Leading with Less: Rethinking Product Management in I-SMEs Through Streamlined Coordination

By Jefferies

In today’s hyper-fragmented market environment, the conventional models of product management — crafted for large conglomerates with vast departments and deep verticals — often fail to account for the constraints and realities faced by industrial small and medium-sized enterprises (I-SMEs). As Ying Zhu of the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO) has often argued in her research on organizational culture and strategic orientation, smaller firms operate in environments where agility, relational capital, and resource frugality define survival. In such ecosystems, streamlined leadership becomes not just a virtue but a strategic necessity.

The traditional understanding of interfunctional coordination — the synchronized cooperation across marketing, production, finance, and R&D — has long been assumed to be linearly scalable. However, a growing body of research suggests that applying the high-intensity, information-heavy coordination models from large enterprises onto I-SMEs creates not synergy, but strain. This research, building upon the multiple-case method, reinterprets coordination through a minimalist lens: not by expanding collaboration, but by reducing coordinative intensity and curating relational flows with precision.

What does this mean for product management?

In an I-SME, the product manager cannot afford to be a mere integrator of internal processes…