Decoding Good PM — Bad PM

Metacognition — process of thinking about one’s own thinking and learning.        

I didn’t know the word until last Sunday when Shravan Tickoo mentioned this in the 1st session of 2nd cohort of “Breaking into Product management”. And the 2nd time it hit me when I was (trying to ??) internalising my thoughts or understanding from the age-old article “good product manager, bad product manager”written by Ben Horowitz.

The article is fairly simple. It has around 22+ statements defining the differences between good product manager and bad product manager— very easy to understand. The trick however is how do you really reciprocate or even disagree in any of the 22+ odd statements which were written 27 years ago. That’s where actual impact of metacognition lies for me in this article’s context.

While understanding beyond the 22+ statements of differences- my 2nd activity after reading the article was to understand if the statements are relevant even after 27 years. A reasoning is associated with this activity.

I am neither a product manager nor I have any background of working in such set up (had worked only in service domain). So to neutralize this drawback I had to resort to exploring many other articles or lectures or fireside chats to truly understand the relevance.

1. Behavioural characteristics:

a. Responsibility vs Excuses:

Ben mentions a Good PM takes full responsibility and measure in terms of success of product ??, while the BAD PM gives only excuses ?? on Funding, Competitor, Resource, Time.

While it sounded as generic as it is true for any role in the entire universe (IDEALLY !!), a thought came to my mind from my earlier job that as a Supply Chain Lead or Customer Service Manager I was responsible for end to end — right from determining if the forecast given by Country/ Customer is correct to any issue in product delivered at Customer end — there should not be any point in the VALUE CHAIN I would be unaware of. This not only creates trust of the leadership on my capability but also brings the same sense of responsibility to my team.

The same essence is true for Product manager also which Ms Amanda Richardson (CEO CoderPad) pointed out in one of her talks 4 years back that

“If leadership’s questions on issues in feature, pricing or competition fall into Sales or Marketing person’s desk instead of the Product manager, then clearly it’s a failure in taking responsibility for the Product manager.”

The Bad PM always fails to take the share of problems on him/herself and mentions excuses like the calculation of budget was wrongly done by the team, project/ sales team did not share right information, all his/her time goes into meetings on clarifying doubts etc. etc…. which not only degrades the reputation of the manager but also lowers the moral of the team under him/her.

b. Proactiveness vs reactiveness:

The other way to put this out is Anticipation vs Fire Fighting. Co-relating with my experience, In most of the traditional organisations (small or big) this issue of fire-fighting spreads like wild fire. To some extent the organisation culture is responsible for such situation as the Product managers imbibed the culture and never practice proactiveness.

Boeing Commercial Airline leadership team under CEO ALAN MULALLY had been proactive on monitoring primary drivers of performance (passenger traffic pattern, airline yields, load factor, new aircraft orders) which helped them to develop and deploy effective countermeasures during any crisis situation.

Similarly any good Product manager should identify issues/ flaws and always keep in mind the perspective of any other function whomsoever is referring to PRD or Road map or anything developed by the PM that helps in anticipating bottlenecks.

Bad PM would only be busy on Fire-Fighting and getting annoyed with questions from sales or engineering or marketing for what he/she thinks as trivial matters without understanding the fact that it is the PM’s shortfall on anticipation to make things simpler for everyone.

c. Discipline :

There is no other way to say it — any strategy in the business requires constant discipline and clarity, while the opposite is distraction and compromise.

A Good PM never deters from a disciplined status report, and neither over-commit anything to the team. In a way discipline helps in developing proactiveness also as pointed in point b. The regularity and clarity can simplify things for PM and team.

Bad PM’s all incidents related to decision compromise, feature complexity are rooted to the issue of discipline. It also links to the lack of responsibility beyond the authorities on taking avenues that may lead to decisions.

2. Activity or transactional characteristics:

a. Knowledge:

A great PM would understand the value of knowledge which is not limited to market, product, product line, competition but also related to organisation’s vision, revenue, funding etc. Idea is to have as much leverage as he/she can have to take better decisions.

While a Bad PM would go for features and competition analysis (again taking a cue from Amanda’s talk) instead of gathering the information on stakeholders (users and consumers) to be put into the product which may lead to misalignment with organisation’s vision.

Martin Eriksson’s (co-founder of Mind the Product) famous Ven diagram of product management which states,

a good product manager must be experienced in at least one of User Experience, Technology and Business, passionate about all three and conversant with practitioners in all.

b. Documentation:

It can be easily termed as an art for Product management. It includes collection of white papers creating presentations, FAQs, taking written positions on — competitive silver bullets. Architectural choices, product decisions, market strategy (As Ben pointed out). Basically communicating in a crisp written format to other stakeholders for better clarity.

A BAD PM typically doesn’t break sweat on documentation rather focuses on verbal dialogues and thousands of meetings that itself becomes the excuse for him/her at some point in the delivery.

Martin Eriksson mentioned that Demos are powerful tools which can help product managers in improving the skills and focus on objectives which help in communicating the status and create a sense of reasoning to the decisions taken.

c. Time management:

As it infamously touted that crazy busy is the natural state of Product managers. In some way PMs themselves are responsible for creating this mindset. Ben mentioned a good PM should identify his or her priority on attending meetings, managing functions etc.

Annie Dunhum , director of product management at ProductPlan mentioned it is essential to take a step back and identify what’s most important to accomplish and then break it down to necessary requirements to complete that.

A Bad PM gets sucked by all the meetings thereby fails to identify the prioritisation.

d. Collaboration:

While a Bad PM acts like a marketing resource for engineering manager, a good PM understands the collaboration nature of relationship.

Referring to the venn diagram again — Martin mentioned,

it is important to create a collaborative triad between the product managers, designers and lead engineer.. whole team is responsible for the product so actively communicating this is the key.

These are some of the key points as per me which differentiate a good PM and bad PM — there are many more as Ben pointed like

• focusing on revenue and users,
• deconstructing problems,
• defining all the WHATs rather the HOWs,
• focusing on winning plan rather a roadmap,
• anticipating high level questions etc.

In a nut shell a good PM would work like a conductor of an orchestra to combine the talent of tech, guide the development to generate user experience thereby achieving business needs or targets.