Good Public Sector Product Manager/ Bad Public Sector Product Manager

A Contemporary, Re-Focused Take on a Classic

There is a longish story about where this article came from and why the author’s wrote it. If you’d like to read the article along with that context — which we hope and suggest — you can do so here.

Twenty two years ago, Ben Horowitz, an American technology entrepreneur, wrote a seminal article on what it means to be a technology product manager, “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager.” Despite the passage of time — and Horowitz’s more-recent disclaimer questioning its contemporary relevance — it is still today required reading for commercial product managers.

But what of those working outside Silicon Valley and its smaller siblings? Where does the government product manager look for public sector-specific guidance? By remixing and riffing on Horowitz’s original, the three co-authors of the present article — J-P Fournier, Heather Remacle & Rumon Carter, all part of the pathfinding Exchange Lab community in British Columbia — have made an attempt at an answer.

As we express more fully in the annotated version, we’ve put this out into the world with a humility borne of our own self-identification as inexpert — consider it a provocation with positive intent. We deeply welcome and encourage your feedback and contributions to make it better.

Good product managers are situationally aware.

Good public sector product managers understand user needs, the political environment, the policy and the product, and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

Good product managers are product owners. They understand the outcomes that they are trying to achieve. They understand the context going in (political direction, budgets, internal resistance, etc.) and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no excuses).

Bad product managers make excuses. They blame the policy director for not getting it. They call out stakeholders for not trusting them to make decisions. They feel micromanaged. They accuse the IT department of treating the work like a back-office IT project.

Good product managers focus on outcomes.

Good product managers are not split across several projects and don’t sit in meetings all day. They prioritize and delegate so that they can focus their time on users, the team and the product.

Good product managers are not required to be “Subject Matter Experts” from “The Business”. They are not engineers, project managers or business analysts from IT. Delivering citizen-facing products and services is not the same thing as delivering commodity IT, though both are important.

Good product managers build and empower diverse teams — including design, policy and engineering — to uncover and respond to user needs. They define a clear vision with objectives and simple, measurable results. They manage the delivery of outcomes, not outputs.

Bad product managers get sucked into the weeds trying to figure out the “how”, and manage for outputs, not outcomes.

Good product managers communicate clearly.

Good product managers communicate crisply — both verbally and in writing — to their team and key stakeholders. They don’t give informal direction. Good product managers constantly gather information about users’ needs, organizational priorities and their political environment.

Good product managers communicate proactively. They build trust by working in the open; anyone can learn about their product in real time with just a few clicks. They write the story they want told by their peers, superiors and public affairs departments.

Good product managers clearly explain the context, purpose and important background information. They always avoid buzzwords and err on the side of clarity.

Bad product managers get lost in minutiae. They communicate in detail about specific features and technologies.

Good product managers assume their executives, communications people, the public and the press are really smart, communicating with them as such.

Bad product managers assume these people are anachronisms and don’t “get” technology.

Good product managers are proactive.

Good product managers are proactive. They anticipate issues — technical, political or otherwise — before they arise.

Bad product managers spend all day putting out fires and fielding requests from politicians and executives. Their teams are feature-obsessed and their products are riddled with technical debt.

Good product managers know that outdated standards, policies and laws can be changed. They dedicate part of their time to shaping and modernizing the system within which they operate. They write about important issues, share the stories of their teams and contribute to policy modernization efforts.

Bad product managers lament all that is standing in the way of delivering good products. They complain about people who don’t get it, antiquated policies and overly strict standards. Once they fail, bad product managers blame “the system” or “the bureaucracy”.

Good product managers are results-oriented.

Good product managers measure their impact using objective success criteria like user uptake, completion rates and cost per transaction. They automate the collection of these metrics and publish them in the open to focus their team on valuable outcomes, not outputs.

Bad product managers lose sight of outcomes and instead only track scope, schedule and budget. They use change orders to re-baseline these so they always appear to be on track.

Good product managers are pragmatic.

Good product managers think big but start small. They clearly describe the context, purpose and common goal for their team. They define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. They set clear parameters around product decisions that they can make, tactical decisions the team can make, and policy decisions that executives or elected officials must make. They say “no” much more often than they say “yes”.

Bad product managers provide vague direction and let their team build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest technical problem).

Good product managers are strong strategists.

Good product managers understand how to decompose products into component parts. They understand that some of these components should be built; others copied, reused or remixed; still others consumed as a service. They also understand that to manage these different components effectively calls for using a variety of appropriate methods.

Good product managers, in other words, recognize that a cult-like devotion to custom development will not actually save the world.

Bad product managers dogmatically apply a single approach to all problems and work in isolation.

Good product managers craft their own roles.

Good product managers define their job and their successes.

Bad product managers constantly look to the team or their superiors to be told what to do.

Good product managers are disciplined.

Good product managers are disciplined. They always show up early and never forget to send their updates or submit their status reports on time.

Bad product managers are always late and forget these things because they aren’t disciplined.

Finally, painting outside the lines of Horowitz’s original, and in so doing seeking to make explicit what the authors hope was already understood:

Good product managers are relentlessly aspirational, generously self-compassionate, and a continuous work in progress.

In other words, based on the foregoing, none of the three authors are good product managers on any given day. We’ve all missed weeknotes, made excuses and burned days of a sprint’s productive effort on reactionary fire-fighting and busy-work. But we’ve seen — on good days, demonstrated by the great people with whom we’re privileged to work — the good that we’ve described above. We’ve seen the great results that follow. We celebrate and we want more of that — for ourselves, for the benefit of our teams, and for the positive public impact that will follow from these efforts. And, if we know anything for certain, it is that…

Good product managers are connected and contribute to a growing, generative community — one that is committed to shared learning, shared values and the deep and lasting meaning that comes from sharing in positive public impact.

We are grateful and privileged to be here with you, part of a #oneteamgov team-of-teams, and look forward to your suggestions for making this article better.