Product Management dates back to 1931 when Neil H. McElroy from Protect & Gamble wrote an influential memo describing “Brand Men”. He outlined this modern role which was to manage each brand separately in all its aspects from advertising and promotions to monitoring sales. To achieve this, “Brand Men” were to conduct research to understand consumer preferences and behaviour. McElroy’s ideas shaped P&G as a brand-centric company but also influenced two entrepreneurs that he advised at Stanford, Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The founders of Hewlett-Packard implemented a similar organizational strategy focused on products with the importance of making Product Managers the customer’s voice within the company. In The HP Way, David Packard credits the “Brand Men ethos” for HP’s continued 50-year success which saw an annual growth of 20%+ from 1943 to 1993.

The consumer goods industry may have invented the concept of Product Management, but Silicon Valley took it beyond its marketing roots to apply its principles to software development. In tech companies, product development traditionally follows the long and complex waterfall process: every single feature of a product is detailed before being developed over many  months, only to become obsolete upon delivery. The Product Manager came in as a way to reconcile the business objectives, the technological requirements, and a user-friendly design through a customer-centric approach. This breaks the traditional silos (IT/marketing/business/design/sales/customer support) to fit the new paradigm in which products need to be developed faster and continuously improved to respond to customers’ needs. Data is used as a way to shorten the feedback loop and agile methodologies to quickly adapt.

Product Managers are the cornerstone of agile organizations

A Product Manager is a cross-functional leader at the crossroads of business, technology, and design. The PM aligns the product vision with the business objectives and coordinates its design and technical architecture. The role requires both soft skills (emotional intelligence, negotiation, prioritization) and hard skills (analytics, technical, business). The Product Manager however is NOT the “CEO of the product” as it is not his product or his team and he is not hierarchically superior to the rest of the team. At the core, a Product Manager is more than a role, it is a mindset using a holistic vision to solve problems.

To sum it up, a Product Manager is a:

• Strategist

The PM is a product visionary translating business strategy into a product vision and a roadmap. He is also a user advocate representing the user’s voice from within the company and always putting experience first. The PM is also an analytics lover as he keeps track of key metrics towards business objectives.

• Polyglot

The PM is at the crossroads of all teams and knows how to talk to all stakeholders involved in the product (designers, developers, marketers, etc) in their language. The PM is a negotiator managing internal expectations and top management decisions. The PM is proactive to quickly test and learn new user-centric features. The PM is a coordinator and a motivator making sure each person is involved and aware of their mission.

• Maker

The PM is tech-savvy and understands how a product is built and can explain technical choices that have to be made. The PM is a sketch artist, able to quickly draw a prototype to test a feature. Finally, the PM is agile as adjustments have to be made often and quickly.

How can you get started in your company?

A client of ours once complained that it took their company 2 years to launch a mobile app, while a startup we had introduced to them delivered a better product in under 4 months. The answer was simple: the startup had no legacy to protect, no organizational constraints, a highly motivated team, and a great PM to envision and coordinate the development of the product.

So is the answer to hire PMs? As the tech ecosystem is growing worldwide, these profiles are becoming increasingly available but we strongly believe in upskilling or reskilling your talents. Whether they come from the business side of operations, are engineers or generalists, we can teach them the skills for this new role. This is how we came up with the idea of launching a Product Management Academy dedicated to corporates in our San Francisco office. We have been helping our corporate clients with their digital transformation since 2003. After developing Design thinking programs for Fortune 500 like Orange and helped companies like L’Oréal to scale their agile practices, we tare convinced the next step in becoming an agile organization is through training Product Managers.