From my understanding, it seems that product management as a job is less about following a path from point A to point B but rather being told that we have to get to point B from point A and to devise whatever is the most efficient and circumstantially suitable path to get there.
It is also a job in which there doesn’t seem to be any sort of natural “break” in which one is able to detach from people because the job requires constant linkage between and within teams. It seems that in order to survive this job for longer periods of time, it requires a lot of tolerance of high exposure to people and invisible labor in forging and reaffirming connections from teams to you and also between any levels of the organization. It also seems to be a job where nobody will know how to do your job because they only know how to do their own jobs so there is no company-specific tutorial that can be followed.
One of my questions for Mr. LeMay is that he speaks about going from saying 60 hours a week is the minimum for PM to realizing that he can set boundaries for a 10am-4pm workday – is it required to start at Stage 1 in order to get to Stage 2? As in, is this built into the general trajectory of a PM career, just as many new freshmen in college end up going overboard in their first year so that they can slow down in their next few years and still have enough units to get their degree? Would it not be presumptuous for a new grad to skip over those steps of intense work and onboarding period to a company, and to implement a 10-4 schedule from the get-go?
