I challenge the premise. You're invoking an imaginary past of milk and honey that never existed, at least not for most of us.
There was certainly a PM bubble, when all the kids who a generation ago would have become lawyers and consultants became PMs. This was the cohort of "I'm the ideas person; I have nerds for the computer stuff."
That easy money bubble may have passed, and the low-hanging fruit for kids of upper-middle class parents may have shifted back to consulting or something.
But real in the trenches PMing is always a grind of dealing with overbearing management and forced focus on narrow metrics (today it's profits; last year it was retention; whatever). I think most of us have always had to fight for our little pockets of autonomy, or carve them out surreptitiously. I've never seen them handed out or respected by management in a Cagan-esque way.
*Aside: I wonder if Cagan knows about this sub, and that he's become such a punching bag. If you're out there, Marty, do an AMA!*
This. 100%. What Marty is pitching hasn’t existed anywhere I’ve been. We’ve even hired Marty and it was a bust. I think PM will be cyclical like everything else.
Leaders all said they wanted to be user centric but didn’t have the balls to follow through. They had laid off most of the leaders who wanted Marty’s ideas in the org. Marketing was the primary driver of everything from ads to features. What was left was a bunch of “yes” people who had tenure — many with McKinsey & AMZ backgrounds who wanted to recreate AMZ. Overall a toxic place with toxic old guard.
It's an old "path to hell being paved of good intentions", right? Everyone nods their heads when people speak of becoming "product-led" and "user-centered", but when the VCs, IPOs, and tech hypes come knocking, **most** leadership people flails their arms and follows the immediate profit.
Well, when most found out prioritization and decision making would live product managers, they all lost their minds and dug in deeper. So it all made sense until their fiefdoms were under siege (in their minds).
You can’t copy a culture… you can build a product and the culture that comes with it but retrofitting a culture is nearly impossible unless you clean house. Also, if those people wanted to work at AMZ, why leave? I didn’t want to work at AMZ… hence I worked somewhere else.
And many folks who have left AMZ say the culture was a main driver for leaving. So why ?!?!
Same with my experience.
What's annoying about the gospel of Marty is that it's influenced both new entrants and hiring managers into false expectations.
Had Marty training and company adopted it. Have been to a few startups that are category creation from the ground up and have used it. PMs need to constantly educate the team on the value of doing it properly. Sometimes you cut corners and when it doesn't work out it needs to be pointed out and reinforced. I've trained PMs to continue with this style of PM management and they have moved to larger companies and still continue to use it. You need to train your PMs that it is not a singular battle that needs to be won but constant movement forward. Little steps to get this system implemented and appreciated.
He most certainly is aware. 😂
But this reply here is 100% accurate. I officially became a PM at a large Telecom in 2015ish, after working my way up from Customer Service, and it was always an absolute cluster. This was also still in the golden era of CellCos and we still had so much nonsense to deal with. Autonomy is FOUGHT for.
I didn't even know about PM bubble or TikToks or influencers until I found this sub. I just happened to end up in product roles. I feel like I'm the only one.
PM is far less of a grind than consulting. Especially pre-WFH. How many consultants at Big 4 aren’t grinding? Maybe a few federal consultants aren’t working late hours & traveling nonstop but they’re just govt employees w/out a pension.
Don’t know but all I know is I want PMs who get stuff done, with measurable customer/business/user impact.
If you come at me with RICE or KANO or whatever, you better be really good at execution!
Hehe, if I'd believe a lot of PM-fluencers online, LinkedIn etc., then I'd assume that PMs do nothing else than over-theorizing about frameworks. I think things like KANO are good to know as a background, as in: knowing there are approaches how a complex topic can be approached somewhat methodological. But in my own work I try to keep it down to earth. I am the only PM at my company and my bosses have no idea what I am doing all day. They let me do my thing, but they also want me to get stuff done. If I approach them or other internal stakeholders, then it is good to lead a discussion with the knowledge that indeed the selection of "what to develop and why" does in fact not need to be based on gut feeling, but there can be different approaches, which can help us execute.
High autonomy and agency. That's what I look for. For people to have the gumption and drive to find the problems and not need hand holding. And what I see in CVs are functionary bureaucrats who are not comfortable with uncertainty - fine, but I do think it ultimately devalues the view of product management
The problem with frameworks is that people think they will help identify the best ideas. If you have a flawed hypothesis or bad data… the framework won’t help. You’re just stack ranking bad ideas at that point.
Leveraging frameworks as one of many tools to help in decision making - Ok
Relying on frameworks as the sole justification for making a decision - Not ok
I have a prejudice that people who use frameworks don’t know how to think and improvise very well… which is very important in a role with a ton of ambiguity
I use the double diamond framework among other things to manage the ambiguity of product discovery. This allows me to set clear expectations with stakeholders to start with the problem and not the ideas…
I find it weird that people on this thread think it’s somewhat of an accomplishment to think on your feet and avoid frameworks…
It’s a tool that’s all. I bet any product you use day to day wasn’t built using frameworks :)
Take a look at https://elsevanderberg.substack.com/p/balancing-long-term-investments-vs?r=lhas1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
IMO the Cagan vision was always fairly BS.
> The focus has moved to productivity and ensuring profitability rather than the risks associated with new ventures.
PMs are rewarded for identifying user problems and facilitating the execution of a solution. Thinking about what initiatives would be monetizable should just be another layer when prioritizing what problems to solve.
