The Homeopathic Product Manager
The homeopathic product manager exists in many organizations. It is based on the mistaken belief that by diluting a product manager across multiple product teams their impact and influence increase disproportionately.
The idea is facile yet fallacious: a product manager’s impact increases proportionally to the number of products they manage. It presupposes that the impact per product is constant and does not relate at all to the product manager’s dedication and commitment to each product. In that case, why bother with product managers at all? Perhaps it is linked to a PM’s level of expertise, so not any person could step in and deliver the desired impact, but it seems that at some level, managers expect any individual contributor in product management to be able to scale their impact superlinearly. Sure, seniority does correlate positively with efficiency, but that leads to the next incorrect assumption.
Homeopathic product managers (HPMs) must be able to withstand the pressure of increased workloads, as if each additional product added only a marginal amount of stress. With multiple products and teams, multitasking becomes essential, even though research shows that it ruins productivity for most people, as it disrupts flow. It is remarkable how managers can pick the few people for whom multitasking does not seem to be a productivity killer merely from brief encounters in sporadic one-on-ones.
There, however, is a far more insidious problem with the idea of an HPM whose impact increases as their effort is diluted more and more: impact is only a function of the quantity of products or platforms under their aegis, not the quality of their efforts for each individual one. Perhaps generalist managers have trouble understanding that increased scope can not only mean scale (breadth) but also complexity (depth). Managers do not sell it as “more of the same” though; it is usually repackaged and sold as more cross-functional responsibilities, which translates to more meetings, more politics, and less hands-on work that individual contributors excel at. Such a description is ironic in the specific case of product managers, as they already work cross-functionally all day: with engineers, their manager, designers, analysts, customers, directors, and various internal stakeholders, such as sales and marketing.
Roads to homeopathic status
How does it happen that a product manager becomes homeopathic? One of two ways: an ambitious product manager is promoted to a people manager role and leaves a gap as an individual contributor, or a disgruntled product manager leaves for a better job elsewhere and also leaves a gap.
Since hiring inevitably takes time, both situations are temporary and the product manager is only supposed to be a diluted solution for a while. But as any engineer knows: nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix. Interim PMs end up becoming permanently attached to multiple products.
PMs tend to be asked prior to being handed off another product whether they believe they can handle it, but such requests from superiors are really orders in disguise: “If not, you are about to be served a PIP!”
It may seem as if HPMs are more abundant in startups, but in reality they are found primarily in enterprises. In startups, especially early-stage ones, there tends to be a single product person, if any at all. That person is responsible for all of the product, but it is ultimately only a single product or platform. From my own experience, the antipattern of diluting product managers is more common in large organizations who have a tendency to squeeze costs at every corner.
Overhead for the 5× HPM
Let’s dilute a product manager by a factor of five and see the consequences. It is not uncommon for individual product managers to manage up to three products; some reports state a median of 2–3 products per PM, which means a few have up to five. From personal experience, I can confirm that such situations definitely exist in certain enterprises.
Instead of managing one product all week, 5× HPMs manage five each week, or, if you will, a different one every workday. Customer research, market research, daily standups, weekly planning, monthly status updates, irregular check-ins with leadership, quarterly business reviews, design sprints, customer and stakeholder communication, documentation, and so on are thus multiplied by a factor of five. But on top of that come the many context switches and the decreased involvement in each team, which often leads to engineers going rogue. Teams notice that their product manager is not as engaged with their immediate concerns as before.
What is more, the company pays the product manager a single salary, yet they see much more than that in impact. In the ideal case, five times or more. Realistically, barely more than one. Still, it’s a great deal for the employer and a pretty gnarly one for the employee.
