Is Product Management important?
Summary of the panel discussion I hosted at Techcon So Cal
Hi PMs,
Is Product Management Important?
What are the main goals for a product organization?
This weekend I had the honor to moderate a panel discussion on product management at the TechCon Socal in San Diego.
My panelists were
Gui Peres - CEO of Ergomotion
David Richter - VO Business and Customer Development at Doordash
Renil Komitla - CEO Terralogic
Gaurav Agrawal - COO Clickup
We have seen various sides of the argument on the importance of product management. Some say they are the CEO and some say are glorified business analysts or project managers.
So I started with this controversial question.
Overwhelming answer was Yes. The function itself is important.
I then asked what is main mission of a PM Org. Their main mission is customer value with an eye on revenue growth.
A good product org should have a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve in the marketplace. There can be technical PMs who are focused on ensuring the product provides the value as promised. There are feature PMs who are focused on improving the product experience and add customer value. And then there are growth PMs
So when you are hiring a PM, ask what is the goal of the role and then hire for those traits.
I then asked PLG/SLG and Gaurav’s take was this was a wrong way to look at it. To him, the key question is what is your inbound mechanism. It could be content/blogs/social or the product itself. If the inbound is product, then you tailor the GTM motion around that and make it successful.
According to him, products that are horizontal with a large market and low price range, are more suitable for PLG motion. High ticket prices or products with high set up are more suited for SLG.
We briefly touched upon PM in the age of AI. They all agree that AI is here and anyone who effectively leverages these tools will benefit. However, they all said that PM’s core mission towards customer empathy and revenue growth is not going to change.
Now this panel consisted of CEOs and GTM leaders and it was important to understand their expectation of the role. They want their PM Orgs to figure out the best value a customer can obtain that can provide the best opportunity for revenue growth.
There is a video of the discussion, which I will post when made available.
To summarize, your jobs are safe. However, not for those PMs who think their job is to gather requirements and create stories and test features. Those will likely be automated. Rather it will be understanding the markets, the customer and grow revenue.
And this has been my mantra in all the article I have written around the role of product management.
Here is one from a recent past.
Until next week.