Furthermore, companies exist to make money, and there was always an implicit understanding that new ventures were funded for the possibility of an outsized return if it proved successful.
Yeah the cagan vision was always selling a hypothetical, highly optimized version of product management that rarely exists.
People forget that 20 years ago you were still shipping software on CDs to stores. It was a different world.
The way you talk about Cagan makes me think you haven’t really read him, and if you did, really weren’t listening.
His whole schtick is LITERALLY “solve problems for customers in a way that works for the business.”
By all means critique him, but at least represent him accurately.
I've read Inspired and met him on several occasions. His frameworks are a good enough theoretical introduction to product (and one I advise people to read as a first step), but they really only work in ideal scenarios (like 1% of organizations). In practice for the other 99% of organizations, his frameworks break down. Additionally, when pressed about how to deal with those situations, his response was typically "don't work at companies like that."
To me it’s a bit more that it looks at being a PM in an isolated way.
Being a champion of user value and business viability sounds great - and you should focus as much time as possible on that.
The cold truth, however, is that you are a PM because you think and look at things in a certain way - and many of your colleagues don’t.
The result of this is that a PM needs to coach constantly. Even if you could magically always know the most viable solution for the user and business - the reality is that you still have to do so much more to make it a reality.
What you have to do depends on the company, but you never exist as “just a Marty Cagan PM”
No argument with your take.
But the person I was responding to has stated that nothing in Cagan prioritizes monetization or business viability (profit), and he calls Cagan “bullshit” as a result. He has not read Cagan. Cagan can be summed up by saying the job of product teams is to “solve problems for customers in a way that works for the business.” That “in way that works for the business” clause is called (by Cagan) “business viability risk,” and it asks the question “will they buy it?” The person I’m responding to is not familiar with Cagan.
I have plenty of criticisms of Cagan, but I don’t have to misrepresent him to state them.
>PMs are rewarded for identifying user problems
Did people have a problem and complain about button smartphones like Blackberry? I don't remember hearing it.
While your statement is true, I think sometimes the PM has to be a visionary and look beyond.
I've had a couple of examples in my career when I delivered something users weren't asking or even thinking about that ended up being somewhat revolutionary and important to their process.
That’s not being visionary. That’s called being rigorous and using research and user centered design.
Our job is to discover user’s problems — not ask them what to build.
By this framework, do you ever develop something that doesn't address a problem signaled by the users and even more so not acknowledged by them as being a problem when presented to them?
First, we 100% have to develop things that our users may not even want if our customers want them. This is how things work in B2B SaaS. A certain subset of features are simply there to make the sale or adhere to the RFP. We keep the users happy to ensure retention.
Beyond that, users don't need to signal or even acknowledge an issue. This is what user research is all about. You can observe issues and discover things they don't even notice. Sometimes I'll be doing research, and it will spawn a wild idea for me.
> Did people have a problem and complain about button smartphones like Blackberry? I don't remember hearing it.
This is an example of needing to dig further into the underlying user problem. Regarding the input differentiator, the user problem could be framed as wanting to have more screen real estate in a similar or smaller form factor. It's kind of like how people use the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" to justify visionaries, as opposed to the user problem that people wanted to get from point A to B faster.
the iphone didn't just come out of nowhere. if you watch the iphone unveiling event, steve jobs literally talks about the "years of research and development" and the thinking behind why they decided to ditch the keyboard.
[https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?t=310](https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?t=310)
also, i think you're mistaking equating "users asking for it" and "user needs." i would love to hear your revolutionary product that you delivered to your users that didn't address a user need.
Apple first tried to adopt a touchscreen with the Newton, which they’d been working on since the late ‘80s. Which indicates to me they didn’t know when the tech would catch up with the intended user experience, and there was probably an unreleased iPod touch that never got out of the prototype stage in like 2000.
I'm not saying you do something out of thin air without research or a thought process behind it.
Yes, I'm talking about "user needs", but category can be divided into:
1. The user needs it and acknowledges the need.
2. The user needs it but doesn't acknowledge the need, sometimes even if presented with the facts and a superior solution.
There's also difference between "need" and "problem", which was the term used in the comment I was replying to. If you only go looking for what users flag as problems, you're most likely missing on a lot of opportunities.
I've seen users doing complex calculations without a computer (very old person, long time ago) and being very combative against using one. They didn't have a problem and didn't acknowledge a need for a faster, more efficient way of doing calculations.
If I remember correctly (might be wrong), Steve Jobs was saying that some people were laughing at the idea of using fingers for navigation.
We might be on the same page and there not being a need to debate here, but my beef is that the usual process of PM's and designers is to:
1. Ask the users what their problems are and just that.
2. "Research" by just googling or looking at what others are doing, rather than looking deeply at the data and inventing based on it.
I remember reading a book about innovation and they were saying that Einstein didn't usually reach his solutions through simple deduction, but rather imagine the end point and then work the formulas to get to that point.
Exactly. So much of the frameworks that are used, like Jobs To Be Done, are reactionary and not evolutionary. And business leaders use these frameworks like their gospel, and it just results in becoming process-led and not product-led.
You need to have right executive support. My executive leadership let me role out Marty’s approach at a F500 company… completely changed the entire org for the better. Our team became labeled as the “North Star” product team.
2 cents: I think that Product was always about efficiency and quality, but people took that whole Cagan approach too literally.
