How I See the Job
A PM is first and foremost a people job with with a strong data and systems backbone. You’re the connective tissue between engineers, designers, data scientists, and the business. Most importantly, you’re not above them, but the person who can translate constraints and align the team on clear outcomes. This means you need great communication, empathy for customers, engineers, and business goals, and comfort with the metrics. It’s vital to measure success by real data-driven outcomes.
Concrete Practices I Would Use
With LeMay’s book as a guide, I would prioritize the following in my day-to-day work:
- People-first coordination: remove blockers, credit the team, and take responsibility for failures. As LeMay notes, PM work is “communicating, supporting, and facilitating,” not bossing people around.
- Multidisciplinary fluency: be conversant in tech, UX, and business so you can make confident, evidence-based tradeoffs without trying to do everyone’s job.
- Reduce ambiguity with structure: alignment sprints, stakeholder decision maps, and experiments.
Pitfalls I Will Avoid
I think the most important pitfalls to avoid are the Jargon Jockey and Overachiever/Feature Factory. In a day in age where startups can throw “.ai” on nearly anything and get funding, it’s so important to not rely on trendy language to mask thinking. While this may drive hype in the beginning, it can create confusion and erode credibility in the long-run. We need to focus on the specific problems we are solving, develop effective experiments, and choose the right metrics to analyze. It’s also vital to measure outcomes, not activity. Wasting time on output without specific goals wastes time and masks strategic failure. Time is money, and a PM needs to figure out which problems are worth solving and determine the right features to ship at the right time.
Questions for the Author
- How do you balance long-term strategy with short-term pressure for shiny launches from execs?
- How do you see practices differing by company stage in day-to-day rituals, and how would your advice throughout the chapter change given the context of stage?
