In Product Management in Practice, author Matt Lemay writes that in theory, ”product management is about building products that people love.” However, in reality, the job of a product manager can be quite different. In their day to day, product managers primarily focus on improving aspects of a product versus managing large scale product direction itself.
As a connective role, it requires the bridging of multiple different skills, from business, technical skills, to communication. In that way, I can see product management as almost the ligament that hold a body together, connecting bits and pieces and ensuring that each part of a limb can move in time.
It’s interesting how product managers become a glue for their companies, filling in whatever spaces they’re needed in as a jack-of all-trades. Juxtapositions of the expectations of a product manager in a small company versus a larger one can be stark. Even within a company, across departments, product managers don’t have a set role description, instead flowing around a company to fill in its areas of need.
Instead, they few constants for a product manager seem rather bleak. Having high responsibility but little authority, needing to complete whatever job is needed to be done, and being in the middle. Indeed, it seems like a product manager is at the helm of a ship tossed around in the sea, with little influence on the surrounding storm. However, product managers are people who thrive in this capacity, literally the “sum of their experiences,” from the challenges they’ve faced to the people around them. A successful product manager can come from everywhere, minted through how they have managed each problem that comes across their desk.
From this, much of the appeal for product management lies within this chaotic, undefined role. It’s exciting to be working in a different capacity every single day, and it’s exciting to have a new puzzle to work through to apply a wide range of skills. As a product manager, it’s important to build resiliency to thrive within this world, to always look to the future of what can be done. However, this skill doesn’t come easily for us all. For the new product management initiates, we all wonder, how can we best build up these skills of rebounding and recovering from challenges?
