The four habits of impactful product managers

Letter to a new PM

Dear Product Manager,

Welcome to the team! Sorry to interrupt your on-boarding with this read, I am sure you already feel pretty busy: watching videos explaining the company culture, getting acquainted with the various areas of our product, doing introductory calls with developers, designers and business stakeholders, going through our key metrics, understanding the current priorities of the company, answering your first questions on JIRA… I am a hundred percent sure that you are already busy — but busy people rarely have an impact on the world. It’s unfortunate because your job, as a product manager, is precisely to have an impact on the world, on the company, on the people around you.

So don’t start — not yet. Take a pause, and read this.

Your job, as I was saying, is to have an impact on the world. To accomplish that, the Greek scientist Archimedes would say: “give me a long enough lever.” But as you will soon find out, you haven’t been given any lever. Check your drawer — it’s empty. Call your direct reports — you have none. Try and use your decision-making authority — nope. To make things worse, you are surrounded by experts in fields that you will never master. How can you drive change?

Unfortunately, the lever that you need cannot be given, you have to build it yourself: it is the ability to inspire people on solving customer problems.

I ended up developing this skill through trial and error while doing my job as a product manager. In that process, I have uncovered four habits that enabled me to make significant progress and became a guide for personal growth. Some of them were things that I was doing intuitively. Others required me to question myself, my communication style, my assumptions about the right way to get things done.

Frédéric Mazzella, the Founder of BlaBlaCar, says that learning from your failures is great, but that it’s even better to learn from others’ failures. He is right. I would have loved to hear about the four habits on my first day, instead of having to uncover them the hard way, through my failures. I hope that by sharing this with you, you will avoid some of the pitfalls in which I fell.

The four habits are Care, Check, Craft and Catalyze. They express the fact that an impactful product manager has empathy for customers and colleagues (Care), is rooted in the reality of the product (Check), is excellent at illustrating and summarizing ideas (Craft), and ensures quality decisions while keeping a lean mindset (Catalyze).

The rest of this letter consists of four articles that detail each habit. Each of them starts with a story, then describes more concretely what the habit is about and why it matters, gives you practical advice, and finally contains links to other articles, books or videos that can further shape your understanding. Before you start reading, a couple of disclaimers.

Firstly, those are habits that you need to adopt, and not a step-by-step process. There is no pre-defined moment where you need to care about someone or check something. Be systematic at wondering what the situation requires, stay aware of your biases towards one or other of the habits, and decide what to do.

Secondly, those habits are hard to follow when combined together, and that is what makes them interesting. Product management is a job of tension between speed and ponderation, between details and high level view, between theory and experiment. The four habits aim at capturing these tensions and guiding you to find balance. Use them as a tool to grow in the job and become every day a better product person.

Your journey has just begun !

Start reading:

Habit n°1 — CARE: Build empathy for your customers and colleagues.

Habit n°2 — CHECK: Be rooted in the reality of your product.

Habit n°3 — CRAFT: Illustrate and summarize as much as you can.

Habit n°4 — CATALYZE: Ensure quality decisions and keep a lean mindset.