Developers in suits
Describe what you do as a product manager. Go on, think about it for a while. If you had to give an elevator pitch describing your role, what would you say?
It’s not an easy question to answer. There’s not a quick, snappy response like there would be if you were a developer “I write code” or a sales person “I lunch sell”.
I get to ask lots of people that very question; “Describe the role of product managers in your organisation” and see lots of head scratching, blank looks and strained thinking – even from product managers! You know at this stage the answer is “I have no idea”, but there usually follows some long, convoluted description littered with “product” and “management” and “erm”.
Every so often, I get a response that really surprises. Top of the list of surprising responses was from a presales guy in a UK software company. Not for him was the long winded effort. He got straight to the point “Product managers are like developers, except they wear suits”. As a strap line it’s got quite a lot going for it – brevity, clarity… If it were true it would be perfect.
But this line really got me thinking, and the more I thought, the more convinced I became that he’d captured what many people on the commercial side of a company think about product management.
