Product as Editor-in-Chief
For all the PMs out there: "What would you say you do here?"
(Gen X-ers and elder Millenials like me will get the reference. If not go watch Office Space immediately.)
It's really easy for most people to say what they do in a startup, for other people to say what they do, and critically, for both those answers to be the same.
What do sales people do? Sell.
What do engineers do? Code.
What do accountants do? Take care of the money.
What do product managers do? Ummmmmmmmmmmmm...
I've observed that nearly all frustrations and unhappiness around product management - from the PMs themselves, to product leaders, to executives - stem from misalignment on what the role is.
That's because product management comes in many different flavors. There is no right way to do it, it's all contextual.
One extreme is the "product led" organization. Here, product is king of the hill. They're driving strategy and have clear decision making authority. How to do this well is best captured by Marty Cagan's work in Inspired and Empowered. It's a really rewarding environment to be in if you're a PM - but also the most demanding and highest stakes. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. This type of environment also tends to attract a lot of egotistical *ssholes.
Another extreme is the "feature factory" organization. Here, the business (in the vaguest sense, aka somewhere that is outside the product org) is setting the strategy and has decision making authority. PMs are there to execute - which is a Herculean challenge in its own right, and executing well creates a lot of value. No shame in this game, but you might feel stifled if you're also a bit of a strategist or if you don't fully embrace the strategic direction set by others.
DO NOT GET MISMATCHED on product culture and type of PM.
If you're running a feature factory, but hiring PMs from product led environments, it's going to be a disaster (I did this at a 100 year old grocery company, trust me, it gets ugly). And if you're running a product led org (or aspire to be one) and are hiring feature factory PMs, you're going to be consistently disappointed by the lack of strategic acumen and vision.
For a PM looking to assess which type of environment they're getting into, just ask two things during the hiring process:
How is product strategy set?
If there's a disagreement between product and the business - who gets to make the final decision?
Now if you're an early stage startup, and you're still building your product culture, there's a third way I always advocate for - "product as editor-in-chief." Jack Dorsey espoused this as the best way to be a CEO, and it applies to product management as well.
Why should you consider this model?
Maximizes idea generation while minimizing ego - this type of model forces PMs (and execs) to acknowledge that they are rarely the source of the best idea, and therefore they need to build and maintain repeatable processes for idea capture from all over the board. From their own R&D teams, from the customer directly, from quant data, from industry trends, from execs, from sales, from CS, etc.
Forces narrative creation - when you're editing, it's not just about having a hodge-podge collection of stories or articles. A well edited collection tells a cohesive, compelling narrative where the whole is far more powerful than the sum of the parts. The same holds for products, which can be just a set of features, or something much greater. The editorial narrative is what makes that difference.
Maintains clear decision making rights - product still gets to make the hard calls, and I believe that's appropriate in most cases, where a high performing PM will have a cross disciplinary perspective and understanding of the trade offs that is rivaled perhaps only by the CEO.
If you're a PM and not sure how to describe what you do, try this on for size:
"I'm an editor. I seek and source ideas and inspiration from all over the place, including people much smarter than me, like my colleagues. I look for patterns, make hard decisions on what ideas to keep and which to cut, and put them together into an incredible story that resonates with our customers (and makes a bunch of money)."
