The first chapter of this book ( Product Management in Practice) by Matt LeMay was very interesting to me in the way it approaches Product Management because it was quite different from how I would think of it. It focused on human social skills rather than “technical” skills on what qualities make “successful” product managers. What I appreciated most, was not giving any precise definition to the term and instead shedding light on the fact that the meaning differs depending -a lot- on the context (type of the company, type of product, the company itself…) which remarkably reflects the reality of the product management world. As someone who has been interested in the field for a long time, and got to talk to many product managers, I noticed that some of them hold the “product management” position, but as they explain to me their role, it seems to me far from the traditional definition of Product Management that I had in my head. Some other times, people would talk to me about their jobs, goals, and tasks and I would say “Hey, that sounds a lot like product management!” which, most of the times, they do not disagree with.
Additionally, -and I am far from being a Product Management expert- I think the book exposed a lot of unpopular opinions/facts that aren’t really talked about a lot, or go a little bit against some stereotypes. For example, the fact that being a product manager does not automatically equal working 60 hours a week, and the author even took us through their journey of hey they grew out of that belief.
Overall, I think this first part of the book contains great lessons and prompts us to think about very interesting ideas like having responsibility without authority, leadership, and remembering to give enough attention to humans instead of only focusing on the technical parts as well as being at peace with the fact that we may not necessarily have direct contribution to the product.
Many questions pop-up in mind to ask the author because they clearly have a lot of experience in the field, but the one I would choose is: Do you have some key criteria in mind to find in someone well suited to be a product manager?
