5 types of bad product managers that no one talks about

You probably know someone that fits within the description.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

I write a lot about product, so much so in fact that I’ve learned to spot precisely when I or someone else around me is not doing it.

It’s hard to find an organization where you can build products as originally envisioned. Pretty often you’ll need to compromise a little (some times not even that little) to fit it and keep the paychecks coming.

There are some obvious profiles that are born from those concessions:

• The fire manager: the product is on fire, your stakeholders are on fire, you are on fire. Your schedule is full of “war rooms” and you use that meme of a dog on the middle of a burning room way too much. No value delivery whatsoever, it’s just bug fixes and hurried launches because someone threatened you.
• The product owner: your job is to deliver, not to think. You ship feature after feature, always with an impeccable backlog and well written stories. No value assessment, no feedback collection, just ship, ship, ship… If someone requested it, they might have a good reason for it.

It’s bad to resort to them, and they’ve been bashed enough. You should always try scape those archetypes, but that’s a given, you don’t need…