The problem for these Product Managers is that the incentives between the different stakeholders are drastically misaligned at a fundamental level.
The people in charge of community, design, content and publishing are actively fighting the demands of the parts of the organization that drive profits.
Companies that use advertisements to subsidize free content have sales and marketing teams that need to interrupt the goals of all of these other functions in order to keep the organization alive.
However, if you look at the incentive structure for say a traditional book publisher, the marketing and sales don't actively fight the content because they don't put adds inside the covers. They just sell the finished product.
Sure, market appeal might affect the kind of content that gets invested in by a publisher, but it doesn't affect how the content is presented.
That makes me wonder - why do companies treat design and content as something that does not drive profit? Profit is holistic, otherwise why bother with the so-called "cost centers"? Kind of like a restaurant saying "the cash register is where our revenue clearly ends up, let's just cut out all the other cruft like the kitchen".
It's harder to point to specific items in those areas and say, "this feature X saved us $Y", whereas the sales departments have easy figures to point to.
Sadly, this whole "cost center" versus "profit center" exists at all types of companies. I used to work in food manufacturing, and the incentives in play there were beyond strange. The sanitation budget was constantly being slashed, because Quality Assurance as a department doesn't bring in a profit (that they can see), whereas hordes of "process engineers" would come in and rearrange boxes and claim that they have just eliminated 10 steps out of the workflow and calculate this to be saving $92/day. They quickly get promoted before anyone can actually see if this made orders any faster. Another common tactic was to cut positions on the manufacturing line, claim the reduced headcount as a savings, and move on before the problems of fewer headcount (slower throughput) became apparent.
With a professional kitchen, yes, the cash register is a place where value is stored, literally, but what are the inputs? Settled bills coming from customers. Who were paying for what? Food coming from the kitchen. The kitchen is creating valuable things that can be tracked and accounted for by both the customer and the cash register and the bill and the receipt from the debit card and all tracked in a double-entry style in to books, organized by many different kinds of departments.
This way the kitchen itself can be viewed as an isolated financial entity, separate from the concerns of the cash register or the landlord. We can then see exactly how profitable the kitchen is because it has well defined inputs and outputs. With this information in hand, we would probably not want to get rid of the kitchen.
Imagine if the food were free and covered with ads. That's what we have now.
Content, when treated as property on a market, like food sold to customers, retains these properties. Now the "content department" is most definitely creating valuable things for the salesmen to hock.
Design is tough because it is qualitative and it sort of falls apart from an accounting perspective. It's really hard to see it as anything other than an expense, which is probably why it is so undervalued in most corporate settings. It certainly is important but only when it is novel as it can be easily copied. You can't copyright an entire design paradigm, so the minute someone invents "Art Deco", well, the cat's out of the bag.
The iPhone is interesting because it had such a big head start but don't for a minute think that there aren't fleets of accountants with a lot of say running around Apple and helping them figure out how to bridge the economic realities of engineering and supply chain with the delightful new features being dreamed up for the products.
Most long-lived corporations that make money back for most investors end up in a situation where they design and ship lots and lots of products precisely because they can't ever quantitatively figure out how to ship a "hit record". So if you turn the product of all your subjective creations (design, art, content, creative) in to intellectual property that participates in a marketplace, you're creating a way to run a business that you might be able to make some sense out of.
The people in charge of community, design, content and publishing are actively fighting the demands of the parts of the organization that drive profits.
Companies that use advertisements to subsidize free content have sales and marketing teams that need to interrupt the goals of all of these other functions in order to keep the organization alive.
However, if you look at the incentive structure for say a traditional book publisher, the marketing and sales don't actively fight the content because they don't put adds inside the covers. They just sell the finished product.
Sure, market appeal might affect the kind of content that gets invested in by a publisher, but it doesn't affect how the content is presented.