A recruiter told me yesterday that “there is this new thing called Product that everyone is hungry for.” I didn’t bother to correct him by pointing out that this “new thing” called “Product” has actually been around for centuries, it just had different guises.
In the manufacturing world, it is the industrial designer; in the property world, it is the architect; in the print media world, it is the editor. Each of these roles have to marry function, form and aesthetic to appeal to customers.
Yet in the digital world, this product role has emerged as a distinct discipline in its own right. Why? Because the digital world is complicated. My theory is that this role has emerged organically from our fast-changing technical ecosystem which requires a whole extra layer of expertise that didn’t exist before. Professionals like architects, editors and industrial designers (to name a few) have all perfected the way to get their information or concept across in a static medium (a drawing, a newspaper, a 3D prototype). But they usually don’t have the time, experience or skills to package that content different ways for different devices, screen sizes, and different customer needs. Digital product managers are the people who make that happen – who tie together creative output, technical capability and customer needs to build digital products that customers will value.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were no industrial car engineers. They emerged from the rapid growth of the auto industry in the early 1900s. The same is true in the digital revolution. We are just at the beginning. Product management is a nascent discipline.
This blog is dedicated to this “new thing called Product” – a “thing” that I have been doing for 20 years, since the first Mosaic browser was launched in 1993. I want it to focus on the human side of the equation – communication, empathy, collaboration, buy-in and executing shared visions – rather than methodologies and tick list skills. The skills and methodologies will change over time, but the inner-workings of people don’t. The best product managers love people more than machines. They love what machines can do for people, but people come first.