Product Management Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Friends,

During a recent conversation with veterans Andrew and Kieron, who collectively bring decades of experience to the table, I found myself fascinated by their nuanced understanding of the product lifecycle. Their insights revealed that successful product management isn’t just about building great technology, it’s about orchestrating a complex balance between customer needs, organisational capabilities, and market realities.

The Genesis of Great Products: Ideation Beyond Brainstorming

"Ideas are important," Kieron noted with characteristic understatement. But what struck me was how both experts pushed back against the romanticised notion of ideation as some mystical, unstructured process where inspiration strikes like lightning.

"Agencies sell and position themselves on ideas and creativity, and they often resist structure to ideation because they think it’s kind of the manna from heaven," Andrew explained. This resistance to structure can be counterproductive. In reality, product management is a process that thrives on ideas but requires systematic approaches to nurture them.

What I found particularly insightful was their perspective on where breakthrough ideas actually come from. Rather than emerging from formal brainstorming sessions, the most transformative concepts often arise through what biologists call "exaptation"—when something created for one purpose proves unexpectedly valuable for another entirely different application.

"Feathers didn’t come about because birds wanted to fly," Andrew explained. "Feathers came about because they wanted to keep warm... and then they were able to fly." This biological example perfectly illustrates how innovation frequently follows unexpected paths rather than linear progression.

The cross-fertilisation of ideas from seemingly unrelated fields often yields the most significant breakthroughs. Google, for instance, deliberately designed clubs around interests like beekeeping to bring together employees from different departments, creating environments where diverse perspectives could collide and spark innovation.

But here’s where conventional wisdom gets challenged: despite our cultural celebration of collaborative brainstorming, both experts were adamant that the initial spark typically comes from individuals, not committees.

"I don’t believe that great ideas come from committees," Andrew stated firmly. "Great ideas usually come from an individual having just a moment where they think of something." Kieron added an important distinction: "The idea, I think, is often from a single person... It becomes great through validation, which requires people."

Strategy: Aligning Ideas with Business Reality

As our conversation shifted to strategy, I was struck by how often product initiatives fail not because of poor execution but because of misalignment with broader business objectives.

"What do you mean by strategy?" Andrew challenged. "Which strategy are you talking about? Because there are different strategies at different levels." This seemingly simple question reveals a fundamental truth: product strategy must serve multiple masters simultaneously.

Sometimes a product exists primarily to generate revenue. Other times, it might focus on cost reduction, improving customer loyalty, meeting regulatory requirements, or creating market differentiation. The key is clarity about which strategic objectives take priority.

What’s frequently overlooked, according to Kieron, is the customer’s actual behaviour rather than their stated preferences. "Implicit behaviour was far more reliable than explicit behaviour," he noted, recalling how marketing automation tools revealed the gap between what customers say and what they do.

He shared a fascinating example about privacy versus personalisation: "If you ask customers, 'Do you want companies collecting information on you so they can make better offers?', customers will say no. If you ask, 'Do you want to only see adverts that are relevant to you?' the same proportion will say yes." This contradiction highlights why observing behaviour often yields more valuable insights than direct questioning.

Definition: Where Vision Meets Reality

The definition phase is where ambitious ideas confront practical constraints. It’s about "taking that idea and distilling it down to what you’re actually going to build," as Kieron put it.

This stage serves a crucial alignment function within organisations. When excitement about a new concept spreads, people naturally extend and embellish it. "Suddenly in this short space of time, that idea gets extended out to 'wow, wouldn’t it be amazing if...'" Andrew observed. The definition phase reins in these expansive visions and creates shared understanding about what’s being built.

Both experts emphasised the importance of in-person communication during this phase. "Get them in a room," Andrew advised emphatically, noting that digital collaboration tools, while useful, filter out crucial elements of communication like body language. Kieron added that curating who participates is equally important: "You want some dissenters in the room... people who are going to ask tough questions."

For prioritisation, they recommended the classic effort-versus-reward framework, but with an important caveat: definition isn’t just about the technical aspects of a product. It must encompass the entire customer journey—from awareness through purchase, usage, and eventually replacement.

Development: Beyond the Technical Build

Perhaps the most eye-opening part of our conversation concerned the development phase, where both experts challenged the common misconception that this stage is primarily about technical implementation.

"The single most important thing to remember? That it’s not just a technical thing," Andrew emphasised, with Kieron immediately echoing the sentiment.

To illustrate this point, Andrew used the example of McDonald’s launching a new burger. The technical aspects include adapting kitchen equipment and updating menus. But development also encompasses forecasting demand, determining pricing, creating marketing strategies, training staff across all locations, and ensuring the new product doesn’t disrupt existing operations.

