Out of all the concepts of what is and is not product management, the concept that stuck the most with me is the idea of having lots of “responsibility but little authority.” More specifically, the idea that you are “ultimately responsible for the success or failure of your product – regardless of how well supported that product might be by the rest of the organization” is something that is a little scary to me. The quote really emphasizes what Christina mentioned in class – that persuasion is crucial in product management. How will you persuade others to “show up” and get things done while maintaining good relationships and dynamics and without resorting to power?
Having read this chapter, I definitely think that persuasion is something that I will need to work on; I have definitely been the type of person who ends up doing things myself if I am upset with the things are going. As Matt Lemay puts it, I would be the one “actually building the product [myself]”, which he clearly outlines as NOT being product management. Reflecting back, I believe that I have been able to pull this off due to the scope of my projects. Most school projects are not too large in scope, especially compared to those in industry, where tens of people may be working on a single project. With this truth in mind, the importance of persuasion and the infeasibility of “building the product yourself” has become a lot clearer.
This reading also really emphasizes the very first lecture of this course. I remember that the slide listing top skills of product managers mostly involved soft skills. At that moment, I found it hard to believe that the most important skills for product managers were soft skills, especially as someone who comes from an engineering background where technical skills tend to be more emphasized. However, the reading has really solidified what we discussed in class.
From the reading, I better understand how complex and difficult it can be to navigate a product manager’s job – from not having a clear understanding of the project and specs, having to find resources and people to talk to, taking ownership of a project that you do not have organizational power over, and aligning people with different backgrounds, interests, and priorities. At the beginning, I used to like the idea of being a product manager because I would be able to leverage my technical knowledge while getting to work with different types of people and having some strategic roles. Now, I see that though my previous statement is still true, it was quite naive. The reality is much more complicated, though I would say I am even more interested and excited to learn and develop such skills (I’m sure it will be useful in all kinds of contexts and roles, even technical ones).
Question: How do you learn to be persuasive or practice being able to persuade others? Is this an innate skill or one that you can develop?
