Owning the product = owning your ego
It was written 20 years ago, but I still love Ben Horowitz’s seminal essay on product management, Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager. Some of the concepts have expired (product management being a function of marketing, for example) but the attitudinal expectations it places on good product managers are golden and timeless:
- No excuses. Ever.
- Focus. A focus on the metrics that matter to the business. A focus on high-leverage activities, such as taking written positions on important matters so you don’t get your time sucked up with the same conversations again and again.
- Assertiveness. Assertiveness derived from a deep understanding of the value you bring to ensuring “right product/right time”. Enough that you don’t act as merely a “gopher for engineering”.
- Respect. Respect for your teammates strengths, specialities and maturity so you don’t define the process, solution and design for them. You don’t “project manage the various functions”.
I re-read it often to remind myself of what i’m doing wrong, and of what i need to keep-up despite any pressure that may be building. However, the phrase that I remind myself of most regularly (which really encompasses all of the above) is:
“Good product managers crisply define the target, the ‘what’ (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the ‘what’. Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out ‘how’.”
Identifying, owning and delivering the ‘what’ is crucially important and painfully hard. The ability and discipline to resist ego-fuelling, high-visibility but low-leverage features and instead nail this is one of the most vital for any manager leading a product team.
Wait… Isn’t the ‘why’ the most important thing?
Simon Sinek popularised the Golden Circle concept which taught us that the really great, successful leaders start with the ‘why’ when building companies, brands and products.
This is an awesome way to think about your business: It helps to anchor the vision and long-term strategic decisions for your product(s). However, the fact is that day-to-day 99% of an organization’s valuable efforts, resources and costs are poured into building the ‘what’. The ‘what’ is the bet a business makes that they believe will enable them to beat the competition and achieve their vision.
Let’s take Osper (where I recently looked after product) as an example:
Why -> Osper exists to help children become financially responsible.
How -> Osper does this by improving upon the pre-existing ways children engage with money.
What -> Osper provides a pre-paid debit card and a mobile banking app focused on teaching children how to manage money.
Every member of the Osper team was aware of some version of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ — and that’s important. But the ‘what’ is what we we’re actually building. The ‘what’ is the output of the company that moves the business’s vision away from words and into a tangible product that customers can touch, use, and benefit from. Frankly, the ‘what’ is the reason it is a group of engineers, product designers, researchers and growth marketers that are employed to execute on this vision rather than bloggers, journalists or teachers.
What’s more, while the ‘why’ is important in order to make sure everyone understands the broader vision, it is not proprietary to your company. Many businesses will have at least a similar ‘Why-How-What’ to yours. They’re called ‘the competition’. It’s your philosophy towards delivering the ‘what’ that will determine if you’ll be able to differentiate your product or service, beat your competition and achieve your vision.
So start with ‘why’, but the ‘what’ is the thing effective product leaders need to own and push forward every day, month, quarter and year.
What does owning the ‘what’ actually mean?
Leaders that own the ‘what’ know that progress towards the goal is the most important thing, not just launching stuff.
Owning the ‘what’ means defining the right success criteria, not defining the solution.
- Good product manager: Focuses on improving the products viral coefficient to turbo charge growth and reduce CPA.
- Bad product manager: Focuses on integrating the Facebook SDK in to the mobile app.
Owning the ‘what’ means framing the business problem concisely, consistently and memorably (through dashboards, updates, bleating on about it at standups… whatever), not post-rationalising decisions.
- Good product manager: Curates the product dashboard so the metrics-that-matter are super clear, holds herself to account based on it and learns from failures.
- Bad product manager: Searches for signs of success after the fact.
Owning the ‘what’ means ensuring the right data is attained to inform decisions that will impact your ability to achieve success, not patting yourself on the back when you argue a colleague round to your way of thinking.
- Good product manager: Recognises when opinions are assumptions and looks to the data for the answer.
- Bad product manager: Wins most arguments, despite gathering no new information.
Owning the what means empowering your team to contribute towards a desired result, not holding them accountable for building your idea.
- Good product manager: The whole team shares the load to come up with relevant hypotheses, ideas for exploration and possible solutions. They share the glory too.
- Bad product manager: Fails valiantly, but it’s not their fault.
Owning the ‘what’ means shipping product as soon as it is in a state that will improve your customers lives, not fetishising UI to get it to the point where (you think) it will impress your peers, investors or even your boss.
- Good product manager: Releases, learns and iterates.
- Bad product manager: Goes for the glory, the hail-mary… and wastes valuable time too often.
The ‘how’ is easy, gratifying and gets some points on the board. It provides short-term ego-boosts. Resist that temptation. Getting the ‘what’ right more often than your competition is how you win in the long run.
And if it’s ego you’re fuelling… nothing does it better than getting a ‘W’ on the board anyway.
