Last week, Paul Young at the Product Beautiful blog made an excellent post titled “Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?“. His post is based on a recent Fortune magazine article titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs“, and Paul asks the question:
“Is Product Management incompatible with creating products that inspire passion? Product Management’s function is to discover market needs and fulfill those needs with products. But people don’t buy on need alone; they also buy on emotion and other soft factors.”
This is a very thought-provoking topic, and had several insightful comments – make sure to check out Paul’s post. Here are our thoughts on it.
As Paul says above, one of the key roles that Product Management plays in a company is to discover market needs, and meet those needs with products.
iPod – a Quick Case Study
Let us pick a recent, uber-successful Apple product as an example – the iPod. It turns out that in the market the iPod plays in (i.e. personal music players) – one of the market needs is sexy design & ease of use.
I remember the MP3 player I had before the iPod hit the market – it was really ugly and damn hard to use. Apple ( aka Steve Jobs?! 
) identified this unmet market need and fulfilled it admirably with iPod & iTunes.
As Paul wondered in his article, we are not sure how much involvement Apple’s Product Management team had in uncovering/meeting that need – but we think whoever did that job (Steve Jobs?) played the role of Product Management very, very successfully.
In Summary:
We think that Product Management & products that inspire passion are not at all incompatible. As a matter of fact, we believe it is Product Management’s responsibility to identify all the market needs – including “passion-inspiring” features, where applicable. And then work with others – Design team, Engineering team, seemingly overbearing execs, et al – to bring the product that meets (exceeds?) those needs to market. And help make the product successful!
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