• Product Manager
• Leadership

The art of clarity: The real role of product management

We exist to create and maintain clarity within the Product Teams that we’re operating within.

Imagine you’re at a conference, and someone introduces themselves as a Product Manager. The chances are that you either have no idea what that means; or that you have so many ideas about what that means, that you’re immediately picturing a different reality to the other person.

I come across this challenge all the time. Even with my own management within my team of Product Managers at Brightec, I have found it difficult to neatly summarise why our role exists and therefore how we can do better at it.

It's all too easy to get bogged down in tooling and practices. Roadmapping, Backlog Refinement, User Flows, Stakeholder Meetings, etc.

All of these things are important, but they are not important ‘just because that’s what we do’. They are important because they serve the underlying purpose of a Product Manager.

Why, what and how?

Why’ gives us direction. ‘What’ turns that direction into decisions. ‘How’ belongs primarily to the experts doing the work.

Why are we building the thing that we’re building? As Product Managers, we need to chase hard after that answer as early as possible and then maintain the team’s focus on that answer for as long as possible.

What we’re building is the natural next question to conquer, and it's also in the Product Manager’s domain. I do not want to belittle the ‘What’, in fact it's perhaps the single most tangible part of our role. Managing the scope, making decisions about what to say yes to and what to say no to. These are crucial elements of the role, but they’re impossible to do well without a crystal clear understanding of why the project exists in the first place.

When we understand the why behind the what, our decisions become far more powerful and far more confident. Difficult conversations with stakeholders get flipped on their head. It's not just ‘Yes, that feature is in scope’ it's “Yes, that feature is absolutely in scope, in fact it's indispensable to get to the outcome that we all want”. It's not just “No, you can’t have that” it's “No, you don’t want that, because it doesn’t get you where you want to go”.

What that looks like in practice

When we started talking to the Virgin Trains Ticketing team about giving their marketing team more freedom within the app, the conversation could easily have become a list of features.

Instead, we spent a day together at the Brightec studio getting clear on what they were actually trying to achieve. Their marketing team wanted to be able to respond quickly, running campaigns and promotions in the app without being held back by older technology or waiting for a new app release.

That clarity gave us something much more useful to build around. It eventually led to a capability that allows the team to manage in-app messages and promotions themselves. They now use it across campaigns including Triple Points and railcard promotions.

The feature mattered. But understanding why they needed it was what helped us arrive at the right feature in the first place.

Your internal compass

We cannot have conversations like this with the team or with stakeholders without our own internal compass alignment. Ask yourself, “Do I understand what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it?” If you can’t answer that, the chances are your team or your client is lost too. If you can answer that, you’ll be able to maintain focus and clarity for everyone else and you’ll have the perfect filter through which to pass all the team’s amazing ideas.

It would be criminal at this point not to mention the obvious links between this line of thinking and Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’. (Although unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years you’ve more than likely already read or referenced it.)

‘Why’ comes first. Product Managers seek this out passionately. This is the foundation for our clarity.

‘What’ comes next, and is informed by the Why, as well as the expert ideas of our team. Product Managers continually speak into this, but constantly refer back to how each item serves the foundational purpose.

‘How’ comes last for a Product Manager. Our job is to give the experts enough clarity about the Why and What to determine the best How.

Give great people something to build around

At Brightec, I’m privileged to work alongside genuine experts and genuinely creative people. There is no shortage of ideas or skills to get a fantastic job done. The team could build almost anything. Where the Product Managers come in, is to act as the scaffolding within which the team can safely build the right thing.

The old ‘build it and they will come’ mantra is slightly flipped around for a Product Manager. It's more like ‘Provide a clear vision and a ton of scaffolding poles, and your expert team will build you the most impressive building you’ve ever seen’.

Everything comes back to clarity

All the other tools and practices essentially come back to this, how do I bring and communicate clarity to my team?

Roadmapping? That’s how you bring clarity on where the product is headed.

Backlog Refinement? That’s how you facilitate clarity on the steps the team can take to get there.

User Flows? That’s how you clarify the shape of the product to the rest of the team.

Stakeholder Meetings? That’s how you maintain clarity of expectations between all parties.

And the need for that clarity looks different every time. For Virgin Wines, it meant helping guide the team through their first ever app build. For Waterstones, it has meant stepping back and looking across a complex, multi-platform technical landscape. For Willis Towers Watson, it can mean getting around a roadmap together and making sure everyone understands where we’re going and why.

Different products, different teams and very different challenges. The Product Manager’s job underneath all of it remains remarkably consistent.

So, what does a Product Manager actually do? We create clarity. Everything else is a tool for getting there.