Posted
Jun 2010
How To Prosper As a Product Manager
Redefining and Strengthening the Product Manager’s Role
Based on the research of Rajesh K. Tyagi And Mohanbir S. Sawhney
The title “product manager” is the most commonly held marketing position. Product managers are essential to a company’s efforts, yet the position is fraught with frustration. Often, product managers are disappointed to discover that tactical coordination requires so many of their working hours. Why does the strategy-oriented job they thought they had accepted so often become lost among the rest of the position’s demands?
Most literature in the field has focused on factors affecting a new product’s success or failure, including the quality of market research or a product’s superiority. Mohanbir S. Sawhney, a clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and Rajesh K. Tyagi, an assistant professor at HEC Montreal, believe that too little research has looked at the role of the product manager and the relevant processes and organizational structures. They set out to explore the circumstances that affect, define, and ultimately determine a product manager’s effectiveness. In essence, what makes a successful product manger? The answer is simpler than you may think.
Product Managers at Work
Imagine the product manager as an orchestra conductor, and the product as the symphony being played, Sawhney suggests. “The conductor doesn’t play an instrument or sing, but needs to coordinate all the players,” he notes.
The product manager doesn’t have a script to follow, but all the functions need to come together to make the product succeed.
However, he continues, the conductor is following a score. “The product manager doesn’t have a script to follow, but all the functions need to come together to make the product succeed. This means that market research has to provide the right customer insights, engineering has to build the right product, the supply chain must get the product to the customer, and the salespeople must be effective in selling.”
Product managers supervise the everyday marketing of a company’s products, both current and those in the pipeline. Despite the job’s pivotal nature, its roles and responsibilities can be very unclear—job descriptions are often poorly defined, and many product managers lack the authority to carry out their responsibilities effectively.
The position’s significance varies among industries, and is far more common in technology than in consumer goods. “Proctor and Gamble has brand managers, not product managers. Consumer products are not all that complex, so it’s all about the brand,” Sawhney explains. Technology companies such as Apple and Microsoft have more complicated, expensive products and therefore a stronger need for product management.
Identifying Impediments
Sawhney and Tyagi developed a detailed, four-part questionnaire after lengthy interviews with more than twenty experienced product managers. Of the 198 survey respondents, more than 40 percent worked in business-to-business technology and nearly 23 percent in industrial products. The product managers averaged 7.4 years in the position and 42.3 percent of them held advanced degrees.
One of Sawhney and Tyagi’s hypotheses was that organizational barriers, short-term tactical focuses, and a lack of formal training impede communication and weaken a product manager’s performance. Another theorized that organizational silos and barriers affect roles, responsibilities, knowledge, and competencies, all of which can determine product management performance. They also anticipated that customer knowledge and strategic thinking were key competencies for the role.
In most cases, product managers have little influence on corporate branding, channel selection, or advertising. Rather, they have greater input in defining product specifications, launching the product, and positioning the product. Sawhney and Tyagi found that the marketing department is often brought into the product management process once the developed product is ready to enter the marketplace.
In Sawhney and Tyagi’s survey, product managers reported they felt that the sales function, followed by engineering, wields the most power in an organization. They considered corporate marketing the least powerful function, with comparatively little direct authority over budget and ownership.
More authority would increase a product manager’s effectiveness, Sawhney says. Usually, “the product manager must master the art of influence without authority—and that’s not easy,” Sawhney observes. The study identified the position’s two most important skills as product knowledge and customer knowledge.
Another critical factor—a product manager’s interfaces—is often managed poorly. “It’s hard for the product manager to get to either the people or the needed information, because so many interfaces are required, with sales, R&D, operations, advertising, finance, the supply chain, and executive management,” says Sawhney. “A good product manager should spend 20 to 25 percent of his or her time with the customer. We found they spend as little as 14 percent with customers, and as much as 38 percent on administration and follow-up.” Survey respondents would like to spend more than one-third of their time on planning and strategy, but can devote only about 25 percent to those activities.
Sawhney and Tyagi identified firms’ organizational structure as the biggest determinant separating those that perform high in product management from lower performers. “There’s no shortcut if you really want to fix the product management function. Where that does happen, leadership has to set the tone,” Sawhney reports. “The corporate culture has to empower the product manager. Jeff Raikes, who ran the Microsoft Office business for many years, was a product manager. So the product manager role is well-respected in Office business development [there].”
Empowering the Position
One study participant at Oracle said salespeople rarely take product managers on sales calls, fearing they will get in the way. When an Oracle product manager researched how their new product could compete against IBM’s, a salesperson who heard about the information invited him on what turned into a successful sales call. Word quickly spread that the product manager was the one to contact when competing with IBM. Soon he was getting frequent invitations to go on sales calls. “It’s all about what you know,” explains Sawhney. “If you have the credibility that comes with the knowledge, you’ll get a seat at the table—but you have to contribute something of value.”
