Future of Product Management: 2021 Forecast
Introduction
Product management has come a long way in the last decade but there have been many setbacks. There is more interest and awareness in product management than ever before. But the product world has also become an increasingly chaotic domain.
There are many human and commercial motivations at play, influencing the state of the product management domain. This sober and concise review outlines some of the market dynamics in product management which will emerge in the very near future.
The Positives
- Career — The product management profession will be further recognized as a lifelong career and as a stepping stone to an executive management position.
- Certification — Product management will be spared the certification inflation phenomena that has plagued the Agile and IT worlds. Product management certification options on the market will remain relatively stable. New and existing low-stakes product management certifications that are easy to pass will be heavily promoted.
- Crossover — Google is now offering a Project Manager and UX Designer courses. The Project Management Institute (PMI) now offers five different Agile certifications. Google, PMI, and similar organizations will eventually offer product management courses and certifications, most likely based on public-domain content or Agile software development methods. The large marketing budgets will drive interest in a product management career.
- Interest — Investment and interest in product management will grow as more companies wish to transition from a technology-driven product delivery strategy to a market-driven one. In addition, the rising popularity of Scrum in software development had spurred a growing debate about its relationship with product management, and this in turn had created a great interest in understanding what true product management is.
- Jobs — More job openings in product management will be available than ever before, in both high-tech and traditional industries. This dynamic will raise more awareness to product management.
- Large Consulting — Large consulting and research firms (e.g. Gartner, Forrester) will build and market their own branded product management consulting service. Expensive and superficial, these services will be primarily based on widely available public-domain content (lean, mvp, agile, design thinking, etc’). This dynamic will raise more awareness to product management.
- Online Training — Web-based product management training options will continue to grow exponentially. Primary formats of delivery will be streaming videos of pre-recorded lessons and web-based presentations. This dynamic will make the most basic product management content available for free or at affordable prices.
- Product Coach — More companies will acknowledge the need for internal mentoring and will build internal product management coaching and mentoring programs for their employees. The new role of a Product Coach will be gradually recognized.
- Product Groups — Emphasis and demand for consulting services on building efficient product groups will continue to grow. In particular, large and enterprise companies will seek to build large product groups with more consistency in the internal management and application of the product management discipline across business units.
- Product Leadership — Hiring will boom for senior professionals (CPOs, VPs) who know how to formulate and lead product organizations and establish effective product management processes. But there are not enough experienced and knowledgeable product leaders to meet the growing demand.
- Product Management Methodologies — PMTK remains only product management methodology presently available. Simple unsupported product management models that are partial to Agile software development will be introduced into the market by new entrants.
- Startups — Hiring for product management positions at technology startups will boom. Expectedly, practitioners at these companies will struggle to apply discipline and structure.
- Strategy — Renewed interest in strategic product management will continue. However, the unsupported Generalization and Technology approaches to product management will remain the most dominant forms of product management being practiced.
- Traditional Industries — Traditional industries, specifically non-software manufacturers and services providers, will see the need to build new product management groups and adopt universal product management methodologies that are unrelated to software.
The Negatives
- Agile Money — The commercialization movement of selling Agile training, consulting, coaching, certification, and transformation services will continue to spiral out of control. Agile commercialization in itself will have negligible or no impact on product management.
- Agile Wars — No clear winner will emerge from the ongoing state of competition between the various Agile methods (LeSS, DAD, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP). Each of these software development methods on its own will attempt to encroach upon product management, trying to shape and control product management to their needs.
- Community — Online product management meetups and virtual conferences will replace the former in-person events. But there will be less online community events with less participants comparatively since travel and in-person networking (not content) were the driving forces for in-person community events. If at all, it will take several years to return to pre Covid-19 levels.
- Coveted Employment — In order to boost sales and as a marketing tactic, some product management training and consulting vendors will informally allude that their services can help secure employment or a job interview at highly sought companies such as Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc’. This marketing tactic is questionable.
- Definitions — What is product management? what does a product manager do?. People will continue to struggle with questions related to product management identity and role definitions that have already been answered in PMTK twenty years ago.
- Guru — The masses’ desire for a visionary and futurist in product management will come up empty handed. This is because the product management domain is finite. Instead, one or more Tony Robbins-like inspirational and motivational figures could emerge.
- Job Descriptions — There will be more splintering and variations in product management job descriptions. The product manager job descriptions will be increasingly more task-based as opposed to being role-based, heavily slanted towards the Generalization or Technology approaches to product management.
- Politics and Social Justice — In order to boost sales and as a marketing tactic, some product management training and consulting vendors will attempt to link product management to a wide range of political topics and social justice issues such as diversity, inclusion, gender, women, race, minorities, climate change, inequality, etc’. This marketing effort will be inconsequential.
- Product Manager vs Product Owner — Scrum is supposedly intentionally unclear and incomplete. The Scrum guide does not mention “product manager” even once. Yet some people continue to opine that the Scrum Product Owner role is an alternative to the Product Manager role. Despite forceful counter arguments, this debate will not cease.
- Public Training — Demand for in-person public courses will gradually diminish and online (web-based)product management training will progressively replace in-person (classroom) public training. This situation will continue post Covid-19.
- Publications — A steady stream of self-published superficial booklets and eBooks will trickle in to the market. These product management booklets will mostly contain blog post aggregations, collections of interviews with practitioners, lists of tips & tricks, career suggestions, and a lot of widely available public-domain content (lean, mvp, agile, design thinking, etc’).
- Rebranding — Product management practitioners will continue to be distracted by the renaming and relabeling of pre-existing terms and content, in the attempt to provide the appearance of new and promising ideas. Original content in product management remains woefully lacking.
- Scrum — Unsupported interpretations of Scrum will increase with ongoing attempts to shape and control product management to their needs via the product owner role. As a general rule, more companies will realize that the product manager is not subservient to any product development method currently employed by the engineers.
- Social Media — Product management related online social media postings and discussions will reach a steady volume and will not grow any further. Social media channels will be increasingly flooded by commercial and advertising posts.
- Software Development — Software development practices will continue to struggle for a very long time to achieve subject matter consolidation. Endless internal debates, over-analysis, and over-interpretations will continue to spill over from product development in to product management, and hamper the job of product managers at software development companies. Conflation between product management and product development will remain an ongoing problem.
- Talent Recession — The ongoing talent recession in product management hiring will continue. It will become increasingly difficult to find qualified product managers at all levels and in many industries, not just high-tech.
- Tangential Training — The unsupported Generalization approach to product management (product manager does everything, aka CEO of the Product) and Technology approach (product management is an extension to product development) provides justification for vendors to offer a variety of useful but non-essential generic courses. This will include just about anything from financial reporting and social media to basic coding and wireframing.
- Thought Leadership — Sorely lacking for a very long time, thought leadership in product management will be marginalized. The quest to learn and understand the fundamentals and principles of product management will be ignored. Ongoing debate and analysis on the nuances of unsubstantiated techniques will dominate the spotlight.
- Trivialization — In the absence of true thought leadership, product management related social media will continue to be inundated by rudimentary phrases (e.g. “ build the right product and build it right ”) that position themselves as thoughtful insights.
- Variations — Confusion will reign as unfounded variations of product management are increasingly being promoted for marketing purposes: digital product management, B2B product management, B2C product management, technical product management, software product management, lean product management, even UX product management or Agile product management. It will take a long time to untangle this and bring back some clarity into product management.
Summary
There is no better time to be a product manager but man-made challenges and obstacles await. Circumventing them is possible if one is keenly aware.