Product Managers are not Designers

A deep overview of why Product Management is reframing some old ideas as new, and how it might be impacting Design

It’s funny. 

You can read more posts on LinkedIn by Product Influencers about user interviews than User Research Influencers (do they even exist?).

I heard of a User Research Freelancer who was struggling to find new gigs. She rebranded herself as a Product Discovery Coach and she’s now fully booked.

Regardless of what she’s offering and her actual skillset, it tells a story.

We have certainly evolved as an industry. The skillsets, mindset, and toolkit that go into “Product Discovery” today are more sophisticated than they were decades ago.

Thanks to contributions from giants like Steve Blank, Alexander Osterwalder, David Bland, Teresa Torres, Bob Moesta, Robert Fitzpatrick, Marty Cagan, and (why not), Eric Ries.

Several others have influenced our practices in how we discover value.

But most of the principles are not necessarily new.

There are Product Management Leaders out there claiming to be experts in human-centric design, but don’t know who Don Norman is.

Do they need to know?

Well, to be frank, maybe not…

Yet it’s probably frustrating if you enter a room full of senior designers who have been studying and practicing Design for decades, and you bring the little Product framework you just found online and say:

“Let’s start following this design thinking and discovery framework! It’s great!”.

There are 3 important things we need to understand:

• Great discovery is cross-functional, where each discipline brings a unique skill set and perspective to the table

• For Product, that’s business. It’s what’s missing in most cross-functional teams.

• Many aspects of Discovery are rooted in Design - and have been around for decades. For example, at the very fundamental level, this includes user interviews and iterative prototyping.

But so, why in the world is Product School teaching wireframing to Product Managers?

Why is Audacity’s Nanodegree on Product Management teaching sketching?

And what is this doing to the industry, and to Design?

I’m still framing these thoughts, but let’s dig into my little theory.

Modern Product Management is a new, emerging, and fast-growing discipline

I’m not gonna go into the history of Product Management, from the old days at Hewlett Packard in 1940 up until now - and how it has evolved.

But one thing we can all agree with:

Product Management is not the same thing if you visit Netflix, Microsoft, a tech scale-up in Oslo, a large Healthcare company in Eastern Europe, or a small bank in Singapore.

You’ll find so much variation in the practices, habits, and scope of the role (highly influenced by company size, organizational culture, national culture, org maturity, leadership style, and industry they operate in).

We don’t see this grand variation in Engineering, for example. Or even Design…

In fact, the biggest variation you see in how engineers work is ironically related to how the company sees Product Management in the first place.

Depending on how they see the PM role, engineers will either be mercenaries implementing requirements defined in traditional PRDs - or empowered and highly involved in defining the solution together with the PM and the Designer (how it should be).

So, Product is still claiming its space, especially due to the still very high influence of the Project Model, Agile madness, “Founder Mode”, and “Product Operating Model” on the rise.

Another thing we can probably agree on: the nature of the job is ambiguous.

It’s difficult to measure great Product Management since whatever gets discovered and eventually shipped is a teamwork effort.

The value Product brings is often understood through the results the product generates, how soon it appears, and the happiness of the team. But everyone plays a part in it…

I can tell a lot about a PM by observing the mental models she brought to the table, the questions she asked that led to vital discussions, the dots she connected through excellent communication, the tradeoffs she facilitated by bringing the right people in the room and inviting discussion, the critical-thinking-lenses she added throughout the whole journey, the business modeling she wrestled with, the endless brainstorming with other parts of the business to de-risk viability, the conversations she had with customers and users, the experiments she initiated to test hypothesis, the hard conversations she had with stakeholders to influence the right decisions on behalf of her customers, the way she collaborated with Design and Engineering, and all that jazz.

The problem? It’s subjective, fragmented, and context-dependent.

For those reasons, we might be seeing a need to claim space and rebrand old ideas into new - as a way to “formalize” the discipline. 

With the right tone, propagated by the right people, and targeting the right audience - it works. And, it’s impacting how some Designers feel about their own job.

Memetics, Prestige Bias, FOMO: why it matters

One of Dawkins’ old-school contributions in the book “The Selfish Gene” is the idea of a “meme” and Memetics theory.

He drew an analogy between biological evolution and cultural evolution - where memes (i.e. ideas) are replicated, mutate over time, and undergo selection to fit different audiences.

This can make ideas seem new, even though the core of it might be old.

I’ll elaborate on why this matters in just a second. 

Then there’s Prestige Bias - people are way more likely to adopt ideas from prestigious figures. 

This can be a thought leader or a “successful” company (e.g Spotify).

Which is why the “Spotify Model” started being copied by several organizations that failed to understand that the model is highly contextual and wasn’t even the same model inside Spotify a few months after (because Spotify kept changing, which is part of the whole idea of the actual model…). Anyway.

On top of this, we all suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). 

As thought leaders adopt “new” concepts, less mature businesses and individuals fear falling behind - so they immediately rush into adopting these rebranded concepts to stay competitive.

So, let’s tie it all together.

Because Product is a little messy and not yet fully established, there’s space for rebranding ideas or repackaging them with Product lenses on.

This is maybe what we’re seeing with Product Discovery.

Older ideas, mostly from Design, have evolved by connecting a few extra valuable dots (which is a good thing). 

And in addition to that, it has mutated to fit a powerful audience: Business Executives.

Historically, and unfortunately, many business leaders haven’t put Design on a pedestal. 

They still don’t.

You can observe this by seeing how many companies have Chief Product Officers or Chief Technology Officers - and then a Design Director leading the exact same layers as their peers.