“A product manager needs to gain power through expertise,” Sawhney asserts. “If you can make sales or engineering feel that you are the ‘go-to’ person for your product, you can become more influential.”
Product managers should not “be thrown into deep water” to learn on the job, Sawhney says. Instead, he recommends formal training as they enter the organization and as they begin climbing the corporate ladder there. Strengthening the position’s power can significantly contribute to improving product management outcomes.
The quality of the marketing process impacts a product manager’s performance. Sawhney and Tyagi suggest that managers of consumer products be directly involved in creating the marketing requirements. With industrial or technology products, marketing and engineering should jointly define the requirements. “High-performance firms … have a clearly-defined process for product launch, escalations, and need identification,” they conclude.
Making the product manager responsible for more of the total product functions can mitigate interface difficulties. Sawhney recommends “creating mechanisms for better communication across functions, or restructuring the organization” to remedy interface problems.
A realistic starting point for the employer is to define and sharpen the product manager’s job description. Sawhney has been consulting with Microsoft for some time on improving the product management function. “Microsoft is in the middle of a new program, Role Clarity, which goes across marketing functions, including product management. The impetus is coming from the top, acknowledging the importance of [defining] roles and responsibilities in product management.”
The study’s most important finding, says Sawhney, is that product managers encounter too many barriers, organizational silos, and vagueness about what they can or should be doing. “Once you reduce the ambiguity around things like their deliverables or specific authority, performance improves. The clearer the roles and responsibilities, the more successful the product manager.”
17 Comments
Jun 11 2010
Dear Professor Sawhney,
Long time since I contacted you. I just read yours and Rajesh Tyagi’s article on Product Management function. I couldn’t agree more with your findings. As a career professional in product marketing and product management where I held senior leadership responsibilities at major high-tech companies, including Motorola recently, the function is very challenging and very often gets compromised for daily tactical “crisis management” that are very internally focused; and I feel that customer/industry interaction suffers as a result which is very crucial to drive the product/service leadership, P/L assessments, and market share. Furthermore, my experience suggests that many companies have the best of intentions and even have well defined job-description/charter for the role, but when it comes to execution and daily practice it is completely a different story. I also agree that placement of product management and product marketing function organizationally is a big issue that many companies wrestle with - i.e should these functions be part of the “Marketing organization” or should this be part of “product line” entity where engineering is also included.
I wish that I was able to participate in your research and contribute. I appreciate receiving any details you have to support this article and would love to engage in your further studies of this topic.
Regards,
Uma Murty
Jul 18 2010
I’d recommend getting involved with ProductCamps (a BarCamp spinoff) to do further research or learn more about the role.
I agree the role changes dramatically based on industry. For the software industry, many times the role is part of development and not marketing.
Jul 25 2010
As a former product (marketing) manager in Motorola’s handset division, I concur with the article wholeheartedly.
The point around building influence with little authority cannot be emphasized enough.
Typically product knowledge and mastery of product details is given an inordinate amount of importance relative to development of soft skills which are necessary during customer engagements and required for cultivating relationships with parties outside of the product managers organization.
Lastly, I would like to add that in addition to the industry-specific variations for the role, the size and culture of the company also plays a critical factor in determining the roles and responsibilities of the product manager. I would assume that less hierarchical organizations would tend to provide product managers with greater degrees of freedom when it came to making critical decisions and at the same time, hold them accountable for their actions.
Echoing Uma’s point, I would also love to get more engaged in any further studies on this topic.
Thanks,
Kartik
Aug 31 2010
Excellent advice. In my experience as product manager and manager of product managers, I find the most difficult challenge is to have a clear set of business goals from which to operate on. While you can interpret the Product Management role in many different ways, the interpretation I use most frequently is that the product manager is responsible for managing the product to meet the overall business goal. Executive management teams often have no problem defining vague, all encompassing growth goals but struggle with defining clear, actionable, attainable business goals/vision that take into account real tradeoffs that have to be made. Clear business direction and goals makes the product manager’s life much easier and frankly, more accountable.
Sep 17 2010
Very informative and thought provoking research. Please reach out to me in case I can assist with further research.
One key pain point is getting the sales & engineering team on the same page. Sales have a different perspective through “VOC” and engineering team has emotions involved as “owner” of the product. At times it can be difficult to bridge the gap and build consensus without authority.
Also you may have designed a brilliant product but to get sales to push when exisitng sales opportunities are abundant can be challenging.
Finally it is imperative to have right balance between short term tactical activities and strategic things. I would concur that having more authority and having sales report through product management may improve the situation and remove some ambiguity.