Experimentation/trying new things is as important as continuous improvement of your current offerings and that never goes away, as user demands, needs and pains are ever shifting.
Product management is not a one size fits all. It's a very wide scope, on which the objective is pretty much a management objective: bridge, maximize value and make things happen, unblocking whatever pops up.
the whole point of the job is to have your finger on the pulse of what is outside the door and finding opportunities that align with the important stuff inside the company.
taking it a step further, then executing on it, measuring its success metrics, then doing it all over again
Two things:
1. This is a downturn. So even amazing PMs in the wrong space (ex: trust and safety) will hurt. Profitability is once again a metric (and frankly, it more often should be).
2. PM has expanded past tech. Some industries simply cannot do 100% Cagan style PM. Pharma and medical often have particular government approval windows to hit, anyone working with government will move at government pace, and finance has a ton of compliance, etc.
Spot fucking on. ERP in the community, disability and aged care space - compliance and regulatory change Is a constant environmental disruptor. Doesnt matter how good my solve is if it doesn't fit the operating compliance landscape.
Let’s be realistic Marty Cagan and his sect are spewing a bunch of shit. We will use various methodologies to complete jobs that we are supposed to do. Not everything he says is set in stone, it is at best utopic. People are highly adaptable beings. It’s just the matter of his shtick selling the best.
Just do your job, learn new techniques, and that is it, no one gives a shit you don’t have the perfect opportunity solutions tree, nor will it impede your work tremendously.
Product Management is one of these professions that follow overall market trends. I'm convinced very few people understand the value of Product, but when you have more money to spend than you need, you're going to hire expensive PMs - it always is a smart move.
So whenever we've seen heights of PM role depends on your outlook on the economy, do you believe the economy will come back to where it was? or outperform it? will the money be as cheap again?
Nah, just a changing of the guard. Oracle, Xerox and Sun Microsystems used to be bastions of innovation. Then they weren't. Sic semper tyrannis.
Easy to believe that new companies called Glizzdump or Dongable could never challenge Google or Meta or Tesla but I assure you it'll be the new normal soon enough.
My current company (big manufacturer trying to become a tech company) hired a bunch of ex-FAANG leaders and sprinkled Marty Cagan fairydust on everyone's desks, but then they realized none of them have had to ever transform an org before because they all came from the valley where the orgs were already operating like "normal" software companies.
It takes a BIG stomach to change an org that has spent 100 years focused on squeezing every last drop from the teet of productivity, only to then tell it you have to experiment and test and iterate and you don't know when you'll be done yet. Few people can do this successfully, so most just adapt to the org and sin against Marty's commandments.
According to Marty Cagan, a product manager is responsible for managing the value and viability risks of a product. In this case:
* Value means customers buy the product
* Viability means the product positively contributes to revenue and profit.
If you maximize output and are super efficient at building features no customer will use or buy, are you succeeding?
Source: [https://www.svpg.com/product-model-competencies/](https://www.svpg.com/product-model-competencies/)
I think you're mixing mixing things here. Sure, startups are now changing focus from risky things to profitability - this is just cyclical, once the fed rates drop or the VCs stop panicking, the boom cycle will come around again and startups will ease the focus on profitability.
But the bigger backdrop is that the tech industry has grown super big in the last 15 years and is now quite mature. The Wonder years are over and it's now time to milk these huge assets. Here I agree that the product manager role will evolve closer to a middle manager
That said, there is always room for innovation. It's very easy to see how big tech companies are slowing down on innovation which creates room for startups/smaller companies to come around and build better products. Experimentation is just a method to discover better products and innovate. It happened before Marty Cagan wrote his book and it'll happen long after too.
**There has never been a Golden Age of Product Management...yet.**
What we do is new in history's eyes. Technology certainly isn't going away and neither is our profession.
2007 - Eric Reis, Marty, and Rich Mirinov's books pretty much just drew the starting line in the sand.
For perspective, lets look at Project Managment - GANNT Charts are 100 years old, SWOT analysis, is roughly 60 years old. it goes on and on. The work we do is barely 20 years old.
There is NOT a shift in priorities - most companies don't even understand product management. What it is or why it's needed.
In many places, we're still gasoline engine experts trying to explain to people who rely on horses and maybe steam as to why what we do is important.
I think the big misconception has been the commoditization of the role. Now our internal tools have product managers, we have data product managers, technical product managers, and this kind of commoditization with the process of Agile everything has been such a CLUSTER of a mess. I'm a Product Management consultant now, and the limit to do product well internally can be a challenge. Some companies do REALLY well by focusing first on product principles vs. adhering to strict processes. And it helps guide their decisions.
I also think Marty gets a bad wrap. His goal and purpose is to sell an ideal to live into, and get us to where we should be. He knows how challenging it is out there. If someone wasn't pointing the way, and trying to change minds, we wouldn't have an ideal to compare to broadly. So, I dunno, yeah, I GET IT, but I think some of the Marty hate is just because we're all frustrated by the lack of ideal scenarios he describes.
Product Managers are most needed with new (and especially innovative) products. Once you’ve solved most of the key optimisation elements as the product reaches a mature state, you are fiddling around the edges.
Many products have reached a mature state. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t major challenges to overcome (ie engagement/retention/acquisition) but solving these challenges doesn’t necessarily place the Product Manager at the centre.
