"It must be remembered that nothing is more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain of its success than to create a new system."
-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince 1535
Introduction
Since the earliest days, humanity has looked at their surroundings with a critical eye, asking, "How can I improve this?" This quest for betterment has been the driving force behind innovation, from the invention of the wheel to the complex technologies of today. It's interesting to see how this process of seeing a need and creating a product evolved over time.
The Dawn of Innovation
Perhaps the first instance of product development was the creation of the wheel — a tool made by those who needed it most. In those early years, each person was their own developer and the end user, crafting tools for their immediate needs. This self-sufficient, engineer-centric approach dominated most of civilization, where product development was synonymous with hardware development.
The Silicon Valley Era
Fast-forwarding through centuries of innovation, the rise of Silicon Valley kicked off what would become a pivotal shift in product development. High-tech in the valley began with engineers often developing products for other engineers. The engineers understood the product requirements implicitly. As recently as the 1990's there was no notion of having one person responsible for the requirements of the product. The idea of having a dedicated headcount just for product definition was absurd. During my time leading the SPARCstation development at SUN Microsystems, my team of 200 engineers and I determined what the product spec should be. We built what we knew — a practice I refer to as "Wave 1 Narcissistic Product Development."
Trend 1: The Evolution of Product Management
However, as innovation expanded beyond the engineering community, the need for a deeper understanding of specific customer requirements emerged. The role of Product Management began to crawl out of the product development primordial ooze, with dedicated individuals focusing solely on the customer journey. This will surprise many of you, but this is a relatively new concept and is still coming into its own. This marked a significant shift from an engineer-centric approach to a customer-focused methodology. Despite its relatively recent emergence and often being underappreciated, this role has become central to successful product development.
As innovation expanded and products were developed for consumers, ie, non-engineers, the need for understanding the specific customer requirements began to emerge. The role of Product Management (BTW, a terrible name, more on that later) began showing up in teams, and there were dedicated people, PMs whose job was to understand the customer and their requirements and distill that down into a product requirements doc that the engineers, would then develop.
This concept of having dedicated people on a team solely to understand the customer requirements, to immerse themselves in the customer journey, and to guide the definition of the product is still relatively new, misunderstood, and still highly UNDERVALUED.
When I say new note, Steve Blank and the Lean Launchpad movement have been explaining the importance of "Getting out of the building," understanding your customer and confirming Product Market Fit (PMF), but that began only ten years ago. (iPhone 5 era)
We have one clear trend in the creation of and the continuing evolution of the role of Product Management. (Have I mentioned what a confusing name that is ?)
The abundance of OTS technology.
Early on in the Valley, engineers became rock stars. Intel, SUN, CISCO, Nvidia, etc, all had brilliant engineers developing the proprietary base technology the systems were built on.
Historically, the companies with the best hardware engineering talent won.
The best engineers worked in teams to create unique technology that highly differentiated their products in the market. A company's success was predominately based on its in-house engineering expertise and its ability to attract and retain more and more engineering talent.
Then HW began to evolve. Hardware companies, such as SUN and Cisco, had initially designed their own custom chips, but as the industry evolved, chips became more and more complete systems on a chip. The key ingredients, such as BT, wifi, ethernet, etc., all became integrated into the chips and available OTS.
Many hardware companies evolved into largely system integrators. Apple, Nest, Ring, and SONOS, to pick a few, built great products that disrupted their segments, and yet all used off-the-shelf chips. HW companies succeeded by delivering solutions with breakthrough capabilities transforming their markets yet did not depend on deep proprietary internally developed technology. This is a critical trend that changed the way HW companies developed products.
I am not saying HW companies don't, at times, innovate by creating their own HW, but it is way more of an exception than the rule.
Software companies also began with foundationally proprietary SW. Google is a great example with its excellent algorithms; they created the notion of searching for the internet.
Adobe is also a great example of highly proprietary software for image processing and video editing, which made them #1 in their industry.
The companies with the best technology won. And to have the best technology, they needed the best engineers. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Adobe all developed amazing products and fought each other to get the best, brightest software engineers, as the early days of HW where those with the best engineers WON.
Trend 2: The Abundance of OTS technology.
Hardware, which has been evolving LONGER than software (because product development started as HW development) has over time developed incredible OTS technology that for the most part allows companies to build whatever they need HW-wise.
Hardware has evolved to have OTS ingredients of :
CPU
Wi-fi
Bluetooth
GPU and image processing
LTE
etc.
Companies designing new products that require state-of-the-art software technologies no longer have to develop these themselves. Software now has a staggering list of OTS ingredients as micro-services available to everyone.
Cloud-based servers for infinite compute
LLM for intelligent agents in any domain
Databases and Vector Databases
Image processing
Image generation
Voice recognition and NLP input
Voice with NLP output
Machine vision and object recognition
Location-based services
Mapping
No longer do you need to have an army of Data Scientists, NLP gurus, etc., to build state-of-the-art applications requiring this technology. The most advanced technology is available OTS and, of course, must be integrated seamlessly to create the actual product, the solution.
You need to know how to USE these technologies, not how to CREATE them. This is the software world following the hardware world, where it became essentially an integration capability that was required.
Rather than focusing all the resources on creating the technology, companies can now spend all that time and headcount to create the Solution.
This is a HUGE shift, and once embraced by the next wave of startups, companies will have both shorter time to market (TTM) and vastly improved PMF, which will result in dramatically steeper revenue ramps.
So no longer do the companies with the best proprietary HW or SW product win.
Companies that understand the customer's problems best and understand how to use technology to solve the customer's problems best are the new winners.
This brings me to say we are about to see "The Ascension of Product Management."
Product Management is evolving from an occasional nice to have in the last decade to assuming a proper leadership position in creating breakthrough products. Those who can immerse themselves into the customer experience and deeply understand the Art-of-the-possible become the Picassos of today. Those companies that invest in teams of product experts who can understand the customer's problems and define the solution while using a small team of developers will be the winners.
We all know that the customer is #1. What we are just finally learning is the companies that UNDERSTAND the customer the best, become #1.
It's that ability of an organization that transforms it from good to great.
Leave me a comment, and all suggestions for a better title than Product Management are well received.
Comments