Where Should Product Management Live?

Marty Cagan argues that product management should not sit inside marketing or engineering, the two most common homes for it. Marketing tends to confuse listening to customers with product discovery and merges product management with product marketing, while engineering focuses on building the product right rather than the right product. He recommends elevating product to a peer of engineering and marketing, ideally alongside design, led by a senior product executive with a seat on the leadership team. In large companies with centralized engineering and decentralized business units, he prefers embedding product management in the business units. He concludes that even when structural change is hard, the skills and visible value of the product team matter most.

01Key takeaways

• Avoid placing product management under marketing, since customer conversations alone do not produce successful products.
• Keep product management distinct from product marketing so both roles can be executed well.
• Engineering-led product teams often drift toward spec writing and away from market strategy.
• Give the head of product a seat on the executive team so product is not driven by technology or sales alone.
• Embed product management in business units when a company has centralized engineering and decentralized business lines.
• Build visible product skills and value; this matters more than the exact org chart.

02Key sections

Why marketing is a poor home

Placing product management under marketing rests on the mistaken belief that customer conversations alone yield great products. The roles also blend together, so product management and product marketing both tend to be done poorly.

Why engineering is also problematic

Engineering organizations are optimized for building things correctly, not choosing what to build. Product managers can get absorbed in writing detailed specs instead of analyzing market opportunity and strategy.

Elevating product to a peer function

Cagan favors a standalone product organization on par with engineering and marketing, ideally including design, led by a VP or Chief Product Officer with an executive seat. This signals that products are not driven by technology or sales alone.

Large companies with business units

In companies with a shared engineering function and multiple business units, product management is best integrated into the business units, since their managers must play a major product role.

Making any structure work

Organizational change is difficult and not always possible. Success ultimately depends on developing the product team's skills and demonstrating their value across the company.

03From the post

“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.