If you're reading this, you're probably intrigued by the clickbait-esque title or perhaps have recently caught yourself questioning what your job entails. Before we dive in, let's start by asking yourself this: what is the essence of a PM's role?
Imagine standing on a tightrope with a briefcase in your hand. Already quite challenging, right? Now imagine that the tightrope is made of a series of coloured threats, and at the two ends of the rope, the threads unwind. Each thread is held, pulled or loosened by various obscure groups of people.
At one end of your rope, a group known as "The current customers and their needs" firmly grasps and tugs at the green thread. Their regular yanks oscillate the rope as you try to move forwards.
At the same end of the tightrope, a purple thread unravels and stretches a bit further away from the people holding the green one. The thread ends on the hands of another group of people, sitting relaxed on the curbside. Their faces are indistinguishable in the shadows of an alley.
They are the "Potential customers you haven't won yet and don't know much about your product either". Initially, they held their thread steady as you walked towards them. But recently, their grip slackened, some even leaving you to check out the rope-walker on the next block, who has been seductively inviting them through the alleyway with claims of faster progress.
Across the two ends of your tightrope, many more threads unravel. The pink thread has been caught in the exhaust of a bus. On its side, a cinematic banner reads: "We are the market trends and hypes bus".
Not far from the pink thread, a yellow thread trails down a street shaft into a new subway construction site. Underground, it occasionally gets yanked by machinery or scorched by a mishandled explosion. A tag on the thread reads "Technical debt and other constraints".
Allegories aside, let's get back to the real world. Not unlike in the real world, you the Product Manager are the performer on the tightrope in the allegory. And your balancing act is the value you need to manage for your product. That's it; that's the single thing this job is about. Every activity a Product Manager undertakes should be geared towards executing what the job is about; managing value generated by the product. But what does managing value even entail?
Think of it as a series of three fundamental missions:
Mission 1: Discover value
Mission 2: Assess value
Mission 3: Create a focus on value
Whenever your to-do list includes tasks that serve all three missions mentioned above, you can be confident that you're truly embracing the core responsibilities of a Product Manager.
PM Mission 1: Discover value
In customer-centric product development, most of the value will be generated by customers, whether current, future or unknown, and one of the product manager's main concerns should be understanding them and their particular needs.
Since there can be many types of customers, you need to know what each expects, how it differs from others and what tactics need to be employed to generate value for and from each type.
Furthermore, no product exists in a vacuum. Your product's value will be impacted by how competitors act or fail to act and how they place their bets on what is valuable. PMs should keep a close eye on the competition, and map out the market to identify areas where each player wins or loses.
Tasks geared towards carrying out this mission will culminate in the formation of hypotheses about what could be deemed valuable in the first place. These hypotheses will then become inputs for the next mission.
PM Mission 2: Assess value
Just like I've alluded to in the tightrope allegory, there are different kinds of value you could pursue, some more optimal than others at any given time.
Assessing value will involve validating the hypotheses you've formed about the problems or opportunities you've discovered in mission 1. Typical assessment tasks will involve testing (such as A/B testing), measuring and benchmarking (through KPIs and other metrics), and de-prioritising initiatives that don't maximise value.
Carrying out this mission will equip us with evidence to use as input in mission 3: creating a focus on value.
PM Mission 3: Creating a focus on value
Returning to the tightrope metaphor, imagine making the deliberate choice to shift your weight slightly towards the green thread, (representing your current customers), while simultaneously reducing your focus on the purple thread, (symbolizing potential customers). The ability to balance your attention between different types of value, such as "current" and "unrealized," is a common and significant challenge encountered by many companies.
Given the abundance of initiatives, maintenance work and other troubleshooting your company will want to pursue, your mission is to focus and guide the team's attention towards the most valuable pursuit, ultimately maximizing the potential for generating value in the short, medium and longer term.
Together with other decision-making tools, the evidence you've collected as the output of mission of 2 will help you establish a focus on the next most appropriate thing worth your team's or organisation's attention.
Additionally, it is important to take into account technical constraints and resource capacities, as they significantly impact the value equation. Evaluating these factors will help you determine the types of value that you are better positioned to tackle now vs later.
Throughout this mission, the Product Manager, armed with the insights gained from mission 2, plays a crucial role in facilitating stakeholder understanding of the current priorities and motivations within the product organization. This enables productive conversations and fosters a collective focus on value generation.
Avoiding pitfalls
There's an inclination in many PMs to descend from the tightrope and then stay on the ground. This urge is often fueled by the desire to fix things, do things, or achieve immediate results. After all, who wouldn't want to run down and directly stabilise a wildly swinging thread, right?
By spending too much time away from the rope, you risk losing sight of the overarching strategy and the broader perspective necessary for managing the value generated by the product. This doesn't mean you should ignore or not interact with forces acting on the product. Rather, you avoid becoming so immersed in the details that you lose sight of your main job. You should step down to understand these forces in enough but remember, your place is back on the tightrope, thinking about the overall balance.
You could, for instance, get lost in the underground construction site – the symbolic representation of technical details, features, and outputs. While understanding these elements is crucial, an overly technical focus can shift you away from your primary role: managing value.
You might also work with UX researchers, developers, or other team members who can delve into these issues in depth. As a PM you need to maintain a broader perspective and understand each thread enough to derive value from it but not get so involved that you lose sight of the big picture.
It's all about balance. Ultimately, the PM role is strategic and calls for maintaining an overall perspective. Remember, it's the tightrope walker's view from above that enables them to balance their feet on the right part of the rope. So always return to the tightrope and stay focused on value - that's the essence of the job.