Whenever I’m coaching Product Managers about Product Thinking, on thing becomes clear - Product Managers are expected to do too much. They are accountable for the success of their product. They are told they are the CEO of their product, and must know to know what customers and users need. They must assure that the product is viable, feasible, valuable, and usable. Then they get treated like Project Managers.
Product Managers are commonly driven to deliver multiple projects and are not incented, empowered, or trained to measure product success. Too often, they are not granted the time or access to leverage data to make product decisions, but are asked for meaningless status reports. Many Product Managers don’t understand how to work with technology and are left wondering why projects are late. Product Managers need help.
They need training and coaching, and they need to be adept at communicating how digital products are tied into the overall product and organizational strategy. The most important thing they need is a funding model that supports Product Thinking. Product funding helps Product Managers measure outcomes and creates incentives to deliver to OKRs, monitor KPIs, and measure product performance instead of driving teams to complete projects. Product funding simplifies the world of Product Management and allows them to pivot to true product success. You can read more about why Product funding is so important in this article by @martycagan https://www.svpg.com/project-based-funding/