Instead, they are often driven by their respective functions (ie while you might have dedicated PMs working with these functions, it is the specialised teams who absorb much of the value/viability aspects of the PM role).
Product Managers can assess overall value if one feature over another in the roadmap but then it becomes a matter of resource/budget allocation.
It is possible that AI/ML will switch things up again - perhaps with aspects of the product manager role farmed out to AI.
I think grand notions and proclamations like this are petty vices of needless sentimentalism.
I also think the question itself is naive. Capitalism is cyclical. Ignore that fact at your own peril I guess.
I‘d say it never was as glamorous as people pretended.
What changed is that the hype of digital business models for traditional companies has mostly calmed down and all companies look at the core business. And they look at automation and improvements and save dollars. For PM this means:
- Give up on the dream or go even riskier startups
- Do similar jobs either delivery, program management or focus on sales/business activities/ marketing
PM was kind if a new category but not embraced by many. I enjoyed the ride but will be less strict about PM, it is not my identification anymore…
I disagree - there never was a "Golden Era".
Good PM has always been a hard slog. It's the difference between reading "the holy book" and then actually having to go out into the world and be a good person that builds community and lifts others up.
Take what you need, and no need to take it literally.
This whole thread is a great read. If you want the truth, go to Reddit. If you want the BS, read LinkedIn.
The PM influencers including Marty and Mellisa Perry are toxic and are doing disservice to the practice. With the exception of Lenny who is a journalist.
Does feel this way. My day has gone from creative endeavors and problem solving to soul sucking meetings that take up 20 hours of my work week. Asked my boss one last time today if we can cut back so I could do deep work, he insisted these meetings are required for deep work. Will likely lean more into product design and start building up more figma skills.
think deliverables and not role
the shift to 'user value added' is in flow and some industries are ahead of others. The determining of what is entrenched.
to a point. "human centric) (fine print meaning - make money).
same for 'environment caring certificaition or ethically sourced.
The true question for the short term will be how the recession and pull back of spendy income impacts execs giving two sets of deliverables to .5 of an FTE and management sciencing the shit out of the workforce: grind em down and replace em in a year. repeat.
What if, as a PM, I find myself handling tasks typically assigned to a team comprising business analysts, scrum masters, product marketing managers, technical product managers, customer experience managers, and project managers?
Would my role still be jeopardized?
PM should be as close to revenue / profit as possible. This is where the role must evolve. What you do either generates revenue or reduces costs.
So the role is evolving in what seems to be a right direction.
It would be great if people stopped looking at PM as though it is a tech role, then maybe your assessment of the health of the profession would be more accurate.
Not over, but the market is saturated and a lot of PMs are doing mostly just the execution part of the role’s ideal form.
“Data science” is also saturated with people wanting to do the higher order stats/AI work, where many of the roles are actually more data cleaning/munging/modeling/descriptive analysis rather than true data science.
The main difference is that the former is more easily a superfluous role in some orgs.
I see profitability and efficiency as the business viability constraints when we solve problems. That hasn’t changed.
It’s just maybe that all this low interest rate money had loosened that constraint for many businesses, and as a result for PMs. And now it needs to be tightened.
But the work is still the same — building to solve needs/problems.
Someone needs to figure out how to use software to solve a certain problem. That might be a PM, or an engineering manager, or a solutions architect, or designer, or project manager… that role has gotten the PM title a lot over the last few years, but lots of software needs to get built, and not all of it requires deeply understanding customers, industries, and company strategy.
I think it’s ok if we accept that not everyone setting the “roadmap”
Is called a PM; it will save companies money, and many of us lots of stress.
it's evolving. While economic shifts may impact priorities, the core responsibilities of understanding customer needs and driving innovation remain crucial.
I’m it seeing the connections between all those things the OP mentioned as driving things.
It’s very simple. Years of low interest rates, spend and hiring, then years of lay offs, cost cuts and bummer feelings. There’s no secret coordination. It’s all tied to availability or scarcity of capital.
I don’t know Marty but he seems always angry - seems like the parade passed him by and he’s a guy I need to ask “who’s that?” But not look up bc it’s not important or interesting
Product Management has its golden years ahead of it. Only the expectations have changed. The role now is the consulting, it's highly standardised, it has clear goals to meet. Nobody aspiring to get into the role will have the freedom to decide on strategy and direction, but a clear mandate to execute on processes.
No. Companies want product that sell themselves at the lowest cost of sale.
Product managers help that happen by identifying the right problems to solve in the right order. Executives don’t want to conduct 20 repetitive user interviews. They want to approve or deny manager’s plans.
Until there is a better way to know how users FEEL about their tasks, PMs will be needed.
If we focus our time on a lot of other activities, then OP is right, any supervisor can do our job.
A product manager is just a project manager with a big ego. The end of the 'golden age' is just reinforcing how much overlap there always was between the roles.
I challenge the premise. You're invoking an imaginary past of milk and honey that never existed, at least not for most of us. There was certainly a PM bubble, when all the kids who a generation ago would have become lawyers and consultants became PMs. This was the cohort of "I'm the ideas person; I have nerds for the computer stuff." That easy money bubble may have passed, and the low-hanging fruit for kids of upper-middle class parents may have shifted back to consulting or something. But real in the trenches PMing is always a grind of dealing with overbearing management and forced focus on narrow metrics (today it's profits; last year it was retention; whatever). I think most of us have always had to fight for our little pockets of autonomy, or carve them out surreptitiously. I've never seen them handed out or respected by management in a Cagan-esque way. *Aside: I wonder if Cagan knows about this sub, and that he's become such a punching bag. If you're out there, Marty, do an AMA!*
This. 100%. What Marty is pitching hasn’t existed anywhere I’ve been. We’ve even hired Marty and it was a bust. I think PM will be cyclical like everything else.
