Waiting for the Product Management Ombudsman? You Might Be Waiting a Long Time!

If you want to transform how your organisation works, it's probably time to get started

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The perennial problem: A lack of respect for our craft

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion with a UX professional on LinkedIn. We discussed the problem of non-UX leaders not understanding the benefits of proper UX practices. Although this particular discussion was about UX, I’ve seen similar thoughts and complaints expressed by various product managers over the years, so I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about it in a product management context.

It’s no secret that product people often complain that their leadership team just doesn’t “get it”. We have all these best practices, mindsets, frameworks and a fundamental product management craft. Champions of this craft write books, speak at conferences, sell courses and expensive consultancy services. Their work is evidenced by the fact that the very best companies work like this, and the promise that your company will be more successful if it does the same.

But what do we see instead?

The story for many product managers is somewhat different. Instead of working like the best, they’re sitting squarely with the rest, suffering from:

• A complete ignorance and/or suspicion of these ways of working

• Marginalisation of product management teams

• An intense resistance to change for change’s sake

• A constant demand for proof of return on investment

One of the things that came up in my recent discussion was that, like many true believers, the person is tired of being made to advocate for the way things should be. There was also a general feeling that this is “an industry problem” that needs “industry solutions”, rather than the tireless advocacy of exhausted practitioners. For the record, I am sympathetic to this frustration!

The Industry Problem… Wait, What “Industry”?

Again, it’s an incredibly common problem that many business leaders don’t “get product management”. If it weren’t such a common problem, we wouldn't have so many people (including people like me) trying to fix it. But, when we think about asking for industry solutions, it does beg the question, “Which industry are we talking about?”

Consider the definition of an “industry”:

“The aggregate of manufacturing or technically productive enterprises in a particular field, often named after its principal product, e.g. the automotive industry, the steel industry”

This implies some degree of coherence. But, what coherent industry are we a part of? The SaaS industry? The product management industry? Are we members of an industry at all?

If we’re thinking about a coherent industry, we might ask ourselves, “What are some characteristics of an industry that wants to enforce rules, standards or best practices?”. We might expect an overseeing industry body or regulator that:

• Sets standards (and possibly certification requirements)

• Has some form of escalation process or an ombudsman to handle complaints

• Enforces penalties on industry organisations that don’t adhere to these standards

Ombudsman (n) - a person who investigates and attempts to resolve complaints and problems, as between employees and an employer or between students and a university.

But what do we have in the context of product management? We have a vast array of very different companies that have evolved to their current state through a combination of:

• The background and biases of their founders

• The commercial and competitive pressures of their markets

• The average of all the working practices of every person they’ve hired

A lucky product manager works for a company where companies work more or less like the “industry” best practices. Of course, many product managers are in a very different situation, where product management is ill-understood by an organisation populated by people who’ve never worked with a well-functioning, empowered product team, and have no implicit grasp of why that would be better than how they work today.

Remember, most companies aren’t designed… they just happen. There’s no industry ombudsman to complain to, and no one is coming to save us, because we’re not all part of the same industry.

So, what do we do?

So, if no industry ombudsman is coming to save you, you have a couple of options. You can give up or try to be an agent of change. But, remember, you’re not going to change an industry, because there isn’t one. However, you can change one company at a time, or give it your best shot at least.

Now, sometimes, external pressure can increase the urgency of change. For example, if the company is not performing well, the board can exert pressure from above to shake things up. Where board members are product-savvy, they may pressure the CEO to implement sweeping changes as their patience runs out. That said, many boards often approach these problems solely from a financial perspective, so you can’t always rely on that to help you change how you work. You should take advantage of that situation if it arises, though.

Otherwise, here are some ways to try to make a case:

Get off your ideological high horse

I’ve fallen into this trap before, trying to persuade non-product leaders of the awesome power of product thinking, almost entirely justified by the fact that… well, it’s product thinking. But that just sounds like I’m reading books at them.

There’s also a vocabulary problem here. We can advocate for experiments, hypothesis-based development, MVPs, outcomes over outputs and all the rest. But these words are our words and might as well be Klingon to a non-product audience.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advocate for those things, but try to find a common vocabulary that resonates with your audience.

Get agreement on the problem before pushing for a solution

The worst way to advocate for change is to propose that the company invest time and money in solving a problem that no one believes the company has.

We product people certainly believe that good product management practices will deliver superior results, and there are probably many changes you want to make to get closer to those practices.

But it’s important to map these changes back to solutions to problems your leadership already cares about. You can’t agree on solutions if you can’t even agree on the problem you’re solving. Leaders care about problems like “our churn is too high” or “our sales are stagnating” rather than “our product team isn’t doing enough discovery”.

Of course, we believe that doing more discovery will help with those business problems, but we need to frame it in that way explicitly.

Don’t be scared of trying to prove ROI

It’s not just about mapping your efforts to problems that the leadership cares about, but also having ways to prove that your ways of working are worth investing in. This is something that many product people shy away from and, in many cases, struggle to articulate.

It’s especially problematic for internal-facing products, or anything stuck behind a sales team that will often take full credit for product revenue (the only One Metric That Matters for most companies).

That said, product teams are expensive! Product teams should make an impact! If you can’t at least give a qualitative description of how good product practices will benefit the company, what do you expect a business leader to say in return?

Find trusted, cross-functional allies

In many companies, it feels like the product management team is well down the pecking order. In some companies, it feels like their opinion isn’t respected at all. In cases like these, it’s important to find allies within the organisation to bolster your own advocacy.

In most product companies, there will be people from other teams, like Sales, Marketing or Customer Success, who have worked in other, better-functioning organisations. These people can be valuable allies to help you make your case to a sceptical leadership team who are tired of hearing all this “book talk”.

It doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to get your way, but don’t underestimate the power of a united front in selling the message.

Be prepared to lose the battle to win the war

Rome was famously not built in a day. I’m sure that if you wrote down all the ways your company could be “better at product”, there’s a big list of improvements you want to make.

It’s tempting to try to think that you have to stand your ground on all of these at the same time, because that’s what the books say, and how can you possibly be a “proper” product team if you don’t do all these things?

But change is a process, and you don’t have to fix everything at once. Sometimes you have to be prepared to give up ground in one area to ensure that you don’t burn all your credibility in one go. You still want to get invited to meetings and be seen as a trusted partner, rather than an inflexible fundamentalist.

This doesn’t mean you have to give up; simply be savvy and choose the right time to go all-in.

Bonus Tip: Get External Help

Now, of course, this is the sort of thing a consultant like me would say (and I’d be delighted to chat!). That said, getting an external perspective from a qualified someone with a wider perspective, whoever it may be, is an excellent way to build support for change.

This can be a consultant who conducts an assessment of your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, or a coach who can help you make a case and deliver the right kinds of changes. Even if they end up saying the same things that you were already saying, take the win. The most important thing, after all, is that the changes happen.

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Now, to be clear, there are companies out there willing to change, and there are companies out there that will resist all changes tooth and nail. And, actually implementing changes can be fraught with difficulties (I talked about ways to approach this in this article recently).

Not all companies will want to work the way you want to work. An important consideration is whether there is any appetite to change at all, and whether any of the things you can’t change are showstoppers for you and are preventing you from doing the job you want to do.

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Does this post resonate with you? Do you disagree? What have you tried in the past? Feel free to hit me up in the comments!