Is the product manager role becoming extinct?
A friend (and fellow PM) recently shared this article by Nisha Ramchandani and Varun Choraria with me on the future of the Product Manager role.
It covers a lot of ground and in doing so touches on some of the long standing challenges in product management today, namely:
Large variability in the job description depending on the size and sector of the company, which in part leads to…
Continued confusion about the responsibilities of a Product Manager (creating frustrations on all sides)
The challenges of stakeholder management and communication (particularly in a remote first environment)
At the end one of the contributers to the article asserts that as companies are forced to become more customer centric in order to survive, all teams will automatically tightly align around that goal and be expected to be accountable for it.
Furthermore, as tooling and tech stacks continue to evolve everyone across the business will be capable of delving into areas the PM’s have traditionally been responsible for (e.g metrics).
I think these are strong points and it’s great to get the discussion going on them.
I don’t think these shifts signal the end of the product manager though for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I think it’s tremendously positive for other roles (e.g engineering or sales) in a software organisation to have ownership of the product and want to get into understanding and solving the customers pain. I’ve been lucky to work in organisations with Product Engineers who have overlapped hugely with the PM. Having engineering get close to the customer massively increases understanding, innovation and the speed at which real value is delivered.
I see this situation as a big positive.
The same goes for metrics. When an organisation is fully conversant in data driven decision making, that information should be available to the whole company for everyone to work with (sales, marketing etc).
So where does this leave the PM? What is the PM’s role when these ‘technical’ skills are now able to be carried out by various roles around the org?
Ultimately I think this is one of those “do you sell oil or do you sell energy” discussions.
The most critical thing a PM does is provide and communicate direction and clarity, and protect and nurture the product towards success in the face of a multitude of competing forces.
As Sales, Engineering, the CEO / Board pull the product in all sorts of different directions, the PM is the person who has to manage those tensions (and personalities) in order to steer the team and the product towards something valuable, feasible and useable.
It is hard. It can be lonely.
If as a PM you define your value to the organisation as how great your user stories are, or your ability to interpret data, then whilst these skills are valuable at the moment, you may well go extinct just as mechanical type setters did when desk top publishing came along.
If however what you bring to an organisation as a PM is the ability to identify customer value (through a range of evolving techniques), develop a strategy and align the entire team around it (including potentially those more senior than you), and deliver a commercially viable product that customers love, then you needn’t worry.
You’ll be in work for a long time to come.
