Now, I am not one to get too hung up on titles, particularly when it comes to Product Management. I see companies use varying titles for Product Managers, including separating “business” from “technical” product managers. Many companies that have adopted Agile Development methodologies have added the title of Product Owner as a separate function. And, when we are talking about digital products, I have seen the introduction of roles such as Growth Product Managers and, even Platform Product Managers.
In many instances, there is a good reason for these separate titles and roles, as the assignment of responsibilities for these roles is different from a more “general” Product Manager.
Product Owners tend to be more focused on the delivery of a product and less on the strategy of the product.
Growth Product Managers focus on the sales and marketing opportunities across a variety of product offerings – more of a horizontal than a vertical slice – relying on marketing and merchandising experimentation (including A/B testing) to enhance revenue potential.
Platform Product Managers tend to work on software platforms that balance the requirements of a variety of products within the organization, in addition to the needs of external customers and partners.
Even with these delineations, I see companies getting confused on roles and role definitions and stakeholders not understanding what responsibilities a specific product management title should have so that there are overlaps and gaps in companies that have multiples of the titles and roles mentioned above. I encourage companies to get precise with their role definition and communicate that clearly to individuals in these roles and affected stakeholders.
Recently, I have seen various discussions advocating for a new role called Product Service Management. The advocates claim that this is a “marketing function focused on the act of managing a product or service sold by a company.” It includes responsibilities such as ensuring products keeps up with customer demand, marketing the product to its intended audience, expanding the intended target audience and improving already existing products. Duties include such tasks as performance evaluation, customer feedback management, analyzing market trends, competitive tracking, pricing and profitability analysis, lifecycle management and, even, new product development.
I have led many small and large teams of Product Managers and worked with many companies that have hired and developed Product Managers and these are many of the same skills and responsibilities that I have expected of these individuals. The discussions that I have seen around Service Product Management have advocated for the importance of this role – such as ensuring high customer satisfaction, boosting loyalty, sparking innovation and lowering support costs – but I have seen little about why you would need a distinct role for such a title.
Some may argue that it is not such a big deal to have this additional title in product management and so what if there is a significant amount of overlap between Product Service Management and core Product Management. However, I am a fierce advocate of the importance of the discipline of Product Management and I believe that anything that further confuses the role and the responsibilities of the role without a clear set of differentiating requirements or an easy way to split accountabilities as the span of a role gets too wide (for example, between Product Managers and Product Owners) needlessly confuses product teams, stakeholders and partners and brings with it the risk of turning Product Managers into Product Janitors – where their main responsibilities is just to clean up everybody else’s messes – a lament of many Product Managers that I have worked with.
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