Sean Everett argues product managers must act like founders, overseeing design, engineering, finance, and go-to-market strategy. He cites Steve Jobs and Satoshi Nakamoto as exemplars, and measures PM success by moving North Star metrics like growth or revenue.
Good morning. I'd like to talk to you today about product management, something that I'm passionate about and have been doing for the better part of a couple decades now. One of the primary questions that seems to have come up over the years is, what does product management do? What do they actually do? The short answer to this is everything. At least that's the expectation. So Design, yes. Project management, yes. Fundraising, yes. Let's see, engineering, yes. Social media, yes. Advertising, brands, yes, yes. Let's see, go-to-market, partnerships, sales, yes, yes, yes. So why is this? I think I'll describe it this way. So who is a recognizable product manager? The best one that I can come up with that I've told people over the years is Steve Jobs. Everyone thinks of him as the founder of Apple, which is true. And it's sort of the reason why the product management skillset encompasses such a wide array of skills is because you almost have to become a founder of a product and thusly a business. Because do you do corporate finance, free cash flow, P&L management? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So Steve Jobs was not a sales executive. He was not a marketing executive, even though he employed those skills. He wasn't an engineer, right? He did do fundraising. Basically all the skills that he put together that took the better part of like 3 or 4 decades to get to iPhone moment meant a lot of struggle, a lot of time, a lot of mistakes, a lot of hypothesis testing. A lot of pricing strategy, pricing failings, too high, we need to price it low and go for volume, and come to realize that, oh, people buy based on user experience. So that's sort of a rough intro and overview of product management. But then the question becomes, how do you separate, or how do you understand what good product management looks like from bad, mediocre, maybe novice? What is a master product manager? And then at least in my mind, what is like a magical product manager, right? So I'm going to use an example. Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I would call that a magical product manager because he basically wrote the spec, didn't do anything else. And he was right. He wrote the spec and he was right. And he set up and designed a new system. He was an inventor, a founder, a product manager, et cetera. that sort of took the world, the financial world by storm, and it developed into a trillion-dollar ecosystem over only a decade. So that's one example. But in the real world, what you typically find is that some product people will be focused on a specific area. So like technical product management, typically they're working very closely with the engineers on the backend or the frontend of the software, perhaps hardware, for example. You have product marketing, which is more of what Apple calls product management because they aren't necessarily in the weeds doing the invention. That's sometimes left to the engineers and designers, which I think is, you know, sort of lose something there. But that's more product marketing. So I'm gonna be focused on what is the feature set that when we drop it, it impacts with the market. And of course, there's a lot of different levers there, strategy, user research, UX, Copy, et cetera. So you know Steve Jobs used to say, "What does product management do?" He plays the orchestra. The orchestra being all the individual team members playing different quote instruments, which in this case would be a specialty or a skill: strategy, design, engineering, marketing, et cetera, et cetera, operational excellence, manufacturing, supply chain. It sort of seems a little weird to be a conductor because I think it's sort of even playing field, but. I think the best way to understand whether or not a product management is executing against real goals is, did they set a vision? Did they write the spec? Was it able to get implemented? Did it move the North Star metric? Most of the times that's growth, revenue growth, user growth. And if those things are true, then did it continue to compound and create a successful business? Otherwise, it's just a hobby. So iPhone versus quote Apple TV, right? Okay, so that's a little high-level overview on product. Hope you all have a great day. Couldn't get out of here without talking about it a little bit. So yeah, hit me up with any questions. EverettAdvisors.com. Peace.
