Taking product management ‘upstream’ in government
At last week’s New York Product Conference, JJ Rorie described the role of a product manager as more akin to a steward or an orchestrator (rather than as a mini-CEO). This made me think of the greater value that product managers, or perhaps more accurately, product management skills, might be able to bring to the broader public service, beyond purely digital teams, that is.
I spoke in 2018 at the Leading the Product Melbourne conference about digital product management in government, including what’s the same and what’s different about doing product management in the public sector (my slides are still floating around if you’d like to see them).
Part of it was a pitch at why private sector product managers should consider applying themselves to work for the greater good (essentially: purpose, scale, impact). But another element was around the seemingly good match between the needs of government and the skills and attributes that good quality product management can offer.
Currently, government agencies that do employ product managers have them in digital service delivery teams - where they are doing the very necessary and good work of making it easier for citizens and businesses to digitally fulfil the ‘jobs’ or ‘obligations’ that government requires of them (eg apply for this, register for this, prove who you are, keep track of this entitlement, pay this fine or tax etc etc).
But there are opportunities further upstream, in policy and program design, for product management to make a difference. Upstream, things get more fuzzy and difficult; where the increasingly ‘wicked’ problems that are usually the government’s problem, reside.
This is where many of the skills and temperaments of product managers would be an interesting addition1 to the traditional policy, economic and analytically skilled people that shape policies and large government programs:
Skills in design and eliciting underlying citizen or user needs
Skills in managing and influencing a plethora of stakeholders without formal authority, something which is probably even more heightened in government, where there are many more stakeholders across departmental, and often jurisdictional and sectoral boundaries
Skills in reducing uncertainty and risk in uncertain and dynamic contexts, eg testing risky assumptions through deliberately designed experiments, be it prototypes or small-scale tests
Helping to orchestrate and combine experts from different disciplines - in digital teams it’s often engineering and design, but is there any reason why product managers couldn’t help do the same with other experts, eg policy experts, economists, lawyers, frontline workers etc?
A fusion of policy and delivery, through closer feedback between these two, which are traditionally separated in the public service. That is, policy teams design something, and separate teams implement and operate it. Product managers are skilled in finding the intersection of customer needs and organisational value - in the public sector the equivalent is the intersection of the needs of customers and the overall policy intent of the government.
And, of course, bringing expertise in technology and software to the table - what problem nowadays doesn’t involve software at least somewhere?
There’d no doubt be some challenges to introducing product managers or product management skills further upstream. One is that bringing strategy/policy and delivery together is inherently challenging to the usual arrangements in the public service. The second I can think of is that all of this implies more decentralised decision-making authority or influence. There are no doubt more.
As Martin Stewart-Weeks and Simon Cooper make the point in their book Are We There Yet?, these new types of skills should be added to, rather than seen as a substitute for, traditional public sector skills.