Product Managers have feelings too

There are a lot of articles about being a Product Manager out there. Some are pretty shitty and some are pretty good.

A special mention goes to those articles that, as soon as you read, make you compare yourself to that mythical product manager described in the article and you just thank the lord for having a boss pretty much blind to how shitty you are.

You have nothing on that über-PM. It’s like that time when I was watching the Thor movie with my wife and the Thor dude appears on screen with his shirt off. And my wife looks at Thor’s six pack and then at my belly. I love her for sticking with me. Silvia, you are either an angel or you have been a very bad person in your previous life and are just paying for a lot of sins.

But pretty much all articles — the good, the bad and the ugly ones — don’t talk about feelings. Awwwww, Renato is a carebear talking about feelings!

Yeah, well. Feelings have fucked the quality of my job as product manager many times before. So I’ll write about some of them here. Vanity, eagerness to please and aversion to confrontation.

Vanity

I was a product diva in the beginning. I was too much in love with my own ideas and prioritized them because I thought they are just too good. Time and many (many!) failures taught me better.

Vanity is a pretty easy thing to control when you identify that you have that personality: do as I do and just start assuming all your ideas are stupid. If they sound okay, it’s just because you failed once again — this time at seeing how stupid yours ideas are.

Ideas coming from other people should be respected because other people are not you and hence not as stupid, but your own ideas shouldn’t have the privilege of protection or respect. Treat them ruthlessly. If they survive a barrage of unreasonable criticism, then okay.

But just assume you are a fountain of stupidity spilling dumb ideas and vanity shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Kinda been working for me at least!

Eagerness to please

This is something that I tend to fuck up even these days.

You know how you are the guy who’s always saying no to everyone? Well, eventually everyone is gonna have enough, give you the middle finger and stop wasting their time with suggestions you would invariably discard.

So that leaves you in a bit of a pickle. Because maybe if you just accept that one half-assed suggestion, people might start liking you and maybe you won’t have to eat lunch alone anymore!

Also, saying yes is so much easier. It’s just a yes and that’s it! When you say no, you need explain why not.

But if you do say yes to that mediocre idea, you are betraying the thing that should have your utmost loyalty: the product. The product trumps the team’s emotions, unfortunately.

Everyone in the team is always advocating on their own behalf. But the product is pretty much defenseless.

It only has you.

So, basically defenseless, see?

You need to be a hard-ass and just keep saying no. Most times I gave in and accepted suggestions just to please someone ended up in us having to go back and fix/improve/remove that idea.

So short term relief ended up in more work afterwards. Bleh.

Aversion to confrontation

On one hand, your product needs a little attention in feature A — it’s not broken, but it surely is far from okay. And your competitors nailed feature A a few months ago. Your boss never fails to remind you of that.

On the other hand, feature B is broken — the team has said time and again that it’s not working and you should spend some time working on that. Even your peers and bosses told you about that. The previous PM also had fixing feature B pretty high as a priority. Users are also writing reviews of your product talking about how feature B is bad.

On the other other hand (wee you three-handed weirdo), you believe that true value lies in working with feature C — and that’s not something obvious to everyone else.

So choosing to work on features A and B is very acceptable. No one will blame you for doing it. And when you do that, you know what happens?

Nothing! Because to everyone’s eyes you were doing your job. You optimized to appease to everyone’s expectations — not to win whatever market you are trying to win.

I have chosen A and I have chosen B before. They looked like wins and everyone said great things about the decision. I wanted to minimize the flak coming my way, so I took the easy way out and just prioritized the obvious — despite that having less impact.

You know, none of that felt like true wins. And that sucked.

Conclusion

Yeah, I think the article come out pretty okay and no conclusion is necessary. So here’s a spinning chicken.