Day 28/30: What product managers are not 🤔

…And what I think we are 💡

Photo by Mollie Sivaram from Unsplash

With product management garnering plenty of attention, here is my take on what we are not, contrasted against what I think we are:

• We aren’t born. We’re created. We all have strengths that we’re “naturally” inclined towards, through our upbringing, education, and other life-shaping experiences. However, I believe that we can learn the core skills needed to be successful as a product person.

• We aren’t a hyper-specialized business function. We’re generalists who partner with professionals who are more specialized than we are to deliver great products to our target audience and market.

• We aren’t responsible for doing all the work that goes into bringing products to market. We’re responsible for sharing relevant context and information that enables our cross-functional partners to contribute with their respective expertise and knowledge. Sometimes, we may perform a role or set of responsibilities for some period of time, especially when there is currently no coverage of said work.

• We aren’t dictators of the product over which we oversee. We’re facilitators of the conversations amongst the appropriate cross-functional partners and stakeholders to ensure everyone’s frame of reference for the topic is consistent, so that we can arrive to the most well-informed decision at the right time. We’re leaders who earn the trust and respect of our peers, partners, and stakeholders through consistently showing up, advocating for what is best for our customers and our business, demonstrating good judgement, being pleasant to collaborate with, and rising up to overcome challenges.

• We aren’t conflict-averse. Instead, we lean into dissenting perspectives to understand where others are coming from and collaborate with them to figure out if the disagreement is really even a problem in the first place. We try to steer everyone into finding common ground between the alternative perspectives, based on what is best for our customers and our business.

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What else comes to your mind regarding this prompt? 👇