To the good product manager, everything matters

At Confluence, the Pittsburgh-based producer of financial industry software, each product manager is the CEO of his or her own product with sweeping responsibility for every aspect from initial vision through to the end of its life cycle. In carrying out those assignments, no detail is too small, and there is nowhere to hide, according to company COO Kirk Botula.

The belief that the world of art and the world of commerce follow separate and largely incompatible principles, is commonly held among practitioners on both sides of the great divide. After all, the arts are typically right-brained, imaginative, emotional, and profoundly subjective whereas business is left-brained, disciplined, rational, and constantly exposed to outside scrutiny. But even from his days as a fine arts undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon back in the 1980s, Kirk Botula would have none of that.

“A lot of people articulate a false dichotomy between arts and engineering,” Botula said. “But then you see disciplines like architecture where it all comes together. In business what we’re doing is really architecture; we’re bringing together a lot of disciplines to construct something. Think about making a feature film; for the business to succeed, you’ve got to bring together the money, the actors, the cranes and the trucks and get it all to work together.

“I’ve worked as a musician, I’ve worked in the visual arts, I’ve worked as a freelance writer. But to my mind, it’s all the same thing,” he observed. How? Because while music, painting, and literature are clearly creative endeavors, the arts are not alone in the creative process. “Business is really a creative enterprise. Value creation, which is what businesses are about, is a creative enterprise,” he said. And to Botula, professional product management plays a leading role in that creative process.

“To pick the low hanging fruit of higher revenue, higher profitability, higher market share, and greater shareholder value, the very first lever is product management,” he pointed out. And today, Botula is in a powerful position to influence the pulling of those levers. As Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Confluence, a Pittsburgh-based maker of software for the financial services industry, the company’s sales, marketing, and product management functions all report to him.

Do not attempt this at home

“In product companies, if you can do one thing right in business, it is to deliver the right product, at the right time, to the right market; that’s what product management is ultimately about,” he said. “So for product companies to ignore product management as a discipline is like having someone with a heart problem say ‘oh, I’ll do my heart surgery at home.’”

In product companies, even more than in service firms, a variety of separate elements are essential to growing the business. And the failure to successfully execute any one of them can spell disaster, according to Botula. “I tell our team at Confluence that everything matters. And yet, the first constraint on growth is having a value proposition that people care about, something that somebody needs. But particularly when you’re dealing with technology, there’s a strong tendency to fall into the ‘if you build it, they will come’ error. Technologists and engineers classically fall in love with their technology. There are lots of solutions out there looking for problems. That’s a major reason why a lot of businesses fail.”

It’s not fair

Recognizing the danger of that trap, and keeping the business from falling into it, is a task that falls heavily on the product manager, according to Botula. But it is only one aspect of the job. A recent posting for a product manager job opening at Confluence put it this way: ‘Product management at Confluence is not for the faint of heart.’

“When we’re interviewing candidates, we tell them that a product manager is expected to wear all hats, have all answers, predict the future, be right, deeply understand the market, plan for changes, and when things go wrong, it’s because he or she did something wrong,” Botula said. Our VP of product management was telling me that some of the product managers were saying ‘gee, it just doesn’t seem fair.’ And he replied: ‘Exactly. That’s what we do for a living.’

Of course, not everyone is cut out for that kind of work, or for that level of responsibility, although a lot of people claim that they are. “A lot of people think they want responsibility. A lot of people think they want accountability. A lot of people think they want to make decisions. But when push comes to shove, they really don’t,” he said.

“There are certain conceits that people can fall prone to. One is that ‘everything would be better if I were making the decisions.’ Or people will act as though everyone else is an idiot but them. But in point of fact, we all know we’re all idiots and things wouldn’t be any better if we were making the decisions. We’d just be making different decisions.

No place to hide

No one is alone in wanting to duck important decisions, according to Botula. “The reason why the Supreme Court is allowed to make the kinds of decisions that they are is because the Senate doesn’t want to make them and is happy to let the Supreme Court handle controversial issues,” he said. “That’s human nature. It’s much easier to criticize what other people are doing than to stick your neck out, take responsibility, and take accountability, particularly when a lot of people are counting on you: the market is counting on you, the clients are counting on you, the employees are all counting on you.”

Botula cites a sports metaphor capturing the paradox of the product manager which has been circulating at Confluence for a while now. “You’re walking down the street, and you see a pickup game of basketball going on and you join in. If that game happens to be the Olympic team working out, it will either be the best afternoon of your life or the worst, depending on what you’re looking for. If you were just hoping to have a nice time, it could be awful. If you were just hoping to hang out with some friends, it could be a personally brutalizing experience.

“If, however, you had always been looking for an opportunity to elevate your game, and to be pushed, then it could be the greatest opportunity,” he said. “It’s the same with our product management team. Our expectation is that the only way we’ll compete is by performing at a very, very high level of discipline where luck isn’t adequate, heroic effort isn’t adequate, there’s no place to hide, and everything matters. That can be challenging.”

Peter Longini is a Managing Editor for the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it