Practice of Product

Sean Horgan

“The job of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible” -- Marty Cagan

Unlike domains like engineering and medicine, the path for product managers isn’t a well-established road with clear directions. The goal of this document is to lay out some resources for product managers so they can learn more about the craft, share best practices from others, better serve the people that use our products, and most importantly, manage your career.

So what is Product?

This is a popular diagram from

Martin Eriksson⁠

that shows products as the intersection of technology, business, and user experience. I like to qualify a few things:

Many people love to see pictures that show them in the middle of things. I think a better version of this diagram would show customers in the middle with a PM pointing the way.

Tech isn’t limited to software technology. It encompasses experience with the materials and knowledge used to build any product. I think the best PMs have built something in their life and appreciate the inherent challenges of weaving together a range of capabilities into a coherent solution.

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Another take is

Dan Schmidt⁠

’s

Visual Vocabulary for Product Building⁠

, it covers the same 3 core elements but adds more details on the connections between them:

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Product Life Cycle

No product stays static -- it moves through different stages of its life cycle over time. In

Marketing Management⁠

, Kotler & Keller propose that four things are implied when stating that a product has a life cycle: (1) products have a limited life; (2) product sales pass through distinct stages; (3) profit rises and falls at different stages; and (4) products require different marketing, financial, manufacturing, purchasing, and HR strategies at each stage. While these stages are never a predictable (or smooth) process, Orckik, Tekic, and Anisic laid out five stages in

Customer Co-Creation throughout the Product Life Cycle⁠

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As a Product Manager it’s very important to understand the stage your product is in and the forces being applied on it. Products at different stages require different leadership, strategies, and processes. Simon Wardley described 3 different types of people you need as products move from their earliest stages (what he calls genesis) to their later stages (what he calls commodities):

Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners⁠

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Kent Beck provided a similar framing in this

3X post⁠

where he said that product development proceeds in three phases: explore, expand, and extract and Shreyas Doshi does a great job of mapping this to PM performance in

Better approaches to evaluating PM performance⁠

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