PM Daisy Insights
I want to say thank you to all participants. It’s an incredible honor to have so many contributors.
Statistics
As of 10/10/2020, 2358 people generated 2611 daisies. Fun fact – 1885 of them unique.
Insight #1: PMs are not CEOs
More than 70% of PMs are not involved in business decisions and more than half of them are doing project/program management jobs solo. The picture (see below) is not dramatically different across all company sizes.
I regrouped clusters to simplify the picture. For each workstream:
Solo players – people who gave only “I do it myself" responses
Team players – people who gave (“I do it myself” AND "(“I have a team” OR “I use external resources”)) responses
Conductor – people who gave (“I have a team” OR (“I have a team” AND “I use external resources”)) responses
Detached – people who gave (“I don’t oversee” OR “I use external resources") responses
My hypothesis, which was based on common knowledge, was that in large companies, the number of solo players would decrease dramatically and the width of responsibilities would be much larger than in smaller companies. As you can see, there was no proof.
Insight #2: You can be any type of PM at any company.
Although there is some correlation between company size and the breadth of covered workstreams / amount of available resources, it’s not significant enough to make strong claims such as “join a startup if you want more breadth” or “work for a large company if you want to have a lot of resources.” There were many incredibly broad and incredibly narrow Daisies in both small startups and large companies.
The biggest differences appeared in Customer Research, UX Design, and Program/Project management. PMs in smaller companies tend to do those activities solo.
Research is done solely by PMs:
small companies – 37%, middle-size – 24%, large companies –14%
UX work is done solely by PMs:
small companies – 19%, middle-size – 8%, large companies – 9%
Program/Project mgmt is done solely by PMs:
small companies – 58%, middle-size – 40%, large companies – 41%
For the rest of the workstreams, the differences for different company sizes were less than 10 percentage points.
Closing words
The framework was designed for self-assessment and never was intended to assess the industry. As a consequence, definitions might not always be crystal clear, and people filled out Daisies based on their subjective assessment. This analysis is less objective than, for example, state of the industry reports specifically designed and led by PM-focused websites and agencies.
However, I believe that the main conclusions are legit and are in-line with ones from more objective reports. More precise analysis might show that, for example, the percentage of people who don’t oversee a specific area is 27% instead of the 35% that my analysis shows. I believe that is not important for the purpose of this framework.
What is important, however, is to show that when you are applying for a PM job, no matter what company or title, there is no guarantee that the role will have the desired exposure to business and marketing. Or, vice versa, the role may end up having more cross-functionality than you would prefer.
Therefore, as Product Managers pursuing a meaningful career, we have only one choice…
“Do your homework assessing a specific position.”