The Softer Side of Product Management Or. Say No to Bro-duct Management
One of those things you’re supposed to do in product is write. Sure, communication is one of the most valued skills of PMs but perhaps more importantly it’s used as a litmus test of your thought processes — Do you understand these concepts? Can you exhibit both depth and the ability to concisely summarize in digestible formats? All of this is great in practice for product managers and helps build mental muscles, but it also ends up with a giant corpus of similar content.
When I first started finding product literature online I was a voracious reader and read anything I could get my hands on. My excitement soon turned to boredom and ultimately frustration however, or though, because what comes out of most of these is regurgitated thoughts explaining core principles of product development. I’m totally guilty of sharing these half-articulated thoughts and it’s not that writing about product is wrong — especially when done in the context of existing thought but honestly, is this where we have the most value to add? Is it wrong to hope we have a lot more to add to the dialog than this?
My personal pet peeve is what I call ‘Bro-duct Management’ or, the Product Management equivalent of Brogrammers — Product Management for Bros. I’m not going to shame any essays in particular but if your essay features a combination of “crush it,” “get shit done,” or “shut up and [code/let the data speak/build]” you may be a likely candidate for Bro-duct Management. What bothers me less than the methodology is the assertion that this is the correct way to PM a product, not a personal style.
For me product has been about learning that the confidence to assert something must be carefully pared with the humility to be completely wrong. “Oh hey, we thought ____ but as we got more data that turned out to be totally untrue.” A few years ago in a class on project management I learned about horizontal versus vertical organization of projects and companies and which was more efficient. Their conclusion was less that any particular method was effective but that the ability and frequency a group could switch between them was predictive of success. Mutability, the ability to accept faults and embrace changes to resolve, were more crucial to success than adherence to a particular methodology.
For me, being honest about this “softer side” of product — the failings and learnings, the struggles and connection through them — resonates much more deeply.
Product management has two halves of a coin — the hard intuition, confidence, and product instinct to know what to build and the softer part — the totally uncertainty in what you are building that allows you to be open to feedback and new ideas. In reading and writing we seem to project so much more of the first. Perhaps it’s that Product Management tends to attract confident people or that part of the purpose of writing is to show what you know but the result is still a series of hyperbolic statements of ‘the right way to ____.’ I’d like to hear more about the softer side and in my experience, I think there’s a niche for writing to fill.
My most popular story is about deeply felt career frustrations and uncertainty. I started writing it in anger and reaction but it was terrifying to publish. I didn’t know what to do. Compare this to dissecting and redesigning an experience or running a usability study and spending time researching a topic and solutions or opinion pieces on trends. Technically, those are all part of my job but while writing them was personally beneficial, it didn’t resonate with people in the same way as when I expressed what felt like a deeply personal uncertainty. What I’ve found in both my writing and work is that embracing the ambiguity and the failures is half the battle.
I’m not alone in thinking this way. I went to a great talk by Merci Grace where she talked about tactical empathy (this is like normal empathy except much more strategic). Frederique Dame also does a great job of talking about the softer side of product management and what you gain from interacting with a soft touch. That said — I don’t meant to suggest this is an entirely female concept. For example, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, for me, often qualifies as soft and admitting a lack of knowledge — it’s all about “well we tried this and it didn’t work but then we tried this other thing” instead of claiming they know. Design thinking was popularized by David Kelley and is all about admitting what you don’t know and the willingness to put ideas to the test. If we’re taking ‘being lean’ and design thinking seriously, shouldn’t we consider taking the same approach with our own writing? My lean hypothesis is that if we shy away from declarative statements (how many medium stories have you seen with one like about the “right” way to product? While they may help you prove comprehension, people don’t really enjoy reading them) and instead move towards a more ambiguous softer side of product.
Ambiguity and uncertainty are most definitely uncomfortable but they’re also where a lot of interesting thing happen. As people and product managers, let’s be less afraid to live in this space — it’s where the dialogue (and views) happen.
