Who is a product manager?

The rise of the tribe of product managers (PM) is a recent phenomenon. There were no PMs in the old organisations like say L&T, Dabur or HUL, though there could be people doing a similar job. The explosion of internet based solutions to people’s problems has given rise to a PM. If we want to understand who a PM is, we have to examine exactly what happened in the internet revolution that enabled a PM to set up shop.

Internet Revolution

The internet revolution was an information revolution. The internet made a lot of information available at the fingertips of the human being - data about weather, flight schedules, stock market, football scores etc. With internet availability becoming cheaper and the speeds becoming faster, the number of people accessing the internet increased substantially. Businesses soon realised that the internet is a huge new lever to prop their businesses up to newer heights. 

Why? 

Because the key part of most business transactions is consumption of information and making a decision, which would result in exchange of goods, services or money. For example, a person purchasing a shirt first gets informed on the shirts - how do they look, what are their prices, which ones does the merchant recommend, is it a familiar brand - post which they chose which shirt to purchase. One would even ask their friends or colleagues which is a good store or brand to purchase shirts from. Or a business looking for insurance policies for their employees would speak to different insurance providers to get their quotes and benefits, basis which they would choose the best provider for them, resulting in a transaction. 

Businesses Move Online

Businesses realised that this exchange of information happening in a marketplace can be facilitated very easily on the internet (online), thanks to the amazing powers of storing and showing information, very quickly. It can be done at a scale so that 10,000 users can look at the information they need, simultaneously. Not only that, but the information can be really detailed and enriched in order for users to make better decisions. For example - a user could look at expert and user reviews for a mobile phone, as well as compare the specs with a few other phones very easily in an online store. Setting up such an online store is much more cost efficient than setting up multiple offline stores which would serve an equal number of users. 

Additionally, businesses could marry the data for their businesses with the information provided by the customers to generate amazingly relevant business experience for the customers. For example - based on what a user has been looking at on their website or has listed at her interests, a business can show relevant products or ads to her. This is made possible only because of the awesome processing powers of modern computers enabling complicated statistical models to run on top of the data. These models also enable businesses to very accurately estimate the sales they would be making in the coming months, across geographies or categories, thus enabling them to plan much better and save losses. Thus, the combination of rich and vast information provided by the internet and the computing powers of modern computers opened big, new opportunities for the businesses. 

Pursuing these huge advantages, businesses started mushrooming online. Merchants began to sell clothes and furniture, medical and car insurances, books and art, rail tickets and travel packages over the internet. But there were some key differences between doing business offline v/s online. 

Challenges in the Online World

Firstly, because the nature of online transactions is fairly different from offline, the business models needed to support online transactions were different as well. For example - while selling a shirt online, users would not be able to touch and feel the shirt or see the fit of the shirt. Businesses would have to enable the users to return the shirt if it is not up to their liking. This is an additional cost and a new supply chain has to be created to take the shirts from the customer to the warehouses. 

Secondly, the way users interact with information on a website or app is very different from the way they do it in a store. Not only is the amount of information available on an app significantly more, but the kind of visual interactions and ways of seeing are completely different as well. For example, a user needing groceries walks into a supermarket and while browsing through the aisles figures out what she needs. She might be running out of soap, and will remember it as soon as she sees soap. She need not have prepared a laundry list of items she needs beforehand. In a grocery app, the user would not be able to ‘walk through the aisles’, but would instead have to scroll through the category of products or widgets available on the homepage of the app. But at the same time, the app would remember what the user ordered before which can be used as a reference to shop in the future. 

Thirdly, while the majority of businesses before the internet were built on brick and columns, the businesses online are built on code and UI design. In order to become a successful and long run online business, it was imperative to have a good technology system to back the business and a good UI for the customers. This was a new territory which many companies making a move online did not understand.

Enter the Product Manager!

A new role was created and called the Product Manager, whose job was to bridge the gaps i talked about above. First, a PM would identify the businesses opportunities which could grow further using internet based solutions, then chart out a business model for taking them online. Second, a PM would identify the key information needed by the customer in a transaction with the business, and then create an interaction journey for the user in the app to enable exchange of the necessary information. Here it is vital for a PM to understand in detail all the ways in which users interact with information and enable the same using the tools available in a website or an app. Third, a PM would define a good engineering system which could enable this exchange of information seamlessly. Here a PM would usually work closely with software developers or data engineers to define these systems. 

The birth of the PM tribe was in the birthplace of modern technology, the Silicon Valley. Initial PMs worked on the tools to enable early interactions between users and information on the internet, such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer. As more businesses started moving online, the tribe of PMs grew, and so did the range and complexity of problems tackled by them. 

Charting New Territories

The internet has enabled existing businesses to grow fabulously by taking them online, examples being Amazon for shopping, Zoom Car for cart renting, Acko for insurance purchase etc. But it is making it possible for human beings to explore completely new and fascinating grounds, in the process creating new business opportunities altogether. Social media products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or the Google search engine are taking much more complex and nuanced interactions between human beings and enabling them through the internet. 

Take for example the kind of interactions students have on college campuses. They talk about interests, passions, courses, friends, friends of friends, where to go after classes, who is interested in who, who is single v/s who is not etc. Facebook enabled students to have these information exchanges online and do much more, and was a massive success. These platforms enabled, for the first time, very democratic conversations between human beings - an insignificant person, heads of states, artists, movie stars, sport persons etc. could all be involved in a conversation, as well as organisations such as  political parties, police departments, companies, sports teams etc. The resulting mish mash of interactions and information exchanges is irresistible! The business opportunity here is not a transaction that users would be making on these platforms, but the data they would be generating -  through posts, pages, pictures, likes etc., along with enabling businesses a very efficient marketing platform as the cost of information exchange between users and businesses reduces drastically. 

We still don't understand completely what these products are and how they will evolve. Product managers working on such products become even more pivotal as it is their job to define in very real terms the inherently ambiguous and abstract interactions between human beings (and organisations) and then design a product around those. These are completely new territories and PMs working in these domains are literally path breakers and innovators, with an opportunity to empower human beings through information and access. 

Extension Beyond Apps and Websites

A PM was born because of and for the internet. Most PMs work in the domain of interaction of businesses with the internet. But considering the framework in which a PM thinks and operates, they can become good problem solvers in domains outside the traditional businesses - such as reducing the traffic congestion, increasing access to reading, improving the number of voters, reducing the school dropout rates in primary education etc. The problem here is one of incentives - what would be the incentive of an organisation to solve these problems? This is a tricky question and material for another blog post. 

A word of caution

With the explosion of information come many cautionary tales. One is around information overload - with multiple apps mercilessly sending notifications, countless articles waiting to be read, and N number of social media apps to be scrolled through before bed time - we are overloaded with information,, much beyond the point of consumption fatigue. Even choosing to watch a movie online is tiring because of the number of choices available! Information explosion also leads to a proliferation of bad information and fake news, as it becomes increasingly difficult for people to differentiate between good and bad, genuine and fake. I hope, in the long term, incentives are aligned and PMs are empowered to add another dimension to their job - how to solve problems and grow businesses while having checks and balances around both the quality and quantity of information being put out there.