Great Product Managers are like… Brain Fluid
Analogies are one of my favorite communication tools. When they’re good they help people understand a complicated idea, and I’d like to propose one for product teams to think about if they’re struggling to define the value of a product manager on their team.
The human brain is a complicated system of things working together. We commonly refer to the brain as a two-half system that creates a cohesive “human processor.”
Product Designers are technically an offshoot and evolution of the older profession of Graphic Communication: The art of visual storytelling to communicate something that resonates with people. It’s the science and art of human emotion — and in extreme cases, manipulation of those emotions. On the surface, designers are making our products usable, and, ideally, beautiful. Great design is more than great information architecture or readable fonts. Designers can simply make us feel good.
We can think of a product pesigner as the stand-in for our touchy-feely “right” brain.
Engineers actively pursue expertise in the systems and services that power the engine of the team’s products. Every day, they go toe-to-toe with machines to create or source the perfect set of instructions to bend it’s abilities to their will. They have to be resourceful hunters of documentation, and students of logic, languages, and systems. Great engineers can command numbers or reason through complex puzzles with ease. Engineers have the power to make almost anything you can imagine feasible with enough resources.
The Engineer then will serve as our logical and analytical “left” brain.
Designers and engineers often think of each other’s professions as being the only necessary, and complementary components to building great products. But just like the human brain, the left-brain and right-brain are not a complete picture of how things really work. They overlook a third critical system that supports, enables, and protects the brain’s two halves. The ewwey-gooey-sciency-slimy brain fluid!
I’ve come to see the best product managers as the uncelebrated, but vital “Brain Fluid” of the team.
Hear me out…
Brain fluid is a necessary and equally complementary system to the two-halved human brain, and great product managers serve similar vital functions:
Provide vital resources — Lead discovery activities (ie. market research, customer expertise and communication, and stakeholder negotiation) great Product Managers should be giving their teams the inputs and context to create products that are valuable to customers and the business
Filter out waste — Keep teams focused on what’s important, filter out distractions, and manage things like stakeholder relationships that would only serve to slow down or muddy the waters, so designers or engineers can make our products usable and to ensure that they’re feasible
Absorb shock — Process and respond to hyper-critical feedback from customers and stakeholders, and provide a steady hand at goal setting through worrying market performance
The Product Manager does these things so the inputs and outputs of a product team’s “brain” can continue to cleanly run their “nervous system” unabated. Just like the brain fluid, keeping our brains afloat, and producing the best of what we humans are capable of. If any of those systems don’t work, we can’t work.
Of course, all three of these parts of the product trio are filled by complete people with self-sufficient brains of our own, and at our core, each person feels at best misunderstood, and at worst deeply disrespected by being cast into any narrow definition of what we do. When any of the people on a team broadly generalize either of the other two core roles on the team, we undermine our ability to appreciate how wide-ranging all of the crafts are, and it can lead to bad mindsets:
I won’t invite Engineer A to the customer interview because they don’t care about that stuff
“I won’t explain the system to Designer B because it’s too technical for them to understand”
“I won’t get Product Manager C’s opinion because if it doesn’t make money they’ll shoot it down”
Product Management, Design, and Engineering all require every free neuron that we humans can muster, including the ones we devote to respecting each other for the value, craft, and expertise that we all bring to the whole damn thing.
