Stone soup is a folk tale about motivation and cooperation. It applies directly to our work as product managers, since we don’t have the authority to force cooperation or alignment. We have to provide leadership, motivation, and clarity of goals.
A perennial problem for Product Management (PM) is finding the right organizational home. In companies large enough to have a PM department, it has a tendency to oscillate between Marketing and Engineering. Two root causes for this are role confusion and organizational distance. Let’s walk through each in turn, while trying to map a PM’s place in the grand scheme.