This is likely among the top 10 most important frameworks I will ever share. And the reason I say that is that once you understand this framework, a lot of what you see around you in your company, with regards to the power that PMs have or don't have, with regards to who gets to call the shots, who gets to be in the driver's seat, why is engineering so laid back and doesn't seem to care about users enough? Or why is there such a turf war between PM and design on who gets to own product strategy? This framework will actually help you understand the root cause of the vast majority of such questions.
With that, let's get ready. So this framework is the best way I have found to identify if a given company or org has a PM-dominated culture, PM-guided culture, or PM-serviced culture. We're going to break this framework down step by step.
So here are the bands that each of these three PM cultures occupy. But let's get to the very beginning. The way to figure out the type of PM culture of a given org or company.
is first to think about the competence of a given PM, a given product manager within a team, can have low competence or high competence along the lines of what we define the PM role, which is to define the product and orchestrate actions across the org to make the product successful. So they can either have low or high competence along a certain continuum that's shown in this horizontal axis here. Okay, next. On the vertical axis, we look at the degree of influence that that... PM has over product decisions.
The product decisions we're talking about are what is our product strategy? What are our prioritization criteria? Should we say no to this large customer request or should we say yes?
Should we take time to build a higher quality, more full-featured product or should we aim for a quick ship? When the stakes are high and it isn't clear what to do, should we do A or should we do B? Who has the biggest voice in that?
Whom does the CEO look to for making the call on these things? Or whose input does the CAO weigh more heavily in these situations? What you'll notice is for a given org or company culture, despite whatever people say, there is usually one function that gets to call the shots on these types of important questions. So that's what degree of influence would such a PM have.
With this, if we now look at the bottom right section of this 2D space, that is the situation when you could be the best PM in the world. but you only have a low degree of influence or at best a medium degree of influence over product decisions. If that is the situation in a given company, that company likely has a PM service culture. And this is when some other function, usually engineering or sales, is top dog. PM's job is first to make sure it's serving this top dog function well.
Next. Now we look at the top left part of the this two-dimensional space. Here we have a situation where a low to medium competence PM, so a PM who's like 60th, 70th percentile or lower, sometimes a PM who's even in the bottom quartile of PMs at the company still has a high degree of influence over product decisions.
So here, this PM who's say in the bottom 25% of PMs in terms of competence is still able to wield a lot of influence mainly because of his or her title. not because of the quality of ideas or abilities. So when this is usually the case in a given org, it has a PM-dominated culture.
This is in some ways the opposite of a PM service culture. Lastly, we have this middle part in the 2D space. And this one is a little more nuanced. This is a culture in which a high-competence PM has a high degree of influence over product decisions. But unlike a PM-dominated culture, a low-competence PM does not get the same luxury.
A low-competence PM... can at best exert low to medium influence over product decisions. And in that case, when it's a PM who has low competence, the influence delta is taken on by somebody in some other function.
Usually more competent product person, whether it's an engineering, sales, design, product ops or somewhere else. So in a PM guided culture, PMs don't just get the luxury of calling the shots because they have the PM title. But if you're a strong PM, then the culture actually lets you wield more influence on the product, both macro and micro.
With that, we can go to each of these. Basically, this is what a PM dominated culture looks like. It's PM as a dictator and other streams are treated as resources.
This is what PM guided culture looks like. And the best metaphor I've found, which is PM as a tour guide, which is if you hire a tour guide in a new city or country you're visiting, you don't want the tour guide to basically dominate everything you do. You want the tour guide to give you some space to explore.
But at the same time, you don't want the tour guide to not have an opinion. You want the tour guide to have some idea of where he or she wants to take you and what is worth seeing. But at the same time, the tour guide cannot be too dominant. and at the same time cannot be too loose. So that's why I thought the PM as a guide metaphor, a tour guide metaphor is really great to describe this.
And then lastly, this is what PM service is. This PM is housekeeping. This is a point of frustration for many, many, many talented PMs.