Product management is heck

Business is much like bloodless war, and it’s common for business leaders find inspiration in classics of military strategy like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. So it might not be too surprising that the lessons learned from the recent war in Iraq may provide some useful insights into how to compete in the business world. In particular, what was learned about situational awareness may be particularly relevant for product managers.

Situational awareness focuses on the knowledge and understanding of their environment that helps people make complex decisions. It’s particularly important in cases where there is a lot of information available and a poor decision can have severe consequences. Thus situational awareness is critical for people like air traffic controllers, military commanders and doctors.

You can probably add product management to this list. There are often large amounts of information available to product managers and poor product management can bring down a company as easily as poor air traffic control can cause planes to crash. And although billions of dollars are spent each year on research and development of systems designed to increase the situational awareness in many fields, there seem to be few advances that help product managers do their jobs better.

Military commanders have two types of situational awareness to be concerned with.: situational awareness of friendly units and situational awareness of enemy units. Inadequate situational awareness of your own units can lead to casualties from friendly fire, which are just as serious as casualties caused by enemy action. Inadequate situational awareness of enemy units can lead to being outmaneuvered and defeated, even by a weaker enemy force. A good military commander should have both of these types of situational awareness.

This roughly parallels the two roles that a product manager plays. They need to work with their engineering organization to guide the development of their products. Doing this requires a situational awareness of their engineering organization that’s much like the situational awareness of their own units that military commanders need. Product managers also need situational awareness of the market in which their products compete and of their competitors in this market. This is much like the situational awareness that military commanders need of enemy units. And much like a successful military commander needs to understand both his units and those of the enemy, a product manager needs to understand both the development of his products as well as the way in which they will compete in their market if he’s going to be successful.

An ideal product manager should be able to excel at managing both his engineering organization as well as working with his marketing organization, but not everyone is equally skilled in both aspects of the job or has the time to do both well. So if you have to pick one area to excel in over the other, which one should it be? The lessons learned from the recent war in Iraq may provide some useful insight in this area.

One of the lessons learned in this war was that situational awareness of enemy units is more important that situational awareness of friendly ones. If you don’t keep track of friendly forces, they’ll usually try to cover your mistakes because they’re also keeping track of your units. On the other hand, enemy units are not so helpful. They don’t go out of their way to make sure that your mistakes don’t cause problems. They do the exact opposite, in fact – they look for your mistakes and try to exploit them for their benefit.

This suggests that product managers who need to focus on either dealing with their engineering organizations or dealing with their marketing organizations might do better to focus on marketing. If you don’t work with engineering as closely as you’d like to, it’s likely that your engineering organization will still try their best to deliver what’s needed. On the other hand, if you neglect marketing, then your competitors will eventually notice any missteps and will do their best to exploit them.

In an ideal world, all product managers would have an aptitude for both engineering management and marketing as well as the time to effectively manage both aspects of their products. In the real world, however, this never seems to happen, and it might be the case that product managers who need to decide how to spend their limited time should focus on marketing instead of engineering.