The typical product management process. A senior stakeholder believes there's a problem (probably due to talking to a client or sales person), comes up with the most obvious solution, puts it in the backlog (often near the top) and then promptly forgets about it.

The intermediate product management process. A senior stakeholder believes there's a problem. The product team then validates that problem through research, comes up their most obvious solution, launches it and then watches how it performs.

The mature product management process. Continuous research identifies and validates a problem. The product team comes up with a hypothesis and a range of solutions, which they test. They A/B test the most likely candidates, test again, and then settle on the most successful one.

Obviously it's a lot more nuanced than this, but I wanted to fit these ideas into a single Tweet, so please don't respond with whataboutisms

I would say that 80% of the companies I see work in the first way, 15% work in the second and 5% work in the third.

There are a lot of good (well understandable) reasons for the most basic product management approach. Leaders believe they know their customers and are in their position because they have a more acute sense of what their users need. The lack of research never proves them wrong.

As such, why waste time and money to prove something they already know, when they could use that time to push out two or three more of their wonderful ideas?

See yesterdays rant https://twitter.com/andybudd/status/1252981160499728388

The intermediate product management culture starts when the company begins to scale, the most obvious "ideas" have been implemented, and managers are forced away from the "fun product stuff" and towards more business focussed things, forcing them to rely on their product teams.

It can also be the result of a more product and design focussed leader or early product team. This is especially true if early product and design leaders come from an agency or a bigger start-up as they bring that customer fixation with them.

While the latter product management process can emerge from the intermediate one, it can also be driven from a very analytical, engineering culture that eyes designers and more qualitative research suspiciously. Being VC funded and laser focussed on growth is a big contribution.