Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.

They need to understand the market and how the business works. They need to truly understand the vision and goal of the company. They also need deep empathy for the users for whom they are building products, to understand their needs.

To be effective team leaders, product managers need to recognize team members’ strengths and to work with them to achieve the common goal. They need to convince their team—​and the rest of the company—​that what they are working toward is the right thing to be building. These influencing skills are essential.

Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building.

Product managers connect the dots. They take input from customer research, expert information, market research, business direction, experiment results, and data analysis. Then they sift through and analyze that information, using it to create a product vision that will help to further the company and to solve the customers’ needs.

How do we determine value? How do we measure the success of our products in the market? How do we make sure we are building the right thing? How do we price and package our product? How do we bring our product to market? What makes sense to build versus buy? How can we integrate with third-party software to enter new markets?

product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product manager is a career.

If you take your Scrum team away, and Scrum as a process, you are still a product manager. Product management and Scrum can work well together, but product management is not dependent on Scrum. This role should exist with any framework or process, and companies need to understand that in order to set their people up for success.

Product managers ultimately play a few key roles, but one of the most important ones is being able to marry the business goals with the customer goals to achieve value.

Without a Scrum team or with a smaller team, you might be doing more strategy and validation work for a product that has not been defined yet.

With a Scrum team, you might be more focused on the execution of solutions.

As a manager of product managers, you might be leading strategy for a larger part of the product and coaching your te...

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) teaches this differently, and I think it’s one of the weakest points in the entire framework. In SAFe, product managers are the managers of product owners and are responsible for external-facing interactions and work. They speak to the customers, they define the requirements and scope of the products to be built, and they communicate these down to the product owners. The product ...

With a good strategy framework in place and ruthless prioritization around a few key goals, one person can effectively talk to customers, understand their problems, and help to define the solutions with the team. The amount of external versus internal work will shift, depending on the maturity and success of your product. But, you should never be doing all this work at once.

Each of the teams has ownership of their goal and is judged for success based on their outcomes. They are also allowed to work across all products to do whatever is needed to reach those goals.

redundancy throughout the company, so that important information about a single product is not stuck in the head of one person. If someone leaves, they don’t need to worry about all that ingrained knowledge going with them. If one team is busy with work, another team doesn’t need to wait for them to fix a bug because they own that piece of the product and no one else knows how to fix it.