“What Product Managers look for in…” — a short series
There’s a lot of amazing content out there about how product managers should work with those around them. From how we should engage with developers to dealing with designers, as far to how we manage everyone’s expectations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. To be fair I do have some personal favourites such as Julie Zhuo’s posts; they’ve been quite helpful shaping my own way of working with product designers (in particular with this and this). But, in my honest opinion, there’s not enough written on how others should work alongside a product team (and making our lives a bit better). I know I’ve said before that product management is a servant role — I myself wrote about it here — welcoming others to tell us “look, if you’re here to accelerate me, here’s how you deal with me”.
Sorry but we gotta find a middle ground.
Yes, PM’s don’t think much about themselves in the technology building process. When was the last time you accounted for product effort/time when estimating the development of something? How often is product doing a late night round of work because they had to care for dev/design/data teams during the day? Even though I don’t think this part of the job will disappear, there’s a significant number of behaviours (from others) that would really make us more productive, more focused, more efficient and more effective. All in sake of building better products. This is what I want to explore so I am kicking off a short series titled “What PM’s look for in…”.
Some important disclaimers: 1) all I will write is just one person’s PoV; 2) if you take the content and “implement it”, it’s free advice therefore worth what you paid for; and 3) even though skewed by my limited experience I will try to be brief and force you to pose questions helping you assess your own setup. I will provide the goods, but also try to expose what really breaks the relationship and gets everyone into sub-optimal mode.
The roles I am looking to cover are:
1) Developers and CTO’s
2) Designers and Design Leaders
3) Sales teams and Heads of Sales
4) Marketing teams and CMOs
5) Junior PMs and CPOs (this one will be fun)
6) Founders and leadership teams (this one will be a rollercoaster)
My goal is to focus on real-life examples (hopefully relatable for PMs out there; and cautionary tales for PMs-to-be); why it worked in different situations and why it didn’t in some others.
