Overthinking Job Titles
To most normal human beings, the job titles I've had for the last quarter of my life don't mean very much. Although in the past "science journalist" and even "web developer" resulted in more or less reassuring nods of understanding, the last decade or so of "product manager" has basically drawn an uncomfortable blank. Not least from me.
It's not that I don't know what it means to be a PM, it's that only people who already know know.
Lots of modern job titles are pretty opaque. They either stick around because they sound good, like "technical architect", or they just never get updated, like "project manager". Either way, they don't make useful answers to the question "what do you do?" because the only people who vaguely understand are those in the same specialist work area. Everyone else is none the wiser, and even people in the niche next-door will only know very roughly.
If you're being introduced to a future parent-in-law, or you're looking at yourself in the mirror in your mid-forties, you really should have something meaningful to say.
Over the last 7 or 8 months, I've been gradually trying to rebuild my own answer to that question, having left my job and become a freelancer. It suddenly becomes quite important to be able to say what you do under these circumstances, and not just because you have to write a decent bio on LinkedIn. If nobody knows exactly what you do, then how are you gonna get paid to do it?
This is why so many people end up having to their descriptions in so many ways. "Working on the border of technology and design" or "with experience in P Q and R"
Although on paper I've been employed as a "product manager" for the last 14 years or so, I don't see myself as a product manager. To make matters worse, I actively dislike those words. This leaves me sitting there like the Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek asking "what am I?"
This might seem like angels on the head of a pin shit, but there actually is a real problem for me here,
Maybe because - according to what the general definition of a "product" is, I've never actually managed a one.
what do I work on if not a product? And what does the name of it say about what I do?
Definition of product and service
What about system? Platform?
There isn't a word for it.
There are millions of blog posts and articles on the subject, mostly being read by product managers trying to work out what exactly they're meant to be doing for a living. The consensus has always been that being a Product Manager is a bit like being a translator, sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram of the types of people involved in making technology things. They help these different disciplines - broadly "technical", "design" and "the business" - to go in the same direction by translating between the languages they speak, carefully working out which bits need translating and editing while they're at it.
All the disciplines have their own areas of expertise and focus on problems that overlap in various combinations, but in the end they're working on something, and that something is mostly referred to as a "product". The Product Manager's job is to work out what the product should actually be: what problems there are in a particular area, who has those problems and why, how to work out whether the ideas behind the product are successful, and so on.
But not all products are equal. Some are destinations you deliberately go to, with names and purposes and marketing budgets. Something like BBC Sounds is like this, and it'll have Product Managers looking after it and steering its development. That's the kind of thing most people think of as a product.
On the other hand, the BBC Account system isn't a destination you deliberately visit, it's more like the door you go through to get there. Things like this often get called "services", with someone called a "Service Owner" responsible for them. Strangely, they still have a Product Manager.
Still more strangely, some see products and services the other way round. "Products deliver outputs, services deliver outcomes" is a great article on the NHS Digital blog, and it makes a convincing argument that the word "service" is the big and important one. For example, the website you use to book your COVID vaccine is a product, and the broader interconnected machinery - which includes the website, but also the booking system that the website talks to and plenty of other things - is a service, delivering the end-to-end result that you end up actually getting your vaccination.
The outcome, the ultimate reason for any of the constituent parts existing, is the thing that everyone needs to keep in mind so that the people booking their vaccination don't fall between the cracks. This is something that could happen if the constituent parts forget what they're constituent parts of. Product managers are working on the parts, while service designers have a view of the whole.
I think what I'm revealing here, if anything, is that what I really do is overthink things. But I think I'm in pretty good company on this: like lots of other Product people I've met, what I do could be called purposeful overthinking.
While it might seem like angels on the head of a pin stuff, I think some useful ideas can result from going down the rabbit hole. The NHS article about products vs. services isn't just about defining words, it's about the different ways the words get used, what the concepts mean, and what they tell us about what we're doing and why.
I think it's useful to spend time swimming around in the area you work in, overthinking it, and seeing what happens.
It's like being an opinionated Rosetta Stone.