Product management is the glue of the organization, the only group that interacts with sales, marketing, engineering, QA, support, ops, finance, the CEO, CTO and every other corner of the office. But it doesn’t matter how much responsibility sits within product management, there is never any authority that goes with it, too bad, deal with it.

For PMs-in-training: get a thick skin, develop a passionate voice and have data to back up your beliefs. This will earn you respect within the organization.

In my world, I report directly to the VP/GM of the business unit. In a sense, it is like reporting to the CEO (at least for our structure). This would be fine if the relationship between myself and the VP/GM were in lock step. However, he is the former VP of engineering, whom I think spent a night in a Holiday Inn Express, and now thinks he knows marketing. He has the (mistaken) notion that PM == Marketing, and feels that we in PM can really do three jobs effectively. First is the traditional PM role. Second is the PMM (product market management) role, and lastly, the Marketing Communication role. This would likely be OK if I had a single product, or even a single product line, but I manage two diverse (but related) product line, with 8 distinct products int he families.

If I were king for a day, I would carve some headcount out of our enormous engineering team (nearly 38% of our total staffing) to create a properly structured PM organization, and the marketing support organization, to handle our complex business.

However, since our VP/GM places the priority of adding PM talent one notch below hiring a full time receptionist, I have no illusions of it ever getting better.

I wholeheartedly agree to the comments above that a kick-ass PM can function anywhere, and that lesser PM’s will whither and die, particularly in the ballet that an effective PM has to dance to lead consensus among the key stakeholders. I used to be happy to try to mentor people who are new to PM, but after so many failures, I have concluded that good PM’s aren’t grown out of dissatisfied engineers, field applications engineers, or technical marketing people, but are born to the life.

Perhaps I am jaded, and indeed my current gig sucks eggs, but working for a leader who couldn’t lead a pack of hyenas to a dead wildebeest carcass is tiring and unrewarding. But I can’t imaging not doing this for a living. When you do well, it is the best feeling in the world.

I share similar experiences to those who are disagreeing with this post, and I had my best experiences when I’ve been in a PM org that reported directly to executive management. However, I’m not satisfied with the conclusion that “it’s ultimately up to my management” – regardless of what org I’m in.

Yes, if you report to someone who doesn’t support you or invest you with official authority, you’re going to have all kinds of problems when you’re disagreeing with others on product direction. As others have noted, that’s gonna be true whether you’re reporting up through marketing, engineering or directly to the CEO.

But for me, I take it as a personal failure if I can’t get management to back me up. Even if your boss is literally smoking crack, a PM’s gotta do what a PM’s gotta do. E.g. step one is to hold an intervention and put your boss through rehab, followed by step two which is to get them to sign-off on your latest product roadmap PPT. The most effective leaders use their personal authority to get things done – whatever it takes as long as its ethical.*

And that personal authority comes from peoples’ respect for your knowledge, abilities and the contributions you make to the team. It doesn’t come from having all the data to prove that you’re the one with the “right” answers. Early in my PM career, I made the mistake of believing in that sort of self-righteous “correctness”, and if management couldn’t see how obviously correct I was, then to hell with them. My “smarts” got me a lot of respect from sales, support, engineers and even management when we were talking about tactical stuff. But I was hitting a brick wall when management discussed strategic stuff.

Well, as we all should know, facts and logic aren’t the only way to influence people. Don’t get me wrong, facts and logic are great, and please use them liberally :) But I’ve had occasions where I’ve influenced key people by beating them at foosball or by singing Elvis tunes at karaoke bars. If you think you’ve got the facts, the direction is obvious, yet management doesn’t see it – then there’s something else influencing them that you’re not addressing. Sometimes it’s a trust issue, sometimes it’s political ass-covering or power-mongering, and sometimes it really is random stuff like someone’s an alcoholic and you have know when they’re sober and when they’re not.

Face it, even when you’re good at what you do as a PM, you always want/need to share the credit for your product’s success and you always take a lot of the blame for the failures whether you want to or not. Having a schmuck for a boss is just another fun part of the inherently “unfair” job we so masochistically adore.

*fyi – ’sake bombs’ at a karaoke bar are considered ethical. using your camera phone to record embarassing videos of your VP is not unless you just use them for personal amusement. just an example…

1. Whether the product manager’s decisions are respected by the rest of the company. For example, if the product manager reports to the CEO, marcom is more likely to respect her positioning decisions than if she reports to the VP of Development.
2. Whether the organizational structure enables the product manager to do her job. For example, Development’s budget may not allow for travel for on-site prospect visits.

Where I agree more with the spirit of CPM is that the formal reporting and departmental structure is not itself what’s relevant. It’s the drive of the product manager and the nature of the interaction and personalities around her.

Roger

Have to violently disagree with you here.

While individual product managers may focus on what’s right for the product, the reporting and organizational structure will help or hinder them in how successful they can be in getting done what needs to be done.

Every function in a company, not just Product Management has people who want to do what is right. But organizational structures and power politics will very quickly come into play in enabling or hindering doing what is right.

Having PMs report into Development, for example, will constrain what they do in the same way that having QA report into Development.

Having PMs report into Marketing may be better than reporting into Development, but again, the focus and objectives will be influence by that reporting structure.

I’ve written about this topic here.

http://onproductmanagement.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/product-manager-vs-product-management-part-3/

In short, Product Management can work while reporting into various orgs, but it will work best when they are viewed, measured and valued as a distinct but equal function alongside Sales, Marketing, Development, HR etc.

Saeed