Different Types of Product Work
There's a world beyond PMF...
I’m thinking a lot about Fareed Mosavat & Casey Winters excellent article, "Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit."
Product Managers aren't all doing the same "type" of product work! I see lot of “how to do good Product work” writing - but it’s super critical to be very precise about what kind of product work you’re talking about.
It’s obvious when you think about it, but: What you’re trying to accomplish as a Product Manager changes how you should be thinking, the skills you need to be successful, and how you manage your stakeholders, your goals, your product - and so on.
Of course, as a PM, it behooves you to learn all you can about all the frameworks & domains you can - but make sure you understand how & when to apply them & what it means to be doing what "type" of Product work. That means understanding the goals of your work as a PM - which comes back to having a super precise understanding of what "type" of Product work you're doing!
Let’s get into it.
What Kinds of Product Work Are There?
Pre-PM Product Work
1) 🔍 PMF-Seeking: This is the "Default" PM work people often talk about. Often at a startup that hasn't yet hit Product Market Fit (PMF), & often working with not-quite-enough resources. If someone doesn't specify... they probably mean this. PMF-Seeking Product work is critical to the org - an has its own set of unique requirements. You have to be profoundly scrappy, but also need to be laser-focused on what success means to keep your org afloat.
There are tons of great resources to help support this kind of work, but as Enzo Avigo, CEO of analytics company June.so points out, most product books talk about working in a post-PMF world. As such, he gives a bunch of great book recommendations for PMF-Seeking PMs in this thread.
What Else?
But that's not all that there is. Far, far from it. In fact, as it turns out, most PMs won't ever work on a "Find us PMF!" situation in their careers since that requires jumping into a pretty early stage startup - and most series B+ startups will be post-initial PMF… and all big tech co’s will be much farther down that road as well!
Which kind of product work is right for your org right now? It all depends. They all require a clear model and story about where your org and product are going - and all have complex pitfalls if it’s not the right time for that kind of work yet!
As I imply at the start of this article - a lot of what follows is adapted from & with gratitude to Fareed Mosavat & Casey Winters from their excellent article, "Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit" - a very high recommendation that contains a LOT of caveats & nuances worth deeply digesting! One could write pages and pages about each type of product work alone - and maybe I will in future posts!
They outline a lot of the dangers of doing the wrong kind of product work at the wrong time in an org - & how you can tell when you’re doing the wrong work!
Post-PMF Product Work
2) 📈 Growth: You have a product that's hit PMF. Your job is to capture more of the existing market - to grow the product! Org might be a more mature startup, or maybe even a big tech org trying to grow its section of the world. Growth focus requires having a really clear growth model - an understanding of how your product can grow. This doesn’t mean just building more features!
3) 🌝 New Features: PM's goal is to extend the existing product's functionality. New features have maintenance costs and add product complexity - so it’s super important that you understand why you’re building the new features you’re advocating for! They should tell a story about a key customer problem that you’re solving or a larger, future horizon overarching product experience you’re working to create. Otherwise, you run the risk of just building features to build features - and “the number of features shipped this quarter” is a really bad success metric.
4) ⚡ PMF Expansion: Bigger bets intended to expand in a big way into new/adjacent markets. New market = new PMF! But also: PMF is not a static thing that, once achieved, stays achieved! This is about, as Mosavat and Winters put it, “anticipating the future evolution of [the] problems [of your current users and target audience].”
5) 👾 Scaling: Your work here is to ensure the org maintains the ability to ship new things, across all other types of product work! It’s often assumed to mean technical scaling - and this is one part of it, but not the sum total. Rather, it also includes what processes you implement to help manage the increased organizational complexity that comes from the pressures of scaling, as well as the user impacts of a product scaling to a broader group of users than you initially targeted.
As Mosavat & Winters outline, you can't be an expert in all areas of product work - and so you need to understand what the options are so you can understand what it even means to improve as a PM.
There's a lot more under the sun than simply "Get us to Product Market Fit!" And each different "type" of product work requires you to plan, strategize, measure, build& collaborate with cross-functional teams in different ways.
Building Product Strategy Is Complex
Know How To Use Each Type of Product Work
Maybe even more critically, however - a great Product Leader should have an understanding of which type of product work to recommend as the immediate-term product strategy. Each has its own set of potential success metrics, risks, dangers, and headwinds - as well as product & org benefits. Constructing the right product strategy for a mature org is a very complex thing - and it starts with understanding the breadth of options available to you.
Building product strategy is a massive topic. And so: more on that soon!