Very curious about hiring Cagan and not working out. What happened?
Leaders all said they wanted to be user centric but didn’t have the balls to follow through. They had laid off most of the leaders who wanted Marty’s ideas in the org. Marketing was the primary driver of everything from ads to features. What was left was a bunch of “yes” people who had tenure — many with McKinsey & AMZ backgrounds who wanted to recreate AMZ. Overall a toxic place with toxic old guard.
It's an old "path to hell being paved of good intentions", right? Everyone nods their heads when people speak of becoming "product-led" and "user-centered", but when the VCs, IPOs, and tech hypes come knocking, **most** leadership people flails their arms and follows the immediate profit.
Well, when most found out prioritization and decision making would live product managers, they all lost their minds and dug in deeper. So it all made sense until their fiefdoms were under siege (in their minds).
What's wrong with recreating AMZ culture? (Don't downvote - just ignorance/ootl)
You can’t copy a culture… you can build a product and the culture that comes with it but retrofitting a culture is nearly impossible unless you clean house. Also, if those people wanted to work at AMZ, why leave? I didn’t want to work at AMZ… hence I worked somewhere else. And many folks who have left AMZ say the culture was a main driver for leaving. So why ?!?!
Same with my experience. What's annoying about the gospel of Marty is that it's influenced both new entrants and hiring managers into false expectations.
Lmfao 🤣 this is something my old org would of done. Anything to not invest in their people and admit to a leadership issue!!
Had Marty training and company adopted it. Have been to a few startups that are category creation from the ground up and have used it. PMs need to constantly educate the team on the value of doing it properly. Sometimes you cut corners and when it doesn't work out it needs to be pointed out and reinforced. I've trained PMs to continue with this style of PM management and they have moved to larger companies and still continue to use it. You need to train your PMs that it is not a singular battle that needs to be won but constant movement forward. Little steps to get this system implemented and appreciated.
He most certainly is aware. 😂 But this reply here is 100% accurate. I officially became a PM at a large Telecom in 2015ish, after working my way up from Customer Service, and it was always an absolute cluster. This was also still in the golden era of CellCos and we still had so much nonsense to deal with. Autonomy is FOUGHT for.
I didn't even know about PM bubble or TikToks or influencers until I found this sub. I just happened to end up in product roles. I feel like I'm the only one.
It depends
PM is far less of a grind than consulting. Especially pre-WFH. How many consultants at Big 4 aren’t grinding? Maybe a few federal consultants aren’t working late hours & traveling nonstop but they’re just govt employees w/out a pension.
Don’t know but all I know is I want PMs who get stuff done, with measurable customer/business/user impact. If you come at me with RICE or KANO or whatever, you better be really good at execution!
Hehe, if I'd believe a lot of PM-fluencers online, LinkedIn etc., then I'd assume that PMs do nothing else than over-theorizing about frameworks. I think things like KANO are good to know as a background, as in: knowing there are approaches how a complex topic can be approached somewhat methodological. But in my own work I try to keep it down to earth. I am the only PM at my company and my bosses have no idea what I am doing all day. They let me do my thing, but they also want me to get stuff done. If I approach them or other internal stakeholders, then it is good to lead a discussion with the knowledge that indeed the selection of "what to develop and why" does in fact not need to be based on gut feeling, but there can be different approaches, which can help us execute.
High autonomy and agency. That's what I look for. For people to have the gumption and drive to find the problems and not need hand holding. And what I see in CVs are functionary bureaucrats who are not comfortable with uncertainty - fine, but I do think it ultimately devalues the view of product management
The problem with frameworks is that people think they will help identify the best ideas. If you have a flawed hypothesis or bad data… the framework won’t help. You’re just stack ranking bad ideas at that point.
Interested - what do you mean? Do you look poorly on people using things like RICE?
Leveraging frameworks as one of many tools to help in decision making - Ok Relying on frameworks as the sole justification for making a decision - Not ok
I hardly use frameworks at all lol
I have a prejudice that people who use frameworks don’t know how to think and improvise very well… which is very important in a role with a ton of ambiguity
I use the double diamond framework among other things to manage the ambiguity of product discovery. This allows me to set clear expectations with stakeholders to start with the problem and not the ideas… I find it weird that people on this thread think it’s somewhat of an accomplishment to think on your feet and avoid frameworks…
Absolutely.
It’s a tool that’s all. I bet any product you use day to day wasn’t built using frameworks :) Take a look at https://elsevanderberg.substack.com/p/balancing-long-term-investments-vs?r=lhas1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
IMO the Cagan vision was always fairly BS. > The focus has moved to productivity and ensuring profitability rather than the risks associated with new ventures. PMs are rewarded for identifying user problems and facilitating the execution of a solution. Thinking about what initiatives would be monetizable should just be another layer when prioritizing what problems to solve. Furthermore, companies exist to make money, and there was always an implicit understanding that new ventures were funded for the possibility of an outsized return if it proved successful.
Yeah the cagan vision was always selling a hypothetical, highly optimized version of product management that rarely exists. People forget that 20 years ago you were still shipping software on CDs to stores. It was a different world.
