The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

How Might We Fix Product Management and Close the Skills Gap

Dec 18, 2024

The discussion dives into the impact of the pandemic on product management, highlighting how the rush for rapid delivery has overshadowed strategic vision. It emphasizes the emerging skills gap, as product managers become overwhelmed by the demand for features at the expense of cohesive user experiences. There’s a strong call to reassess core competencies like customer discovery and critical thinking, urging professionals to reclaim their roles and meet user needs more effectively.

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Quick takeaways

The rapid demand for digital products during the pandemic led to product managers becoming overly focused on speed, sacrificing cohesive user experiences.

To bridge the skills gap in product management, there's a critical need to refocus on foundational competencies like customer discovery and data analysis.

Deep dives

The Impact of Rapid Growth on Product Management

The surge in demand for digital services during the pandemic led to rapid hiring and an expansion in product teams across many companies. This shift has caused product managers to prioritize speed over thoughtful product development, resulting in a decline in meaningful user experience considerations. Instead of focusing on cohesive solutions that directly address customer needs, many product managers have transformed into feature churners, producing numerous features without sufficient analysis. This trend has created a significant skills gap, as the core competencies vital for effective product management have increasingly been overshadowed by a focus on superficial outcomes.

Reassessing Core Competencies in Product Management

12min

How Might We Fix Product Management and Close the Skills Gap

“During the pandemic, many companies experienced a surge in demand for digital services and products, leading to rapid hiring sprees. With expectations of continued growth, they expanded teams across every aspect of the product, anticipating long-term demand.

Features that would have once undergone thorough discovery, prioritisation, and sizing were now being churned out at breakneck speed.

Product managers, who once prioritised delivering cohesive user experiences, have increasingly become mere managers of feature factories, losing sight of the broader vision.

This shift has come at a significant cost, resulting in a substantial skills gap in product management due to the diminished emphasis on developing core product development skills.

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