Today, more than ever before, we are living in the age of product driven organizations. Product driven organizations grow, gain customers and retain customers by constantly bringing innovative products to market. It’s all about growing your product and making it better year after year. I explained this in detail in the video below:
If you want to learn what a Product Manager does please check out this article first before diving into this one. You could also read about the 4 qualities that make a great Product Manager here.
Consumers are NOT loyal. The moment you miss a cycle or two of innovation, consumers will leave you. This is why it’s so important to be extremely intentional in updating your products whether it’s software or hardware or a gadget. Unless you create a product stickiness people will leave very fast so you need to create Product Managers who are strong at fostering great product ecosystems and therefore keep consumers loyal. Look at Apple, their percentage of consumers may go down but the people who say they’ll never leave because Apple has the Apple Watch and Apple has FaceTime they love to us or to sync their iPad… and it’s all connected. That connectivity keeps them loyal.
Now you may be asking yourself- if Product Managers are so important and necessary why is he saying he stopped hiring them? Great question! I have a several pronged answer that I hope sheds light on why a company might do this and why I’ve specifically gone this direction. I also give some tips at the end on how to nurture Product Managers into the role.
In the beginning, when a company is first starting the CEO/Founder is the Product Manager because it is their own product and they’re the number 1 person who knows everything about it. It gets to a point though, if your company is successful, you have to scale it up if you want to grow. At some point my company tripled in size in one year and I found myself with 15 Product Managers and we started running into some issues that made me think “oh boy, what have we done?”
- They don’t have the same product philosophy as you do or your company has already established. Often Product Managers come from some kind of engineering background (not always!) and they come with some preconceived notions and their own philosophy that can mess with the already established rhythm a company has. You need someone who is totally aligned with your philosophy and that is tough to insure when you’re hiring someone who has never worked with you before.
- People who get into Product Development should know their company’s products and customer base inside and out. This takes years. If I hire someone from outside it’s tougher to understand something that I implicitly have inside me. What is as natural to me as breathing is something foreign to you. It’s hard to become a fan from the outside. I can think of two analogies for this-
- If you’ve been a fan of a sports team since you were a kid and followed them your whole life you’ve grown up with them and you know them inside and out. A person who just started following them will not know them the way that you do. They will not fundamentally understand what the true fans do and they won’t be taken seriously at first. The teams that you root for when you grow up become part of your DNA. You know their strategy, who played for them and when/why they left, who is beloved, who is hated etc… A fan mindset like that has to be nurtured for years to become natural and authentic.
- Or you can think of it like being Italian, cooking Italian food, making homemade pasta with your grandma etc… and then going to a restaurant that claims to be authentic, you’ll know within 10 seconds if that’s true or not. There is simply no substitute for the years, history and love pored into knowing something.
- Entrepreneurs are the best Product managers. The entrepreneurial skills of ownership, problem solving, tenacity, and creativity make you an automatic manager of your own product. People who come from bigger organizations are so narrowly focused they’re often lacking 1-2 things from those 4. It’s also difficult to find someone who has all 4 because they don’t apply to jobs and honestly niche positions like this aren’t often even shared widely. A lot of good people are out there who already started their own companies in the past and still have those skills but a lot of people with these skills start another company next so you have to catch them at a moment where they happen to be available but if you do catch them it’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. It can happen but it’s incredibly rare.
- Nurturing from within the company is the best place to start. If you are building a Product Management department at a young company you may be wondering- where do I start? You should look at who works for you already and who already knows your products well. Typically customer support is a great place to look for talent because they understand the product really well and they interface with your customers daily. Sales department is another place to look because these people sell your product so they know it well and they have to be almost overly confident about it. Sales people have to be tenacious or they won’t be successful at selling. You should have every department keeping their eye on who on their team they could see becoming a great Product Manager because then you can start nurturing them from within the company and putting in the years of time immediately. Here are 4 suggestions at how to put this into action-
- Give tiny projects to these people and see how they handle them, giving them feedback along the way. This is a great way to see their problem solving and tenacity in a real way.
- Look at who is selling your product very well because they’re already a fan. They have tenacity and they’re already in your ecosystem. Sales people never give up on their team no matter how many times it loses and this can be a great quality to have in a Product Manager.
- If you see people on your team who loves to be there, fits in seamlessly with your philosophy then start seeing how they measure up with the 4 components of entrepreneurial spirit to see how they do across other skills. You can make this as obvious or organic as you like. Often I like to keep it very organic and it’s very easy to see who jumps at the chance to take on more difficult work and who isn’t interested in that at all. If they’re staying with company and have been loyal for years they already have a great base to start from.
- Department heads should be keeping their eyes out for people who show these talents so you can start integrating talented people into the company DNA. See who stays late just to make sure a customer is happy, pay attention to who is a fast learner and little by little they can grow into the Product Manager role.
