Ousting the middle manager in PM/PMM organizations
After reading an interesting post in HBR (The End of the Middle Manager), I’m compelled to offer my response. I find the HBR post timely and noteworthy. Here we go.
First, let’s take a look at the classic product management/product marketing organization (PM/PMM): Pragmatic Marketing’s most recent survey of product management professionals tells us 63% of product managers report to either a ‘director’ or a manager. The other 37% report to an executive, and my guess is they work in small, nimble, flat organizations like start ups that reward productivity over process and cannot afford the deadweight of a middle manager. The focus of this post is the 63% that report to a director/manager and question the need for that middle manager role.
In my experience, most ‘director/manager’ of PM/PMM positions are limited to the following four duties:
- Tracking statuses of individual product managers in the team (and rolling up their status reports to report to the VP) – as indicated in Lynda Gratton’s research in the HBR post
- Combining individual product decks to a portfolio deck and presenting it as the company product strategy (in many instances there is no synergy among individual products; instead, they are merely grouped for organizational politics)
- Testing ground for people management skills of a product manager (often costly)
- Spending 25 to 30% of time on HR activities (e.g corporate compliance forms, expense approvals, HR training)
Next, in regard to the HBR post I referenced above, I found the following excerpt to be particularly striking: “Gen Y workers see no value in reporting to someone who simply keeps track of what they do, when much of that can be done by themselves, their peers, or a machine. What they do value is mentoring and coaching from someone they respect. Someone, in other words, who is a master—not a general manager.”
Based on my personal experience with product management & product marketing, HBR’s observations are not far from the truth in many (though I’m tempted to say ‘all’!) PM & PMM organizations. Rather than proving useful, ‘directors’ often exhibit one or more of the following ‘occupational hazards’:
- Having no (or little) idea about the products
- Mostly managing up
- Rolling presentations up/down the organizational chain
- Spending inordinate amounts of time on meetings because he/she is representing the whole team
If you find the above characteristics present in your current PM/PMM organizations, it may be time to consider an organizational redesign. The next time your ‘director of PM/PMM’ is out of the office with no access to his/her email or telephone for a full week, consider the following questions: What happened? Were interactions between the executive team and the frontline PM/PMM more fruitful? Did you still see a need to pay someone to act as middle manager between the PM/PMM and the executive team? Was productivity halted when the middle manager was out of the office?
If your organization’s needs are not being fulfilled, it may be time to consider dispensing of your ‘director’ of product management/product marketing. Here’s a quick assessment to help you judge for yourself:
Is a middle manager in the PM/PMM organization necessary for your business?
Can you dispense of the ‘director’ of product management/product marketing role in your organization? Here are four question areas to consider:
- Does the role offer anything beyond general management skills? In other words, does this person create anything of value or is he/she simply cutting and pasting, paraphrasing direct reports?
- Does this person prevent work from getting done? Does it take longer to create, plan, and execute tasks because this person sits between the doer and the executive who approves the budget/resource?
- What original deliverables did the middle manager create in a calendar year?
- Is this ‘director/manager’ a master of anything? Ideally, the answer should not be the unary ‘people management’.
Answers to the four questions above should help you decide on the necessity of a full time middle manager solely for ‘managing’ PM/PMM members of your organization. When organizational designs are tending to flatter, faster and effective models, it is time to inspect the PM/PMM organization and challenge widely accepted models.
Related posts:
- ProductCamp Boston & Building Product Management Organizations
- Why is innovation hard for large organizations?
- Are you a PRODUCT manager or a product MANAGER?
- Worth Repeating: How to be a GREAT Product Manager
- Good Bye “Product Owner”, Hello “Backlog Manager”
Ousting middle managers in PM/PMM orgs http://wp.me/pXBON-1XK @onpm #prodmgmt #prodmktg
oh, this is a good one RT @PGopalan: Ousting middle managers in PM/PMM orgs http://wp.me/pXBON-1XK @onpm #prodmgmt #prodmktg
Ousting the middle manager in PM/PMM organizations. Interesting observation. http://bit.ly/hQoT1L
Prabhakar,
Great thoughts to consider. .
Product Management and Marketing by itself it is a tough role. Being a manager also has it challenges. Finding someone that can do both roles effectively is not easy but in my opinion is worth finding (or developing).
The best Product Manager Director I have ever worked for was a master. He had a strong vision of where the portfolio should go and was not only able to help drive the team that way but also provide air cover from outside distractions.
Now, this experience was based on a multi-billion dollar portfolio of products so it made sense to have the team and the structure. Should this be in place for a smaller, startup organization, probably not.
The main point you bring up that I completely agree with is the need to break down barriers when it comes to making planning decisions. In my experience, waiting for and having to revisit decisions was one of the most frustrating parts of the job.
Maybe what you are really advocating for here is better manager training? Often it is the best/visionary product manager that gets promoted but that does not mean she/he are ready to be a team leader.
And to end with a follow-up question, without having experienced managers/mentors, how are new/young product managers going to develop into experienced/successful product managers?
Thanks for brining up such an excellent question.
Josh
Thanks,
Josh
Josh,
Thanks for your comments and thoughtful questions.
You have it right when you say being both product manager and a people manager isn’t an easy thing to do. There is no guarantee you’ll be good or successful at both. I think most of us in the PM/PMM world are aware of this. Yet, we see that the career path for most PM/PMMs is simply the next level which is managing a team of PMs. While that position takes away a lot of actual PM responsibilities, it reduces the manager’s role to simply an HR monkey. Add the inadequacies and unsuitability for a people manager role, you end up with a dysfunctional product organization.
Of course all of the above assumes you need a people manager. One of my fundamental questions is, do you really need a people manager? in this day and age, and that too a full time position?
