Hey, happy Monday!
I can finally announce it!
The Product Manager Alliance ↗ has been founded, and STRTGY and I are among the members of its board of directors, demonstrating our commitment to supporting product culture in Italy and abroad.
Sole24Ore featured us briefly (including in the print edition on May 3), and a website is already online with a form to fill out ↗ to express your interest in becoming an active member of the association.
As a member of the community and an active reader of this newsletter, I’ll make sure you can access the benefits an institutional association like this can offer its members.
If you think your company deserves a prominent place in such an important project from day one, get in touch with me ↗ or forward this email to someone who can.
In this Note, I interviewed Luciano Castro, the association’s president, who will be joining a guest from Silicon Valley at PMDAY22 (read to the end to find out who it is).
I’m sure you won’t want to miss it and lose the chance to meet all of us in person in Rome on June 25.
Here’s a link you can share with anyone you like to get 15% off your ticket (valid for both the online and in-person event).
I can’t wait to meet you in Rome or at one of our events ↗!
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS
Antonio
● PRODUCT / Join PMAll
The Product Manager Alliance Is Born
Q: What’s the best way to introduce yourself?
Luciano: I’m the president of the Product Manager Alliance, the first association for product managers in Italy.
I’m also an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and Business Angel, and I lead a company specializing in Product Management.
I’ve been working in the field for twenty years now, mostly abroad, where the Product Manager role has become essential and is seen as the perfect mix of someone who manages processes, someone who turns ideas into reality, and someone who handles marketing to evolve the product.
In Italy, however, we’re a little behind culturally, both in terms of mindset and experience delivering this kind of service.
The difference is especially clear right now in the ability of companies and public administrations—not to be overlooked—to deliver services and products while maintaining a continuous cycle of interaction, evolution, and growth.
Companies and public administrations that can manage this process are also the ones that can stay in the market; those that can’t… unfortunately don’t find their place.
When you manage to stay in the market and meet certain standards, it means you’ve continued to iterate, learn, and gradually improve your products with care, passion, and expertise.
Q: How does a company that hasn’t yet introduced product management into the way it creates value operate, and what problems might it face?
Luciano: Rather than having a Product Manager among the managers—which is absolutely right—we need to focus on mindset and methodology.
You need to be humble and understand that, essentially, no one has a crystal ball and knows exactly how to grow. It’s important to break out of the solipsism typical of all organizations and start understanding and listening to users again, aiming to base your decisions primarily on two actions.
First: listen through surveys and interviews, gathering all the information you can to collect insights and data.
Second: analyze that data cyclically and iterate as many times as possible.
When you adopt this approach, you avoid ending up in the position of 70% of startups when they launch: without product-market fit, evolving the product in an unprofitable direction, or not knowing how to position it.
The difference between those who adopt a methodology and those who don’t lies in their ability to constantly adapt to growth and market needs, which are essentially unpredictable and change very quickly.
Those who adopt this methodology are called Product Managers—precisely because they can adopt and execute it—and product managers.
Q: What qualities should a Product Manager have?
Luciano: The first is a passion for adaptation and innovation. They must be able to adapt, innovate, and consistently keep up with the reality around them.
The second is the ability to maintain constant oversight and a so-called big-picture view of their surroundings, recognizing competitors, the state of the market, and so on.
The third is having creative abilities, because in the end, throughout the various stages—even when working with data and analyzing it—you need a little creativity to find solutions that work and are the most effective, not just the most efficient.
The association is a vibrant community representing product experts
Q: This role is emerging and there’s still a lot of confusion: many organizations don’t know they need it, or even how to find product managers. That’s why the Association was founded, right?
Luciano: That’s exactly right, not just in Italy but worldwide. This role emerged so quickly that it was defined within companies before a job description had even been written.
So people started doing product management before the Product Manager role existed. What’s the result? There’s a lot of confusion about the Product Manager’s role, and people also confuse which methodologies work and which don’t. Not everything classified as product management actually works, and not everything Product Managers do is always useful or effective. That’s why the Association was founded.
The Association’s first goal is to create a standard.
The Association’s second goal is to represent the profession. Right now, Product Managers generate significant revenue and are found in most scale-ups, hopefully in many startups, and perhaps in the future in public administrations too, but they have no representation.
Q: What does a company gain by joining this Association for Product Managers?
Luciano: Companies that join aim to embed the most effective processes to grow their products and, as a result, their businesses.
To define what’s right, what’s correct, and what works, companies that join the Product Manager Alliance can access this kind of knowledge, connect with companies in our partner network, and keep their product leaders up to date and aligned.
They also become part of a vibrant community of people working in the industry. For now, we’ll focus on Italy, but then we’ll turn our attention to the European market.
Q: At the Product Management Day ↗ on June 25, you’ll be joined by a guest from Silicon Valley, someone who has trained thousands of product managers now working in companies and whom everyone looks up to. Can you tell us a little about it?
Luciano: Yes, of course. I’ll be at PMDAY22↗ with Carlos González De Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO of Product School.
He started his journey in 2014 and recently received a substantial investment round. We’ll talk with him mainly about delivery, or how the product creation and management process can be put into practice. This is a fundamental part of the process and probably the most complex phase of product management, because it involves so many people across the company.
Q: Are there any resources you recommend reading before attending the event?
Luciano: There are lots of interesting videos and articles on Carlos’s website, productschool.com, to help you learn more about this field.
