A while back, I had a spirited exchange with someone who took a rather extreme position about the role of product management in software as a service companies. The less polite version: He staked out a silly position – just poll your customers about what to build, and eliminate the PM role altogether – so I felt obliged to refute it. With two additional years of research into SaaS and PM, it's worth returning to that contretemps for a moment.

Then, I argued that PM was necessary in SaaS ventures.

Now, it's clear that PM is not merely necessary but essential.

Product Managers Are Really Innovation Managers
If the sole responsibility of PM were requirements, as my foil assumed, a poll might replace a person, but only if you had no interest in the long-term success of your company. Polls are extremely useful tools, and it's far better to use them than not to. However, polls have their limitations: most obviously, as a tool for taking the temperature of the customers you have, they tell you absolutely nothing about the customers you don't have yet.

This week, I've already written a little about the need to go beyond polls to use other tools, such as serious games. In an upcoming post, I'll have more to say on the topic. For now, I'll just say that, in both business and politics, voting alone is not the ticket to ultimate success.

Another excellent post from Scott Sehlhorst, this time pointing out that, even without product managers, product management still happens. Scott’s post is a response to Jason Calcanis, the founder of Mahalo, who wrote the following:

In under 30 days, we completely overhauled our product-development process, removing everything between the developer and iterating on the product. We eliminated positions and process. We made it clear the developers were to make the decisions even if those decisions resulted in a developer being 50 percent slower because they were busy *thinking* about the product (as opposed to just transcribing features from the product manager wireframes).

If Calcanis is arguing that his company doesn’t need product managers, because they just are in the way, Scott makes the obvious counterargument:

When I was still writing software and leading teams that were writing software, I would occasionally point out that all software is designed – even if someone sits down and just starts typing code. There is, at the minimum, implicit design happening in the mind of the programmer. It might not be “good” design, but there is always design. There is always a method to the madness, just not always a considered method. The same is true of product management...Eliminating product managers does not eliminate product management.

[For earlier posts in this series, click here and here.]

Imagine that you're dining at a new Italian restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood. You've heard that the chef is well known and widely respected, so you're expecting a great first experience.

You sit down, and the waiter hands you a menu. Actually, it's not a menu, but a listing of all the top-quality ingredients in the restaurant's refrigerator. Some ingredients suggest the kind of recipes that the chef might prepare: For example, the veal shank might be destined to become Osso Bucco. Since you're not an expert in Italian cuisine, it's hard to guess what kind of recipe might require some of the other ingredients (rabbit, goat, boar, etc.).

The waiter is no help. He'll dutifully return to the kitchen with the ingredients you tell him the chef should prepare, but he won't tell you if that combination will transform into a delicious meal or an indigestible lump. 

In this scenario, chances are slim that you'll get the sort of dining experience you expected. If you were hoping for an experience you've never had before, the kind that a world-class chef could provide, the odds are even worse.

Sadly, this is exactly the way in which technology companies have pitched their products. Rather than explaining the experience you should have, they leave it up to you to figure out what experience might be possible, given the ingredients (features and functions) available in the product. This approach has two pernicious consequences:

Since there's no systematized, look-it-up-in-your-economics-textbook definition of thought leadership, people generally lapse into metaphor when they try to describe the concept. The language usually gets very Joseph Campbell-ish. Thought leaders might be visionaries, Delphic conduits into some shared future. Or, they might be heroic trailblazers, clearing a path into places that no one knew existed, or they were afraid to venture.

Our recent research into thought leadership points to a different metaphor. Thought leaders are not seers, like Cassandra or the Sibyl. They're closer to trailblazers or founders, like Romulus or (less mythologically) Alexander the Great. But even that's not exactly right, since thought leadership depends critically on communication. Alexander got a lot of good press; Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, got much less (at least in the West). As a result, people are still sifting through Alexander's career for nuggets about successful leadership. Cyrus the Great? Not so much.

Thought leaders are, to a big extent, more like Homer than the people whom Homer chronicled. They're good story-tellers, which demands far more than relating a collection of incidents.

Just ask anyone reading a success story on a tech vendor's web site.