Product management is the backbone of any company in the marketplace. It’s not just about designing, building and selling products; it’s about building a team to help make sure that their company has the best products in the market. and that they compete with the best in the market. Product management involves a wide range of activities and tools, including building a team, managing schedules, writing strategy documents, organizing meetings and events. Working as product manager means working with different types of people from different backgrounds to create a vision for products that have value for customers. A product manager typically has experience in business analytics or marketing but may also have experience and skills in engineering, design or sales.
Which software businesses are recognized as having the best product management practices globally? I’d appreciate any articles or links!
According to their blogs, events, podcasts, and other public appearances, I find that many product organizations are just as much of an internal clown show as most other businesses are. Being a frequent reader of Intercom’s blog, I was disappointed to learn as much about the company as I did.
The best PMs I know and have worked with (FAANG and Unicorns) don’t publish pompous blog entries and Medium articles. They are obviously too busy with their jobs. I did work with a couple PMs who had a significant following on LinkedIn and who had been featured on well-known industry podcasts to discuss their work. They were all scruffy, generally. The talented ones let their work do the talking.
My experience after working with numerous PMs is as follows. The top product specialists are more concerned with their clients’ problems and how to address them than with “PM talents.” Consider joining one of the FAANG + tangential companies if all you’re looking for is a good product company. Any organisation that makes reference to Marty Cagan is also attempting to be a decent place for PMs to work.
One that I’ve heard of is intercom. What discrepancies exist between their portrayal and reality?
Well, to begin with, there’s the well-liked Intercom blog post on the “RICE” priority structure that everyone constantly seems to mention. When I asked this PM if they used it, he laughed and responded that he had never heard of anyone at Intercom utilizing a framework like that. I found it amusing that so many PMs were using that blog to inform their own prioritization efforts. In addition, he expressed some disillusionment with the organization, which caused me to have some cognitive dissonance because, based on their podcast and everything else, they really seemed to have it all together, and I was a big admirer of them. I wish I could remember more details, but it has been a while.
They were one of the first I can remember using a big thought leadership engine as a customer acquisition / brand recognition play.
Interesting that a lot of their thought leadership was about product management but they ended up building tools for support, sales, and CS. Likely left an opening for the likes of Drift who spoke directly to the needs of sales.
Personally the great ones I know have never written articles. 
The mediocre ones have! Way too much.
I’m ready to guess that the majority of world-class companies and teams are ones you’ve never heard of. Many of the well-known figures who assert to have the answers are, as someone else said, just as dubious as everyone else.
Do you have a specific justification for asking this question?
Although Google and Facebook are frequently used as examples, there isn’t, in my opinion, a single model for product management organizations. It has been a mess when people have attempted to replicate the same processes in much smaller firms or organizations with fewer engineering skill.
@MarieHamilton, 100% to this.
While it’s great to learn about what other teams/organizations do, I’d rather look at why they implemented certain PM processes, structures, and disciplines so that I can decide what’s best for the challenges I face. It’s too easy to assume that their problems mirror those of your own team/organization.
If we don’t truly appreciate reading yet-another-shiny-Medium-post every single month, we need to promote more conversation on the “why” behind our own “what,” rather than celebrating solely the latter component.
100%. Instead of merely adopting them as best practices or guidelines to adhere to just because Someone from Some Well-Known Company wrote an article about it or authored a book about it, we need to engage in more critical discussion and critical thinking about PM concepts and methodologies.
I’d love some examples that aren’t FAANG, if anyone has them
What do you think about Spotify?
Is that a question, a guess, a statement based on what you’ve heard, or a statement based on what you’ve experienced?
Spotify is well known as a model of agility, that’s what I referred to.
I find it a little difficult to accept that Google has a top-notch organisation. They frequently appear to have an illogical strategy and constantly release subpar products. They’re not terrible, in my opinion, but they aren’t superior to other tech behemoths either. All large corporations have large corporation issues, but they are not constrained by them since they have the financial resources to buy out or destroy any future competitors.
For world-class enterprises, I would consider smaller, quickly expanding startups.
In my experience, it depends on how the decisions are made within an organization. It could be a marketing driven, engineering driven or product driven organization.
W. L. Gore & Associates - Wikipedia here’s a more random company that’s not tech product but you can see how they took their one invention of Goretex and continuously found product market fit. Amazing private company.
Here’s their site: