Product Management in Practice

Chapter 11. In Good Times and Bad

As of 2017, there were about 2.2 million apps in the Apple App Store, and 2.8 million in the Google Play Store.

According to a 2015 study by Forrester, most smartphone users spend the vast majority of their time interacting with only five apps that did not come preinstalled on their device.

That leaves a lot of disappointed product managers.

I cite these statistics not to be fatalistic, but rather to set the expectation that building a product that sees the kind of meteoric success associated with companies like Apple, Uber, Facebook, or Google is exceptionally rare. Great product managers work on products that fail all the time. There are no “best practices,” no perfect prioritization frameworks, no Agile-cadabra magic words that will guarantee the success of your product.

Product managers working on established and successful products face their own set of challenges that can be just as galling. Established companies tend to become risk-averse, bureaucratic, and political, at times making it excruciatingly difficult to implement minor changes that have clear user value. Even when the numbers are going in the right direction—especially when the numbers are going in the right direction—getting out ahead of fast-changing user needs can prove incredibly difficult.

Product management is not an easy job—but the practice of product management can make everybody’s job easier. It can help programmers become better communicators, marketers become ...