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

by Melissa Perri

One of the biggest misconceptions about the role of a product manager is that they own the entire product and therefore can tell everyone what to build. Act this way, and you will only alienate the rest of your team. Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building. They know the goal at hand and understand which direction the team should be building toward, depending on company strategy. They communicate this direction to the rest of the team. The product manager works with the rest of the team to develop the idea and then jumps in, as requirements become validated, to make sure that the product being created achieves the goals of the customer, user, and business. They then work to solidify the product vision, crafting it and communicating it, and then championing it. But, at the end of the day, it’s the team, collectively, that really owns the product — the what.

Product ownership is just a piece of product management. A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market. Without this background in product management, someone can effectively go through the motions of the product owner role in Scrum, but they can never be successful in making sure that they are building the right thing. In other words, product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product manager is a career.

A good company strategy should be made up of two parts: the operational framework, or how to keep the day-to-day activities of a company moving; and the strategic framework, or how the company realizes the vision through product and service development in the market. Many companies confuse these two frameworks and treat them as one and the same.

In most product organizations, there should be four major levels in strategy deployment (see Figure 12-1): Vision Strategic intent Product initiatives Options Figure 12-1. Strategy deployment levels The first two are at the company level, whereas the last two are specific to the products or services of the company. Strategy deployment and strategy creation, though, are two different things. A significant amount of work goes into defining what each of these should be, coordinating them across product lines and teams and then communicating them upward and downward for buy in.