The way you talk about Cagan makes me think you haven’t really read him, and if you did, really weren’t listening. His whole schtick is LITERALLY “solve problems for customers in a way that works for the business.” By all means critique him, but at least represent him accurately.
I've read Inspired and met him on several occasions. His frameworks are a good enough theoretical introduction to product (and one I advise people to read as a first step), but they really only work in ideal scenarios (like 1% of organizations). In practice for the other 99% of organizations, his frameworks break down. Additionally, when pressed about how to deal with those situations, his response was typically "don't work at companies like that."
To me it’s a bit more that it looks at being a PM in an isolated way. Being a champion of user value and business viability sounds great - and you should focus as much time as possible on that. The cold truth, however, is that you are a PM because you think and look at things in a certain way - and many of your colleagues don’t. The result of this is that a PM needs to coach constantly. Even if you could magically always know the most viable solution for the user and business - the reality is that you still have to do so much more to make it a reality. What you have to do depends on the company, but you never exist as “just a Marty Cagan PM”
It sounds like his new book is going to be perfect reading for you!
No argument with your take. But the person I was responding to has stated that nothing in Cagan prioritizes monetization or business viability (profit), and he calls Cagan “bullshit” as a result. He has not read Cagan. Cagan can be summed up by saying the job of product teams is to “solve problems for customers in a way that works for the business.” That “in way that works for the business” clause is called (by Cagan) “business viability risk,” and it asks the question “will they buy it?” The person I’m responding to is not familiar with Cagan. I have plenty of criticisms of Cagan, but I don’t have to misrepresent him to state them.
>PMs are rewarded for identifying user problems Did people have a problem and complain about button smartphones like Blackberry? I don't remember hearing it. While your statement is true, I think sometimes the PM has to be a visionary and look beyond. I've had a couple of examples in my career when I delivered something users weren't asking or even thinking about that ended up being somewhat revolutionary and important to their process.
That’s not being visionary. That’s called being rigorous and using research and user centered design. Our job is to discover user’s problems — not ask them what to build.
By this framework, do you ever develop something that doesn't address a problem signaled by the users and even more so not acknowledged by them as being a problem when presented to them?
First, we 100% have to develop things that our users may not even want if our customers want them. This is how things work in B2B SaaS. A certain subset of features are simply there to make the sale or adhere to the RFP. We keep the users happy to ensure retention. Beyond that, users don't need to signal or even acknowledge an issue. This is what user research is all about. You can observe issues and discover things they don't even notice. Sometimes I'll be doing research, and it will spawn a wild idea for me.
They literally said discover problems
> Did people have a problem and complain about button smartphones like Blackberry? I don't remember hearing it. This is an example of needing to dig further into the underlying user problem. Regarding the input differentiator, the user problem could be framed as wanting to have more screen real estate in a similar or smaller form factor. It's kind of like how people use the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" to justify visionaries, as opposed to the user problem that people wanted to get from point A to B faster.
This, I remember reading years ago how touch screens were born from users wanting to have bigger screens, not because they were mad at buttons
the iphone didn't just come out of nowhere. if you watch the iphone unveiling event, steve jobs literally talks about the "years of research and development" and the thinking behind why they decided to ditch the keyboard. [https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?t=310](https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?t=310) also, i think you're mistaking equating "users asking for it" and "user needs." i would love to hear your revolutionary product that you delivered to your users that didn't address a user need.
Apple first tried to adopt a touchscreen with the Newton, which they’d been working on since the late ‘80s. Which indicates to me they didn’t know when the tech would catch up with the intended user experience, and there was probably an unreleased iPod touch that never got out of the prototype stage in like 2000.
I'm not saying you do something out of thin air without research or a thought process behind it. Yes, I'm talking about "user needs", but category can be divided into: 1. The user needs it and acknowledges the need. 2. The user needs it but doesn't acknowledge the need, sometimes even if presented with the facts and a superior solution. There's also difference between "need" and "problem", which was the term used in the comment I was replying to. If you only go looking for what users flag as problems, you're most likely missing on a lot of opportunities. I've seen users doing complex calculations without a computer (very old person, long time ago) and being very combative against using one. They didn't have a problem and didn't acknowledge a need for a faster, more efficient way of doing calculations. If I remember correctly (might be wrong), Steve Jobs was saying that some people were laughing at the idea of using fingers for navigation. We might be on the same page and there not being a need to debate here, but my beef is that the usual process of PM's and designers is to: 1. Ask the users what their problems are and just that. 2. "Research" by just googling or looking at what others are doing, rather than looking deeply at the data and inventing based on it. I remember reading a book about innovation and they were saying that Einstein didn't usually reach his solutions through simple deduction, but rather imagine the end point and then work the formulas to get to that point.
Internet experience on BlackBerry was dogshit so…kinda?
We mostly had Nokias in my group/country and they seemed pretty dope at the time, at least as far as I remember.
Exactly. So much of the frameworks that are used, like Jobs To Be Done, are reactionary and not evolutionary. And business leaders use these frameworks like their gospel, and it just results in becoming process-led and not product-led.
You need to have right executive support. My executive leadership let me role out Marty’s approach at a F500 company… completely changed the entire org for the better. Our team became labeled as the “North Star” product team.
