Why Media Companies Need Product Managers

I saved my most provocative question for the end. I was at a strategy session with the executive team of a $100m B2B media business. The company was growing, but they were looking for ways to expand digital revenues. I was invited to provide a fresh perspective.

“How many of you have experience in programming, interaction design, or product management?” I asked. One out of the 12 executives raised his hand, the CTO. The rest looked at me cross-eyed. “There’s your problem,” I thought. I didn’t need to say it.

With the explosion of digital devices and technologies, it’s remarkable how lacking most media businesses are in product management. Most executives I talk to recognize the need for digital product development — revamping the website, creating an iPad or iPhone app, making their emails responsive, launching new data products, etc. They know what needs to be done, they just don’t know how to do fast and effectively enough. And they usually face pressure to expand digital revenues while preserving cash-flows — not an easy needle to thread.

The typical mid-market media business has a CTO, a small development team, and maybe a head of digital. The limiting factor to driving digital value typically isn’t technical capacity or ability. It’s an ownership issue: No one “owns” the soup-to-nuts success of a new product. No one is cross-functionally connecting all the dots.

This is why media businesses need to hire product managers. The job of a PM is to own the success of products, ensuring, as Marty Cagan would say, that they are “valuable, usable, and feasible.” The role sits at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. Technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been hiring PMs for years. A good PM is the type of guy or gal who can act as a mini-CEO of a product line, modeling the business and financial objectives of a product, turning them into wireframes and technical specs, executing a marketing plan, training the sales team, and measuring and iterating towards success. They’re great at navigating an organization to get things done.

The good news for media companies is that there’s a decade’s worth of product management best practices we can learn from. There are many good product managers in the market, and it’s a popular field to go into among MBA types.

My advice to media execs is to better understand this role and how it works, invest in related skills training for their teams (for ex, building wireframes), and start recruiting today. Longer term, I would cultivate a “product management advantage” over competitors.

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