Before taking this class, I was deeply misguided on what a product manger is. This confusion persisted, despite having prepared for PM interviews and attending career fair booths. Truisms and vague slogans littered the conversations. Certainly, some tidbits I picked up were indeed accurate, if not slightly negative — PMs get the short end of the stick (mapping to “You have lots of responsibility but little authority”). However, after reading the first chapters of Product Management in Practice, I see now that I harbored many incorrect preconceptions — you need to be a straight CS person to get hired, and thus, there will be a lot more coding involved, for instance. I now see that PMs are much more likely to be people-oriented generalists. (In full disclosure, as a people-oriented generalist in a specialist’s world, this brings me some relief & validation). I now see a PM’s job as being a battery. They energize not only the product development process from start to finish, but more importantly, the people they work with to bring that product to life. They are a generator, a self-starter (as the author writes, “You can’t wait around until somebody tells you what to do.) I also now see a PM’s job as being a conduit. They link various teams, uniting the engineers and the customer success team and the designers, making sure that nothing seeps through the cracks (“you are in the middle”). Synthesizing these findings, I find that a PM’s job is to anticipate crisis & resolve conflict in building something that is larger than the sum of its parts.
While the author emphasizes the crucial role that PMs play, something I see online sometimes is that “PM is a fake job.” When the role has so many overlaps with other teams, rather than being on a particular team, and is in many places at the same time, I do wonder how we could quantify/qualify the impact that a PM has. So, some questions I have for the author: how impactful is the role of a PM relative to other roles in a company? What would happen if an organization didn’t have a PM, how much worse off would they be?