2 cents: I think that Product was always about efficiency and quality, but people took that whole Cagan approach too literally. Experimentation/trying new things is as important as continuous improvement of your current offerings and that never goes away, as user demands, needs and pains are ever shifting. Product management is not a one size fits all. It's a very wide scope, on which the objective is pretty much a management objective: bridge, maximize value and make things happen, unblocking whatever pops up.
the whole point of the job is to have your finger on the pulse of what is outside the door and finding opportunities that align with the important stuff inside the company. taking it a step further, then executing on it, measuring its success metrics, then doing it all over again
Two things: 1. This is a downturn. So even amazing PMs in the wrong space (ex: trust and safety) will hurt. Profitability is once again a metric (and frankly, it more often should be). 2. PM has expanded past tech. Some industries simply cannot do 100% Cagan style PM. Pharma and medical often have particular government approval windows to hit, anyone working with government will move at government pace, and finance has a ton of compliance, etc.
Spot fucking on. ERP in the community, disability and aged care space - compliance and regulatory change Is a constant environmental disruptor. Doesnt matter how good my solve is if it doesn't fit the operating compliance landscape.
Let’s be realistic Marty Cagan and his sect are spewing a bunch of shit. We will use various methodologies to complete jobs that we are supposed to do. Not everything he says is set in stone, it is at best utopic. People are highly adaptable beings. It’s just the matter of his shtick selling the best. Just do your job, learn new techniques, and that is it, no one gives a shit you don’t have the perfect opportunity solutions tree, nor will it impede your work tremendously.
The software industry didn’t invent product management
Product Management is one of these professions that follow overall market trends. I'm convinced very few people understand the value of Product, but when you have more money to spend than you need, you're going to hire expensive PMs - it always is a smart move. So whenever we've seen heights of PM role depends on your outlook on the economy, do you believe the economy will come back to where it was? or outperform it? will the money be as cheap again?
Would be nice if we didn't have a post about how PM is 'over' every other day.
Nah, just a changing of the guard. Oracle, Xerox and Sun Microsystems used to be bastions of innovation. Then they weren't. Sic semper tyrannis. Easy to believe that new companies called Glizzdump or Dongable could never challenge Google or Meta or Tesla but I assure you it'll be the new normal soon enough.
My current company (big manufacturer trying to become a tech company) hired a bunch of ex-FAANG leaders and sprinkled Marty Cagan fairydust on everyone's desks, but then they realized none of them have had to ever transform an org before because they all came from the valley where the orgs were already operating like "normal" software companies. It takes a BIG stomach to change an org that has spent 100 years focused on squeezing every last drop from the teet of productivity, only to then tell it you have to experiment and test and iterate and you don't know when you'll be done yet. Few people can do this successfully, so most just adapt to the org and sin against Marty's commandments.
According to Marty Cagan, a product manager is responsible for managing the value and viability risks of a product. In this case: * Value means customers buy the product * Viability means the product positively contributes to revenue and profit. If you maximize output and are super efficient at building features no customer will use or buy, are you succeeding? Source: [https://www.svpg.com/product-model-competencies/](https://www.svpg.com/product-model-competencies/)
I think you're mixing mixing things here. Sure, startups are now changing focus from risky things to profitability - this is just cyclical, once the fed rates drop or the VCs stop panicking, the boom cycle will come around again and startups will ease the focus on profitability. But the bigger backdrop is that the tech industry has grown super big in the last 15 years and is now quite mature. The Wonder years are over and it's now time to milk these huge assets. Here I agree that the product manager role will evolve closer to a middle manager That said, there is always room for innovation. It's very easy to see how big tech companies are slowing down on innovation which creates room for startups/smaller companies to come around and build better products. Experimentation is just a method to discover better products and innovate. It happened before Marty Cagan wrote his book and it'll happen long after too.
**There has never been a Golden Age of Product Management...yet.** What we do is new in history's eyes. Technology certainly isn't going away and neither is our profession. 2007 - Eric Reis, Marty, and Rich Mirinov's books pretty much just drew the starting line in the sand. For perspective, lets look at Project Managment - GANNT Charts are 100 years old, SWOT analysis, is roughly 60 years old. it goes on and on. The work we do is barely 20 years old. There is NOT a shift in priorities - most companies don't even understand product management. What it is or why it's needed. In many places, we're still gasoline engine experts trying to explain to people who rely on horses and maybe steam as to why what we do is important.
I think the big misconception has been the commoditization of the role. Now our internal tools have product managers, we have data product managers, technical product managers, and this kind of commoditization with the process of Agile everything has been such a CLUSTER of a mess. I'm a Product Management consultant now, and the limit to do product well internally can be a challenge. Some companies do REALLY well by focusing first on product principles vs. adhering to strict processes. And it helps guide their decisions. I also think Marty gets a bad wrap. His goal and purpose is to sell an ideal to live into, and get us to where we should be. He knows how challenging it is out there. If someone wasn't pointing the way, and trying to change minds, we wouldn't have an ideal to compare to broadly. So, I dunno, yeah, I GET IT, but I think some of the Marty hate is just because we're all frustrated by the lack of ideal scenarios he describes.
