Justin’s 10 Truisms of Product Management

I haven’t posted much in the past, but as my career goes on, I find my opinions on a variety of topics to be increasingly well-formed, including many thoughts on product management.? So with this post, I begin sharing, in the hope that my experience can help others as they navigate the treacherous paths of product work.

Since I love top 10 lists, I will start with a set of 10 observations I’ve made over the past couple decades, portioned out 2 per day this week.?

In some particular order, here are Justin’s 10 Truisms of Product Management:

1. Names stick

It’s amazing how some inner codename for a project has the tendency to become the product name or the version name or appear somewhere in the URL to access it. For example, more than once, I have seen the name “Polaris” (everyone has a north star, and yes, coining it was my doing/fault one of those times) get into documentation, URLs, and customer conversations.? So the lesson is, utter names carefully, and pick ones you can live with forever (see truism #2). The whimsical corollary to this rule is that if you absolutely want to ensure that a name will change (maybe you need to think through a proper name but need a placeholder to refer to it by today), name it something proprietary (or something like &$#@?), because a name like that won’t see the light of day.

2. “Good enough” is forever. ?

The reality of every product organization I have been a part of is that there was MUCH more work to do than time to do it. So if anything is in a state of “good enough “, it is only logical that it will never rise high enough in your priorities to justify changing it…until the day when it is no longer good enough.

#3 and #4 coming tomorrow.?

In the meantime, what are some of your inadvertently long-lasting product names from your past? (Share in the comments)

#productmanagement #product #prodmgmt #naming