Product Management
- Collaboration.
- Experimentation.
- Small chunks of work.
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.
Tactfully saying “no” is one of the most difficult skills to master as a product manager.
Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the most important, most valuable skills.
Product roadmaps aren’t predictions.
They’re instrumentation of your thinking about the problems to be solved and the priorities at which they might be addressed, based upon estimated velocity, known dependencies, and identified risks.
Use them to align on the future of your product.
Why is being a product manager such a great experience?
Each day is spent solving problems that really matter - whether it’s streamlining processes or enhancing user experiences or eventing new ways to accomplish goals.
You’re making a meaningful difference in the lives of your clients.
Whenever you will think other people are wrong about a given approach, check to see if you have any data available to validate your position.
If not, this is an ideal time for an experiment.
A big part of your job is to learn how to focus on the most important thing and ignore the noise.
Don’t underestimate the value of sharing how you plan to solve your customer’s problems with your fellow product managers.
Divergent opinions and unexplored alternatives only serve to hone the final product.
Validating your hypotheses as a product manager isn’t about being right - it’s about learning.
It moves you out of chaotic uncertainty and into confident execution.
Discovery isn’t a checklist; it’s a conversation.
You listen actively, try to ask the best questions, and generally let curiosity be your guide.
As a product manager, you relish understanding the nuances of your clients’ needs.
Agility.
Draw out the product planning calendar as far into the future as you can.
Dates will move and shift about as you continue to iterate but the calendar itself serves as the scaffolding upon which everyone can organize their work.
#ProductManagement