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!

What do you think? Let us know your comments.