A Simple Truth
What I have come to realize is that product management is a lot of things. But there are also some important distinctions to be made about what it isn’t. One of the most notable things about the role of a product manager is the difference between responsibility and power. Matt Lemay put it very simply in saying that at the end of the day, “You are not the boss”. At the same time, however, you are also the person upon whom the responsibility for making sure the product comes out on time, meets certain financial projections, etc, falls. This can be a very difficult line to balance because you are responsible for so much, and yet don’t have the same kind of control. This leads to qualities such as adaptability and flexibility to be so extremely critical in a role like product management.
Insecurity
Another really important distinction to make that I feel as though would be easy to forget at times is that you are not actually the one building the product. Matt Lemay articulates it perfectly when he mentions that those who actually want to end up building the product might end up “deeply frustrated by the connective and facilitative nature of product management.” Perhaps the most interesting piece of information I gathered from Lemay regarding the role of product management is the idea that “Product management can be a brutal and relentless trigger for insecurity”. This is extremely important to point out because I did not originally realize just how impactful this can be. Lemay talks about how this sense of insecurity can help develop even the best people into poor profiles for this role. More specifically, Lemay touches on some very typical profiles, such as the “Jargon Jockey,” but also some surprising ones, such as “The Overachiever”. From a more personal standpoint, I would almost argue that there is no such thing as overachieving, especially in a business sense, that could lead to a poor outcome. One would reasonably think that the more a product manager does, the better a product manager they are. But it is interesting to see the theme of quality over quantity, and that just because a product manager is launching a lot of new features, it doesn’t actually mean that they are contributing positively to the business’s overall success.
Messing Up
In almost everything successful I have done, there have been countless failures before that one success. This seems to also be the case for product management. Matt Lemay allocates a significant amount of time admitting to the several mistakes that he had personally fallen into as an inexperienced product manager, including things like insecurity. It is critical for any product manager to realize that they cannot be perfect, and that the product may also never be “perfect”. At the end of the day I feel as though the most important quality for a product manager isn’t perfection, but more so having a large capacity for adaptation.
