Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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The Link Between Brand Management and Product Mangement

Product management is a central discipline in just about every technology company in the world. The job, at least as we describe it at Percolate, is to own the strategy and roadmap for the team product/s and oversee the execution of those products. At places like Google (and Percolate) these jobs are held almost exclusively by people with an engineering background. The thinking here is two-fold: On one side the engineer’s approach to solving problems is generally pretty optimal and on the other, it’s hard to lead a team of talented engineers if you don’t understand what they’re doing at a pretty deep level. (While product managers mostly don’t actually manage the engineers on their teams, they are expected to “lead” the team and make choices around what they’re developing.)

What’s interesting about product management, though, is that it actually came from the world of marketing. The idea was inspired by brand management, which was originally introduced by Proctor & Gamble in 1931. I’ve read bits and pieces alluding to this connection, but this piece on the evolution of the discipline draws the line quite explicitly:

One reason product management has not traditionally been included in engineering curricula is because it did not start as an engineering role. Its earliest form was brand management, a term coined by a young advertising manager named Neil McElroy, who in 1931 wrote a memo to the executive team at Procter & Gamble proposing the idea of a “brand man”β€”an employee who would be responsible for a product, rather than a business function.3 The role had many similarities to modern-day product management. His memo called out the need to promote processes that work and outline solutions to problems. Above all, it called for the “brand man” to take full responsibility for the product.

December 11, 2014 // This post is about: , , , ,

P&G’s Strategy Algorithm

In response to my post on Strategy as Algorithm, Michael Migurski shared this image with me from P&G CEO A.G. Lafley’s book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works.

These are the five questions Lafley’s used for making major strategy decisions at P&G. In explaining why he uses this approach and why strategy is hard, Lafley explained:

In Roger Martin’s and my view, the essence of strategy is making 5 integrated β€” sometimes difficult β€” choices; so 5 choices to win. And a lot of us, a lot of human beings, don’t like to make choices, right? Choices are difficult, we want to keep our options open, choices involve taking risks, and not only risk to the business but personal risk. So I think there’s this sort of human resistance to making choices, and choices are the core of strategy.

Business Insider has a nice breakdown of what each step in the above image means and how they were used. Here, for instance, is how they explain the capabilities question:

What are my core competencies that are going to enable me to win? In order to make the above decisions work, they have to be based on and supported by the things that a company’s best at. For P&G, it was innovating quickly and understanding consumers.

Now that Lafley is back at the helm as CEO it’s interesting to take some of his more recent decisions, like the big one to divest a large number of brands, through the lens of this system.

December 4, 2014 // This post is about: , , , , ,