How I see a product managers job:
It seems like the product managers job is to direct the ship while the ship is still under construction. It seems a bit ephemeral but also very hands on. They have to act as an intermediary in between the design and business sides of the enterprise. They have to coordinate people in their team to get things done, but also respect the autonomy of the designers that allows them to be creative. The description that resonated with me from the text was the idea of the stewards of the value exchange. I think this is a cool way to think about it. They help transfer the brilliance of the people creating things to the customer in exchange for money.
Questions:
- How do you navigate the “product managers don’t have direct authority” and “product managers are accountable for product success” phenomenon? What does effective influence without authority actually look like day-to-day?
- What frameworks do you find most useful when people disagree about priorities? How do you balance data-driven decisions with intuition, creativity, vision and the other design intangibles?
- You talked a bit about how PMs might be working on mockups at a startup vs attending a bunch of meetings at a big company. How does the PM role differ across startup, growth-stage, and enterprise contexts? Are there fundamentally different skills required, or just different emphases?