This holistic view of development becomes increasingly important in the age of AI, where technical implementation is becoming less of a bottleneck. "What’s really exposing is that it’s the non-technical stuff where the problems lie," Kieron observed. "The bottleneck has shifted from technical development and has moved to organisational change."

He cited research suggesting that in successful AI projects, between 40–70% of the effort goes into operational and organisational change—not technical implementation. This shift has profound implications for how we approach product development in the coming years.

Launch: Orchestrating a Complex Debut

When I asked about launch best practices, both experts emphasised that launch isn’t just the moment when someone stands on stage announcing a product—it’s a comprehensive process that begins long before any public reveal.

"For some products, you might try a staged introduction with a beta phase," Kieron explained. "For others, there’s no beta phase; you just need to go out with the end product straight away."

The approach depends entirely on your strategic objectives. A high-profile consumer product might warrant a splashy event, while enterprise software might benefit from a controlled rollout with select customers.

What constitutes a "bad" launch? "Where it feels bad is when you feel it’s out of control," Andrew reflected. "You can cut a few corners here and there... if you feel confident you can manage those things. But if you reach the point where you go, 'I’m not sure this is going to work,' then it’s bad."

He described using launch checklists that vary based on the product’s nature and scale. Launching a mobile phone package that will reach millions requires far more rigorous controls than releasing software for a limited audience.

Kieron shared a cautionary tale about a challenger bank’s telephone banking launch where marketing was too successful: "It was taking like an hour, an hour and a half to get through the telephone lines to open a bank account." The operational capacity couldn’t match the demand generated by marketing, resulting in negative feedback despite the product itself working as designed.

Early Life Support and General Availability: The Critical Transition

The early life support phase serves as a crucial bridge between launch and general availability. Unlike beta testing, which happens before official launch, early life support occurs after launch with actual paying customers.

"You typically use early life support when you’re launching something relatively complicated and where you’re not absolutely certain that the customer experience is going to do exactly what you want," Andrew explained.

During this phase, companies often create specialised support teams with direct access to product managers. Kieron described how his team handled the launch of a new core network: "We had a bunch of our most experienced customer service people... I had a separate chat box with the support team as the product manager so they could ask me questions directly."

This approach allows organisations to identify and address issues before transitioning to general availability, where standard business processes take over. The transition timing varies dramatically based on the product’s complexity and customer uptake—it could be as short as a month or extend much longer.

The End of the Road: Sunsetting Products with Grace

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of product lifecycle management is the withdrawal phase. "I think it’s often the poorer sibling," Kieron noted. "It’s like, 'Oh yeah, we’re done with it now.' But it’s got to be managed just as much as a launch."

This phase typically begins with a "stop sell" decision, where new orders are no longer accepted, followed eventually by full withdrawal of support. The transition requires careful planning, especially for products that are part of larger solutions.

"It becomes a little bit of a game of Jenga," Andrew explained. "You may be going, 'I’m just going to withdraw this security service because we don’t do that one anymore,' but that customer may be wholly reliant on that particular service... and you pulling that block out may be enough for them to go, 'Right, I’m going to scrap everything.'"

Both experts emphasised that product managers often struggle emotionally with this phase. "For the same reasons, usually a product manager is the champion of their product, they commit blood, sweat, and tears to it, and it’s hard to give up," Kieron acknowledged. "That’s why you should always plan for replacing your own product."

The Evolving Nature of Product Management

Throughout our conversation, a distinction emerged between traditional product management and its software-specific variant. "Product management in software kind of means a different thing to product management everywhere else," Kieron observed.

Software product managers often focus on specific features rather than the entire product experience, including marketing, sales, operations, and customer support. "In a full product management role, you’re the CEO of your product and you are responsible for everything that happens around the entire product," he explained.

As I reflected on our conversation, what struck me most was how product management fundamentally requires balancing competing priorities—innovation versus stability, speed versus quality, individual vision versus collaborative refinement. The best product managers develop an almost intuitive sense for when a product is thriving or struggling, often detecting problems before metrics confirm their suspicions.

"There’s sort of a lack of energy," Kieron described, explaining how he can sense when a product is approaching the end of its lifecycle. "You get signs from salespeople... you haven’t lost customers, but the amount of interest suddenly starts to wane."

This intuition doesn’t come from fractional attention or occasional oversight. It develops through complete immersion in the product’s ecosystem—listening to customers, watching competitors, engaging with sales teams, and developing a deep understanding of how the product fits into users’ lives.

In an era of rapid technological change, mastering this holistic approach to product lifecycle management isn’t just valuable—it’s essential for creating products that truly matter.