It’s Time to Change the Conversation about Product Management

Nearly every product manager I know has experienced a moment of panic upon realizing that their day-to-day work is very different from what they thought their role would be.

For me, these moments of panic came early and often during my first couple of years as a product manager. During the interview process, I had laid out a number of ideas for how the product could be improved, and demonstrated enough technical expertise to win over the engineers. But as a full-time member of the product team, I discovered quickly that most of my “great ideas” had already been explored by the team, and abandoned for good reason. And every time I tried to put on my “engineer hat,” I wound up either putting my foot in my mouth or stepping on somebody’s toes. Product management was supposed to be this technical visionary role, and here I was working on other people’s ideas, putting out fires with senior leaders, and playing errand-runner and therapist to my team. What was I missing?

It took me nearly five years, and hundreds of conversations with working product managers, to realize that I was not alone. The difference between product management in theory and product management in practice is enormous, and leaves many product managers feeling like they’re doing the wrong thing, cultivating the wrong skills, or just missing the point entirely.

I’ve heard many people tasked with hiring and interviewing product managers express the same concern from the other side. In an effort to ground the abstract and ambiguous role of product management in quantifiable “hard skills,” hiring managers often find themselves posing technical questions and “product challenges” that they know have little to do with the day-to-day work that lies ahead. Megan Kierstead wrote a fantastic piece about this a few years ago. I have experienced it myself in numerous product management interviews.

At its worst, this this approach actively encourages some of the very behaviors that guarantee failure as a working PM: arrogance, reliance upon a fixed set of technical knowledge, and an unwillingness to explore and synthesize diverging perspectives. Talking up your own ideas and showing off your technical knowledge can get you pretty far in a product management interview, but they won’t get you very far as a working product manager.

It’s time that we change the conversation about product management, to better reflect the day-to-day activities and priorities of working product managers. It’s time that we stop weighing and measuring “hard skills” vs. “soft skills,” and instead to look at the unique connective skills that product managers must bring to their work every day.

I wrote Product Management in Practice in the hopes of providing working product managers with some much-needed real-world advice for cultivating these connective skills. For too long, product management has been seen as a mix-and-match grab bag of “hard skills” vs. “soft skills,” or design skills vs. technical skills vs. business skills. But the skills required to connect and align designers, developers, and business stakeholders are very different from the skills required to be a designer, developer or business stakeholder. Product management is a unique connective role, and it deserves to be treated as such.

You can order Product Management in Practice from Amazon here.