Top 4 Reasons Why Beyonce Is the Ultimate Product Manager
An In-Depth Look into the World of Beyonce From a Product POV
Yes, you heard that right. No, I’m not ludicrous. I know what you’re thinking — You can say that about any popular mainstream artist of the last 50 years. Probably, but hear me out on this…
1.Beyonce is the product manager, the product, and the user experience all wrapped up in one.
According to Atlassian, “A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.” A product manager is also coined as the “CEO of the product” because she/he/they intuitively knows every aspect of that product’s lifecycle. This makes perfect sense because some product managers have gone on to become high-profile tech founders and CEOs after delivering successful products in the market.
After Beyonce was announced as the first Black artist and the first Black female artist to headline the Coachella Music Festival in 2018, fans flocked to sunny California to see her slay the stage in her superstar “Sasha Fierce” persona (product) and her dynamic, HBCU-inspired performance (product/user experience). Whether her public persona is partly manufactured by Columbia/Sony Music (Let’s be real) or an aspect of her true personality that she feels comfortable sharing with the rest of us, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Everything that is attached to Beyonce’s brand — from Parkwood Entertainment and her 28 Grammys (and counting!) to her five sold-out solo world tours and notorious private life, is a living testament to her work ethic and the many people behind the scenes that she has trusted over the years to make her dreams come true. Her evolution as an artist and entrepreneur will keep her brand selling and her millions of fans guessing in the many years to come.
The raw talent Beyonce brings to the table that has gotten her died-hard fans, admirers — and yes, even her haters, into formation for the last 25 years. So in other words, Beyonce has become both the product manager and the product, creating magical, and at times, controversial popular culture and political statements for all of us to digest and critique at a moment’s notice (user experience). They don’t call her the hardest working woman in music for nothing! Seriously, what kind of reverse psychology is this?!
2. Act 1: Renaissance is a series of three major sprints.
I’ll be honest. I’m not a huge Beyonce fan. I’m usually the type of person who loves music, but doesn’t get too emotionally invested in the artists. However, Act I: Renaissance, Beyonce’s seventh critically-acclaimed studio album, pretty much challenged that notion altogether — and since the July 29th release date, I still can’t articulate my reasons why into words. Yes, that’s her impact! I personally would have loved her to develop a more R&B inspired album. But Beyonce knows more than everyone else that as a product manager who assesses market trends, straight R&B music will not keep her competitive in this Spotify-esque mainstream music era where the number of streams and online clicks count more than the music production itself. Pop music still reigns supreme in these parts. For any artist, creating a new album is a long, arduous project. Beyonce took it a step further with Act I: Renaissance by dividing her team’s work into three major sprints like the bomb-ass product manager that she is.
Beyonce’s team launched the first sprint to produce and then publicly release the album. Now, we won’t be able to figure out if any of her team’s sprints were broken down into smaller sprints. I would assume yes because Beyonce (product manager/product) wants to continue being the #1 pop artist in the game and so, the caliber of work and her expectations for success can’t be completed in one large sprint. Her team had to follow a very strict timeline for all of this to happen rather smoothly. It has been highly publicized that Beyonce started this album during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I like to think that this Virgoian perfectionist had a product roadmap ready to go the moment she started humming the first melody for the album. It probably had all the high-level strategic plans of how the album would maximize her evolving brand even further, down to the official listening parties and tour dates, the latter which we can only speculate for now since that information is not officially yet.
I bet she also had a product backlog on her laptop or dozens of post-its on her wall, grooming and refining all the things she wanted to include on the album in rank of importance and seniority such as certain themes and motifs she wanted to address to her fans after being on a six-year hiatus since Lemonade, and the number of guest artists she wanted to appear on the album. But like any good product manager, she would understand that everything on that backlog was not going to be delivered out in-time to the real world. Business priorities mostly likely changed. Unreleased tracks that didn’t make the cut are probably locked up in a vault somewhere. Her product team probably had to also work around her super busy schedule and Sony Music’s tight deadlines to make this masterpiece of an album come alive, so many initial ideas were removed from the backlog, and that’s okay.
The second sprint is very well underway (could be finished as we speak but we’ll never know lol) and would consist of the worldwide releases of her 16 visual videos. As a Type-A professional, Beyonce is making damn sure that each and every video and piece of choreography not only reflect each song’s theme but the overall product vision of the album: celebrating her late Uncle Johnny, a black queer man, by utilizing her social capital (product) to reimagine 70s dance, house, and disco and black queer Ballroom music in 2022 (product/user experience). I hope I’m at least on the right track!
