Some people think that it’s only software engineers that build great products. While the role of software engineers in building reliable, scalable, high-performance, and secure products should never be underestimated, the thing is that great products are built by great product teams which include strong software engineers, product managers, product designers, and various other professionals who contribute to the success of the product.

In technology-driven enterprises such as Google, many technological innovations were the contributions of software engineers who could oversee the potential and opportunities technology could bring to existing and new products. However, even such brands recognize the true value that great product teams bring to the table.

Having a strong engineering organization is a huge plus, but it is not enough for creating successful products. You can have the strongest engineers, and you can use the best available technologies for building your products. You can achieve various technology metrics, such as 99.99% uptime for your platform and the fastest load time for your client-side. But the truth is that none of those metrics really matter if your product does not provide strong value to your customers.

At the end of the day who cares about the technological advancements of the product when it is not used by anyone?

Technology companies need to have strong product teams who will work together on discovering amazing products that are meant to solve severe customer pains.

The way product manager empowers the product success is by leading, encouraging, and motivating their product team to go above and beyond for defining, designing, and delivering winning products.

This makes the product manager’s role one of the most important organizational roles that exist in technology companies. Companies are also starting to understand the importance of having a strong product organization consisting of strong product managers who can lead the company’s product efforts. In recent decades, product organization became one of the most strategic units inside many technology vendors, participating in various aspects of the business.

In every technology business, there are decisions to be made. Do we say “Yes” to this or not? What might happen in the future if we take this step? How do we make customers happy? How do we make our customers stay with us longer? The technology business and the product are interwoven. The same issues that bother the business bother the product too. Each product-level decision will impact the business in the long run. So, there needs to be a team of people or at least someone in the company who will make these decisions keeping the customer’s needs satisfied and business’ growth in their mind.

So, if the business has the right setup for product management organization in place, then you can expect the following to happen:

• A continuous product discovery of solutions that customers really want
• An efficient product strategy for quickly taking the solutions to the market
• A continuous product execution that ships the right solution to the market as fast as humanly possible
• A product-led growth that centers the company’s growth around the product

With this in mind, it’s impossible to underestimate the value product management brings to technology companies as a strategic and empowering drive. The product management organization interacts with nearly all organizations inside the company, from engineering to sales, from marketing to customer support, from operations to human resources management. They also act as one of the primary faces of the company and the brand when interacting with customers, partners, and media and PR channels.

Having a strong product organization does not only allow companies to have successful products but also increases a company’s brand as a strong product company.

Now, let’s move on to my own research. I have conducted it to find out what the big picture regarding product management is in a number of technology companies. My research also discusses how people in those companies interpret the role of a product manager. This analysis might seem subjective since it mostly provides the problems that exist in technology companies. However, this is the ugly reality that we need to be made aware of to be able to solve the issues that companies currently face.

The Research

To understand the current trends surrounding the product management profession in general, and the role of product managers in technology companies, in particular, I have carried out research among various companies operating in the United States, Armenia, Israel, and Germany. The findings show that there are some very common misconceptions regarding the role of a product manager and product organization in most of those companies.

In a duration of nine months, executives and product managers were interviewed from eighty-four early-stage, emerging, and enterprise-level technology companies. Targeted companies were building software products for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) domains.

Some of them were mobile-only applications, but most of them provided their solutions in various presentation channels such as web, mobile, and point of sale (POS) terminals. The companies were targeting markets such as big data, gaming, fintech, entertainment, social networks, online marketplaces, education, marketing tools, etc.

All the companies were developing their products in-house, meaning that they were not outsourcing the product creation to other companies. Some of them had offices in different countries, but in most cases, the product teams were either sitting together or working fully remotely.

Interestingly, eighteen of the interviewed companies did not have a product management organization. Instead, they had project managers who were supposed to keep track of the development and product efforts. Twenty-four of the interviewed companies transformed their internal product and development tracking teams into product management organizations during the last one year.

In most of the companies, there was no official head of the organization. In some cases, one of the employees - usually the one who has been working with the company for a long time, became the head of the product organization. Eight of the interviewed companies, that were mostly startups had only one product manager, who in most of the cases was the founder and CEO of the company. Thirty-four of the companies had an officially established product management organization with a product leadership role existing in the company.

Surprisingly, sixty-three of the interviewed companies assumed that the role of the product organization (or their understanding of product organization) is to “serve” the business and make sure that the given product requirements are adequately implemented and shipped to the market. In fifty-two of the companies, they assumed that product management is the more technology-specific and “modernized” role of project management. In some companies, the role of product management was even seen as part of the engineering manager’s role.

Eight of the interviewed companies, where the product manager was one of the co-founders of the company, had a good understanding of the strategic importance of product management, but some of them lacked certain details about how their product management institution will run once the company scales.

