Early in my career as an entrepreneur I assumed that all you needed to build a great product was a problem worth solving and team of smart people ready to hustle through the night weeks on end together.

What I quickly learned however was that hustling harder, working later, and throwing more people at the problem is a short term solution at best. Falling in love with what you build and getting things done is natural for smart people. It also however masks the hard questions that many of us avoid asking each other:

<li>Is this even worth building?</li> <li>If we put it infront of people today would they pay for it?</li> <li>Would **feature x** make people any more likely to pay for it?</li>

It took me tens of thousands of dollars and a couple years of pain to realize that I needed to consider electing someone to *manage the product*. With a lack of any better options that responsiblity fell to me and I started down a track that has led me to the last three or so years as a Product Manager.

In that time I have learnt how to bootstrap better products in 3 months than if you had given me a year previously. I have experimented with budgets of a Visa credit limit to pay the rent, startup seed funding to get to the next milestone and multimillion dollar budgets to build a multiyear roadmap.

There is one prevailing message that I remind myself of daily to remind me what my obligation to my team is. Ken Norton a Partner at Google Ventures and formerly a PM at Google positions it best in his blog post on how to hire a product manager:

Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives. It’s important to remember that — as a PM, you’re expendable.

For all the responsibility and flexibility given to Product Managers there is one challenge that we have to answer to.

In the long run, great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it.

As product managers we need to remember we are expendable. We need to avoid becoming busy bodies and instead consider how we are making our teams stronger than 1+1. As a product manager how can we help our team solve the right problems better. In our organization how can we close the gap between moonshots and our customers.

As a product manager, how do we make our teams scalable? How do we make our ideas and our teams greater than a sum of their parts?