The Forgotten Side of Product Management: The Business

Your Product Needs a General Manager

It happens with software. It happens with hardware. It happens with retail products. It happens with consumer services.

At some point, your product or service reaches a state of perfection — a point at which it is at its most robust, most elegant and most beautiful (for this version, at least). This is a moment of joy.

But when released, after all the fanfare, the numbers start slipping. Suddenly, you realize that the actual demand for your fine-tuned offering is not quite as rosy as the projections you based off of demand for the patchwork offering it replaced.

That’s when you realize you’ve got too much product management and not enough business management. Before this happens to you, ask yourself: Where is your product’s general manager?

The Case of Way Too Much Peloton

As I write this post, Peloton is allegedly stopping production on three of its groundbreaking products. It appears demand “suddenly” fell off a cliff.

This case is probably more post-lockdown-related than anything else, but the end result is the same. It’s definitely a far cry from where Peloton was just 12 months ago, when the share price was four…