The New New New Product Development Game
Or just the old one?
This is a fragile thought piece designed to drive discussion on the role of Product Management. I am not certain of my opinion and only have my experiences and biases to draw from. Feedback and different views are welcome. See it as a request for comments.
It began in 1986 when Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikurgiro Nonaka published “The New New Product Development Game” in the Harvard Business Review. The authors spotted some positive trends in de-risking product development. “Companies are increasingly realizing that the old sequential approach to developing new products simply won’t get the job done”, they said. “Instead, companies in Japan and the United States are using a holistic method—as in rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.”
They observed a product development process that “emerges from the constant interaction of a hand-picked, multidisciplinary team whose members work together from start to finish.”
Here begins the pull of the business into product development and the ending of the world where Product Managers (or Product Marketing Managers as they might have been called back then) would define the requirements and hand them over to a Product Development team (usually led by a project manager). Since then, with these ideas having been adopted by Agile and Scrum, everything has been so much better - or has it? And for who?
It is observably true that some forms of complex product development work benefit from doing work in parallel and faster feedback loops. But product development is one thing, Product Management, the business function of identifying what needs to be done with products operates on a different cadence, requires focus and effort and a different skill set to product development.
The authors of the “New New Product Development Game” were careful to point out that “Top management kicks off the development process by signaling a broad goal or a general strategic direction.” This is Product Management and my issue is that this new game dragged Product Management (through its Agile and Scrum adoption) into product development software projects without compensating for the capacity lost to strategic research and thinking. Better for software developers for sure. Better for customers and better for the business - not if you’ve lost the insight to identify the right product development to prioritise.
Scrum evolved from a framework for software projects into an attempt at a framework for Product Management - for which it is deeply lacking. Scrum explicitly defines the Scrum Team as being responsible “for all product-related activities” and created the Frankenstein Product Owner role - not just the orderer of the Product Backlog but the single voice of priority for the whole product. Seemingly nobody stopped to consider whether any one individual would have the capacity to do this with any level of credibility. No wonder that the Product Owner role has many different interpretations. Feature factories, the very thing that the Scrum community so rails against are the direct result of having no capacity set aside for research and strategic thinking. No business leader will give the empowerment that Scrum demands to a role that has no earned credibility.
Ken Schwaber himself stated in a 2011 blog post, “Scrum has been driven from the (software) development community. I think this causes us to see the Product Owner in our eyes. What can they do to help us do better. We haven’t seen them through their eyes, responsible for a product…The people in Product Management and customers have caught on. They have realized that we want them for ourselves, to help us do our work. They have fled, leaving behind a largely eviscerated Product Owner position, the Product Owner/Business Analyst.”
Sadly, Ken’s only proposed solution in his blog post was to create a course - which seems par for the course for the Scrum community - create ambiguity and then make money out of it.
There is a New New New Product Development game occurring. It’s being interpreted by some as the end of Product Management or at least a disillusionment with it. I would agree that Product Management has a credibility problem and I would argue this exists because it has given up its place in the organisation to ambiguity directly as a result of the pull into the product development game. When you start referring to yourselves as “the glue” you have a big problem with your worth.
Or maybe the New New New Product Development game is just the old game recurring? Airbnb took Product Managers away from product development and morphed the function into Product Marketing. The Shape-Up method (37 Signals) doesn’t have Product Managers in product development projects. Both pair Product Designers and Engineers together.
Just maybe then we are starting to recognize that the demand from software developers that “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” was an overstretch. Business people need to evaluate the market for opportunities and determine whether product development represents an opportunity. They also need a level of oversight on the progress of investments/bets placed. People who can work closely with customers to find solutions to their needs for a given opportunity should work together daily. Perhaps we need to recognise that these people are Product Designers and Engineers - not Product Managers.