors started writing a series of newsletter articles on common anti-patterns in product management. He’s promised to tackle ten of them; as of last week he’s published six.

Anti-patterns are common models and behaviors that might seem benign, but that actually are ineffective or downright counter-productive. Examples that Castenfors has written about to-date include Giving too much autonomy too soon and Focusing on parts rather than the whole.

Castenfors is a skilled storyteller who is ready with an anecdote or insight that clarifies his concepts. He’s also a talented illustrator, and these posts are peppered with colorful drawings and diagrams that illuminate the text. Here, for example, is Castenfors’s illustration of a dependency map, a tool he recommends to overcome the anti-pattern of “pushing dependencies to the side.”

We’ve subscribed to the newsletter, and expect we’ll be following the series to its conclusion.

How Gitlab does product

Check it out: The Gitlab Product Handbook, published by Gitlab.

One of our favorite subgenres of product and technical content is publicly available documentation of other organizations’ product practices, standards, and processes. You can learn so much by inspecting how successful companies think about product management, design, and development.

The folks at Gitlab, a popular web-based DevOps platform, maintain a really great handbook on their own product principles, processes, and organization.

The entire handbook is worth reviewing, but the brief section on product principles is what first caught our eye. Most of the principles can apply to any product organization. They’re expressed as brief sentences, and accompanied by links to external resources that explain the concept. A few of our favorites of Gitlab’s principles:

• Always be learning (#3)

• You’re not the customer (#4)

• Assume you are wrong (#7)

Other sections worth reviewing include Iteration Speed and Product Excellence and Drive Product Usage. The latter reinforces that a Gitlab product manager’s job is to make sure the product’s users are getting value from the product.

Self-promotion and slides

Check it out: ProductCamp Twin Cities 2024 conference presentations, from PCamptc.org

Shameless self-promotion warning. I (Jason, The Pollinator’s editor) recently delivered a presentation at ProductCamp Twin Cities, a local (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, USA) conference for product professionals sponsored by the local chapter of the Product Management and Development Association. The conference organizers have published the slides that accompanied all the speakers’ presentations, including mine.

My talk, Cultivate Your Garden: Adopting a Digital Product Model Even If You Don't Sell Digital Products, was targeted at companies who might not think of themselves as digital product companies. If that sounds like your cup of tea, check out my slides, available in PDF format.

Before you download the PDF, I should emphasize that Powerpoint or Keynote slides are rarely the most interesting element of a good conference presentation. After all, slides are mere props; the script and delivery are far more important than the images and bullet points that a presenter displays on the screen. Understanding a presentation by reviewing the slides is a bit like understanding Hamlet by looking at a skull and a dagger.

Still, my presentation’s slides can give you a taste of the topic and thesis. If after looking at the slides you would like to learn more about applying product models to non-product companies, let’s gab. Just email me at [email protected]. If you’re lucky, I could even force you to endure a private retelling of my ProductCamp talk.

Outside the box

Powers of Ten is a classic ten-minute film produced by the legendary Eames design studio in 1977. It starts by depicting a couple enjoying a lakeside picnic. The camera then zooms out at an exponential rate, so that every ten seconds the frame depicts another power of ten in scale. Soon we see the city (Chicago), and the earth, and the solar system, and galaxies, and the vastness of deep space. Then, just when we’re feeling cold and alone, we zoom back in to human scale, pausing briefly with our picnickers before heading the other direction, into negative exponents, getting ever more microscopic, seeing skin cells, organelles, and ultimately protons in an atom. The center of the shot never changes; only the resolution does.

I think this is a great metaphor for the work of a product manager or product team. Sometimes we need to think broadly; other times we need to work small. All the while we’re keeping the same user, problem, product, or business at the center.

Check it out at Power of Ten (YouTube).

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.