When faced with a personal choice, to whom do you turn? Your mother or your best friend?
The answer is, of course, it depends on what the choice is about. Seriously, if you are trying to work through a wardrobe issue, do you really turn to your mother? On the other hand, which one is better to understand your marital problems?
It’s no different in product management.
When you are faced with understanding the product, where do you turn? As the product manager, you are supposed to be the product owner. You are the go-to-guy/gal. But, where do you turn when you don’t understand?
If you are in an engineering-driven firm, product managers typically turn to their resources in development. After all, these are the people who built the product. They know the gizmos and gadgets that are inside of it. They know why they put that button on the interface where it is. Or, do they?
If you are in services, do you turn to the content owners (i.e. developers,) to make the suggestions? After all, these are the thought leaders who drive whole industry directions.
In either case, the better product managers will turn to the market to answer the product questions. If you manage product development well, you gave the development team a set of problems to fix, not buttons to create. You gave the consultants feedback you heard on their situations. Products should solve problems. If you didn’t give the product development team a problem, yet they build that button anyway or decided they liked a concept to market, why did you release the product?
The answer lies in the market. Remember that. Looking in, I don’t remember that last time the developers bought their own products to solve problems or consultants hired themselves.
(Exceptions to some consumer software and product lines, of course, where developers may be PART of the market.)
