The Awful Job of a Tech Product Manager
Yesterday I read a post by Suhaas Kaul explaining that you shouldn’t hire a good product manager because you’ll end up with a mediocre product. He explains that you need to hire a great product manager because of the importance and complexity of the job.
Unfortunately he’s right, but you realize pretty quickly that something’s broken if only the most exceptional of PMs can ship a good product. And yet, very few tech companies are evolving the role of PM or their organizations to fix this.
Over the years I’ve held roles adjacent to product teams on the biz and tech sides. I’ve been a developer, consultant, sales engineer, innovation team leader, and alliance owner. I’ve written my share of PRDs, use cases/user stories, and enhancement requests, and come close to a number of PM and product strategy roles. The reason I’ve never taken the plunge is that the day to day reality can be completely awful, and it doesn’t have to be.
I know a number of extremely talented and successful PMs, so it’s obviously not an impossible role, but it’s much harder than it needs to be. This is partly because just like marketing, everyone in the company has an opinion of what the product should do and even worse, how it should do it, so there’s a constant battle with stakeholders. The bulk of the challenges in the role boil down to the mismatch of high responsibility over the product success, and almost zero authority over the actual dev teams or go to market execution. Too much time is spent horse trading with stakeholders vs. actually pushing out a great product.
The killer talent of my most successful PM friends isn’t really in functional product management, but more of a nebulous mix of sales and conflict resolution magic to get to a set of workstreams that can make everyone slightly unhappy but ultimately result in a great product being shipped out the door.
I’m not writing this post just for the schadenfreude derived from the PM life examined, but as a kickoff to a series of posts giving perspectives (both mine and actual PMs) on how tech companies can better empower PMs, and how PMs can better navigate some of the functional and non-functional challenges of the job.
There are a ton of resources available for PMs ranging from courses to posts from experienced practitioners (I’m a big fan of Sachin Rekhi’s posts on the topic). However, I think there’s a gap to be filled in helping senior execs understand how to empower PMs, and helping junior PMs sharpen their hard and soft skills together to become great PMs
I’d love to get reader comments and thoughts, especially on good resources to look at.
I love building great software. Humanity is precious, prioritise love over greed.
5 年My perspective echoes what you said on relation to the diversity of the roles you've performed in your career, and I think this common across the best product managers / owners. I think the best product owners can take a holistic view of the objectives, considerations, constraints - along with a million other factors - to create a vision that inherently, and maybe subconsciously, compromises to find a solution that balances these conflicting "requirements". A lot of the time the stakeholders who are the most vocal are the ones with the smallest sphere of holistic understanding, as maybe they have only performed one type of role throughout their career (design, business, developer, marketing, legal, etc). Making it easy for all stakeholder classifications to add, as well as review other's, context is important, and that's one of the core principles I've built into my platform, FlowStep, along with a raft of other holistically considered capabilities.
Founder at Polite Minds, LLC
7 年A fellow tech product manager once told me that a product manager is like a mini CEO, except none of the stakeholders report to him/her. In my experience in having been a tech product manager both in established large companies and Round B/C startups, there are various factors at play which can make the PM job fun and rewarding. In my first PM job, I was lucky to be working on a product for which I had used extensively and was a customer. Being familiar with and having a passion for the product and understanding the customer helped me be a better product manager and a better “advocate” for the product. For QA/Engineering bug resolution meetings, I was able to explain the customer pain points and how to prioritize and make changes to the product. Of course, PMs don’t always get to work on a product they necessarily like, but we adapt and grow to be versed in it. Another factor that is integral to enjoying the PM position is a supportive and astute manager. I had a manager who was very supportive and was open to look at all the possible intersecting and related aspects of a job and how all past experiences (however slight) can be relevant. The final factor is making friends both in and out of the company.
Senior Product Manager at Datto Networking
7 年Very true. Conflict resolution and overcoming internal cultural challenges are key skills of any successful PM
Great comment Geoff....sometimes the biggest challenge is not development itself, but the culture which you develop within!
Co-Founder and CTO @ iGrant.io | Digital Identity Wallets | eIDAS 2.0 | Data Regulations
7 年What you state Geoff is very much many authors have captured in different occasions. "Innovative Dilemma" rightly concludes that new organizations innovate easier with disruptive technologies because they are not tied to outdated values or organizational norms. This is getting even more true as funds are increasingly available for new ideas and are no longer a proprietary asset of large corporations. I am beginning to see that large equity investment companies prefer their invested companies to focus on their core business and give the best return on investment instead of trying to be "innovative". These investment firms would rather invest their money to startUps more focused on asset creations related to their existing investment portfolio. This way their money is better protected with better ROI, apart from breaking out of the very problems you mention.