Data-driven software product management: What is the role of a modern software product manager and how data-driven are they in making decisions?

Abstract

Software product management refers to the function of managing a software product by considering business, user, and technology requirements. This multidisciplinary function is fairly new field, and the little existing research focuses on the technical aspects. Meanwhile, in practice product management has rapidly evolved to be more focused on the business side and academic research has not yet reported on this change. Product managers are constantly pushed to make decisions about their product and academia reports that these decisions are mainly based on opinions, expertise, and intuition. However, data analytics has been proposed as a tool to overcome subjective decision making to produce more reliable decisions that are of higher quality. Still, the extent to which product managers are data-driven has not been studied and data analytics does not come without concerns.

The thesis aimed to solve the two issues of bridging the gap in understanding product management function between academia and practice, as well as the lesser studied area of decision making based on data analytics. A qualitative interview study was conducted to answer these concerns where 10 product managers from various companies of different fields and sizes were interviewed. The interviews were analysed based on the interview transcripts using thematic analysis.

The results of the thesis research confirm the gap between how academia and the field define product management. Contemporary literature seems to have been closer to the truth where the role is less technical and more focused on business goals and product discovery through understanding users, defining requirements, and managing a roadmap. Two emerging concepts arose during the study, both of which have been overlooked previously in product management research. These include the effect that constraints and limited resources have on the product manager, and the role of stakeholders and how negotiations mould and even limit the product manager’s role but also their decisions. The decisions that product managers are able to make, are mostly based on user research but subjective grounds still play an important part. Data analytics, which has been proposed as a solution for better decision making, was seen as burdensome, time consuming and lacking in depth. Thus, to enable product managers to be more data-driven better tools for analysing and portraying data are required, as the study still indicated that investing in a data analyst for the product team already makes product managers less subjective decision makers.