The Meaning-Makers

How weird is this? Product management is a job function that even its own practitioners immediately reframe as another job function.

You’ve all seen this, I’m sure. Many have argued (though I’m not so sure) that the product manager is like a CEO, but for a product. American football fans (Skol!) might say a product manager is like a quarterback, but for a product team. To reflect the breadth of the work, some product leaders have suggested that a product manager is something like a film director. And here’s one we use throughout the Pollinator: a good product manager is a gardener.

I blame the phenomenon on the imprecision inherent in the work’s two words, product and management. Product is broad and squishy; management is even broader and squishier. So to make sense of it, we describe product management using other jobs that are concrete. My 81-year-old mom knows what a quarterback does; she doesn’t quite believe that product management is real.

One job-to-describe-this-job that we don’t hear as often, but I think is especially apt: the product manager is an editor. More than a decade ago, when the Web still felt fresh and full of hope, entrepreneur and product investor Andrew Chen wrote a brief essay called Why Companies Should Have Product Editors, Not Product Managers. In it, Chen quotes Jack Dorsey, former head of Twitter:

This framing helps me understand product work. Among the wide and various skills necessary for a product manager, near the top are editing skills—and not just of language. (Though, yes, it is essential that both the product manager and the editor write well.) A skilled product manager understands narrative, explores possibilities, makes a case, clarifies through language, plans an experience, and helps other professionals do their best work

Can you make a convincing argument? Can you find a thread that coheres parts? Can you resolve a conflict? Can you bring order and clarity to chaos? Can you identify an extraneous element—and are you brave enough to excise it, even if you love it? That’s what a good editor does—and it’s what a great product manager does.

The list of product artifacts is long: roadmaps, user stories, capacity charts, metrics reports, timelines, research materials, user profiles, and—if you’re doing the job well—a healthy P&L. But as important as any of those artifacts is the narrative of your product. A great product is a great story, and its hero is your user, a person with a problem that your product can solve. The wise product manager edits this story to make this hero succeed.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

When probability fails

Check it out: “Revisiting Subjective Probabilities” from The Uncertainty Project

Those of us who naturally think and work in narratives sometimes suppress our imaginative instincts and try to construct a rational, mathematical model for product and business decisions. “I should analyze this with numbers—maybe even convert it to dollars,” we think, uneasily. “That’s what colleagues expect, right?”

If you're like that too, you might feel the relief of validation when you read this article from the wise gang at The Uncertainty Project. The article is rooted in the principles of a 2020 book called Radical Uncertainty, by John Kay and Mervyn King. That book, and the Uncertainty Project’s examination of it, points out that probabilistic methods (Bayesian logic, for example) may not be the best tools for making decisions in large, complex contexts.

The alternative? Imaginative techniques, like a good story or thoughtful narrative about a user problem. For example, King and Kay recommend that decision-makers (like product managers) construct a good “reference narrative,” and update it as they develop new information.

Once again, we see that storytelling skills are product skills. The product manager’s instinct for narrative may be exactly what a decision demands.

A new cube in your toolbox

Check it out: “The Critical Link Between Product Management and Business Strategy,” by Alexandre Luis Prim, California Management Review 

I know, I know: you don’t really need another product diagram or framework. Your toolbox is full.

But if you can make some room in there next to the North Star framework and your shopworn Jobs-To-Be-Done template, consider adding this tool from Brazilian product expert Dr. Alexandre Luis Prim, published by the Haas Business School at The University of California-Berkely.

The cool thing about Prim’s model: it’s three-dimensional. A product’s outcomes are aligned to business objectives through a standard grid, with columns and rows. But initiatives are expressed through a z-axis, connected to each node in the product and objective grid. He visualizes these three dimensions as a cube, segmented like a Rubik’s Cube. Prim calls this the “Product-Objective-Initiative Cube,” or POIC. It looks like this:

Prim’s article also includes an example of applying this model to real business problems. And it’s illustrated with charts and tables that demonstrate how a manager can connect initiatives to business objectives, via product. We appreciate Prim’s advice on implementing the model pragmatically:

Prim’s POIC may not be your everyday tool, but for specialized situations on complex product portfolios, this cube might be the exact device you need.

An underappreciated product career path: technical writing to product management

Check it out: Transferrable skills: Technical Writer to Product Manager, from the Pink-Haired Content Strategist

This post on Medium, from a writer who calls herself the Pink-Haired Content Strategist, was especially resonant for me: I too started my technology product and content career as a technical writer. That’s right: thirty years ago, I was writing installation guides, maintenance manuals, online help, and interactive tutorials. My first gig was writing the service and maintenance manual for a huge mail processing machine used by the US Postal Service. I still think I could change some of the belts on that thing, because I’m the guy who wrote the instructions and drew the diagrams explaining how to do it.

I always appreciated the way tech writing established a good foundation for my own product career, especially when I moved from mail machines to software products. As the young guy writing a technology’s products online help and training materials, I got to spend time within software design and development teams, learning how different talents interact. And writing documentation is a great way to understand how a product’s users think and what users expect a product to do.

The Pink-Haired Content Strategist identifies these and other profound connections between a technical writer’s skillset and a product manager’s responsibilities. Chief among them: curiosity and empathy with a user.

I often say that the best entry into product management is playing another tactical role on a cross-functional product team. That role is often an engineer, a designer, or a researcher. But as the Pink-Haired Content Strategist reminds us, it also could be a writer. After all, the skills that make great technical communicators—clarity, curiosity, empathy—are also the skills that make great product people.

Note: Transferrable skills: Technical Writer to Product Manager is paywalled on Medium. If you aren’t a Medium paid user and would like to learn more about the article, let me know in the comments or via email.

Outside the Box

If you enjoy cooking, you’ve no doubt discovered that recipes on many foodie websites are cluttered with lengthy personal stories of the recipe-writer. You want my recipe for pasta carbonara? First let me tell you about a lost weekend I spent in Rome. I was wading in the Trevi fountain when I met a mysterious swineherd…

While sometimes these reflections are entertaining and insightful (remember: at the Pollinator we appreciate narrative), more often than not they block the user from their goal. I’m hungry, and I don’t know what to do with my noodles, pork cheek, Pecorino Romano cheese, and egg. Can’t you just give me the ingredients and instructions?

Just The Recipe addresses this problem deftly. Paste in any URL of a Web page containing a recipe, and Just The Recipe will parse the page and return the recipe itself, nicely formatted and stripped of ads, stories, and Roman fountains.

Check it out at: www.justtherecipe.com.

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and 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.