Outsourcing product management to a digital product agency

The Product Management market in Australia is nuts.

Just in Sydney alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of Product roles being advertised at any given time.

Product Managers, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Agile Project Managers… you name it.

Being a Product Manager in a Product Agency, I am always interested to read these varied job ads.

Not because I am going anywhere… though to understand the market, how and where it is evolving and what is being asked of the industry, rightly or wrongly.

People who write user stories don’t also do strategy

At one end of the market, you have sophisticated digital businesses which almost always have well-articulated and sensible job ads.

These businesses understand what they want and should expect from their roles. The requirements are spelt our granularly and it is rare to see overreach in expectations.

Professional and mature corporates tend to be the same.

They have large and sophisticated product functions, albeit from within legacy businesses: retail, banks, insurance, media.

And then there are companies – both large and small – that have not jumped the product maturity wall and would seem to be at the beginning of the product journey: they are likely still outsourcing their “product” development to digital agencies.

These businesses still see “product” and technology/digital through the prism of “project” thinking.

And when you read their job ads for product people, it is clear that they’ve borrowed parts of various job ads, asking of everything from their role: sweeping the floors and writing through to developing sophisticated product strategy.

And this is where things predictably fall apart.

Because the sort of person that develops sophisticated digital strategy is not the person that is going to write tickets.

And the person that writes tickets will be most unlikely to finessing sophisticated digital strategy.

And to that point, only one of these things will you need all the time and it isn’t the expensive strategy bit.

Can you outsource product strategy?

The ultimate answer is yes, though there are a caveats.

Firstly, as a business, you must have a clearly understood and well-articulated business strategy.

A product strategy should not exist unless it aligns and supports the business’ strategy.

Yes, you could argue that that strategy would always be around growth, new markets, revenue and customer growth, though instead, these are merely goals: not the strategy for how to position and how to get there.

So, get your strategy right.

And then bake in some time.

A product strategy takes time, it takes research and it should include previous data and experimentation to support it. I am not going to elaborate on this because what goes into the product business plan and strategy is many blogs on their own.

And in the same way that a business’ own strategy takes time to form, so to does that of the product strategy.

And of course, many people within the business will be needed to ensure proper contribution from across the business.

Though engaging a consultant or a suitable product agency for a period to help form that strategy would often make more sense than trying to hire that expensive and difficult product leader… who also isn’t going to write those all important tickets you will need.

I call it CPO (Chief Product Officer) in a can and I think it is where businesses who are evolving into product should start.

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