Even when the world is heading for its death, when there is no desire to save anything in it, when all the submarines have sunk, the last nuclear power plants have exploded, love has disappeared and childbirth has ceased, when the last children are escorted to the last school by machine gunners and shootouts with kidnappers take place right next to the teachers’ room, when all the guilty have already been executed and the innocent are sitting in prisons, dying of hunger and disease, when armies are rotting in the trenches – even then nature is capable of giving birth to a genius.
– Kir Bulychev, “Genius and Villainy”.
About five years ago, the paradigm of marketing from sales began to change towards design thinking, digital transformation and product creation. It seems that business finally understood that for a company to live a long and successful life, it is necessary for the consumer to be satisfied and the product to be of high quality in itself. That for a long relationship with a client, you cannot start this relationship with deception, manipulation and foisting. Business understood this and began to produce new business children – product managers.
These are special people who, by and large, make sure that the company does not release useless crap onto the market. An excellent task, and, it seems, very timely. Especially for startups opening new markets. What kind of product manager should he be to cope with this responsible mission?
- He must study consumers, understand their needs and problems. He must represent and protect their interests to the development team.
- He must have a general vision of the product and convey it to the entire product team, making sure that designers and programmers do not do something wrong. He himself must be a designer, because the easiest way to convey a vision is through a prototype.
- He must be a business-savvy leader and represent the interests of the product to stakeholders who are believed to be only interested in money.
It seems logical. A product manager
And then a product director, as an evolutionary step) is a bridge between the interests of the company that makes the product and the interests of the users who use the product and pay for it. But here’s what’s interesting. Replace “digital product” with “goods” or “services”, and “development team” with “production”. And what will we see? What will the product manager turn into?
Into a marketer.
If you read classic books on marketing, you will find that all these tasks taken separately are not new at all. And they were traditionally solved by marketers and marketing directors. Market research and analysis is marketing. Audience segmentation, differentiation and achieving positioning is marketing. Product quality management is marketing. Formalization of the mission is management and… also marketing.
Old-school marketers were good at all of this before. You don’t have to look far for examples:
This is a classic. Books were written on these topics long before Steve Blank and Osterwalder. It’s just that mass business traditionally saw marketing as something else – sales. That’s why the role of the marketer has migrated. Now marketers are people who write websites, set up advertising, and manage company profiles on social networks.
But the function hasn’t gone anywhere!
The business need to create long-term liquid value hasn’t disappeared. This is too fundamental a law to be changed by people from “real direct”. And since the need remains, there must be someone who will take responsibility for it. For some time, these abandoned powers wandered around companies, and managers occasionally picked them up. Some even managed to form the conviction that “in a small business, the chief marketer is the director.” Of course, in reality, this is not so, and that is why product managers appeared.
But here’s what’s sad – supposedly a new profession requires the invention of new methods.
And they rushed to invent them, often without realizing that the result is something with two wheels, a steering wheel, a saddle and pedals. And most of the insights and epiphanies have long been described by Kotler, Trout, Drucker, Mintzberg, Senge, Christensen and other “unfashionable writers”. It turns out that product quality management methods did not appear yesterday. The same QFD was used by the samurai in the 80s of the last century. And the Kano model – in the 70s. And not at all for “prioritizing features”, but for production management.
And so it is – wherever you look. Customer development, Osterwalder canvases, lean startup, design thinking – all these are consequences and simplifications of classical methods of research and creation of consumer value. Superstructures on common sense and understanding of the fundamental process of satisfying a need.
