Product Management as Practice
Bourdieu argues in “The Logic of Practice” that habitus is needed for praxis based on experience. This co-evolves during episodes in which the practitioner practices. The practitioner is thereby part of a community based on mutual engagement in combination with a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire of concepts, models, tasks, roles and rules. This requires understanding context within the human activity system: the artifacts, subjects, objectives, as well as the outcome in combination with established rules, participants, and labor division.
To execute product management well, the understanding of practice is essential. Not only because the concept is not limited to the idea of logic but open to ideas of capabilities, tacit knowledge, Action Theory, Participatory Design, Service Management Theory, the Service Dominant Logic of Marketing, Weltanschauung, Managerial Identity Dissemination Discourse. More importantly, it accepts the fact that managing is inherently social and even more so political. In reality product management is often limited to interactivity and improvisation, tactics do dominate strategy — productivity suffers and product development tends to become conservative over time because product managers develop routines and practice management procedural.
„Product Management as Practice“ accepts the social nature, is based on principles combined with a toolset based on insights from varying fields of research.
- Design Innovation Spectrum
- C-K Theory
- Human Activity System
- Strategy Foresight for the Business Model
- IT Alignment and Business Model
- Business Modeling and Software Design
At its core „Product Management as Practice“ is a knowledge building activity based on the communicative act of designing and thereby transforming resources into information.
„Substanz ist Form. Spezieller: Materie ist Form. Bewegung ist Form. Masse ist Information. Energie ist Information.“ — Carl F. von Weizsäcker
This cultural process is called innovation and its outcome is technology, the latter defined as everything of which output of information is greater than the total input of resources. Knowledge thereby is like the epigenetics of information! During the transformation the product manager manages designing.
- Why should we propose a solution to consumers? Why should the community of practice care?
- What does proposed solution entail?
- How should the activity of consumption be configured? How does our community of practice become the authority for that outcome?
- Where do we propose our solution?
- Whom do we address?
These questions are answered within the spaces of problem, solution, construction, and operations. His responsibility is to configure the know how with know what, know when and know why. And as soon as resources needed for transformation become intangible, the game changes. The idea of the corporation solely based on transaction costs becomes obsolete and markets do become echo chambers.
As a matter the product manager needs to act on the principles of:
- Humans act goal-oriented, emotions are a feedback mechanism.
- One cannot not work on the business model!
- Understanding context is key.
- Established products rarely are replaced by new ones, successful new products reconfigure the activity of consumption.
The only things that matter are the human activity system, complexity, scenarios and „deep truths“.