Oct 7 2010
We are an engineering and product development services provider and as such don’t have internal product managers. However, one of our customers appears to be largely driven by the product managers. The product managers have P+L responsibility for their product families and get the corresponding authority to make decisions that affect their products P+L. Do you know how common it is for product managers to have P+L responsibility and authority? It seems to work for this customer, aside from the squabbling about how the cost accounting should really work for the internal services they use for their product lines. They outsource a great deal which makes the cost accounting issue smaller than it might be at other shops.
Feb 24 2011
Eureka! Long overdue study of a key function. I wish I had these insights in my back pocket as a young, ambitious PM at CPG and high tech companies. Great work.
Feb 25 2011
As a product manager within financial services, I have seen organizations struggle with the transition from product development to product management - how to transfer the general system/integration knowledge for future product enhancements and understanding/managing the interplay between key business metrics/drivers (risk/finance).
A wide breadth of soft skills required is key.. ability to champion a product solution and to identify alternatives resources or initiatives (which can be used to help fund and prioritize the implementation effort)
Feb 25 2011
Great article summing up a lot of the essence and frustrations of product managers. With these findings, does anyone know how the authors actually defined
product management effectiveness or success?
Feb 25 2011
Dear Professor Sawhney,
Great to see your point of view on product management once again. I have been your student of technology marketing in 2003.
After having worked for a few years as a product manager, now I have set out to build a consulting firm specializing in product management related services for small to medium technology companies. We will be offering services complementing the clients capabilities in the product space - more customer centric experience design, GTM planning, product integration/roll-out planning, sales training plans etc.
Appreciate your views on such a service.
Regards
Ravi
Feb 28 2011
The research and findings seem accurate enough based on my own research and benchmarking. The unfortunate issue is that the problems continue. Even by what’s called out in the discussion thread, the tremendous variability in Product Management acts as a drag on the entire organization. This is a senior leadership issue.
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The problem is that many senior leaders do not “get” Product Management, either because they didn’t ever do the job, or because they just do not understand how to organize for it. That’s why there is so much role confusion and misalignment on key processes.
Mar 9 2011
I certainly liked this article and went back to read the original paper. It raises the issue nearly every PM has to deal with regarding responsibility without authority and organizational structures.
However, I think there is a meta question here which is how am I helping myself? Organizational structure is certainly important to making the daily life easier. But there is also formal authority and moral authority. The former is entrusted. The latter is earned. Just because you’ve been given something doesn’t mean you still don’t need to earn it. A good product manager needs to be viewed as a leader. This was illustrated with the Oracle PM. S/He was able to demonstrate their value. With this established they were now sought out. That is not something an organization can bestow upon someone though. It is understanding this and working within the constraints that separates a great PM from the rest.
Mar 10 2011
Thank you for your informative and insightful article. In addition to your statement, “A good product manager should spend 20 to 25 percent of his or her time with the customer,” does your research suggest the portion of that time that should be devoted to prospective customers? Perhaps might that depend on market or corporate strategy?
Apr 4 2011
Dear Professor Sawhney,
I have observed Product Management in FMCG - and due to the fact that in FMCG they create SIMPLE specific products for specific people (consumers identified through targeted research) where highly individualised problems can be identified and resolved through product innovation - the Product Managers are effective, influential and respected - setting targets and driving results.
In COMPLEX products (wherever a single consumer cannot quickly understand the differences between similar complex products such as bank accounts, online solutions etc) - and sales people are involved to “explain” the solution to clients - the product manager’s power and authority is undermined - and with it, their effectiveness,
To me it is clear that “knowing your market problems to solve” is the source of a product manager’s influence and power. (And ultimately their effectives)
Regards
Ulrich Wilsenach
Jul 19 2011
I think the research is spot on and is similar to what i have seen as a practicing product manager for years in the US. The role is even muddier in emerging markets where the role is split further with Product owners in the Agile world to the more creative title side called Requirements Manager, Technical PM, Associate PM, Proxy Product Manager etc.
We commissioned a similar research for state of Product Managers in India specifically in the First Annual Benchmarking report that was released at NASSCOM last Nov 2010. The summary of the findings can be found at -
http://www.slideshare.net/adaptivemarketingindia/presentations
and the full report can be downloaded from adaptivemarketing.in
Jul 19 2011
I agree that product manager need to be given more authority and he needs to spend more time with customer. However, if he spends more time with customer then supposedly routine work suffers. Only higher manager can change this culture.
I further agree to the point raised by Uma that many organizations have well defined roles and responsibilities but practicality differs.
Mar 27 2012
The article is awesome and clearly defines the product manager’s role in an organisation..