|
The Collection Wed, 12 Mar 25 |
Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time—every week.. |
Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
A. B. C. D.
In 2017, two professors wrote a book titled Digital Product Management Thinking. At its core was this acronym standing for Analytics, Business model, Coordination, and Design thinking. Essentially, all the key foundations for a great product professional.
Eight years later, both the acronym and the profession it sought to shape are getting all jumbled up. Things are moving around, some are being replaced wholesale.
Product management, and product managers (PMs), are in a crisis.
Let me quote my colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan, an ex-PM with a decade of experience himself, from one of his October 2024 newsletters.
Of late, thanks to reduced venture capital, the rise of AI, and other factors, companies are increasingly leaning towards getting rid of the product management function altogether.
Like I wrote a few weeks ago, some founders have told me privately that they believe that over 90% of product management roles aren’t needed. Others believe that designers, engineers, or business people can simply extend a bit and play the role of a PM.
Praveen surveyed over 1,000 product managers to find out who or what was responsible for this. Why were executives starting to doubt the value of product management roles? Why were so many product managers starting to feel like their profession was a scam? You should read the piece for a deeper look at the survey results and what they mean, or listen to the related episode of the Two by Two podcast. Both are linked below.
Two By Two • 13 |
|
Well, in the months since, AI’s proliferation has only worsened this precarity.
I asked Prof. Varun Nagaraj, one of the authors of the book I mentioned above and currently dean at SPJIMR, about what was happening with product managers and AI, and we stumbled across a new acronym.
C.S.S.R. stands for Critical thinking (which Prof. Nagaraj believes is absent in many PMs), Systems thinking, Responsibility, and “Senseshaping”. It doesn’t have the same ring as A.B.C.D. But these traits might be the kind of “eternal qualities” product managers need right now—to not just safeguard their roles from AI, but thrive with it.
First, some quick context.
In the early 2010s, PMs became the king of the hill in the Indian startup and IT scene. And they did it by driving another variety of PM into obsolescence. Because before there was the product manager, there was the project manager.
The latter, a product of the early IT services age, just couldn’t keep up with the new kid on the block.
A project manager deals with the day-to-day running of the project, understands what outcomes are needed, and coordinates with teams to get it done.
A PM, on the other hand, can take a hammer to the whole thing. “The PM can question everything and spends more time thinking about the problem,” says Sanghavi. It’s a PM’s job to form a hypothesis for the product, find metrics to support it, and then execute. PMs also function across teams like business, marketing and tech, but contribute towards ideation rather than just process.
PMs have grown to be hydra-headed gods.
Project Manager is dead. Long live the Product Manager, The Ken
Product functions and roles have evolved rapidly since, though. And some, such as product design and designers, have started to plant their own stakes in the ground, as we wrote in 2022.
But product management was also starting to lose some of its edge. The magic was getting lost in the mundane, and it became less about art and creativity—why many ambitious professionals flocked to it in the first place—and more about “science”. It was the killing of this artistic side that was making the role redundant. To quote Praveen in yet another edition of The Nutgraf:
“At one point, product managers did what they did because they thought of themselves as creators. Sure, they did the impact assessments, the documentation, the product roadmaps, and the boring Jira tickets, but they also revelled in doing things sometimes because it was cool, serendipitous, or simply beautiful.
Today, they pride themselves on being excellent bureaucrats.”
Product Managers used to be creators. Now they are mostly bureaucrats
But some are learning how to fight in the darkness
Who killed the art of Product Management in India?
It's a murder mystery, and there are several suspects
That brings us to AI. It’s clear that bureaucrats are what it’s coming for first, and that A.B.C.D. may not be enough for PMs to hold their ground.
Out of C.S.S.R., “Senseshaping” is particularly interesting to me. You can read more about it in this research paper, but here is how Prof. Nagaraj explained it.
“…Individual people in an organisation have their perspectives on what is important, what is not… How do you bring these multiple perspectives together?
You can never have perfect alignment. But what you can do is come up with some sort of a view that takes the best views that a product designer might have, that a salesperson might have, that the business development person might have, that customers might have, that developers might have… people who have some experience in what has worked before and what has not.
So all these viewpoints, in my opinion, have to be synchronized or coordinated in some manner.
[…]
This is the creation of a common reality.”
A reality that AI will find the hardest to create because it involves social intelligence, “a very underappreciated part” of product management.
And that’s not the only approach PMs can take either.
They should be putting AI to use.
Prof. Vishal Karungulam, who currently teaches product management and innovation at the Indian School of Business and has previously worked at Microsoft and Google, believes that AI has made the ideation and validation process far more accessible. That makes it immensely useful for product managers.
“One of the big bottlenecks of product management was engineering capacity.
Say I have 10 engineers. How do I optimally make use of their capacity? That is the problem everybody is optimising for, because they are expensive resources.
[…]
But now, with these kinds of tools, the big advantage for someone in a product management role is that you can actually run these experiments yourself without involving the engineering team, and decide or prioritise which ones should actually get coded up in production by the engineers.”
You can’t let a good crisis go to waste, after all.
Below, you will find this week’s entire collection—stories and articles from The Ken on how product management and managers got to this point, why they are feeling the pressure, and what they could be doing to turn things around.
Write to rahul@the-ken.com or leave a comment on our website or app if you’d like to share your thoughts with us.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rahul leads the promotion and distribution efforts for the journalism produced by The Ken. He works at the intersection of the publication's editorial and business operations..
|
|
Share this edition
You can use the easy share buttons below
|
|
|
|
|
© 2025 The Ken
Do you know anyone else who would like to read this newsletter?
Share this edition with them.