Let’s break it down.
| Activity | Hours per month (1×) | Hours per month (idealized 5×) | Hours per month (loss from context switching) | Hours per month (realistic 5×) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daily standup à 15 min | 4 | 20 | 4 | 24 |
| Weekly planning à 60 min | 4 | 20 | 4 | 24 |
| Fortnighly 1:1s with team leads à 30 min | 1 | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Monthly team retrospective à 60 min | 1 | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Monthly OKR/status update à 60 min | 1 | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Quarterly business review à 90 min | 0.5 | 2.5 | 0.5 | 3 |
| Quarterly OKR review à 90 min | 0.5 | 2.5 | 0.5 | 3 |
| Monthly meetings | 12 | 60 | 12 | 72 |
What about productivity losses from context switches? The oft-quoted figure of 23 min to get back into the groove after an interruption is actually not in the original research, where the authors find that people compensate by working faster at the cost of more stress. Reality is actually closer to a quarter of an hour. For back-to-back meetings, there is no such immediate penalty, but it is unlikely a person with five product teams can schedule all meetings like that. Instead, I have assumed a 15 min productivity loss for every additional hour of meetings. For instance, a 5× HPM has 20 hours of daily standups each month, which is 16 hours above that of an undiluted product manager, so that’s 4 hours of productivity down the drain right there.
A month with four weeks of each five days with eight hours has 160 hours. So, an idealized 5× HPM spends 37.5% in various ceremonies that add limited, if any, value. A more realistic figure puts that at 45% of pure busywork, as it excludes the core duties of a product manager: customer and market research, design collaborations, communication, creating documents (e.g. PRDs, specifications, documentation), preparing slide decks, and so on. Note that the figures estimated above are pretty low: the average employee spends 11 hours in meetings per week.
The activities listed in the table are mostly ceremonial, though. The insanity of such rituals is what you can expect from the cult of empty thinking. Still, instead of doing their tasks in the remaining 92.5% of the month like a regular, undiluted product manager, the homeopathic PM has to do it in 55% for five products rather than one. They must therefore be almost 10× more productive.
Homeopathic product managers can therefore be nothing but administrators who fill in spreadsheets to placate leadership. The best such PMs can do is say no to most ceremonies to regain time. When they do spend some of their limited time with their teams, they mostly end up sounding like Bart and Lisa Simpson shouting from the back of the car: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
Contrary to what homeopaths believe yet medicine knows to be true, diluting product managers makes them more not less worthless. On the organizational level, it causes four problems:
- Dissatisfied product teams for whom the HPM is mostly absent or at least not fully involved in day-to-day activities and ceremonies.
- Execution drift as engineers can go rogue without guidance or must assume some of the responsibilities of a product manager.
- Mediocre product strategies, because there is little time for deep customer and market research.
- Talent erosion: decent PMs quit, while the mediocre ones remain.
The road to burnout is paved with boredom
Obvious solutions are to cap the number of products per product manager, to prune unnecessary meetings once in a while, or to block focus time for everyone. Unfortunately, the first will be forgotten in no time even if it is enshrined in the corporate product charter, because there is always an exceptional situation that requires flexibility from the product manager. The second may help until new meetings are introduced, especially by executives who see meetings as absolutely essential. And the third option is hardly ever respected or impossible for a PM to enforce because of the inevitable incompatibility with customer schedules.
With more than five times the amount of stress and little recourse, the 5× homeopathic product manager is destined for burnout, which is a systemic problem with severe consequences for the individual. But surprisingly, boredom is also a cause for concern. More of the same is not what leads to career growth; it is the definition of stagnation. A quarter of individual contributors are already bored. With a massively increased workload, the opportunity to learn anything new becomes more limited; there simply isn’t time. Leadership sees homeopathic product managers as the people they can depend on for the products no one else wants to manage. In fact, leadership does not even want to hire anyone for those products. It is not merely the monotony of more of the same, but primarily stolen potential that is the problem, as it demotes product talent to janitors who clean up organizational debt without any possibility of advancement. The very talent hired to drive innovation is instead sentenced to maintain the remnants of leadership’s past shortcuts. HPMs are not the strategic levers of an organization: they are useful, but not valued.