The Product Discipline's Ownership
by Eva Skoglund
Simply put, our internal job in the Product discipline is to equip Engineering, Sales and Marketing so that they can build the product, sell the product and communicate the product in an orchestrated way. If we fail at this orchestration, we will fail at building a product business.
An absolut critical part of the Product Manager job is to interface with customers in order to understand the market and what needs our solution helps with. But let's look at our internal job for a moment, because if we don't execute well internally, we will not succeed with our product business.
As product managers, we interface with several different functions in the company, and between all of them, the three most important ones are Engineering, Sales and Marketing. My view is that we need to view Product as its own discipline within the company, and that this discipline needs to take greater ownership of the interface not only with Engineering, but also with Sales and Marketing.
The most fundamental thing we do as product managers is Product Definition (see picture below). We define functionality, commercial packaging, price models, etc. Both Engineering and Sales need to understand really well how the entire commercial product is defined. This includes both what the product is, and what the customer buys.
What we also need to do is Product Positioning, which is the foundation for everything done in Sales and Marketing. Positioning includes differentiation, value definition, target market characteristics and market categorization. It's the fundamental understanding of what our key differentiating strengths are, how they create business value, and what characterizes our best-fit customers.
And lastly, we work with Usage Growth of our product. What unites Engineering and Marketing is the goal of increasing usage of the product. (This is mostly important for SaaS products and digital marketing contexts, but it is relevant for other types of solutions as well). With digital product, it's important that UX and Design is consistent across the user journey, from the website, to the actual product usage.
If we think about what it is that Product Management should deliver to the three primary functions (the arrows in the picture above), the output to Engineering is rather straight forward to understand. Everyone knows it’s about problems-to-be-solved, outcomes to achieve, jobs-to-be-done, functionality descriptions, product requirements, use cases, etc, because these things are what Engineering needs to understand in order to build the product. This is a well known area, with a variety of established methods and tools, and it is extensively described in literature and courses. I would claim: how Product Management should interface with Engineering is essentially a ”solved problem”. (Note: I'm not saying that it's easy, but it is an area that is well covered.)
But, what is it that the Product discipline should deliver to the Sales and Marketing functions? If the output to Engineering is a description of problems and outcomes, what it is the actual output to Sales and Marketing? What do we fill those output arrows with? As long as we as product managers only deliver essentially the same thing to Sales and Marketing that we deliver to Engineering - meaning functionality descriptions in various forms - do we really enable them to sell and communicate the product in the best possible way? My answer is No.
In my experience, there are two things the Product discipline should deliver to Sales, and two things we should deliver to Marketing:
Customer Characteristics - in depth descriptions of our best-fit-customers (To Sales)
Value Equation Blueprints - translation of benefits to monetary value parameters (To Sales)
Context Setting - the bigger picture and reason of existence of our product (To Marketing)
Buying Assets Logic - making our product easy to buy for customers (To Marketing)
How the Product discipline needs to interface with Sales and Marketing is both an under-developed and undefined area. While we may have "occasional success", product people usually don't work in a deliberate manor where we take active responsibility and ownership of how we best equip our Sales and Marketing teams. This can be the root cause of why we may have a great product, but not a great business.