Product Management
“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.”
-Kent Beck
#Quotes
There are no silver bullets
“Every tool you use impacts your abilities while using that tool. It increases some capabilities while decreasing others.
For example, a chimp fishing for ants with a stick can’t use her hand for another purpose while holding that stick.”
-David Kadavy
Tools perform specific functions, ideally useful ones.
Good tools perform their functions efficiently and are often cheaper, faster, simpler, and/or better than alternatives.
Great tools are transformative. Notable examples include sharpened stones, metal lathes, maps, and alphabets.
The proverbial hammer is great for driving steel nails into wood. But even the best hammer can’t help if the blueprints are wrong.
You say you want your product managers to write better user stories? Changing your word processor won’t help much.
Tools don’t magically fix broken processes, dysfunctional leadership, misaligned incentives, or training gaps.
See also:
There will be special moments in your career as a product manager.
You will meet and collaborate with remarkable people.
Working together, you will somehow manage to make the world just a little bit better than the way you found it.
Cherish these times.
Your career journey as a product manager is yours to shape.
(One might argue it’s really your most important product!)
Knowing when it might be time to pursue new avenues is crucial for your continued growth and learning.
Stagnation benefits no one.
Maya Angelou said it best:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Remember to share your knowledge, mentorship, and support whenever you can.
Authentic, meaningful relationships are the goal.
Children learn to walk by falling over and over again.
Experiments fail more often than not.
This is how we expand the scope of our understanding and knowledge.
Remind yourself to be bold.
Change is the necessary ingredient for all progress.
I cannot stress this enough.
Make sure you’re working on the right things before you start working even harder at them.
Want a big change in your results?
Consider that you may need a big change in your approach first.
Explore different angles, challenge assumptions, and surface insights from the safety of your virtual workbench.
These dedicated thinking spaces are crucial for the experimentation, iteration, and clarity needed to push your product forward.
Change can be uncomfortable but it’s also inevitable.
As a product manager you need to embrace the uncertainty.
Hypothesize. Take calculated risks. Stay nimble.
No one gets a gold star if you ship a product feature “on time” and it makes things worse.
Don’t make things worse for your clients.
Your first idea probably isn’t the best one.
Dont be afraid to iterate!
Distraction corrodes progress.
Focus on what’s most important right now.
Like Herodotus wrote, we never step in the same river twice.
Everything is constantly changing.
Your job as a product manager is to bring focus and alignment amid the chaos.
Remember to prioritize interoperability over allegiance to specific tools.
A tool-agnostic mindset cultivates resilience and allows your team to pivot without being tied down by specific tooling constraints.
Your job is to build - not worship hammers or wrenches.
Hoarding knowledge might be the supreme anti-pattern.
Remember what Marcus Aurelius wrote:
“Do not expect Plato’s ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.”
Ours is not a perfect world.
Small steps forward each day - eventually - produce compounded results.
I’ve seen firsthand how well-crafted features can be utter game-changers.
Clarity is essential to both captivate your users and to foster seanless collaboration across your partner teams.
If people are forced to guess what you mean, you’re doing it wrong.
Prioritize your product backlog.
By value, feasibility, and strategic alignment.
Relentlessly.
Ruthlessly.
Ferociously.
You and your team can’t anticipate everything as product managers.
Unexpected things will still happen.
When they do, remember to move out of the chaos as quickly as possible. Reorient - and then start iterating again.