Product Management {Product Devil’s Dictionary}

Product management is…

• The responsibility for turning the wrong idea into something profitable without authority, resources, or time.
• The art of using social skills to persuade people more talented than you to work together despite their worst instincts and professional biases.
• Product Development with one less letter.
• The art of convincing teams your roadmap is so real that they work with alacrity to make the promised product. And keep working despite roadmap changes that renege on that vision.
• The talent to say no, repeatedly, subtracting everything that might be to leave just the essential.
• Leadership without special skills, authority, direct reports, or funds to produce positive cash flow, growth, and delighted customers.
• The fortitude to ship a thriving product by overcoming insurmountable obstacles within and without your organization.
• Focus in a circus.
• The deviousness to support multicultural byzantine product development bureaucracy with the least effort and without provoking lethal resistance.

For more of my mildly cynical take on the field, peruse the Product Manager’s Devil’s Dictionary.