Nine of the interviewed companies had made much progress when it came to the establishment of the product management organization in their companies. Those companies believed that the product management organization is one of the key departments of their company and that product managers can effectively contribute to the success of their business.

Only four of the interviewed companies had a “strong” product management organization, where product managers truly felt as “strategic empowerers” of their product, team, and the business. In those companies, product managers always participated in strategic planning and were known as the mini-CEOs of their products.

In most of the companies that had so-called product leadership roles, the role of a product leader (Chief Product Officer, VP of Product, Head of Product) was there to check and make sure that there are no issues with internal processes, hire product managers and track the performance of their direct reportees.

In the four companies mentioned above, product leaders were there to empower their entire product organization. Their empowerment first begins with training their product managers about the customer, market, industry, business, and data. Product leaders further empower their product organization by introducing them to the business context, which entails: company vision, product objectives, et cetera.

Product leadership has been regarded by these four companies to be an “evangelist role.” Those who have assumed the evangelist role are there to help product managers inside the company to not only deliver real value to the customers but to also consistently interact with other product teams and understand where the company is going.

So, it turns out that a lot of technology companies nowadays have not set up proper product management organizations yet. The major problem is that those companies have not realized the value strong product organizations can bring to their companies. In fact, in most of those companies, the roles of project managers and product managers are still combined into one. Most problematically, people in those companies think that the product manager has to be a doer rather than a visionary.

The danger of interpreting product management as a delivery work is that it will cause a very expensive approach for discovering new products and increase the chances of failure during the product work. If we limit the product work only on the delivery side of it, we will see the technology company as a CEO- and request-centric business, something we are trying to avoid during my previous article about the old, bad approach in product management. Finally, most of the interviewed companies lack great product leadership - the influencers of the strong product culture inside companies.

Considering the results of this research, it is hard to imagine product managers in most of those companies as the empowering drives for their product success. Product managers who are there just to lead the delivery work, will not have enough freedom and opportunity to make big and important decisions. They will not feel supported by their leadership to create and maintain an experiment-driven culture in their companies.

Before we jump to concrete examples of product managers who empowered the success of their products, it’s worth knowing the major business domains that product managers touch during their work.

The Business Domains

Building a product for an enterprise and building a product for a consumer are somewhat different things. In the case of business-to-business, the buyer and the actual end-user of the product can be two different personas. In B2B, success is defined by enabling the customers to deliver more value to their business and operations by using your product.

In an enterprise setting, the buyer (one of the C-level people or decision-makers) writes the cheque and the actual user of the product (their employees or contractors) never writes a check, they just use the product. An enterprise can purchase a project management tool such as Jira, so all their employees use the platform as a tracking system for ongoing and future tasks.

B2B products have interesting characteristics. In the B2B sector, the decision-makers (aka the buyers) want the product to comply with their privacy, security, and data management policies as well as have integrations with their existing systems. In many cases, these are the priorities. Hence, once these requirements are satisfied, the buyers occasionally ignore the usability of the product. In fact, many B2B SaaS solutions have a reputation for bad usability (pun intended), since for those product companies usability goes into the secondary list of priorities.

However, this does not mean that user experience is not important for B2B product managers. Instead, it means that since enterprise software usually deals with complex operational and financial workflows and large data sets, it needs to operate perfectly, and the product manager’s number one concern is thus to create a product that does the most important stuff the enterprise needs. User experience can be and should be consistently improved over time.

There are different approaches to discovering successful products and features for B2B products. An interesting requirement for all those approaches is that you, as the product managers of B2B products, are going to closely cooperate with those businesses on a weekly basis, learn about their industry, their needs, their workflows, and even the way they run their business. You should learn what are the old approaches those businesses utilize to solve their problems, so you can have enough knowledge to understand how can you improve the existing approaches.

In some cases, a product manager might even act as a user of that SaaS software to really understand whether the provided solution solves the customer’s problem or not, and if it solves the problem then how effectively does it solve that issue.

In the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, both the buyer and the consumer are often the same persona. In some cases, the B2C product can be free for its users and can act as an operational platform for other businesses. Let’s take Facebook as an example. For its entire lifetime, Facebook has been free for its users. Users don’t need to pay anything to utilize Facebook’s services, and as Facebook highlights in its tagline, “It’s free and always will be.”

However, a B2C product needs to make money as well. How? For example, it can act as a B2B product for businesses and individuals. Facebook is one of the world’s major advertisement platforms - publishing online advertisements for millions of businesses and individuals. Another way a B2C product can make money is by becoming a data provider to other services, specifically by providing anonymous but targeted information about the demographics, behavior, and preferences of their users. Other businesses can utilize that data to learn insights about customers and run targeted marketing campaigns.

