I write, therefore I am (a product manager. )

An alt take on product management mixed with culture, rants and everything in between.

Growing up I was an avid writer; not just professionally but also personally. I kept a semi fictional blog (Titled: Musings of the Unamused) and also dealt with grief of losing loved ones through writing - if you were in the era of Facebook notes (& were connections of mine) you would have read some of them. I will move some of them here to keep this as my main publishing place.

But coming back to the original point; I’ve let my writing slip for a while there are a lot of the reasons/excuses but I plan to rekindle my love for writing, literature and eventually reading in general! 🚀

I'll kick off this collection of thoughts on a more professional note; don’t worry I will also cover the other animals but for now let me give you my take on “Product Management”.

Earlier in 2023, I had the privilege of speaking at Refresh Conference in Tartu; where I had to talk about Scaling Product teams from 0 to 100x. You can always watch the presentation here; you’ll get to see me hopping about in 2-meter square space (thank you ADHD & stage fright), talking about a few things product and many things me.

Post-conference talking to the attendees in the evening, I realised that the human side of being a product manager isn’t often discussed.

Whenever you discuss Product Management with anyone, typically, you’ll hear about this Venn Diagram or how the Product manager is the CEO of the product. While I have my fair share of disagreement with the latter part of the statement, the Venn diagram does hold true. All the planning, delivering value to customers, shipping in iteration, having product-market fit, and directing the product's strategy are the professional values of a product manager.

But when I recall product managers who I met in my career who I thought were amazing at their job or left an impression on me, were great at figuring at user value, some were great designers, some were former engineers, some were human behaviour experts but all of them had two attributes: humility/lack of ego and resilience.

While both are interconnected and I will dive into both, I’ll quickly mention a 3rd “flaw” that most successful product managers have — imposter syndrome. Rather than relying on my own experience and explanation I’ll use a Ted-talk by the Mike Cannon-Brookes which kind of allowed me to turn my own imposter syndrome into a helpful tool. Watch the 13 minute life altering talk here

Now that I’ve revealed I experience imposter syndrome almost every day, I’m more comfortable diving into the two human side attributes.

Humility/Lack of Ego:
Why is this essential? If you are humble then you are willing to believe and agree with the notion that you don’t know everything, you can be wrong and you might not fully understand your customers. Which becomes crucial to a product manager’s life - it allow for faster experimentation; more trial and error and most importantly, it fosters curiosity and discovery in the life of PM. When done properly it’ll allow the PM to figure out exactly what brings value to their customers, what’s their product differentiation and how to scale it to more users.

Resilience:
At some point I was asked how do I describe product management; as a semi joke I said “if it’s successful it was the engineers, the designers, the analysts, the sales team or luck; but if it fails then it’s all you.”

Or you could use Uncle Ben here a bit “with great power comes great responsibility.”

When you're in charge of deciding what products are developed for customers who you may not fully comprehend (as explained earlier on the importance of being humble), it's inevitable that you'll experience failures at least 30-40% of the time. That's where the process of iteration comes in. However, it's also where resilience plays a crucial role.

There are two types of resilience that you need to develop — self-resilience and communal resilience. Self-resilience will help you to bounce back from small failures and keep going until you succeed. Communal resilience, on the other hand, is your ability to motivate your team to keep trying, even in the face of setbacks. It's a constant responsibility, regardless of the mood, day, weather, or any other factor. Your job is to ensure that your team can rally around you and keep pushing forward.

This is nature not nurture?
Don’t let anyone fool you that we're all born with humility and resilience. Luckily, these are the qualities that you can actively work on and develop over time. Like any good MVP, you can even fake them till you make it. But how do you get better at them?

Let's begin by discussing humility. Start by being curious and listening to others. The modern world is dominated by selfies and by phrases like “just be yourself”, it is objectively hard not to be a narcissist or strive for self joy ( side note: it’s kinda bemusing that I’m writing this post most likely to find self joy in writing - but hey ho that’s for another post). Nonetheless, keep track of how often you speak and listen. Try to improve the percentage of time you spend listening every day, in every meeting or hangout, even if it's only by 0.1%. Remember, listening means being engaged, not just being silent.

Make peace with the fact, it’s okay not to know things and it’s definitely okay to announce that you don’t know something but would like to learn. An easier way to go about this is: if you think your team/colleagues/peers are talented then why can’t you rely on them to help you out or is it too wild to assume they should fill a gap in your thinking?

The second important thing to focus on is communal success rather than just celebrating yourself. If you are worried but what do I get from celebrating others at the very least you get happiness — don’t take my word for it, take Dr Laurie Santos’s word for it. You end up discovering new ideas, new solutions and so much more — the opposite of that is being sure in knowing you are right all the time and i wonder what could go wrong there (ummm hello Blackberry and Microsoft phone division).

Let's talk about resilience. How can you cultivate it? If you Google it, you'll find advice like reaffirming the validity of your goals and practising self-compassion. However, my approach takes a different angle — it's all about maintaining objectivity.

Step 1: Be comfortable in knowing not all of your shots will land, that’s just life in the fast lane/ product world.

Step 2: Don’t lose track of where you started and how far you’ve moved — sure it might be far from what great looks like but any small step in that positive direction is the right one - Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Step 3: Reflect; that is exactly why retros are important. Take time out to figure out what worked and why and most importantly how much did it improve things in the grand scheme. Give equal amount of time to praise everything positive but also focus on what didn’t work out and how to ensure you don’t repeat the same mistakes twice! Trying out new things and failing is fun/adventurous but repeating mistakes is cumbersome, tires out a team and also kills any form of joy for you and your team.

Step 4: Build a community. Given that you are the only product manager on your team, it will be quite normal that you feel alone in your troubles or struggle to make your designers, engineers or analysts understand why you are struggling. The easiest fix is regularly talking to other product managers. By all means flex to your community about your product and how awesome you are but most importantly talk to them about your failures and you’ll realise you aren’t alone. Doing it regularly will not only be therapeutic or reassuring but it’ll also help you hear how others faced similar issues and what they did to cope with it, basically empowering you with ideas you can try as well. There’s power in a community, harness it!

What would great look like?
As much as I dislike Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) - he’s quite a boring superhero for my liking; yes i’m a bit of geek and I do read comics and watch super hero movies. But from all the super heroes (sorry Batman) he would 100% be the most successful product manager! And the reasoning for that is quite simple, it’s his ability to learn and adapt to a completely new world while not knowing when to give up!

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