For some reason, there are way fewer CDOs than CPOs. Just look at the contrast.

Many business leaders don’t really care (or maybe understand) User Research, for example.

The same goes for Design. Perhaps many leaders fail to realize the power and scope of great Design, and think of it merely as usability and “making things pretty”.

On the other hand, Product Discovery is a much clearer term.

Especially when packaged in a way that it’s all about reducing business risk, so we can “build products that customers love and that work for the business”!

Even better: tell them this is how all the “best” companies work.

“Best vs Rest” and Conformist Bias

I’m such a Marty Cagan’s fanboy. 

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this particular part of his message in the past few years:

“The best companies work very differently than the rest.”

This message is powerful and simple. And as a result, it has created a movement that you must work in a certain way. Or else you’ll fall behind…

It is prestige bias (“the best”), FOMO, conformist bias, and novelty fetish (for immature orgs) - all at once.

Marty describes how “the best” work regarding product discovery, but sometimes I hear people draw the wrong conclusion from his work.

They say:

“Product Managers own discovery” because they should “spend at least 80% of their time” doing this. 

Instead of: The team owns it together, each bringing different skills and perspectives to the table, and they’re all accountable for the results.

Marty (and others) have never said that “PMs own discovery”, but when it’s argued to be a central part of the role (which it is), when business leaders have a tendency to desperately assign responsibilities to individuals rather than teams, and when further propagated in “PM courses” that teach UX, sketching (!) and wireframing - it creates confusion. 

As a result, some Designers are questioning their role and contribution, especially in less mature organizations with poor leadership.

So, part of the problem is the misunderstood idea (virus?) that has unfortunately propagated like wildfire - lacking context and missing the point.

As tech keeps rising, so do Product Manager positions and some of these misinterpretations of the role (i.e. The PM owns Discovery; the PM is responsible for value and viability and Design ONLY for usability, etc.)

Given the immaturity of the discipline, combined with the nature of the job (ambiguous), the hype, and the perceived scarcity of talent - we have a whole parallel industry booming and contributing to this shift even further.

Consulting, Training and (oh well, why not) Influencers

Have you ever wondered why Product Management has been inundated by frameworks?

Why the Agile principles have been contaminated by processes and certifications - where most are just BS?

It’s because it’s tough to sell principles/mindset/mental models/context-based messiness.

Again, we need to go back to the target audience. Who actually buys this stuff?

Because Product is ambiguous (due to the wide range of variation in the role too), it becomes an opportunity for anyone to start selling it - and of course a whole new range of courses and certifications. 

The problem?

Most of these people have never been a Product Manager or a Product Leader, they turn the whole thing into a process because it’s easier to sell, go heavy on agile stuff because that’s all they know about, and start spreading into Design because it’s already well-established (and therefore easier to teach).

On top of this, we live in an era filled with Product Influencers - ready to jump on regurgitating old ideas and repackaging them to their audience.

As a consequence, any Product Influencer talking about Discovery will inevitably be talking about some old Design idea. But now it’s repackaged, from someone that comes from Product -  and tailored to Product Managers. 

To more junior professionals, it fabricates the illusion that these practices are Product Management practices. 

Which is why you have a junior Product Manager pitching to a team of very senior designers a (very basic) “Design Thinking and Discovery framework” that the team should start using (ref. the story I told you earlier).

I understand how some Designers might feel about all of this, and why they complain:

“But we’ve been doing this stuff for decades!”.

However, complaining is not working out. Here’s a better idea.

Closing the loop: the way forward

First, I wish we could start see cross-functional product teams as an actual discipline in the future.

Forget about Product. Forget about Design. Let’s start talking about cross-functional teams as the unit, instead. 

If we look at it through those lenses, everything becomes less territorial (even though it really shouldn’t be in the first place). Expectations are clearer. And the industry will evolve towards deeper collaboration and bringing the best of all worlds, instead of trying to claim spaces and continuously repackaging old ideas to better fit their audiences. 

Second, this requires Product Management to bring the business skillset and perspective to the table, otherwise you’re not adding value. Sorry. You are not a Designer, so how will you contribute? The answer is business. It always has. But Scrum and other things polluted that notion. 

If Product brings Business and Growth to the table, and leaders have this as a clear skill to the role when hiring, it will reduce the confusion. 

Design leaders need to raise awareness of this with executive leadership too.

Third, I know it’s not going to happen overnight. So, in the meantime, Product Management as an industry needs to be more humble and understand the roots of Product Discovery - as well as comprehend that it’s a luxury if you get to work with a real Product Designer side by side.

Fourth, Designers need to help close the knowledge gap because I don’t think all of this was intentional. 

In many organizations, people fail to share their own domain knowledge with other disciplines. We have all these Design communities of practice, but when was the last time you invited your Product Managers to take part in it? 

Fifth, great product teams actually don’t experience unhealthy “tension”, because they’re guided by evidence and the skillsets are well distributed. This whole article is not even a thing for them.

So if there’s tension between Design and Product - then this is often a leadership challenge typically related to your operating model, hiring and coaching. Start there. 

And last but not least, Designers need to learn business and learn how to effectively work with Product (read: business). This is a new skill for many, especially designers who have worked in a feature team model until now.

What else?

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Hey there! If you got this far, congrats and thank you - I know this was a heavy one but it didn’t feel right to break it down into parts.

I’m still trying to understand this phenomenon, and how much it resonates with the Design community. I’m not quite sure about all of this and some of these thoughts are still brewing.

Let me know what you think - would love to learn from you so I can mature this thought a bit more!