Dear Product Manager, What is a Product?
I’m not suicidal but I’ve entertained the idea a couple of times before.
The first time was as a young secondary schoolboy whose mother had discovered his love letter addressed to a certain lady named Linda.
“Go to school and when you come back you’ll explain to me who Linda is and what you two have in common,” she said to me as I was about leaving the house that faithful morning.
My heart sank. And for a couple of minutes, it stopped beating. My feet were cold while I was sweating profusely under my smartly ironed school uniform.
The walk to school that morning was the longest journey of my life. It felt like I trekked from Egypt, across the Red Sea, into the wilderness.
As I walked through the lonely roads of Benin City, the sound of oncoming vehicles became seductive. Death was beckoning, and I was ready to answer.
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The second time was in December of 2015. I was on the 12th floor of a high rise. The hard surface of the busy Lagos road below was so inviting.
A couple of minutes earlier, I had walked into the office of my supervisor’s supervisor to ask for a change of role. I had done loan analysis and loan collections for a few years and was tired of it all. I wanted to move into Product Management.
Boom! I got my wish, but my joy quickly turned into a state of utter confusion.
What do I know about Product Management? I don’t even know what a Product was, who a Product Manager is, or what Product Management entailed.
I had asked to be made a pilot and now I must fly a plane! A bit like Donald Trump winning the election and realizing that governing was different from campaigning!
A month later, I became a Product Manager without knowing what a product is. I had to grow up quickly.
By January 2016, I was a Product Manager responsible for some loan portfolios running into tens of billions of Naira. It was a great feeling to be a Product Manager, but I still didn’t know the first thing about products or product management. I had to grow up fast!
Why does it matter to understand exactly what a product is?
It is fundamental for an organization to understand her products or product lines to effectively monitor and manage them. Failure to define exactly what your products are, as an organization, might lead to:
- overlapping roles
- overstaffing (or understaffing as the case may be)
- the neglect of some products
- income leakages
etc.
For an individual, before you can be an effective Product Manager, you need to know what you are managing.
Let me illustrate why it is important to define your products properly.
What would you say is the product of a restaurant?
Is the product of a restaurant just the food they sell? Or different lines of food; e.g. “Organic” “Fast”, etc?
Is the restaurant’s website for placing orders also a product?
Since a restaurant sells food, some will argue that it has one product and hence, should have only one product manager.
Others will argue that the website of the restaurant through which customers place their orders is also a product.
So, we must understand what a product is.
So, what exactly is a Product?
There is no universally accepted definition of a product, even among experienced Product Managers.
I define a product as:
an item or service created through a process at a cost which provides a benefit to the market at a price. A product can be physical or virtual.
Randy Silver, Director UK Insider Insights at Motivate Design, has a great definition of what a Product is. According to Randy, a Product is:
Something (a good, idea, method, information, object or service) that serves a need (or satisfies a want) and yields enough profit to justify its continued existence”
Mike Cohn defines a product as:
“something (physical or not) that is created through a process and that provides benefits to a market”
Mike is one of the contributors to the invention of Scrum software development methodology, so definitely knows what he is saying.
From the definitions above, Microsoft Office is a product. Your television is a product. Massage services at your local spa is a product.
A Product within a Product
Products can exist within another product.
Applying our definition of a product above, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc. are all products in their own right even though they exist within Microsoft Office. Each has its customers and income lines.
I will warn you, however, not to define your products so narrowly that you fail to see the whole picture.
For instance, it makes no business sense trying to split Microsoft Excel into different products like “Pivot Table”, “VBA (Visual Basic for Applications” or “Templates”
So, how do YOU define a product?
This post is from a book on Product Management that I am currently working on. You can help make it better by sharing your opinion in the comment box or by reaching me directly on nnamdi.azodo@gmail.com. Your contribution will be duly recognized.
#ProductManagement