My hypothesis is the following – the world we live in today requires less people managers (and definitely not a full time people manager) and more collaborators and innovation managers, not people managers. Organizational design of the past required line managers and automatons to work for them. That model suits an assembly line in a factory. I don’t think it suits a creative workforce = some of Gen X and most of Gen Y.
The plague of people management is rampant in large companies because of two reasons – 1) Peter Principle and 2) lack of real personal growth opportunities within the firm. Contemporary managerial wisdom (obvious in practice but not explicitly codified) to address both 1) and 2) – invent more needless layers of organization to keep people ‘occupied’. Smaller companies can’t afford it, but otherwise they would do too.
At one level, it is the demographics of the corporate world today that wants to drive to a hierarchical organization – because of recent memory. It worked before when people occupied positions at the top by inheritance (like royalty), influence (connections with those already in power), information (only a select few had access to knowledge/influence to get power), socio-economic-cultural factors (poor representation of women, people of a particular race, income group etc) or plain serendipity. But look at the world now. It is now a competition for ideas, innovation and execution like never before. Rewards go to the producer directly and art/creativity is finally accessible and distributed (many times free – e.g. open source) at large scale and at very little cost – all of that was not even remotely possible before.
So what or who wins? Organizations that eschew systems kept to maintain the status quo (e.g. bad culture, poor org design, limited opportunities for employees) of the past are most likely to succeed. A large number of incumbents will try (for longer than we want) to wrest their sense of brand, image, culture and falsehood but they will all fail ultimately. Rome failed. Nobody is immune to failure and we know that is always true.
What I am urging product leaders here, is to do a health check of their organizational design and adapt to the open world. There is still time.
Cheers
Prabhakar
Whenever you hear about “integration,” “silo busting,” or “ousting the middle manager,” what you are really seeing is the generalist tying to over extend themselves. No. If you can’t work with a functional unit, not talking business unit managers, then you are the problem, not the functional unit manager.
Organizations came into being because of the specialization of work. They persist because work is still specialized. Organizational structure organizes knowledge and meaning.
As yourself, you the correct person to decide what version control system development should use? Who makes that decision? The VP of Development makes that decision. They take those decisions off your plate. Likewise across the organization.
If you abolished the middle manager you’d have too much gunk to deal with and you wouldn’t be able to get your PM duties done. It’s not just a matter of staff and your need for authority. It’s a matter of your time.
Staff and authority pretty much means you can’t lead. Oh, well. Never, as a PM, manage staff. Lead them instead.
That functional unit manager has to provide resources to more than just your product. In established organizations, there are several products. Do you really want to escalate a fight about that version control system to the director of product management, because two of you PMs can’t agree. Again, a huge wast of your time and your bosses time.
Functional units are full of self-selected people unlike you. They have to meet professional definitions of the work and its quality. You don’t. I’ve worked with plenty of PM that assumed, failed to communicate, and who having authority over staffing fired people. People who did great work. If that functional unit contributor can’t do great work, they have to leave to protect their career. The functional unit manager ensure that they can do great work and insulates their people from the unknowing, and uninterested generalist know nothing–YOU.
During the #aopm chats, we talked about how anthropology makes us better product managers. It helps us see the real structure of our markets, the functional cultures that comprise it, and it helps us deal with the functional cultures within our own organizations.
The proposers of these destructive ideas like getting rid of the functional manager originate from their own functional cultures, usually functional cultures that inherently ignore functional cultures. But financialization, b-school, the PMI are all concepts with meanings subscribed to by subpopulation, so they are subcultures.
So how do you deal with a functional manager as a PM? Consider your team members boss to be on your team. That means you have to stay in the loop with the functional manager. And, I don’t mean in the loop about the team member. I mean in the loop about the capability. Knowing this manager and their goals can make things easier for your team member, and your product.
At a certain point in the product lifecycle, organizational capabilities expand within the offer. That means as more time passes, you need to work with more functional managers to ensure that those capabilities are ready to go. You need to work with more functional managers, rather than less.
Don’t bust silos. Don’t average functionality via integration. Don’t axe or ignore the functional unit manager. Just don’t.
Consider the solo contributor who doesn’t have a functional unit manager. They have no influence in the organization at all. They work without good tools. They work at the cheap end of the spectrum. They make all the decisions that a functional unit manager makes.
As negotiators, they win their negotiations 8% or 2% of the time depending on the work they do. A functional unit manager wins 35% of the time, a vast improvement for the solo contributor.
If a contractor is doing the work, without a functional manager the situation is even worse. Frankly, you don’t care about this, but somebody has to do it. You assume much, don’t ask, and don’t tell. If it turns out to be a mess. Look in the mirror. Some organizations actually have bad attitudes towards contractors–again, making getting the work done that much harder.
If you can’t get someone to do what needs to be done the way you want it done, Don’t look anywhere else, except yourself. You can’t lead. Stop blaming everyone else.
RT @joshua_d: oh, this is a good one RT @PGopalan: Ousting middle managers in PM/PMM orgs http://wp.me/pXBON-1XK @onpm #prodmgmt #prodmktg
Ousting the middle manager in PM/PMM organizations – http://inverta.me/gFn3rp
http://onproductmanagement.net/2011/01/15/ousting-the-middle-manager-in-pmpmm-organizations/
Quote: 'Gen Y workers see no value in reporting to someone who simply keeps track of what they do…' http://bit.ly/fuOgMZ , OnProdMgt.
Their primary role of product management is to make companies truly market and become customer driven by listening and ensuring customer input is used internally in the organization to improve the business. It is sometimes skipped that these activities are part of promotion, which is one component of a true marketing function. To define the message, you must first define the product and then define the benefits that the product delivers. The aim of product marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.