Being different

Do you know Graham Moore? I didn’t know anything about him until last night.

My night started as usual, insomnia came knocking like an old friend. Morpheus avoided me even though I miss his company; so I decide to browse the web and search for something interesting. That’s how I ran into Graham Moore’s Oscar speech, and one section of the speech keep repeating in my head:

“ I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong, and now I’m standing here”

After I read that, I thought to myself ‘That’s how product managers feel’

As Product Managers, we always feel alienated.

We need to consider the business point of view yet we are not in the business division.

We need to talk to development team although we are not well versed in technical lingo.

Whenever there is an issue, people complain to us despite the fact that we can’t fix the code.

We talk to business about dev team limitations and explain to dev team about business needs.

Business views us as part of IT and IT views us as one of the business guys.

We are different

I spent the entire night thinking, is it a good thing for PM to be separate from others? Won’t that hinder us?

I realized that as a PM we will always be independent and this is a good thing. We can not become part of business or dev or ops or marketing or other business units.

We can see why a feature is needed because we are different.

Because we are weird, we can say no to a user.

Our decision will be neutral since we don’t belong to other divisions.

We are Product Managers, being different is part of us. So continuing the speech from Graham Moore:

“I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere. Yes you do. I promise you do. Stay weird. Stay different, and then when it’s your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message along.”

If you think as a Product Manager you need to become part of other divisions, don’t. You need to understand them but keep yourself unique as the uniqueness is what make us better Product Managers.

PS: I urge all to read the speech from Graham Moore, and think about it. It change my point of view, it may change yours