For B2C products, the consumer segments can be very different, and the user behavior can differ from segment to segment, especially if it's an international product. Factors like age, interests, gender and even political leanings can affect the way people use the product. This means that the product manager should have a hands-on experience of dealing with user behavior analytics tools to measure the behaviors of specific segments.

Another characteristic of the B2C sector is that the users here view design and usability as one of the priorities. A consumer product has to be user-friendly and extremely intuitive above all else. Thus, it’s obvious here: while B2B product managers are more concerned about business-oriented features of the product, B2C product managers aim to keep the product simple and usually have one generic version for all consumers.

The discovery process for B2C products involves consistent communication with consumers. Note that some might argue that the discovery process for B2C products might be harder than the discovery for B2B products. Many times businesses are well aware of their problems and they are looking for solutions. Even if they don’t have competent solutions for their problems, they at least think about their problems on a regular basis.

For B2C consumers, it might be a bit different. Someone who loves attending networking and entertainment events might not think about the problem of finding information about those types of events on a regular basis. They might utilize existing solutions to solve their problems and in some cases, be satisfied with those solutions, especially when those solutions are free. But when they see a new compelling product that offers them an opportunity to search and register for upcoming events easily, it might quickly make them use that new product.

B2B2C

Business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) is a mix of the above two. Usually, the term customer here refers to businesses that are buying a B2C product, and end-user relates to users of such businesses.

In B2B2C companies, the product discovery process is two-directional. On the first hand, we are trying to discover the pain partnering businesses are facing and the places we can improve their operations. On the other hand, we are trying to understand what are the needs of the users of those businesses, where are they struggling and what types of solutions can make their lives easier.

To be more concrete, the goals of the B2B2C product manager is to make the product created for their partnering business valuable and appealing to the users of that business. The customer segmentation process for the B2B2C domain is different as well. There are two layers to this whole thing: a B2B2C product provider can target a specific set of customers who can themselves target very different end-users. Usually, to be a great product manager in the B2B2C sector, it would require having good experience in both B2B and B2C sectors.

An interesting characteristic of B2B2C products is that the revenue model can act as a chain of business models. A B2B business might pay you for using your SaaS product, and their end-user might pay them for utilizing their service. In some cases, you as a B2B2C product company will generate revenue based on the business model that charges money from the consumers - the end-users of your partnering company. B2B2C products are not popular as B2B and B2C ones, but they exist in the market, and the discovery process for those types of products is very interesting as well.

Let’s take a sports betting solution provider business as an example. As a product manager who works for a company that provides sports betting platform for businesses, you should think about what are the tools a sports betting company will need to run their online business effectively. We will need to provide them with a satisfactory business management environment so they can manage their financials and the content of their own website - Sportsbook.

For the players of that sports betting company, we need to provide a comfortable Sportsbook - a place where they can place their online bets. So, as you have seen, when discovering a new idea for these types of businesses, we should think about the implications of new changes on both parties. In case we skip one of the participants, the other side might suffer tremendously.

Famous Product Managers

When we hear names such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or even Elon Musk, we think about famous entrepreneurs who have managed to create and run some of the biggest technology companies in the world. A common characteristic that combines these people, aside from the fact that they are successful entrepreneurs, is that they are also amazing product managers.

They have managed to successfully build amazing products that customers value. They led from small product teams to entire enterprises to define, design, and deliver products that are used by millions of customers worldwide. Even though some of them never had a product manager title on their resume, their work is what a modern-day technology product manager should do on a daily basis.

Product people like these act as an example of strong leaders who empower their product teams to solve the toughest product challenges to yield value to customers. While all of them are known as strong visionaries, they all empowered strong professionals to boost their business performance.

Great products are not built by one person, they are built by great product teams.

Who cares about a great product idea, if there is no strong strategy and execution? Who needs a strong engineering solution, if there is no value for the customers. Who cares about the value of the product, if the usability is so terrible that it causes more trouble than it provides a value. These leaders have managed to create strong product cultures to effectively address all product challenges, and cooperatively create a strong value for their customers.

Seeing all their success, you might ask a question - can I, as a product manager, become a strong leader and an executive of an enterprise that changes the lives of millions of customers. In fact, it is very common seeing product managers become CEOs of various successful startups and enterprises. Intuitively, what product managers do is very similar to what CEOs do on an enterprise level. Strong product managers quickly pick all the necessary product and people management skills to become great leaders.

Leading people as a product manager without authority will give you essential enterprise skills to become a great CEO, but this time with authority.

Are you interested in building a strong product organization inside your company? Let’s chat!

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About The Author

Rafayel Mkrtchyan is a product management advisor who helps companies improve their product discovery and delivery processes. He teaches teams how to set up a winning product strategy and sustainable growth model, run customer and product development processes, develop outcome-, experiment-, and data-driven mindset, as well as robust their lean, agile, and design thinking skills.

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