The third and final sprint would be the highly-anticipated world tour. No officials dates have been made yet, but I would imagine that Beyonce will have to readjust her lifestyle again for gruesome hours of fitness training, dress rehearsals, and COVID-19 safety restrictions to get ready for primetime again. I know that her whole outlook on life has also changed so it’s fitting that she communicates to her product team about her new needs (now that she’s a mother of three and has other business ventures to tend to), so that her team all can effectively manage tour logistics. I think many product managers, or professionals in general in the tech industry, don’t become better at their careers because they don’t allow themselves to change their leadership styles or mindsets once they leave a company for another or move to another internal product team at their current companies. Such a major red flag in terms to both professional and personal development. We’ll see how mature and expansive Beyonce has become in the many months to come.
3. Beyonce would not be “Beyonce” without her product team.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that her father and former manager, Matthew Knowles, was the original product manager. Without his strategic direction, product vision, and backroom deals, Beyonce would not have been able to transition successfully from Destiny’s Child (minimum viable product) to solo music legend (actual product/product manager).
Since taking the mantle, Beyonce and her product team have delivered countless epic visual album experiences, documentaries, and sold-out concerts (product) that her fans can’t get enough of (user experience). Now, I would assume Beyonce didn’t work with the standard software developers and engineers on her album, unless she’s working very intently with Spotify, Tidal, Apple, and other popular music streaming services to ensure that there aren’t any technical issues when fans visit each platform to listen to her tracks or purchase her whole album online.
But her product team is of the non-technical yoke and rather inclusive, consisting of songwriters, perhaps a personal assistant or two, publicists, marketers, crisis management and A&R managers, lawyers, sound engineers, music producers, and other well-represented professionals in the music industry. Each member on that team has a very distinctive skillset that has given Beyonce (the product manager) one of the best selling albums so far this year (product).
4. Beyonce Understands the KPI/Metrics Game
I wasn’t lying when I said that the culture nowadays cares more about the data points than the quality of music that gets produced. If it sells, it will sell. My opinion might change if I were working in the music industry, but I can confidently infer that every industry, including the music industry, is finally waking up to the conclusion that your data is top-tier currency and can help organizations achieve their business objectives. For aspiring and new product managers alike, you’re going to have define your product’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) very early on in the product lifecycle process to forecast your team’s hard earn success.
These metrics will be also used to predict your future work performance at a new company. This goes beyond product management, but that’s why recruiters and hiring managers want to see your prior quantitative results on your resumes and talk about them at greater length during your interviews. For example, if you can’t craft a narrative that shows your potential employer how you were able to increase your product’s monthly active users (MAU) rate by 25% over the past 1.5 years, then how can the hiring manager believe in you stated on your resume? How can they trust you in what it takes to take their product line to the next level?
Communication, leadership, negotiation, and creative skills are all equally important to becoming a good product manager, but product managers must also learn the art of data analytics. Beyonce may not know how to code, but as a product manager, she must hit and potentially surpass those soft KPI targets to protect her brand longevity and reassure her record executives and business partners that she (as the product as well) is still worth the long-term investment. That’s why she makes those money moves light years ahead before we are even aware. She isn’t a businessman. She’s a business, man.
Those sprints that Beyonce’s team are currently administering its progress are gathering and assessing all the consumer data points that they can find to maximize its profit margins and product exposure. Do you know why Beyonce has released all her albums on Fridays instead of a Monday or Thursday?
It’s because she wants her first-week album sales to be tracked on the Billboard Hot 100 list, which is probably the most essential KPI indicator in the music industry right now. In other words, it determines who wins industry awards and other accolades each year. If Act I: Renaissance continues to do well on this list for several more consecutive weeks, fans will most likely buy her Ivy Park merchandise, buy her other albums, or tour tickets. One part of me thinks that Beyonce doesn’t really need Billboard to sell records because of her brand recognition and pull in the industry alone. But there is another part of me who thinks that if her team had missed certain KPI targets and the album didn’t sell as well as planned and it didn’t appear at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 or at all that first full week in August, I would assume that her brand would have taken a major hit.
I’m not part of Beyonce’s team, but I’m going to predict some of the different KPIs her product marketers in particular are probably tracking this very moment:
- The number of social media impressions Act I: Renaissance make on a daily/weekly/monthly basis via Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, YouTube, etc.
- The total number of daily/weekly/monthly/annual streams via Beyonce, Spotify, Tidal, Apple, Pandora, Amazon, etc.
- The Listening Through Rate (LTR) of each song on the album per music streaming service on a daily/weekly/monthly interval.
- The number of daily/weekly/monthly/annual digital album purchases via Apple, Walmart, Amazon, etc.
- The percentage increase or decrease in total ticket sales between The Formation World Tour and the new unannounced tour.
- The percentage increase or decrease in total album units sold between Lemonade and Act 1: Renaissance.
Whew, that’s a lot of information to take in! In conclusion, Beyonce and her product team deeply understand what her fans (or consumers) want and will continue to experiment with different business models and new sounds. For all you career changers out there who want to get into tech, you are your own best advocate. They are gatekeepers out there who don’t want you to succeed. But you must do what is necessary to take reins of your future and achieve your goals. It’s not easy on there. So, when you’re feeling stressed out or nervous, please repeat after Beyonce….
