If you have not heard the name, you should be worried. If you have heard his name, you still should be worried. Why? Marty Cagan’s take on Product Management versus Product Marketing is flawed and tainted but his words and opinions are being embraced by a number of companies, especially in Silicon Valley. His Amazon reviews are unbelievably high (with the emphasis on the UN as in NOT believable … Perhaps they are from members of the technical community).
Marty argues that all product functions be placed in one individual … a Product Manager who is not in Marketing.
Tainted Perspective
The perspective is tainted and is similar to what I see from other consultants and pundits who have only worked for successful companies like HP, eBay and others. It is impossible to understand why you have been so successful. Or why the way the company was organized was successful. Additionally, Marty has been out of industry for over a decade and things are quite different now.
A boss early in my career once advised me, “It’s hard to go up on a down elevator”. The opposite is true as well. When you are on a “rocket ride” a tremendous number of things can go wrong, yet the rocket still goes up. That is until the accumulated weight of those “wrongs” becomes a millstone and the rocket starts to come down. By then it is too late. The Valley is littered with the carcasses of one hit wonder companies.
When I was a Gartner, I had already worked in industry and became aware of a general theme when looking at hundreds of high technology companies … Companies succeeded because of their strengths in spite of their weaknesses, until those weaknesses mounted and would drag the company down.
Development/Engineering Versus Marketing
Marty also has come from a background only in product management and development, so his perspective is also tainted by this particular experience. This is especially true since he worked on products that were intended for other technical people like engineers and software developers.
Walking a mile in another’s shoes gives one a better perspective. Below is a quote from his blog:
Problem Situations: Marketing-driven Product
This situation is pretty easy to spot. The rest of the product team views this person as “the marketing resource” that might be useful for creating data sheets, training the sales force, and coming up with the naming and pricing, but in terms of defining the product, this person is largely discounted and ignored. There are plenty of Dilbert cartoons portraying this person, and we’ve all known this type of product manager. While these people might be great at marketing, they are in way over their heads in trying to define in detail a useful and usable product. In this situation, hopefully someone else on the product team steps in and performs the true product management function, sometimes a lead engineer, sometimes a designer, and sometimes a manager. If that person has the skills, and also the bandwidth, the product may still succeed. More often, however, the product is in trouble right from the start.
This opinion is actually quite widely held in technology-driven companies and can lead to major problems. The situation arises especially when a company does not separate the Product Marketing (outward-looking) function from the Product Management (inward-looking) function. His key criticism is based on the profile of a marketing person whi has no “technical chops”. I would never hire this kind of person in a high technology company (but all too commonly hired in Silicon Valley where far too many come from Marcom or PR backgrounds, or straight out of B-School … ).
Cagan is Right About One Thing
High Technology Product Marketing absolutely requires the technical chops and skills he states are missing in his book. That means someone who was typically an engineer or a software developer earlier in their career or, at least had a quality technical undergraduate degree. (Before Silicon Valley became “bloated”, a technical undergraduate degree was de rigueur for Product Marketing people).
That also means that technical people without real marketing experience should not be the ones to make product decisions unless they are making a product for other technical people. They have a very hard time understanding “normal” customers who, in their opinion, do “stupid things” and “should know that”.
Technical Folks Love to “Mess” with Marketing Types (and Upper Management)
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that good technical folks are the lifeblood of a company, but …
I have developed well over 20 Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs), sometimes called Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), as well as, Product Architecture Documents (longer term development direction). My experience has been that technical teams do have a tendency to overstate problems, demand exact requirements under uncertain conditions and love to see how much a marketing person knows about engineering or development.
Some of the best products I have seen have come out of “family arguments” between marketing and development because those disagreements often result in a technical team member expressing frustration over an assumed limitation that the marketing team does not see as a limitation, or finding out that a limitation assumed by the marketing team has been overcome.
The Bottom Line
- Product Marketing should be separate from Product Management unless financially impossible.
- A technical background plus marketing experience should be a requirement for Product Marketing team members.
