Bottom-up vs top-down product management

By Ernest Oppetit on September 20, 2024

By Robert Leighton in the New Yorker

I like this definition of product management from Lenny's newsletter:

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

I think it clearly encapsulates one of the hardest things about the job which is that it entails both "top-down" activities, like understanding the most impactful things for the company to work on, and "bottom-up" activities like marshalling the resources of the team. A few more examples:

Top-down activities:

Defining the a product strategy and vision, writing "masterplan" docs
Product marketing, pricing, positioning
Market sizing different opportunities
Keeping track of ecosystem & competitor developments
Understanding what new and potential investors in the company are looking for
--> Company management and investors love you!

Bottom-up activities:

Joining customer calls to help sales close a deal, or a customer solve an issue
Dogfooding the product and providing feedback
Being a "shit umbrella" for your engineers, handling tricky customer questions, writing docs, etc.
Ensuring engineering design decisions are rooted in product pragmatism, i.e push back when you see overengineering 🙂
Planning the team's granular priorities for the next sprint
--> Sales, customer, engineering teams love you!

If you're too focused on "top-down", to the point that you've retreated to the proverbial ivory tower where you throw some specs down once in a while, the company management and investors may get super excited by your work, but you will lose goodwill with your customers, sales team, and engineering team. Instead of rolling up your sleeves and working with these teams to solve even the most pedestrian problems, you are working on what's coming in 6 months, and there is a risk you lose some travellers along the way who run into shorter-term issues. You have to keep the momentum and the "wins" rolling, and lead by example on being detailed-oriented, and that means working on "bottom-up" activities.

If you're too focused on "bottom-up", you may be running a prolific "feature factory": an engineering team that ships a lot and you're fully in sync with, but you are taking them to a local maximum. They ship great software that does not translate to lasting commercial success for the company. Perhaps you got too excited by a technical stack or a trend, but did not sufficiently validate the need or the size of the market. You may be a bit like the Thanksgiving turkey, you're having the best time getting fed (shipping features) until you get the chop (bankruptcy/layoffs).

So the reality is as a product manager you have to ensure you balance both sets of activities. You have to identify moments in the product's lifecycle when you have to do more top-down or more bottom-up. When you do more of one, you have to ensure other team members are covering on other activities. Note, the above definition says you marshall the team, you don't do it all alone. Product is everyone's job (but it's especially yours 🙂)

You should also be aware of your own 'biases'. The consultant/MBA type will be more drawn to top-down, and the engineer/UX type will be more drawn to bottom-up. Your company norms may also push you a certain way, eg a very Slack-driven culture with open comms leads to more bottom-up work requests.

I'll leave you with Elon switching abruptly to the bottom-up mode:

"Reaching five thousand cars per week would be a huge challenge. By the end of 2017, Tesla was making cars at only half that rate. Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory floors and lead an all-in surge. It was a tactic-personally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanatics—that came to define the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies. "

"Giga Nevada Hell" chapter of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

PS: before anyone asks, founder mode is not the same as bottom-up mode. Founder mode involves founders taking charge where they see issues, which may also be on top-down activities.