How did product management get here?
- Asad Naqvi
- Jul 19, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 28, 2019
Product Management is a role that can have diverse definitions. The ideal job description for the role can be fairly complex and exhaustive. The role requires a key blend fo hard and soft skills, along with a penchant for healthy curiosity. Tech professionals often wonder where product management role came from and why it has so much crossover with other roles such as Marketing and UX. It fascinates me to track down how modern day jobs, and human skills, have evolved as disruptive technologies have had profound impact across industries. Tracking down the roots of the job can also help answer the question about the present and future skills set that might dominate the specialization. If nothing, at least it helps to understand the organizational trade-offs that happen as our capabilities and thinking evolve.
In 1931, Neil H. McElroy, at Procter & Gamble, wrote a memo that started off as a justification to hire more people but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand and product management. He laid out a job description for employees called “Brand Men” who would be responsible for managing the brand of the organization, which included tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. Not only did he get his two hires, McElroy also led the initiative to restructure P&G into a brand-centric organization that led to the birth of the product manager in the FMCG field. McElroy later became Secretary of Defense and helped found NASA, but he also was a advisory at Stanford where he influenced the life of two young entrepreneurs called Bill Hewlett and David Packard. As these entrepreneurs founded one fo the most iconic enterprises of modern day era, they tweaked the role of the “brand man” as someone who was the internal voice fo the customer. In the seminal book, “The Hewlett-Packard Way”, this policy is credited with sustaining Hewlett-Packard’s 50 year record of unbroken 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993.
Meanwhile, in post war Japan, shortages and cash flow problems were forcing enterprise to develop leaner ways of production. Levels of demand in the Post War economy of Japan were low and the focus of mass production on lowest cost per item via economies of scale therefore had little application. This gave birth to one of the most widely adopted concept called “Lean Manufacturing”. Toyota Production Systems took the concept and ran with it to develop its own version fo the concept of “in time” manufacturing. The framework focussed recognizing two fundamental principles: Kaizen – improving the business continuously while always driving for innovation and evolution and Genchi Genbutsu– to go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.
Of course, when “Just In Time” manufacturing came to the west, Hewlett-Packard was one of the first to recognize it’s value and embrace it. Thus Hewlett-Packard alumni brought this new way of thinking – customer centric, brand vertical, and lean manufacturing – to their future jobs, quickly permeating the growing Silicon Valley with the same ethos. From there it has spread into every hardware and software company to the global movement we know and love today. As a result, product management was a disciple that was closely tied to marketing. The product manager was primarily focused on the customer needs, with an eye on key metric like sales and profits. Also, due to the slow moving nature of the development and production of new products in FMCG, they focused more on the final three Ps: Place, Price and Promotion or Shimizu’s four Cs: Commodity, Cost, Communication, and Channel.
De coupling marketing from product development
The information age is probably one of the most historic times in modern society, driving the shift from traditional industry to an economy based on information technology. As the product manger role was adopted by the tech world, the separation from the between development and promotion of the product was unavoidable. Most of the successful tech companies can be credited with inventing their own industry verticals. The genesis of internet and mobile communication has only been a catalyst, giving rise to a bunch of new disruptive solutions and technologies that are looking to capture market share in an increasingly connected world. This has brought product development back to the centre of the product management role, as it was imperative to not just understand the customer needs, but to align the product’s development with them. Even in the tech industry, product development was originally a laborious process. The waterfall model, which was widely adopted by leading software service providers, involved involved understanding and documenting massive product requirements document over several months. They were then translated to the engineering team that worked in isolation to build a final solution that barely met the clients needs.
In 2001, seventeen software engineers got together in an Utah ski resort to write the agile manifesto, building on work spanning back to the seventies on light weight alternatives to the waterfall method of developing software. The Agile Manifesto articulated the principles behind building modern day software, such as choosing building working prototypes over comprehensive documentation, choosing customer collaboration over contract negotiation and flexibility with change over adherence to a predetermined development plan.
The Agile Manifesto represented a fundamental shift in the mindset to approach software development:
Firstly, it recognized the role of a product manager as being more collaborative, helping act a liaison between the engineering, sales, marketing and other teams involved in delivering an enterprise solutions. This freed up development teams to actually defining effective solutions to customer problem.
Secondly, focusing on customer needs helped get rid fo the artificial separation between the research, specification and development phases of a project, moving elements of the user experience discipline from an afterthought at the end of the project to a fundamental part of the genesis of a product.
Product Management has now arrived
Until very recently Product Management was still a part of the Marketing or Engineering functions, reporting up through those hierarchies. However, these days product management is increasingly important stand alone function that rolls up to the CEO. This helps aligns the product roadmap directly with the business vision and goals, makes them internal as well as external evangelists of that vision. In the near future, product management is going to continue to evolve, absorbing elements marketing and user experience. It will continue to embrace principles of lean development, high velocity engineering and continuous improvement to churn out a higher number of features within shorter intervals of time.
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