I’m a fan of Martin Cagan’s Product Management Newsletter and find them quite precise and illustrative. He doesn’t regularize his newsletter as weekly / monthly etc, but writes as he feels like it and has enough meat to offer readers.
In his latest post, he writes about where Product Management should live, in organizations today. Given that Product Management acts as the bridge between market opportunity and company product portfolio, and is a very crucial function contributing to the art of making business decisions, this post comes as a nice awakening to the PM community (including myself).
Martin starts with analysing the prevalent structures in organizations today, where PM is part of Engineering or Marketing. When coupled with Engineering, the PM tends to become a custodian of the PRD versions while coupling it with Marketing, the PM is likely to be more concerned about Product Marketing.
His assertion is, PMs play a role in converting market opportunities into tangible and saleable products & services. This means, having a say in the investment decisions of the company, which implies access to the executive team, without being colored by the influence of technology, delivery pressures or sales & marketing.
Interesting thoughts. I tend to agree with most of these. In my own experience, I’ve observed that in smaller startups and technology product companies, the Product Manager could very well be wearing the Engineering hat too (I did that in my previous job, working with a Technical Architect or a Principal Engineer). I had colleagues who came from programming / development backgrounds and assumed Product Management ownership. We were fairly successful at churning out high quality products for an international customer base.
Nevertheless, as companies grow bigger in size, product efforts become specialized. In such a context, the Product Manager has to be the torch-bearer of the User Experience that can significantly impact the saleability and acceptance of a product, more so in the case of a consumer-targeted product rather than a business-targeted product.
Interesting post – I agree about Martin’s thoughtful propositions – I have also been following his posts for last 7 months now. His articles especially “Engineering wants to rewrite” are intersting. He treats the PM group distinctly and puts PMs in a critical role for any Product organization. Martin had Product Management sessions in India today and yesterday..I missed it though..Product Management in India is growing now with people giving importance to this job role. What do you think?
Comment by Saumitra Karandikar — July 18, 2007 @ 7:35 pm