After reading the opening chapters of Product Management in Practice, I see a product manager’s job as, above all, fluid.
In exploring PM roles, I’ve focused heavily on trying to find a universal description of what being a PM/Product Owner/Product Growth Manager/ADPR involves, but the more I learn about the job, the less confident I am that such a definition exists. And perhaps the exciting part of product management is wrangling this ambiguity, this ability to jump in and try new things wherever you’re needed. I now see a product manager’s job as a kind of malleable connecting component in the larger machine of a solid team. Your role is to bring the members of a team together towards a common goal, modifying your scope of work to encompass whatever that connection may entail at your specific organization and group. This includes talking to everyone you can to discover how your team currently functions, setting a new direction for growth, and jumping into the middle of the action when it comes time for the team to realize that new direction. Above all, you serve as a go-to person with a grasp of all aspects of the product you work on and all norms of the team you work within. I think each individual PM’s version of what a go-to person is differs wildly based on their team, company, and personal definition of success, and this contributes to the immense variability within PM roles in industry today.
My question for Matt: I feel like the archetypes of bad product managers (e.g. product martyrdom and overuse of jargon) are easy to see in others but challenging to recognize in oneself. How do you identify when you’ve fallen into one of these traps, and how do you work yourself out of that situation?
