“Congratulations! On behalf of FutureTech Labs, we are delighted to confirm your offer to join our team as a Product Manager. We look forward to hearing your decision soon…”.
After months of heads-down study, carefully honing your craft in dimly lit coffee shops or co-working spaces, and guzzling five-hour energy drinks, you’ve finally secured a role at the company of your dreams. After a brief orientation period, you receive your top-of-the-line, fully loaded Macbook on your first day at work, with a shiny employee badge with the title “product manager” superimposed over a less-than-flattering headshot taken of yourself weeks prior. You feel energized, proud, and ready to execute on your Steve Jobs-style vision to elevate the organization to heights it has never seen. In your first 100 days, you focus on setting up one-on-ones with engineering and design teams, introducing yourself to leadership and executive management, and drafting up a strategy for the next year and beyond.
Six months later, the dream suddenly becomes a nightmare. Your enthusiasm and false sense of pride will transform into a vicious cycle of feeling defeated, stressed, and frustrated by the lack of movement. The initial product roadmap you developed was detailed down to a T, but the engineering team hasn’t bought into your goals, and you’ve failed to make any significant progress. Leadership is pissed, and your confidence is at an all-time low.
If the picture I’m painting seems bleak and hopeless, then I’ve done my job of alerting you early as to what happens when you don’t follow the guiding principles of product management. If you walk away with anything from this book, I want you to remember the five basic principles that could make or break your introductory role in product management. From the day you sign on the dotted line of the employment contract, your presence is instrumental in the success of the team. Often, capable PMs fail early because they don’t recognize the core principles of their field, and misinterpret the expectations leadership has set for them. Let’s dive into the five cardinal rules of product management
and break them down in understandable terms. Accept them as dogma early, and you’re immediately in a headspace that prepares you to tackle any issue, technical or political, that presents itself in the work environment you’re thrust into.
Kill your ego
A product manager has an enormous amount of responsibility, sometimes more so than other roles within an organization. However, the inflated sense of purpose and pressure can lead to negative consequences, including feeding directly into a personal sense of ego. A product manager that views himself/herself on a pedestal when compared to his or her peers is losing sight of the goal of building an incredible product. A raging god-complex isn’t the least bit productive, and humbling yourself from time to time can foster the growth of a cooperative, collaborative environment.
You’re not the expert
As much as the PM is the “CEO of the product,” it doesn’t issue you carte blanche authority over every layer of the product, both architecturally and design-wise. If a conversation arises around the tech stack that should be used, loop in the tech lead / CTO. For tasks involving user experience flow design or UI frame mock ups, bring in the designer. Trust your teams to be experts in their particular area, and argue back only if you have data, evidence, or intuition about a user’s needs to support your claim. Stepping on the toes of the engineering, design, or business team is the quickest path to alienating yourself, so understand your unique value-add to the team and play your position. The only exception to this rule exists in startupland if a company isn’t able to hire a dedicated tech lead, designer, or business strategist, so the PM (with relevant background experience) plays more than one role simultaneously.
Make decisions
The tech industry moves at light speed, and waits for no one. A fresh hire PM may be overwhelmed with the number of decisions that need their green light, and can fall victim to analysis paralysis if too much time is dedicated to overthinking simple choices. If you’re writing five-paragraph essays for emails that only require a one sentence approval, you’re wasting time for both people across the wire. Whether you’re supporting your decisions with blind intuition, empirical data, or team buy-in, the PM has to take the reins and exercise good judgement to keep the chains moving. Don’t slow down the timeline bickering over minor details. Find a method to understand the order in which decisions need to be made. Insignificant tasks (e.g., wording on landing page, stock image selection) can be deferred, whereas strongly linked action items need immediate attention to prevent a sequence of events from being delayed. For complex decisions, set up a dedicated time to mull over the details and come to a conclusion. Time is a luxury you cannot afford to waste as a PM, so learn to consider the opportunity cost of each hour you spend on the clock.
Become comfortable with ambiguity
If there’s one word that perfectly encapsulates the standard product manager experience, it’s ambiguity. A PM’s personal task plan is rarely ever set in stone, and you must embrace the feeling of being lost in the water. It’s OK to be uncomfortable, restless, and anxious. A lot can change over the course of a product development timeline, especially if you’re dealing with multi-year projects, so learn to adapt early and remain flexible enough in strategy and mentality to deal with unexpected curve balls that will be thrown at you over time. An average PM looks to his or her manager to ask what needs to be done; a great PM decides what needs to be done and looks to his or her superior to request the resources needed to execute.
Ask the right questions
Time is a non-renewable resource, and people don’t enjoy wasting it, especially in a work setting. If you’re in a meeting, user research interview, or client feedback session, it’s imperative that the questions you ask are clear, concise, and generate useful insight that can be looped back into product development planning
at a later stage. Asking an effective question is comparable to drilling for oil; if you do your research, prepare, and drill in the right spot, your yield will be high and effort will have paid off. If you follow a strategy in which thoughts are disorganized and you start breaking ground in random places, you’re likely to waste time and walk away feeling distressed (with a bunch of empty holes on the ground). Think deeply about the objective beforehand, and understand that the “right” question posed to another individual can make or break the interaction from a product value
perspective.