The Captainless Ship of Product

A product team is a ship without a captain.

The engineers are the crew, but who is the commanding officer? The product manager is the navigator or rather compass needle, not the captain. A captain can command the crew because of their rank. A product manager has no such authority. After all, PMs manage products, not people, at least not the engineers on the product team.

The people who can give orders are higher up in the organization who, in the ship analogy, are ashore and radio in vague instructions from a distance. They are not part of the ship’s crew.

Mutiny?

Without a commanding officer, the engineers can mutiny. Except there is no captain to overthrow. If they decide to go against the recommendations from the product manager, they can do so. A product manager can do little without escalation to management. At sea, the crew must resolve any issues.

The only power a product manager has is influence. That influence arises from trust, trust the team must have in the product manager’s ability to ensure the team can navigate the high seas. That trust must be earned, and the way to earn that trust is by mapping out a course (roadmap) across the seas towards treasure that steers clear of problems: pirates (competitors), icebergs (known risks), sea monsters (unknown risks), winds (market trends), storms (sudden market shifts), and plenty of friendly ports (customers). There the team can offload bounty (goods or services) to the locals and gather valuable intelligence to make it safely to the next port.

So, who steers the ship?

Captain Consensus

The real captain of the ship is consensus, consensus among the triumvirate of product, engineering, and design. The product manager, tech lead, and designer are all roughly in the same boat: they share the responsibility without any direct authority over the crew. I say “roughly” for a reason though.

If a product succeeds, everyone on the team shares in the glory. No single person is single-handedly responsible for the product’s success. It is a product manager’s duty to ensure everyone shares equally in the praise. And to promote the team’s victories far and wide.

But when a ship sinks, the captain goes down with it, because the captain has the ultimate responsibility for the ship and her crew. If she goes down, the captain must save the people onboard at any cost. Does that mean the triumvirate goes down with the ship of product? Well, no.

Responsibility for the product still lies with the product manager. If a product fails, the failure falls on the product manager, though typically annotated with the excuse du jour: “hostile market”, “inopportune timing”, or “bad luck”. Product (value and viability), design (usability), and engineering (feasibility) risks must be managed and mitigated. It is on the PM to make that happen.

So, with great responsibility comes no power. That is a tough gig. But that’s not all…

Solitary at sea

Engineers work with other engineers. Most managers have managers of their own, so they can see how their managers manage people and resolve issues. That means engineers and managers can learn by copying behaviour and habits. As a product manager, such opportunities are rare.

It is hard to learn from fellow product managers while you are a product manager yourself, because you never see them in action. Since becoming a PM, I have not had the chance to work directly with another PM on a day-to-day basis other than in customer interactions, which is a different kind of relationship than one where you are able to freely learn from each other.

A one-on-one exchange of ideas with fellow PMs can be fruitful, but it happens outside a PM’s natural habitat of the product team. You see a filtered version of another PM, and you give a distorted view of what you are like. Likewise, a chat with a product leader is not quite the same, because they tend to manage people, not products. They also wield power over you and your career. That may preclude product managers from speaking up, requesting advice, or asking what they fear may be dumb questions. Perhaps not ideal, but rational, even in a psychologically safe corporate environment.

The ship of product has no single captain, but it is steered by consensus among the team members. Such consensus can be reached through influence, persuasion, negotiation, and trust. Overall accountability of a product is with the product manager. If authority is what you seek, product management will suit you ill.