As I have engaged with leaders in the Danish tech industry, my favorite question has become: “Have you ever worked with a good product manager?” The reaction has been the same so far: “What do you mean by a good product manager?”
This article outlines the role of the product manager in software innovation. I have chosen to describe the role of the product manager in the context of the software product model in contrast to the legacy IT project model.
I have personally experienced the contrast between the two approaches when I worked for Symbian – the first operating system for smartphones, which was used in over 1 billion phones from Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola back in the 2000s. The technical department at Symbian was led by a program manager who came from Ericsson’s infrastructure division. He was used to large development programs spanning several years. Again and again, he accused us product managers of being the source of delays: “You constantly change the requirements” and he would discourage collaboration between developers and product managers in a classic waterfall setup.
In reality, it was the lack of collaboration that was the source of many of the challenges the company faced. In the end, the more agile and innovative company, Apple, prevailed in the smartphone market, and Symbian does not exist today. The project mindset, where schedule, resources, and requirements fight against each other, is probably not the entire explanation, but contributed to a slow development flow based on conflict rather than collaboration.
If you want to create an innovative software development environment, you need to know the difference between a product and a project manager. Let’s start with a definition of a product manager:
The product manager is the person in software development who is responsible for the value and sustainability of the transaction between the customer and the company offering the product.
Here we also have the definition of a product:
The product is the value carrier between the customer (and through them the user) and the company offering the product. The product must deliver value both to the customer by e.g. solving a problem and to the company in the form of e.g. revenue. Company in this context can also be a public institution or an NGO that prioritizes social value over financial.
The product manager is the person in software development who is responsible for the value and sustainability of the transaction between the customer and the company offering the product.
The definitions make it clear that a good product manager must have competencies and experience with a range of areas that relate to creating value and sustainability in a software product. These areas are 1) strategic outlook, 2) product discovery, and 3) product development. The contrast between the software product manager and IT project manager highlights these skills at work:
| Software Product Manager | IT Project Manager | |
| The Role | Strategic problem solver: The product manager must, through their business understanding and vision, drive discovery and lead the product team during development, so that user problems are solved through a unique combination of design and technology. | Process coordinator: The role is focused on coordinating phases, managing timelines, and ensuring compliance with requirements. The project manager manages the project through careful planning and detailed documentation with a focus on deliverables. |
| Risk Management | Early experiments: Risks are handled through quick prototypes and testing with customers. It is ongoing work that takes place in parallel with the development work. Quick iterations are key. | Planning: Prior Documentation and planning minimize risk. Errors in documentation and design are best caught before the project is launched and followed up with project reviews at specific milestones. |
| Success Criteria | Business results: The product manager takes business goals as input and tests different approaches to find the best result for the customer and the business. The result is tied to the organization’s business plan through the product strategy. | Requirements, timeline and budget: Success is measured through achieving specific phases within a pre-determined budget. The project manager must be able to estimate the project’s total costs through clear milestones and deliverables. |
| Team Structure | Cross-functional product teams: Product managers work in development teams of 8-10 developers + a designer. The team is responsible for both discovery and development based on the business problem that the team has been assigned. | Functional silos: Project managers work across professions to define clear handoffs from one process to another. During implementation, collaboration between designers, product managers, and developers is minimized to reduce the risk of new requirements. |
| Perception of Time | Continuous and sustainable: The product and the development of the product must be able to live until we decide to shut both down. The product must thus be technically sustainable. We must be able to continue adding to or improving the product indefinitely. | Fixed start and end dates: Decision makers have set a clear start and end date that the project must deliver on. The classic project triangle makes it clear that either more resources must be added or requirements must be cut, if the timeline is going off track. |
| Financing | Product strategy: Management continuously evaluates how many product teams they want to invest in each opportunity. The evaluation becomes product strategic in nature as the company’s business plan meets the results of ongoing discovery in a prioritization of product initiatives. | Project budget: The project is allocated a budget based on a pre-defined requirements specification. |
Both product and project managers have varying levels of experience. The best IT project managers know the limitations of their approach and recognize the value of skilled product people. No doubt about it.
We must however fight the organisational anti-patterns that kill innovation. Time and budget cannot be more important than the value we derive from our development efforts.
Which product are you working on?
Over the last 10-15 years, a robust international practice around software product development has been built up, which clearly documents that software development work is best organized according to the product model. It is thus important that we educate skilled product managers who are clearly present in our development practice. We need to reach a point where the question is not “When you say you’re a product manager, what does that mean?” but rather “cool, which product are you working on?”
If Denmark is to compete with the best in software and achieve digital sovereignty, we must develop a healthy software product development practice and abandon the IT project mentality – a mentality I still hear about in conversations with leaders responsible for software development in both private and public organizations.
