Late last year I ran an informal poll that asked "What are your top activities?" & "What are your most important activities?".   A meager 22 PM's responded, but the surprising result was that half of the respondents were in companies with less than 100 people, and another quarter were in those with less than 500 people.   There are some other surprises, too.

 

Some bare stats:

• Respondents:  22
• Product Manager/Product Owner Title:  16
• Director Product Management/Marketing Title:  4
• Product Marketing Manager Title:  3
• Company size:  <100 - 11; 100-500 - 6; 501-2500 - 1; 2501-10,000 - 0; >10,000 - 4
• Industries:  Software - 17;  Mobile/Telecom - 5; Hardware/Embedded - 3; Financial - 3; Healthcare - 1;  Other -3 (Multiple categories allowed).  

I'll focus on the Product Managers/Product Owners in the smaller companies, and contrast to the others.  

No Real Surprises on Activities

Repondents were asked to pick their top 5 activities based on frequency.  A whopping 80% indicated the are working with Development on the current release.   Rounding out the top 3  pack were writing/updating product requirements and strategy planning, product strategy and roadmapping.      

Looking at the next tier we see feature/bug triage and then project/release planning at 40% of PMs.   This group is heavily engaged in creating their products.   If you look way down the list, you'll also note that very few (<10%) are performing market/customer research or meeting with customers, doing product testing to customers (13%) or conducting user testing/interviews (20%).   So where do the product ideas come from? 

Alas, we can only conclude that they are coming directly from the feature requests or driven from the executives, and which would  not be so unusual in a small company.    Another hint is about a third of the PM's are assisting Sales with RFPs, customer presentations and quotes, and thus it's also very likely that new customer orders are driving some feature development.   

For the few PMs that were in huge companies (>10,000), the only major difference was they were doing less product requirements and more of something else.    The Directors in the group mirrored the top 3 PM activities exactly and only had slightly more involvement in the sales activities.  

In contrast, the 3 Product Marketers were doing significantly different activities and were mostly in the huge companies.    All of them were doing strategy, planning and roadmapping plus most were also doing Go-to-Market activities in addtion to the market research customer visits.   

What About Impact?  

Our second question, "What top 3 activities would you consider to be the most impactful?"  yielded some extremely interesting results.   Overlaying these results on the list of activities highlights the differences.  

While the majority considered their primary activities of product requirements and strategy/roadmap planning to also be the most impactful, and astonishing ZERO PERCENT indicated that the most common activity of working with Development had the most impact.   Instead, the PMs added the missing market research, meeting with customers, and user analysis to round out the top 5.    The Director responses mirrored the PM responses exactly for the top 5.  

In another bizarre twist, the Product Marketers in the group flip-flopped with the Product Managers.   A unanimous ZERO PERCENT indicated that meeting with customers was impactful, only 1 concluded that market research was  important, and 2 out of 3 thought that working with Development WOULD BE impactful.    They did agree with the PMs that user analysis would have high impact.  

Conclusions

These results on the activities that most product managers are doing are similar to some of the results from the annual Pragmatic Marketing survey, where Product Managers are writing requirements, working with Development, and doing strategy and roadmapping.   Our survey indicated many fewer PM's are doing market-facing activities than their survey.  These demographics, besides being statistically limited, are also a very different set primarily from software in smaller companies.

My take-away is that smaller software companies (and likely all smaller tech companies) are primarily Development-driven (first) and Sales-driven (second) and that product management is more of a support function to those groups.   This is also what I see from experience in these companies.   This isn't necessarily bad, as your prime need as a small company is to get a product out there to test the market and to establish a sales pipeline to get to a sustainable revenue level just for existance.   It's also usual that the founder(s) have significant contact with customers and thus are driving the ship, as they should be.   

At some point, though, it behooves the company to try to start breaking out of this model and get the product group, either the product managers, program managers, or development leads, out into the market to scale the company's innovation braincells.   At least some Product Managers appear to be crying out for it.