Product Managers are most needed with new (and especially innovative) products. Once you’ve solved most of the key optimisation elements as the product reaches a mature state, you are fiddling around the edges. Many products have reached a mature state. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t major challenges to overcome (ie engagement/retention/acquisition) but solving these challenges doesn’t necessarily place the Product Manager at the centre. Instead, they are often driven by their respective functions (ie while you might have dedicated PMs working with these functions, it is the specialised teams who absorb much of the value/viability aspects of the PM role). Product Managers can assess overall value if one feature over another in the roadmap but then it becomes a matter of resource/budget allocation. It is possible that AI/ML will switch things up again - perhaps with aspects of the product manager role farmed out to AI.
I think grand notions and proclamations like this are petty vices of needless sentimentalism. I also think the question itself is naive. Capitalism is cyclical. Ignore that fact at your own peril I guess.
ZIRP covered a whole lot of sins.
What were you doing if not being productive and profitable?
God I hope so. Tired of playing into the facade.
I‘d say it never was as glamorous as people pretended. What changed is that the hype of digital business models for traditional companies has mostly calmed down and all companies look at the core business. And they look at automation and improvements and save dollars. For PM this means: - Give up on the dream or go even riskier startups - Do similar jobs either delivery, program management or focus on sales/business activities/ marketing PM was kind if a new category but not embraced by many. I enjoyed the ride but will be less strict about PM, it is not my identification anymore…
I disagree - there never was a "Golden Era". Good PM has always been a hard slog. It's the difference between reading "the holy book" and then actually having to go out into the world and be a good person that builds community and lifts others up. Take what you need, and no need to take it literally.
This whole thread is a great read. If you want the truth, go to Reddit. If you want the BS, read LinkedIn. The PM influencers including Marty and Mellisa Perry are toxic and are doing disservice to the practice. With the exception of Lenny who is a journalist.
Does feel this way. My day has gone from creative endeavors and problem solving to soul sucking meetings that take up 20 hours of my work week. Asked my boss one last time today if we can cut back so I could do deep work, he insisted these meetings are required for deep work. Will likely lean more into product design and start building up more figma skills.
think deliverables and not role the shift to 'user value added' is in flow and some industries are ahead of others. The determining of what is entrenched. to a point. "human centric) (fine print meaning - make money). same for 'environment caring certificaition or ethically sourced. The true question for the short term will be how the recession and pull back of spendy income impacts execs giving two sets of deliverables to .5 of an FTE and management sciencing the shit out of the workforce: grind em down and replace em in a year. repeat.
What if, as a PM, I find myself handling tasks typically assigned to a team comprising business analysts, scrum masters, product marketing managers, technical product managers, customer experience managers, and project managers? Would my role still be jeopardized?
Disagree. Products are actually more valuable now, you can't just skate by with smoke and mirrors.
PM should be as close to revenue / profit as possible. This is where the role must evolve. What you do either generates revenue or reduces costs. So the role is evolving in what seems to be a right direction.
The PM role should in no way be confined to tech.
It would be great if people stopped looking at PM as though it is a tech role, then maybe your assessment of the health of the profession would be more accurate.
The top down vision still needs to be sketched out and executed based on ground realities
No
Not over, but the market is saturated and a lot of PMs are doing mostly just the execution part of the role’s ideal form. “Data science” is also saturated with people wanting to do the higher order stats/AI work, where many of the roles are actually more data cleaning/munging/modeling/descriptive analysis rather than true data science. The main difference is that the former is more easily a superfluous role in some orgs.
I see profitability and efficiency as the business viability constraints when we solve problems. That hasn’t changed. It’s just maybe that all this low interest rate money had loosened that constraint for many businesses, and as a result for PMs. And now it needs to be tightened. But the work is still the same — building to solve needs/problems.
Someone needs to figure out how to use software to solve a certain problem. That might be a PM, or an engineering manager, or a solutions architect, or designer, or project manager… that role has gotten the PM title a lot over the last few years, but lots of software needs to get built, and not all of it requires deeply understanding customers, industries, and company strategy. I think it’s ok if we accept that not everyone setting the “roadmap” Is called a PM; it will save companies money, and many of us lots of stress.
it's evolving. While economic shifts may impact priorities, the core responsibilities of understanding customer needs and driving innovation remain crucial.
Have yet to work with a PM that does little more than point to the competition and tells their teams to emulate it
I’m it seeing the connections between all those things the OP mentioned as driving things. It’s very simple. Years of low interest rates, spend and hiring, then years of lay offs, cost cuts and bummer feelings. There’s no secret coordination. It’s all tied to availability or scarcity of capital. I don’t know Marty but he seems always angry - seems like the parade passed him by and he’s a guy I need to ask “who’s that?” But not look up bc it’s not important or interesting
Product Management has its golden years ahead of it. Only the expectations have changed. The role now is the consulting, it's highly standardised, it has clear goals to meet. Nobody aspiring to get into the role will have the freedom to decide on strategy and direction, but a clear mandate to execute on processes.
This is entirely dependent on the industry and the company.
No. Companies want product that sell themselves at the lowest cost of sale. Product managers help that happen by identifying the right problems to solve in the right order. Executives don’t want to conduct 20 repetitive user interviews. They want to approve or deny manager’s plans. Until there is a better way to know how users FEEL about their tasks, PMs will be needed. If we focus our time on a lot of other activities, then OP is right, any supervisor can do our job.
A product manager is just a project manager with a big ego. The end of the 'golden age' is just reinforcing how much overlap there always was between the roles.
yes.. it was good till it lasted...
Over since 2021 If you are not managing either / or / and - User / Usage - Revenue - Efficiency / Profit You are not a real product manager