Pragmatic Marketing Rule #20

This is the “final episode” in a series of posts on the Practical Product Management rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #20: The market-driven product manager should be the final authority on what goes into the product.

While at first blush, this should be the most obvious of rules - someone, after all, has to be the final authority on product requirements, and who better than the product manager. But the operative term in this rule is not product manager so much as it is market-driven.

Take it from someone who’s been both, there’s a world of difference between being a product manager and being a market-driven product manager.

The plain old product manager serves a very valuable function. He or she’s the one who makes sure that the requirements are nailed down. Who keeps everything together and on track for a product release. Who knows at any given time just where things stand with development, QA, documentation, packaging, manufacturing, production, training, marketing, support, sales, etc. The product manager knows who the customers are. And who they aren’t. The product manager gets to buy all those pink and blue bubble-gum cigars for launch date - “It’s a product!”

Sounds pretty good, no?

But here’s where life is not so good for the non-market driven product manager: they may well be have made sure that the requirements were nailed down, but they’re not likely to be the one who’d actually done the nailing.

That’s because, since they’re not able to speak with market-authority, they are absolutely, 100% guaranteed, going to end up giving ground on what’s in the product to someone with a big, loud mouth (or even a quiet air of know-it-all). Now, that person may be no more attuned to what the market requires than the product manager is, but the product manager who doesn’t know the market cold is going to have no way to resist the loud mouth/know-it-all.

Who might this force be?

It might be one of the product developers - one of those who just has to be the smartest person in the room. It could be a sales support person - who may well be on to something, but you don’t really have a way to validate it. It could be someone in sales who’s basing their loud-mouth demand on whatever reason they just heard for their last lost sale.

Absent strong awareness of the market - the kind that comes from knowing your customers, your industry, your product domain, your competition, your business and technology environment - a product manager will almost invariably give in to the loud mouth/know-it-all brigade.

The product manager in this scenario is really a glorified project manager - keeper of the Gantt Charts, the spreadsheets, the schedule - but not the person who truly “owns” the product. That is, until the product meets with some market resistance. Then, you can best believe, heads will swivel toward the product manager, eyes will turn, fingers will point….”How did we let the product go out the door without X, which everybody seems to want? Why did we waste all that time and money on making sure the product did Y, which nobody seems to want?”

Sure, this can happen even when the product manager is market-driven. Anyone can make a mistake.

But the likelihood is far less for the market-driven product manager, who will either have made sure that the product does X - or understand why it doesn’t. Who will know why Y went into the product, and what you need to do to make sure it’s not a waste of time.

The product manager should be the final authority - but that will only happen when he or she has earned the authority, by being able to show the world - especially those loud mouth/know-it-alls - what market-driven is all about.

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