(2024-01-30) Cagan Product Management Theater

Martin Cagan on Product Management Theater. I have been warning for several years that delivery team product owners, and feature team product managers are likely going to be facing a reckoning as companies realize that these roles are not what they thought they were.

In this article, my goal is to help people realize if they are vulnerable, and what they can do to dial up their contributions to their company, so they’re not at the top of the list when the CEO decides it’s time to cut costs.

Several years ago I published Product vs. Feature Teams ((2019-08-29) Cagan Product Vs Feature Teams)

I explained in that article that a feature team product manager was essentially a glorified (and usually overpaid) [[project manager], and that a delivery team product owner was little more than a backlog administrator.

Yet so many people did not see themselves in those descriptions.

*One of the most popular of these programs summarizes the product manager role as “40% communication and coordination, 20% design, 20% engineering, and 20% business.”

Hopefully you recognize that this is describing a project manager and not a product manager.*

Certainly this is nothing at all like what is needed from a product manager on an empowered product team.

if you are a CEO that is looking to cut costs, wouldn’t you rather cut this, than lose a hands-on designer or engineer?

The reason I describe this as “product management theater” is because a person that is essentially a project manager, with no real training or skills to cover the true product management responsibilities, simply declaring they are a product manager, is just pretending.

So what to do if you’re one of the countless thousands that have been trained as a feature team product manager or a product owner, yet you wish to show your company that you are capable of being much more than a coordinator or a backlog administrator?

This starts with an honest assessment of where your skills are.

You likely won’t need to spend time building your design skills or your engineering skills.

you likely will need to build your business skills, data skills, and your customer knowledge.

Maybe you can also now understand why we remain philosophically against the many so-called certifications in the product management and product owner industry.