faithpeterson

Sometimes an organization needs more product management capacity. Maybe the organization is a growing startup. Maybe it's a more established company expanding its product management capability. No matter the reason, organizations often ask whether they should create new positions and if so, how to define them.

I think we can learn from how companies scale physical resources, like servers or production lines, and apply the principles of “scaling up” and “scaling out” to help understand options for growing a product management organization.

Scaling up and out in computing or manufacturing

For example, suppose we start with a certain amount of computing power – to keep it simple let's say one server. If we want to handle more transactions or process transactions faster, we could scale out. That is, we could add more of the same type and size of server. We'll get the added power we need, although we'll have to do some things to allocate work across the added servers.

In the alternative, we could scale up. To do that we would expand the capacity of that one server. For example, we could add more memory or storage space, or update the storage media to get faster read/write performance. We might do this as a first step before scaling out. This works when we know what keeps us from getting the performance we want. If the problem is that too many processes are trying to access a server's data, it probably won't help to add more memory.

In manufacturing the same principle applies. If we want to produce more widgets, we can add more production lines or more factories—scaling out. Or we could increase the throughput on our one production line—scale up—by swapping out motors or rollers or fillers or extruders or inkjet printers or other components for new ones that operate faster.

Applying scaling principles to Product Management

Scaling Out

Scaling out is often the first thing organizations think they should do. Adding more product managers can be a good strategy. As in our server example, though, we will have to consider how we'll allocate product management activities to the additional people. (As with physical systems, it also might be better to scale up first.)

We can allocate specific products to each additional product manager, removing those from the original product manager's scope. Speaking from my vantage point in SaaS software, even if you don't think of your system or application as multiple products, most can be readily divided.

1. For example, we can slice vertically: maybe system administration functionality could be a product (for product management purposes).
2. We could allocate by customer segment. This could work well if we have segments with different needs or working in different domains—adults/children, for instance, or K-12 education/higher education.
3. We assign one area to one product manager, front to back. This could be a subset of what we might currently be thinking of as “the product” such as the storefront, favorites/wish list, blog, and customer service sections of an online store.
4. We could allocate responsibility for embedded functionality such as searching, filtering, or navigation, presentation of shipping options, product images in product listings, and so on.

The key to scaling out this way is that each product manager fully owns the allocated area, from business alignment to customer engagement and discovery to useful and engaging experience design to solution co-creation with designers, developers, and other team members. If the added product managers aren't allowed to act with autonomy, have we scaled out? It could be we've just added assistants.

Scaling Up

This one might seem weird at first. What does it mean to make your one product manager bigger, stronger, and faster than they were before? It's easier than it sounds!

First, what are all the knowledge, skills, and capabilities a single product manager brings to the role? (See The Only Product Management Principle You Need.) Given the variety of skills that comprise product management, you first need to decide which skill or activity is the most constrained, and therefore where you'll get the most benefit from added capacity. You can increase your one product manager's capacity by adding specialists in any of the contributing disciplines such as visual design, analytics, designing and carrying out customer needs surveys, or idea validation.

The key to scaling up this way is that the product manager and contributing specialists make up one team. It's important to implement this pattern as an active and ongoing partnership and collaboration.

Antipatterns

Sometimes organizations want to divide a product manager's responsibilities horizontally. That is, they'll delegate all the details, like hammering out solutions with developers, or doing all the hands-on backlog or ticket management, to someone who has no involvement in product strategy, discovery, or solution choice—and no authority to make any decisions or take any independent action.

Dividing product management work this way often leads to undesirable outcomes. Marty Cagan discusses this usefully in Two In a Box PM and the articles linked to it. I encourage you to check out that article. I'll add my comments about this antipattern here.

There's no question that not everyone wants to or is even good at dealing with details. However, if we decide to grow by having some people work mostly with other executives and customers while others work mainly with details, we've limited our product management organization's effectiveness and future growth. For one thing, we've separated people creating solutions from direct access to the information they need to make good decisions. This hurts our product's market performance instead of helping it.

In addition, this structure doesn't enable the “detail” people to become more skilled and take on larger or more complex products. When we need to continue to grow our organization we might find we haven't created a pool of people who are prepared to act as product managers. We'll have more people “working in product” but the product manager's increased capacity is a temporary illusion.

In sum

Scale up or scale out, there is no scale not.

What do you think?

1. Have you had to scale a product management capability?
2. Did you use one of these models to do it?
3. Have you found another way of thinking about it that helps?
4. What books or other resources helped you with the need to scale?